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Quotes of the Day:
“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”
– L. Frank Baum
“Military dictatorships exist everywhere but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.”
– George Orwell
"Make no mistake: Satan’s specialty is psychological warfare. If he can turn us on God (“It’s not fair!”), or turn us on others (“It’s their fault!”), or turn us on ourselves (“I’m so stupid!”), we won’t turn on him. If we keep fighting within ourselves and losing our own inner battles, we’ll never have the strength to stand up and fight our true enemy."
– Beth Moore
1. Mystery Drones Raise Questions Over Who’s Allowed to Take Them Down
2. Behind Closed Doors: The Spy World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak
3. Chinese Students in U.S. Warned to Stay Put Ahead of Second Trump Term
4. The U.S. Needs a Productivity Miracle. It Might Just Get One.
5. America’s Big Natural-Gas Footprint Is About to Get Even Bigger
6. Cutting the Deficit Is Easy—It’s Just Unpopular
7. Ex-Mossad Agents Reveal Details Of How They Turned Hezbollah’s Communications Devices Into Bombs
8. What's In The Bill That Aims To Revitalize America's Decaying Naval Industry
9. Kiev: Russian Troops Executing Ukrainian Prisoners of War Again
10. Faulty mortar rounds spark corruption allegations for Ukraine’s defense industry
11. The New American Imperialism
12. Putin Chose Ukraine Over Syria
13. State Department’s disinformation office to close after funding nixed in NDAA
14. Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians
1. Mystery Drones Raise Questions Over Who’s Allowed to Take Them Down
What do we do now Lieutenant?
Excerpts:
The Federal Aviation Administration in mid-December imposed temporary flight bans over critical infrastructure in New Jersey and New York, citing a request from “security partners.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Newark office also told residents not to try to shoot drones, warning of “dangerous and possibly deadly consequences if manned aircraft are targeted mistakenly.”
“There are certain assets, locations, facilities that are truly critical to our operations, and those need to be defended in real time,” said Scott Aaronson, senior vice president for security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for U.S. power companies. “We have to be able to intervene.”
The military and law enforcement are finding increased uses for pilotless small aircraft for surveillance or delivering payloads. Companies delivering goods, ferrying medical supplies and inspecting industrial equipment are also helping drive drone demand, as are hobbyists.
Federal officials have said the aircraft spurring concerns among New Jerseyites were likely planes heading to and from airports, or lawful drone flights. Serious drone threats emerged elsewhere in the country weeks earlier, however.
Mystery Drones Raise Questions Over Who’s Allowed to Take Them Down
Businesses and law enforcement want more authority to protect critical infrastructure and attendees of large events from airborne threats
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/drones-security-threat-regulations-048c2123?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1&mc_cid=f8e1c60bbf
By Andrew Tangel
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Dec. 26, 2024 5:30 am ET
Multiple drones were spotted earlier this month over Bernardsville, N.J. Photo: Brian Glenn/TMX/AP
Few Americans can legally take down a drone. Businesses, along with state and local law-enforcement agencies, want to change that.
This month’s New Jersey drone scare highlighted the potential threat and public nuisance associated with more unmanned aircraft operating in the skies. President-elect Donald Trump and other politicians in recent days have called to shoot down suspected airborne menaces flying over the Garden State, but only a handful of federal agencies are allowed to do it.
The Federal Aviation Administration in mid-December imposed temporary flight bans over critical infrastructure in New Jersey and New York, citing a request from “security partners.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Newark office also told residents not to try to shoot drones, warning of “dangerous and possibly deadly consequences if manned aircraft are targeted mistakenly.”
“There are certain assets, locations, facilities that are truly critical to our operations, and those need to be defended in real time,” said Scott Aaronson, senior vice president for security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for U.S. power companies. “We have to be able to intervene.”
The military and law enforcement are finding increased uses for pilotless small aircraft for surveillance or delivering payloads. Companies delivering goods, ferrying medical supplies and inspecting industrial equipment are also helping drive drone demand, as are hobbyists.
Federal officials have said the aircraft spurring concerns among New Jerseyites were likely planes heading to and from airports, or lawful drone flights. Serious drone threats emerged elsewhere in the country weeks earlier, however.
The NFL conducts its first-ever drone show ahead of Super Bowl LVI outside Los Angeles in 2022. Photo: robyn beck/AFP/Getty Images
In early November, federal prosecutors charged a Tennessee man in an alleged attempt to use a drone carrying an explosive device to attack Nashville’s power grid. In October, Arizona authorities charged a teenager with planning to use a drone to bomb the Phoenix Pride Festival.
Places such as open-air stadiums and other venues where large numbers of people gather are particularly worrisome for drone activity, industry officials said. Drones disseminating chemical sprays, carrying explosives or inducing panic in crowded places are among concerns that have prompted some stadium managers to rethink risk assessments.
“There are lots of different ways that a bad actor could affect people, and in an open-air setting, like most stadiums are, that is problematic to say the least,” said Mike McCormick, legal counsel for the Stadium Managers Association. “The Super Bowl has quite an extensive drone defense capability. But day-to-day games, concerts, whatever, there really is no mitigation authority.”
In recent years, businesses, airport operators and sports leagues have focused on gaining the ability to detect drones, industry officials said. In many cases, they support giving state and local authorities the legal authority to take down drones.
Under current federal law, drones are aircraft, and interfering with their operation could subject offenders to prosecution. Doing so could also run afoul of federal laws against intercepting communications.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have some authority to take down drones. The Defense Department can generally act against drones deemed a threat to its U.S. bases or nuclear assets. The Energy Department has the authority at certain nuclear sites.
A dispute emerged in recent years over whether U.S. Capitol Police can take out drones, according to current and former federal and congressional officials. The police agency, which protects members of Congress and congressional buildings, believes it does, but other federal agencies including the FAA disagree.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said the agency has the constitutional authority to protect members of Congress. “We are not going to take any chances when it comes to their safety and security,” he said through a spokesman.
Pending legislation in Congress could pave the way for state and local law enforcement to use technology to take down drones. Federal law-enforcement officials testified on Capitol Hill earlier this month to back the proposals, citing threats from domestic terrorists, and criminals on the Mexican border. The Pentagon has also been concerned with mysterious drones that have flown over its bases.
In New Jersey, Monmouth County Sheriff Shaun Golden has been calling for giving state police the power to take out drones, if necessary.
“When you look to the war in Ukraine and Russia and see how they’re weaponizing drones in that theater of operations, it kind of begs a larger question,” Golden said. “Are we prepared for these kinds of public safety challenges?”
Downing a drone is easier said than done. When Rob D’Amico ran the FBI’s counterdrone unit in recent years, getting the green light from Justice Department lawyers required 50-some pages of paperwork and signoff from the attorney general or deputy attorney general.
Federal agents can take over control of drones, jam with radio signals or otherwise interfere with its electronics, he said.
“It’s just not like you push a button and it happens—a lot of people think that,” D’Amico said.
Not all local law-enforcement agencies currently want to be able to disable drones while they are in flight. In Oklahoma, the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office has in recent years been using a drone-detection system at a state fair to track down and warn careless operators who create safety hazards by flying over people.
The FAA has been leery of expanding counterdrone technology too widely over worries such technology could harm commercial aircraft or ground equipment such as radar. The agency, which supports some expansion of authorities to take down drones, has been involved with testing to make sure counterdrone technology doesn’t interfere with systems used by aircraft it is supposed to protect.
“The cure cannot be worse than the disease,” said Abby Smith, a former senior FAA official who focused on drone policies.
Roshan Fernandez contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Tangel at andrew.tangel@wsj.com
2. Behind Closed Doors: The Spy World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak
It seems to me most people thought this was the most logical theory - a lab leak. Maybe the conspiracy was calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory.
The question is why would we want to cover up the lab leak? If it was surely the Chinese would know this. Were we trying to cover it up to try to not harm relations with China? Surely China looks at that as a sign of weakness and gives them an advantage.
Excerpts:
Since the National Intelligence Council was among proponents of the zoonotic theory, and the CIA, like two other agencies, had declined to take a stand either way, the makeup of the briefing meant that no proponents of the lab leak theory were present. A spokesman for Haines’s office said that the FBI assessment that pointed to a lab leak was accurately presented.
More than three years after that briefing, the intelligence agencies continue to investigate, though the full-court press that was mounted during the 90-day sprint is long over. In one sign that some government agencies are still looking at the issue, the Energy Department last year joined the FBI in identifying a lab leak as the most likely source.
In a June 2023 report requested by Congress, Haines’s office also declassified more information about the Wuhan institute. The report noted that some of the institute’s scientists “have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices.” But it added that the U.S. intelligence community had no information that this work involved the virus that caused the pandemic or a “close progenitor,” or that the institute held such viruses in its stockpiles before the 2019 outbreak.
Now retired from the FBI and working as a consultant, Bannan has kept a low profile. He hasn’t been among the parade of witnesses who have appeared in the often-partisan debates in Congress over Covid-19 origins. Among those who testified was Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said he still believes that the virus more likely has natural origins. Fauci has denied ever calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory and says that scenario can’t be excluded.
While the August 2021 intelligence report suggests that a conclusive assessment about the virus’s origin cannot likely be made without China’s cooperation, Bannan is urging that scientists inside and outside of government take another look at the evidence that was fought over during the 90-day sprint.
“What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” said Bannan.
Behind Closed Doors: The Spy World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak
The idea that the pandemic’s origins lie with a research facility in China was once labeled a conspiracy theory
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/fbi-covid-19-pandemic-lab-leak-theory-dfbd8a51?mod=latest_headlines
By Michael R. Gordon
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and Warren P. Strobel
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Updated Dec. 26, 2024 12:01 am ET
A car and driver had been readied to whisk Jason Bannan from FBI headquarters early one morning in August 2021 to brief the White House on a novel virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and had stopped the world in its tracks.
Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came.
Bannan, a Ph.D. in microbiology, had joined the bureau after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington when the agency bulked up its expertise to deal with the threat of germ weapons, toxins and other weapons of mass destruction.
But for more than a year he had spent most of his waking hours on the Covid-19 virus that had seeped out of China in 2019.
Frustrated by China’s stonewalling, President Biden had ordered an urgent assessment by the U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories on whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese lab that had been doing extensive work on coronaviruses.
The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, leaving the Capitol after a House briefing two years ago in Washington. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that it wasn’t standard practice to invite representatives from individual agencies to briefings for the president and that divergent views within the intelligence community were fairly represented.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” the spokeswoman said.
But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal shows that the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known. Nor were the FBI scientists the only ones who believed that the intelligence directorate’s review didn’t tell the whole story.
Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden.
The DIA Inspector General’s office opened an inquiry in the spring into whether the scientists’ assessment was mishandled or suppressed, people familiar with the matter said. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment on whether this inquiry was continuing, had been completed and what it might have included.
Five years after Covid-19 first emerged, the origin of the virus that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million people worldwide has yet to be established. The pace of U.S. intelligence investigation has slackened, as many intelligence analysts who were assigned to the crash effort have shifted to other priorities.
The origin of the Covid-19 virus that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million people worldwide has yet to be established. Photo: Allison Zaucha for WSJ
Congressional efforts to establish a national task force to investigate the origin of and response to Covid-19 that would be styled after the 9/11 Commission floundered, a victim of political infighting. Senate and House committees that dug into the pandemic unearthed some significant leads but their work often became mired in partisan attacks.
Now some current and former officials say a fresh look is needed, including at the analysis that wasn’t included in the 2021 intelligence report.
‘The sprint’
The U.S. was deep in the grip of the pandemic in May 2021 when Biden ordered an urgent study by the intelligence community into Covid’s origins, which he said should be completed in 90 days. The effort became known as the “90-day sprint.”
At that point, the question of the virus’s origins was dividing the scientific community. The debate came down to two prominent theories. The zoonotic theory held that the Covid virus, like other deadly pathogens before it, had jumped to humans from an infected animal, possibly as a result of China’s extensive wildlife animal trade. The other scenario, known as “lab leak,” was based on the idea that the virus had escaped from a research facility, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted coronavirus research.
The debate over the virus’s origins was politically divisive. Then-President Trump said in May 2020 that he had evidence that the virus had emerged from a Chinese lab but insisted that the information was too sensitive to disclose. Trump’s critics said the White House was trying to divert attention from its management of the response to the pandemic.
Those two theories have also divided the scientific community. In February 2020, more than two dozen scientists published a statement in the medical journal Lancet, calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory that would jeopardize global cooperation in the struggle against the virus. One of the authors was Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has worked extensively on coronavirus research with the Wuhan institute.
That statement was followed a month later by a March 2020 paper on the “proximal origins” of Covid-19, in which Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute and four other scientists argued that the virus wasn’t “purposefully manipulated” in the laboratory and had almost certainly had natural origins.
Ralph Baric, a professor at the University of North Carolina, did pioneering work on coronaviruses. Photo: Christopher Janaro/Bloomberg News
But the lab theory has gained credibility. Ralph Baric, a professor at the University of North Carolina who had done pioneering work on coronaviruses with Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan institute’s leading bat coronavirus expert, told Congress earlier this year that the facility’s procedures for carrying out research on bat viruses were “irresponsible” since it was done in a laboratory with inadequate precautions for containing biological agents.
By the time Biden ordered his review in 2021, two U.S. intelligence organizations supported the zoonotic theory, and one, the FBI, suspected a lab mishap. Other intelligence agencies said at the time that they didn’t have enough information to render a judgment.
The intelligence agencies that drilled into the issue brought a range of capabilities, from the National Security Agency, which intercepts foreign communications, to the FBI, which has a cadre of experts, including some who worked in the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, a laboratory for handling biological agents at Fort Detrick, Md.
One of those experts was Bannan, who had a doctorate from the University of Arizona. He was serving as a senior scientist in an agency lab in Quantico, Va., when he got a call from a superior who wanted to know if he was prepared to come to work at the bureau’s headquarters for the directorate for weapons of mass destruction.
He arrived at the FBI’s near-empty Hoover building in early 2020 as most government employees were still working remotely. Bannan had faced his share of tough cases, including working for the task force that established that a scientist at Fort Detrick had sent anthrax-filled letters to lawmakers and others, in what became the worst biological attack in U.S. history. But determining the origins of Covid presented unique challenges: the initial outbreak had happened 7,500 miles away in a country that was withholding cooperation.
The inquiry was barely under way when divisions emerged in the initial conference calls among the intelligence agency experts held over Biden’s tasking.
FBI scientist Jason Bannan, pictured in 2008, worked extensively on the origins of the Covid-19 virus. Photo: Dominic Bracco II/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Much of the intelligence community was dismissive about the World Health Organization’s early efforts to investigate the virus’s origins, which many U.S. officials believe was unduly constrained by the Chinese. After traveling to China in early 2021, a team of experts sent by WHO concluded in a joint report with Chinese scientists that the virus most likely moved from bats to humans via another animal.
The FBI was already supporting the lab theory, but Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who had served as a consultant to WHO, advocated for taking the zoonotic theory seriously. She said that the WHO report shouldn’t be completely discounted, according to participants.
Keen, who had a Ph.D. in infectious disease modeling from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, left the State Department shortly after the 90-day sprint to become the director for Global Health Security for the National Intelligence Council. The council was given a central role in organizing the report under the supervision of James Murphy, the national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction.
With no cooperation from Beijing, much of the debate turned on what was known about previous coronaviruses and work at the Wuhan institute.
One disagreement centered on comparison of the Covid-19 pandemic with other outbreaks. The National Intelligence Council had prepared a chart for inclusion in the report that depicted how the Covid-19 pandemic compared with past zoonotic outbreaks in which pathogens had leapt to a human from animals, including Ebola, MERS and Nipah. FBI experts argued that this was a case of apples and oranges, saying these earlier diseases were strikingly different from coronaviruses, which previously had been far less contagious. But the council’s intelligence officers argued the chart illustrated the principle of zoonotic transfer and it was included in the report.
The lab-leak theory suggests the Covid-19 virus escaped from a facility such as China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronavirus research was conducted. Photo: Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
Another debate erupted over the geographic origin of Covid-19. FBI experts argued that a thesis by Yu Ping, a young scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, indicated that the type of coronavirus that was responsible for the pandemic was indigenous to the mountainous Yunnan province in western China and wasn’t found in Hubei province where the city of Wuhan is located. If Covid-19 had spread naturally from a bat to a host animal and then a human, as proponents of the zoonotic theory argued, early cases should have also been detected in the vast area between Yunnan and Wuhan, a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers. That region, which has a population of hundreds of millions of people, contains thousands of live animal markets.
But Keen took the view that the geographic origin of the virus wasn’t known and that the absence of cases in southwest China wasn’t relevant. Keen, who is now a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also argued that the Chinese didn’t have an effective surveillance network to uncover such outbreaks in rural areas, an argument the FBI experts also challenged. That left the two sides far apart on the most fundamental questions of how the virus emerged.
‘Off the reservation’
As the FBI continued to push to ensure the lab theory was taken seriously, there were also debates at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which houses the main U.S. government organization dedicated to medical intelligence. The National Center for Medical Intelligence looks at health threats around the world that might endanger U.S. troops, such as infectious diseases and biological weapons.
Three scientists there—John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien—conducted a genomic analysis that concluded that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory. Specifically they concluded that a segment of the “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper. That was an indication, they argued, that the Chinese scientists were conducting “gain of function” research to see if the virus could infect humans.
Hardham was a Ph.D. and Navy reserve captain, while Cutlip, a longtime DIA scientist, had a doctorate in biomedical engineering and had served on a White House task force on the virus during the Trump administration. Chretien, a U.S. Navy doctor, had worked on biodefense for the White House and had been in charge of the pandemic warning team for the center.
They briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan’s partners, an FBI agent with a Ph.D., on their initial findings. But in July 2021 they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, which they were told was “off the reservation,” according to people familiar with the matter. That order was earlier reported by The Australian.
Nor were all of their proposed edits to the National Intelligence Council report accepted.
Hospital staff washing the emergency entrance of Wuhan Medical Treatment Center in Wuhan, China, four years ago. Photo: Dake Kang/Associated Press
Hardham, Cutlip and Chretien also wrote an unclassified May 2020 paper that challenged the “proximal origin” assessment. They weren’t allowed to circulate it outside of the medical intelligence center, but it leaked three years later and was entered into the record by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) when he chaired a hearing on the pandemic for a House committee investigating the virus’s origin.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the DIA director during the report’s preparation, declined to comment on whether he was aware of the scientists’ work at the time. But he has previously said publicly that he supported the zoonotic theory. A spokesman for the DIA didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The intelligence officials who briefed Biden in August 2021 at the White House all wore masks to protect them against the still-raging pandemic, as did the president. The participants included Haines, the president’s top intelligence official, and Murphy, from the National Intelligence Council. They were accompanied by another analyst from Haines’s office and a technical expert from the Central Intelligence Agency.
Since the National Intelligence Council was among proponents of the zoonotic theory, and the CIA, like two other agencies, had declined to take a stand either way, the makeup of the briefing meant that no proponents of the lab leak theory were present. A spokesman for Haines’s office said that the FBI assessment that pointed to a lab leak was accurately presented.
More than three years after that briefing, the intelligence agencies continue to investigate, though the full-court press that was mounted during the 90-day sprint is long over. In one sign that some government agencies are still looking at the issue, the Energy Department last year joined the FBI in identifying a lab leak as the most likely source.
In a June 2023 report requested by Congress, Haines’s office also declassified more information about the Wuhan institute. The report noted that some of the institute’s scientists “have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices.” But it added that the U.S. intelligence community had no information that this work involved the virus that caused the pandemic or a “close progenitor,” or that the institute held such viruses in its stockpiles before the 2019 outbreak.
Now retired from the FBI and working as a consultant, Bannan has kept a low profile. He hasn’t been among the parade of witnesses who have appeared in the often-partisan debates in Congress over Covid-19 origins. Among those who testified was Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said he still believes that the virus more likely has natural origins. Fauci has denied ever calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory and says that scenario can’t be excluded.
While the August 2021 intelligence report suggests that a conclusive assessment about the virus’s origin cannot likely be made without China’s cooperation, Bannan is urging that scientists inside and outside of government take another look at the evidence that was fought over during the 90-day sprint.
“What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” said Bannan.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com
3. Chinese Students in U.S. Warned to Stay Put Ahead of Second Trump Term
Money talks - e.g., EB5 visas.
What is more important? Preventing infiltration and espionage through student visas or developing knowledge and understanding through exchanges in both countries?
Excerpts:
Demand for EB-5 investment has increased after Trump’s re-election, said Sam Silverman, founder of EB5AN, which invests EB-5 capital into U.S. real-estate projects.
“Now that many foreign nationals with children on student visas realize it’s going to be much harder for their sons or daughters to stay in the U.S. after graduation, they are seriously considering an EB-5 investment to eliminate that obstacle,” Silverman said.
India surpassed China as the top country of origin for international students, with 331,602 Indian students in the U.S. during the latest academic year, according to data released in November by the Institute of International Education. China came second, with 277,398 students. India and China combined still made up over half of all international students in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans studying in China has been declining for over a decade amid rising U.S.-China tensions and the tightening of controls on expression under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
More than 11,000 Americans were studying in China before the pandemic. According to the most recent IIE data, only 469 American students studied in academic-credit programs in China during the 2022-2023 academic year. The tally didn’t include internships and research work.
Chinese Students in U.S. Warned to Stay Put Ahead of Second Trump Term
Consulate recommends against unnecessary travel as schools urge international students to be in place before inauguration
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-international-students-trump-visa-access-89e0ca96?mod=latest_headlines
By Liyan Qi
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Dec. 26, 2024 8:00 am ET
Chinese authorities are advising Chinese students in the U.S. to think twice about leaving the country over for the holidays, adding to warnings by a dozen American universities to international students to be back on campus before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Students should “try to reduce unnecessary cross-border travel,” China’s Consulate General in Chicago said in a Dec. 14 note on its website, referring to holidays approaching.
The visas of Chinese students, particularly in the sciences, were targeted during Trump’s first term, and many Chinese students now studying at U.S. schools are feeling on edge ahead of his return to the White House.
Many are now scrambling to change travel plans while also thinking about a Plan B if tougher visa rules come into effect next year.
A 26-year-old graduate student at Columbia University in New York, who asked to be identified only by her surname, Guo, said she is still going to visit her partner in Europe during the winter break. To make sure she won’t have any trouble returning, she booked a return flight on Jan. 19, just ahead of the inauguration and a few days before the spring semester starts.
She is set to graduate next year and, feeling a sense of belonging in the U.S., she had hoped to stay and find a job. Uncertainty now surrounds those plans as well as those of other Chinese students, who have flocked to Chinese social-media platforms to vent their frustration about not knowing what is ahead.
“I wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about what to do next,” Guo said. “Anxiety is through the roof, and almost everyone I know feels so lost.”
Like many fellow students, Guo said she is now considering pursuing a doctoral degree or moving to Europe. Photo: WSJ
During Trump’s first term, Chinese students were under heightened scrutiny and faced a range of restrictions. The Trump administration focused in particular on Chinese nationals deemed security risks to American scientific research, including Chinese graduate students and postgraduate researchers who had studied at Chinese universities with close ties to the country’s defense industry.
In 2020 alone, more than 1,000 Chinese nationals had their visas revoked over such concerns, according to data provided by the U.S. State Department.
When President Biden took office in 2021, he revoked several of Trump’s executive actions, including a ban on citizens entering the U.S. from several predominantly Muslim countries but some Chinese students continued being barred from entering the U.S. or being deported.
Admission to a U.S. university is no guarantee a student will be issued a student visa.
Students say in recent years it has become more common for admitted Chinese students to be denied visas, especially those in so-called STEM fields.
Beyond graduation, the Optional Practical Training program lets international students work for a year in the U.S. while remaining on their student visas. After that, they need an employee sponsor to get a work visa under the H-1B program.
Like many fellow students, Guo said she is now considering pursuing a doctoral degree or moving to Europe as the chance of getting an employer-sponsored visa in the U.S. is getting slim.
While schools’ warnings have generally been directed at all international students, during internal meetings some school officials referred to students from China as facing increased risk, according to students and faculty members. Students said they had been advised by school officials to comply if immigration officers ask to check their electronic devices and to be careful with what they say on social media.
The visas of Chinese students were targeted during Donald Trump’s first term. Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg News
“A travel ban is likely to go into effect soon after inauguration,” Cornell University said in a note posted online in November. Apart from countries targeted in the first Trump administration such as majority-Muslim ones, China and India might also be added to the travel ban, Cornell said.
“To avoid any unexpected issues, we advise returning prior to the presidential inauguration,” according to a note posted on the University of Pennsylvania website.
The Chinese consulate in Chicago said it has been its practice to issue consular safety reminders before holidays. The Chinese Embassy in Washington said it was also reminding students to enhance their security awareness during entry into the U.S.
Iris Feng, a Columbia statistics major, recently canceled a planned trip back to China on the advice of her parents, who urged her to stay put rather than risk running into trouble at the U.S. border on her return.
Feng, who like Guo is graduating next year, said she would try to pursue a work permit through the OPT program. If that doesn’t work, she plans to look for opportunities in Hong Kong.
Iris Feng, a graduate student at Columbia University, recently canceled a planned trip back to China on the advice of her parents. Photo: WSJ
Others are considering options such as a program known as EB-5, which offers permanent American residency to foreigners who invest in qualified job-creating projects.
A graduate student studying finance in New York said she had been back and forth on whether to seek a green card through the program, which requires a minimum investment of $800,000 for certain projects. Following the election results, she has decided to take the plunge, relying on pooled financial resources from her parents and extended family.
She is now working with a lawyer to get her EB-5 applications ready, hoping that will allow her to stay in the U.S.
She said she felt crushed by China’s stringent restrictions during the pandemic, when she and millions of others were cooped up inside amid crippling lockdowns. “I know people who have studied here, returned to China and are perfectly happy,” she said. “I don’t think that’s for me.”
Demand for EB-5 investment has increased after Trump’s re-election, said Sam Silverman, founder of EB5AN, which invests EB-5 capital into U.S. real-estate projects.
“Now that many foreign nationals with children on student visas realize it’s going to be much harder for their sons or daughters to stay in the U.S. after graduation, they are seriously considering an EB-5 investment to eliminate that obstacle,” Silverman said.
India surpassed China as the top country of origin for international students, with 331,602 Indian students in the U.S. during the latest academic year, according to data released in November by the Institute of International Education. China came second, with 277,398 students. India and China combined still made up over half of all international students in the U.S.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans studying in China has been declining for over a decade amid rising U.S.-China tensions and the tightening of controls on expression under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
More than 11,000 Americans were studying in China before the pandemic. According to the most recent IIE data, only 469 American students studied in academic-credit programs in China during the 2022-2023 academic year. The tally didn’t include internships and research work.
Write to Liyan Qi at Liyan.qi@wsj.com
4. The U.S. Needs a Productivity Miracle. It Might Just Get One.
The U.S. Needs a Productivity Miracle. It Might Just Get One.
Productivity growth holds the key to a better economy and a manageable budget deficit
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/the-u-s-needs-a-productivity-miracle-it-might-just-get-one-c1f4f8de?mod=latest_headlines
By Aaron Back
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Dec. 26, 2024 5:30 am ET
The economy is getting a boost from investments in new technologies. Photo: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg News
The U.S. could be on the cusp of a productivity boom similar to the one triggered by internet technology in the 1990s. The outlook for the national debt, and much else, depends on it.
Worker productivity is regarded by economists as one of the most important drivers of long-term economic performance. It is essentially just the total output of the economy divided by the number of hours worked, aided by investments in technology and capital. When productivity is booming, it allows the economy to expand faster without triggering inflation. That has positive knock-on effects on all kinds of things, including the fiscal health of the federal government.
Quarterly fluctuations in productivity can be notoriously volatile. The pandemic rendered the data almost impossible to interpret, as both total output and hours worked swung violently. Recently, however, there has been a clear, and highly encouraging, upward trend.
Preliminary estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that total nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased 2.0% from a year earlier in the third quarter—the fifth straight quarter of growth at or above 2%. That is significant as the average rate of growth for the five years before the pandemic was 1.6%.
Jeff Schulze, head of economic and market strategy at ClearBridge Investments, argues this productivity jump is thanks to some unique features of the postpandemic labor market. People have switched jobs, locations and even industries at a high rate, meaning workers are now better matched to their roles, he said in an interview. In addition, the “extreme labor market tightness” of the postpandemic period led companies to step up investment in time and labor-saving technologies.
“I believe that workers are just much better matched to their jobs today, and what’s happening is now that they are better matched and they’ve been in their roles for a couple years, you’re seeing a boost in productivity that’s going to continue over the next couple of years. And that’s even before all of the investment in artificial intelligence even comes to fruition,” Schulze said.
“When you look on the horizon with all this investment in AI, it’s not hard to get too excited about a productivity boom that will move us up to 2.5% or even 3%,” he added.
To see what a big difference faster productivity could make if it is sustained, consider the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term debt projections. (These are based on estimates of total factor productivity, a somewhat more abstract measure that takes into account the productivity of both labor and capital. But the fundamental drivers and direction are similar to labor-force productivity).
Under its base-case scenario in a May 2024 paper, the CBO sees federal debt held by the public rising from 99% of gross domestic product in 2024 to 116% in 2034. This assumes total factor productivity growth of just 1.1% per year. Raising this estimated productivity growth by half a percentage point would mean the debt-to-GDP ratio reaches a much more manageable 108% of GDP by 2034.
Optimists would argue that the U.S. could do much better. Strategist Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research is an advocate of a “roaring ’20s” scenario, whereby he sees rapid growth this decade, driven in part by an AI productivity boom. Due to the volatility of productivity data, he prefers to look at a rolling five-year average of labor productivity growth, which hit an annualized pace of 1.9% in the third quarter of 2024, from a low of just 0.6% in the fourth quarter of 2015. Yardeni believes this could reach 3.5% in the second half of this decade.
“That might sound delusional, but past productivity booms in the late ’50s, the ’60s, and the late ’90s, all peaked at 3.5% to 4%,” he said.
These past booms each had their own drivers, according to Yardeni: The interstate highway buildout and rapid suburbanization of the 1950s, mainframe computers and jet engines in the 1960s and, of course, personal computers and the internet in the 1990s.
As these examples make clear, investments by both the public and private sectors can drive productivity gains. Under the Biden administration, the optimistic case for a productivity boom was built partly on fiscal spending by the federal government, which was designed to encourage or “crowd in” private investment on priorities such as domestic chip production, clean energy and electric vehicles, said Jason Draho, head of asset allocation Americas for UBS Global Wealth Management and another “roaring ’20s” advocate. He is less optimistic that lower corporate taxes under the second Trump administration would have as positive an impact on investment, saying much of the previous round of business tax cuts was spent on share buybacks and dividends instead.
But others see ways that tax policy can keep encouraging investment in productivity-enhancing technology. ClearBridge’s Schulze points to the full expensing of investments in equipment, a provision of the 2017 tax cuts that began being phased out in 2023 but could be renewed as part of a new tax package.
For his part, Yardeni said he began talking about a “roaring 20s” scenario in 2019, and it was never based on assumptions about policy. “What I’ve learned over the years is to respect how well the economy does despite Washington,” he said.
For those hoping the U.S. economy can keep up its growth and resilience no matter what happens in the nation’s capital, productivity growth holds the key. Quarterly productivity readings, volatile as they may be, will be one of the most important indicators to watch in the years ahead.
Write to Aaron Back at aaron.back@wsj.com
5. America’s Big Natural-Gas Footprint Is About to Get Even Bigger
America’s Big Natural-Gas Footprint Is About to Get Even Bigger
Drillers are looking ahead to new export hubs and easier regulations under the coming Trump presidency
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/us-natural-gas-export-growth-higher-emissions-prices-a913a5d7?mod=latest_headlines
By David Uberti
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Dec. 26, 2024 5:30 am ET
A liquefied-natural-gas facility under development in Louisiana last year. The U.S. is already the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Photo: Camille Farrah Lenain for WSJ
Toby Rice, who leads one of America’s largest natural-gas producers, says the “Drill, Baby, Drill” mantra that resurfaced during the presidential campaign is passé. Now, it is all about “Build, Baby, Build.”
Natural-gas investors are looking ahead to potential growth after a year in which historically low prices dinged profits and drilling plans. At the same time, the Biden administration questioned the benefits of making the U.S. liquefied-natural-gas-export machine—the world’s biggest—even bigger.
As climate advocates have increasingly warned of planet-warming emissions, President Biden has ramped up environmental rules and directed unprecedented sums into clean energy, rarely discussing record oil-and-gas output.
Now, with President-elect Donald Trump set to take office, climate concerns are out. New LNG hubs are slated to come online. The White House-in-waiting has promised to fast-track future infrastructure that could help gas companies funnel fuel to new buyers at home or abroad—potentially locking in another era of development.
“Political force has overwhelmed market forces,” said Rice, chief executive of Pittsburgh-based EQT, which produces gobs of gas in the Marcellus Shale stretching across Appalachia. “Let market forces work.”
The U.S. natural-gas market has been constrained in recent years by public aversion to new pipelines and an arduous permitting process that Washington has tried and failed to overhaul. Rice, who recently visited Capitol Hill to talk up natural gas, says this Congress could be different.
But Wall Street is betting that more immediate change under Trump will be better prospects for future LNG facilities, where skyscraper-size tankers load up on supercooled supplies en route to power plants and factories abroad.
Already the world’s largest LNG exporter, the U.S. is set to debut projects that are expected to begin to ship gas in earnest next year, with more scheduled to open by 2028. Trump has pledged to support additional projects beyond then.
Biden’s Energy Department warned this month that “unfettered exports” would boost global emissions, increase market volatility and push up domestic wholesale prices 31% by 2050. But some other analysts, as well as Rice, dispute the ultimate cost impact on households.
“When you say prices are going up, well, that’s because we’ve had historic low natural-gas prices,” said Rice, whose company was among those that curbed drilling in response to languishing prices over the past two years.
For an industry with a long history of overdrilling into painful busts, the longer-term threat now might be overbuilding export facilities in the face of a potential global glut. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm warned in a statement on her agency’s study that projects “that have already been approved will be more than sufficient to meet global demand for U.S. LNG for decades to come.”
Rice doesn’t buy it. In his view, American LNG is well-suited to replace the Russian gas that Europe still imports. Ditto for the record-setting amounts of coal still burned to power China, India and the rest of the world.
“We still have global emissions that are skyrocketing,” Rice said, adding that his recent meetings in Washington suggested an evolution in thinking on energy. “People are reassessing how we got here, and the conclusion they’re going to get to is we need to build more of everything.”
Write to David Uberti at david.uberti@wsj.com
6. Cutting the Deficit Is Easy—It’s Just Unpopular
We have met the budget enemy and he is us.
Cutting the Deficit Is Easy—It’s Just Unpopular
Bureaucrats aren’t driving the deficit. The culprit is the checks they send out that people happen to love.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/how-to-cut-deficit-budget-trump-doge-11e287c6?mod=latest_headlines
By Greg Ip
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Dec. 26, 2024 5:30 am ET
House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to reporters on Friday, hours before a midnight government shutdown deadline. Photo: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg News
Early last week, legislators from both parties agreed on a plan to keep the government funded until March. Then Elon Musk, co-head of President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) demanded that the 1,547-page bill be scuttled. “Either there is massive change or America goes bankrupt,” he wrote on X.
When Congress passed a slimmed-down 118-page bill Friday, Musk posted to his followers, “Your actions turned a bill that weighed pounds into a bill that weighed ounces!”
But slim isn’t the same as cheap. The bill still included an eye-watering $100 billion for disaster relief and $10 billion for farmers. Separately, last week the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, agreed to boost Social Security benefits for some public-sector employees. The bill was just three pages long but will cost nearly $200 billion over 10 years.
The federal deficit reached $1.8 trillion, or 6.4% of GDP, last fiscal year, a record outside of war, recession or emergency. Musk and Trump have promised to attack it by cutting federal spending. One simple step would be to stop adding to it. And yet last week neither stood in the way of Congress’s largess. Musk posted in favor of the money for disaster victims and farmers. The vice president-elect, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, co-sponsored the Social Security expansion.
The reason is obvious: Spending is popular with voters and both parties. This is why commissions, think tanks and earnest outsiders have been papering Washington for decades with ideas to cut spending and the deficit—and mostly gotten nowhere.
Photo: Fazry Ismail/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Plans by President-elect Donald Trump to beef up military spending pose a challenge to efforts to shrink the federal budget, and a spending bill passed by Congress last week included $100 billion in disaster relief. Photo: Angela Owens/WSJ
Will this time be any different? Musk certainly brings sizzle and a soapbox that the typical think tank lacks. He claims he can slash federal spending, which was $6.75 trillion last year, by at least $2 trillion.
And yet to date DOGE’s ideas mostly revolve around firing civil servants, closing or merging agencies, and cutting regulations. Whether this makes the government more efficient, it won’t save much money. Salaries for all civil servants cost around $200 billion to $250 billion a year—or roughly one-eighth of the deficit—and more than 60% of them work for military or security-related agencies, the functions Trump plans to beef up.
Moreover, some savings from shrinking the civil service could be illusory. Fewer Internal Revenue Service agents means less tax collected, for example.
The reality is that the big money isn’t tied up in the people who work for the government, but in the checks they send out. And the checks are much more popular than the people.
For example, the Education Department, perennially marked for extinction by Republicans, spent more than half of last year’s $274 billion budget on loans and grants to students. The Transportation Department spent half its $117 billion budget on checks, mostly to state and local governments, for highways, bridges and other infrastructure.
Federal spending, broken down
Federal spending falls into three categories. First, interest on the debt, at $882 billion last year. Not much you can do about that without defaulting. Second, discretionary spending, which gets authorized each year by Congress. This is what last week’s funding fight was about. It covers defense plus most of the federal services Americans encounter day to day, from the National Park Service to the National Weather Service.
Third, mandatory spending: this is for programs that continue each year without new authorization including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies, food stamps, welfare, child tax credits, veterans’ benefits and pensions.
At $4.1 trillion, mandatory is more than double discretionary spending and, because of population aging and health costs, growing much faster.
Some efficiency evangelists claim mandatory programs can be run much more cheaply. Medicare, for instance, spent $12 billion last year on administrative expenses. Can that be reduced? Maybe. But it’s just 1% of total costs, compared with 12% or more at private insurers.
Trump’s golden opportunity
So taming mandatory spending means reining in benefits. Fundamentally rewriting social programs is mostly a job for Congress, and indeed, Republicans on Capitol Hill are considering a 10-year budget plan that ties mandatory spending cuts of $2.5 trillion to extending Trump’s 2017 tax cut.
But Trump can also cut mandatory spending unilaterally. There’s a misconception that because such spending is mostly determined by the authorizing law, it’s on autopilot. In fact, presidents have a lot of discretion in how they interpret the law.
Perhaps no president has exercised this discretion as brazenly as President Biden. He reversed an Obama era interpretation of the Affordable Care Act to expand subsidies to families, at a projected 10-year cost of $34 billion. Treasury’s liberal interpretation of who qualifies for clean-energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (effectively, though not technically, a form of mandatory spending) added roughly $300 billion to the law’s 10-year cost, according to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, or PWBM.
In a way, Biden did Trump a favor: The new president can restrain deficits unilaterally by undoing Biden’s executive actions. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has identified up to $1.4 trillion in such potential savings. Some, like student debt cancellation, have already been halted by courts, but plenty of others remain.
Elon Musk met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this month. Photo: Benoit Tessier/Reuters
Last month, Biden handed Trump a golden opportunity when he proposed that Medicare and Medicaid cover anti-obesity drugs. Biden officials say this would cost $36 billion over a decade, but PWBM puts the cost at $140 billion based on the big boost to utilization when other drugs gained similar coverage.
The rule can’t be completed until after Trump’s inauguration, which means he can prevent up to $140 billion in new federal spending by simply not implementing the rule.
This wouldn’t be popular: Polls show a majority of voters want Medicare to cover anti-obesity drugs, as do 120 legislators from both parties. Trump’s nominees have sent mixed signals. Trump has regularly promised not to cut existing Medicare benefits. And during the campaign he promised to make in vitro fertilization free, potentially saddling federal health programs with huge costs.
Trump, a populist, has built his economic platform around avoiding unpopular choices. If he’s going to make good on his promise of slashing the deficit while cutting taxes, he’ll have to do some unpopular things.
Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com
7. Ex-Mossad Agents Reveal Details Of How They Turned Hezbollah’s Communications Devices Into Bombs
Ex-Mossad Agents Reveal Details Of How They Turned Hezbollah’s Communications Devices Into Bombs
“We create a pretend world... We write the screenplay, we’re the directors, we’re the producers, we’re the main actors, and the world is our stage.”
Thomas Newdick
Posted on Dec 24, 2024
twz.com · by Thomas Newdick
Key details of the Israeli intelligence service’s operation targeting members of Hezbollah with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in September have been revealed. You can read our reporting of the first wave of explosions here, and the second wave here. Israel didn’t initially admit responsibility for the blasts but was always acknowledged to have been behind them — although exactly how it orchestrated them had remained mysterious.
The new information about the campaign was provided by two recently retired senior Mossad agents, who spoke with the 60 Minutes news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Both wore masks while interviewed and gave false names.
First, it’s worth recapping how the operations played out.
The first wave of explosions, on September 17, targeted pagers used by Hezbollah.
At around 3:30 p.m. local time, it seems the pagers were triggered simultaneously, by a specific message. The message was one that looked, at least, as if it was sent by Hezbollah leadership. The detonation then happened with a slight delay.
The second wave of explosions, on the following day, targeted walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah.
A communication device on the ground as the Lebanese Army prepares to destroy it in a controlled explosion, in southern Lebanon between the villages of Burj al Muluk and Klayaa, on September 19, 2024. Photo by Rabih DAHER / AFP RABIH DAHER
In total, thousands of devices used by the militant group were targeted.
As might be expected for an operation so complex, it took years to shape, with the two Mossad agents — named as “Michael” and “Gabriel” — apparently being key players in its planning. According to CBS, work to weaponize the walkie-talkies began more than a decade before the attacks.
It was already expected that the batteries of the devices were used to carry the explosives, confirmed by Michael, who noted that the walkie-talkies, in particular, were chosen since they would fit into the chest pockets of tactical vests used by the militants.
As for the batteries, these were made in Israel at a Mossad facility, Michael said, and then put in more than 16,000 walkie-talkies, not all of which were used on September 16.
A photo taken on September 18, 2024, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, shows the remains of exploded pagers on display at an undisclosed location. Photo by AFP
To get these devices into Hezbollah’s hands, they were sold via shell companies, which then infiltrated the group. The chosen price was low enough to ensure that Hezbollah thought it was getting a good deal, but not too low to arouse suspicion.
Since the walkie-talkies were expected to be carried in armored tactical vests, it was considered less likely that the targeted members of the group would be wearing them when they were detonated. After all, these vests would normally only be donned when the militant in question was actually taking part in an operation, or training for one.
To make the operation more effective, weaponized pagers were added to the attack plans, with work on these starting much later, in 2022.
In the case of the pagers — which were seen as much more reliable weapons, since they were carried by the targeted individuals at most times — Mossad discovered that Hezbollah was planning to buy such devices from a Taiwan-based company, Gold Apollo.
The problem with the original Gold Apollo pagers was the size, since they appeared to be too slim to accommodate the explosives required.
This led to Mossad running extensive tests, including detonating larger pagers on dummies, to calibrate the destructive effect. According to Gabriel, the amount of explosive was calculated to injure the targeted fighter, but not anyone next to them. While there are videos that show detonations injuring the targeted individual while leaving passersby unscathed, it’s also the case that other individuals — including at least two children — were killed.
Footage of communication pagers worn by Hezbollah members exploding across Lebanon.
Unprecedented incident. https://t.co/gf37usZrxC pic.twitter.com/5VNZKzxEbi
— Faytuks News (@Faytuks) September 17, 2024
In the end, the finished devices were only able to be used as bombs, with no intelligence collection capabilities, Mossad claimed.
Thought was given to the pager ring tones, to ensure they would sound urgent enough to draw a response. Meanwhile, the timer on the explosive charge was also calculated for maximum effect — the average time to call up the message on a pager after hearing the alert is seven seconds, according to Mossad.
According to Gabriel, Dadi Barnea, the director of Mossad, was initially skeptical that the larger and heavier pager would be attractive to Hezbollah, who would likely favor a lighter and more portable device. But he was convinced otherwise and, meanwhile, Gabriel worked on an advertising campaign.
“We create a pretend world,” Michael explained. “We are a global production company. We write the screenplay, we’re the directors, we’re the producers, we’re the main actors, and the world is our stage.”
The advertising stressed the fact that the pagers were “robust, dustproof and waterproof, with a long battery life.” These claims were presented in fake YouTube ads, backed up with fake online testimonials.
This, of course, led to interest from individuals outside Hezbollah, who Mossad didn’t sell the devices to. Part of the strategy to keep them away from other customers involved quoting them exorbitant prices.
People and first responders gather at the scene of a reported device explosion in Saida in southern Lebanon on September 18, 2024. Photo by Mahmoud ZAYYAT / AFP
To get the pagers into Hezbollah’s hands, Mossad first had to supply them to Gold Apollo, which they also did via shell companies, including one in Hungary. A licensing partnership with Gold Apollo allowed Mossad to manufacture the pagers, while the Taiwanese firm still retained credibility.
“When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad. We make like the ‘Truman Show,’ everything is controlled by us behind the scene,” Gabriel told CBS. “In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100 percent kosher.”
To ensure that Hezbollah got the pagers, Mossad hired the relevant Gold Apollo saleswoman, who was unaware she was working with Israeli intelligence. The saleswoman offered the first batch of pagers to Hezbollah for free, while follow-on sales provided the militants with around 5,000 pagers by September 2024.
The timing of the pager detonations was driven, to a significant degree, by concerns that the plot might be about to be uncovered.
There was less suspicion around the walkie-talkies, which were detonated the following day, some of them exploding while being carried at funerals of those killed by the pagers.
Lebanese Army soldiers stand guard in Beirut on September 17, 2024, after paging devices exploded simultaneously in several Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon amid ongoing cross-border tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters. Photo by Anwar AMRO / AFP
Very quickly, Lebanon was gripped by panic, with residents, Hezbollah or otherwise, worried about what electronic devices would explode next.
In the event, around 30 people were killed, including two children, in the two attacks.
In addition, 3,000 people were injured, which was also part of Mossad’s plan.
A man watches a video, published on social media, showing a wounded man on September 17, 2024, after Hezbollah members’ paging devices exploded simultaneously across Lebanon. Photo by JOSEPH EID / AFP
“If he’s just dead, so he’s dead,” Gabriel said. “But if he [is] wounded, you have to take him to the hospital, take care of him. You need to invest money and effort. And those people without hands and eyes are living proof, walking in Lebanon, of ‘don’t mess with us.’”
According to the former Mossad agents, the operation was a major success, undermining Hezbollah’s fighting capacity, decimating its leadership and command and control, and paving the way for the Israeli Air Force attacks that struck targets across Lebanon in the days after.
A building destroyed in the Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 27, 2024, which killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Photo by Ibrahim AMRO / AFP
Before the end of September, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed by an airstrike in Beirut and a ceasefire with the group came into effect at the end of November. You can read all about that operation here.
The retired Mossad agents speaking to CBS were clearly buoyed by the success of the operation targeting walkie-talkies and pagers, and by the diminished fighting capacity of Hezbollah. At the same time, the Israel Defense Forces were also steadily eroding Hamas, with a relentless campaign of bombardment in Gaza. More recently, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak of a changing order in the region, with the heart ripped out of three of Iran’s key proxies there.
Armed with Rampage missiles, an F-16 is prepared for a mission to strike Houthi targets in Yemen. IDF IDF
“After Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime in Syria, the Houthis are almost the last remaining arm of Iran’s axis of evil,” Netanyahu said last week. “The Houthis are learning, and will learn the hard way, that those who strike Israel will pay a very heavy price for it.”
As to the question of what Mossad does next, we can only guess. But what is clear is that the exploding walkie-talkies and pagers are very unlikely to be attempted again.
“We can’t use the pagers again because we already did that,” Michael told CBS. “We’ve already moved on to the next thing. And they’ll have to keep on trying to guess what the next thing is.”
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com
Staff Writer
twz.com · by Thomas Newdick
8. What's In The Bill That Aims To Revitalize America's Decaying Naval Industry
Excerpts:
“Currently, the United States and China have relative parity in overall economic output,” retired Marine Corps Maj. Jeffrey L. Seavy, noted in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings publication in April. “In terms of shipbuilding, however, China has 46.59 percent of the global market and is the largest builder, with South Korea second at 29.24 percent, and Japan third with 17.25 percent. The United States has a relative insignificant capacity at 0.13 percent.”
To offset domestic shortfalls, Navy leaders have been exploring the possibility of repairing U.S. ships in Korean or Japanese shipyards, although by law American warships can’t be built outside of the states.
The nation’s sealift capacity has been deteriorating as well. U.S. Transportation Command leaders told Congress in April that sealift readiness was a primary concern, and that 17 of the 47 Ready Reserve Force ships were more than 50-years-old, which was dragging readiness rates to alarming levels.
To bolster the U.S. sealift fleet, the bill would allow the U.S. to enter into agreements with treaty allies to meet sealift requirements. Already, the Navy is testing the waters for using Pacific allies for such logistics needs.
And from one of the comments to the story:
ttugates
2 days ago
Might as well accept we aren't going to win a long drawn out war with China, that remains conventional, without Japan or South Korea allied with us.. I wish we used SK to churn out our frigates.
What's In The Bill That Aims To Revitalize America's Decaying Naval Industry
As China's shipbuilding continues to operate in overdrive, the SHIPS Act seeks to rejuvenate America's eroding maritime industrial base.
Geoff Ziezulewicz
Posted on Dec 23, 2024
twz.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz
A sprawling bipartisan proposal to rebuild America’s long-ailing shipbuilding industry was introduced by a group of lawmakers last week. Known as the Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security (SHIPS) for America Act, the ambitious bill seeks to overhaul and restore America’s military and civilian maritime capacity and capabilities. These industries have increasingly fallen behind over the decades, and concerns have grown urgent as China’s shipbuilding capacity continues to dwarf America’s in many respects.
“This is the first major piece of maritime reform since the Merchant Marine Act of 1970,” Sal Mercogliano, a former Military Sealift Command (MSC) mariner and associate professor of history at Campbell University, told USNI News’ Mallory Shelbourne this week. “So you’re talking about 55 years since we’ve had anything like this.”
Bipartisan SHIPS Act Aims to Revitalize U.S. Maritime Industry, Counter China's Dominance
Key Provisions of the SHIPS for America Act
National Maritime Strategy: Establishes a Maritime Security Advisor within the White House and a Maritime Security Board to coordinate…
— Sal Mercogliano (WGOW Shipping) (@mercoglianos) December 19, 2024
“By supporting shipbuilding, shipping, and workforce development, it will strengthen supply chains, reduce our reliance on foreign vessels, put Americans to work in good-paying jobs, and support the Navy and Coast Guard’s shipbuilding needs,” one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a Navy veteran and the first U.S Merchant Marine Academy graduate elected to Congress, said in a statement.
Among its many provisions, the SHIPS Act would require the Navy to develop a strategy for a “rearm-at-sea” capability for the surface fleet. It doesn’t specify which platforms would get the capability, but the sea service has already been testing systems for reloading vertical launching system (VLS) missile cells at sea, and did it successfully for the first time in October. In that instance, the MSC’s dry cargo ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11) transferred an empty VLS weapon container to the USS Chosin (CG-65), a Ticonderoga class cruiser, while underway off southern California.
Such a capability would be vital during a war against China in the expanses of the Western Pacific, one that would likely involve a heavy volume of missile fire by Navy warships far from ports. Being able to reload at sea helps mitigate such a challenge.
Sailors change out an empty Vertical Launching System (VLS) weapon container aboard the Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Chosin (CG-65) in October. (U.S. Navy)
The act would also help private shipbuilders to better service military and commercial customers by requiring the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard to assess and integrate commercial best practices for designing, repairing, and building vessels.
As the United States seeks to get its shipbuilding house in order, China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy in shipbuilding has already given the country a massive long-term edge in building commercial, naval and support vessels relatively efficiently and cheaply compared to America and its allies.
Some in the U.S. have started to call for similar integration of commercial and naval shipbuilding.
“The United States has substantial latent shipbuilding, sustainment, and repair capacity, including aging but not obsolete capital assets, a strong base of potential skilled-trade labor, and a middle-management and engineering talent base that has become geographically separated from shipyards,” McKinsey and Co., a consultancy, wrote in June. “Rapidly increasing output requires tapping into this latent capacity quickly and confidently.”
The legislation would also mandate a plan for how the Defense Production Act could be used to enhance shipyard infrastructure, the defense shipyard industrial base, and port infrastructure.
It would work to bolster smaller shipyards, providing $100 million annually from Fiscal Year 2025 to 2034. A loan fund would also be stood up for reflagging vessels or “converting a vessel to a more useful military configuration.”
The SHIPS Act further seeks to expand the American shipyard industrial base for military and civilian vessels by way of a 25% tax credit for such investments, while establishing other financial incentives to encourage innovation in shipbuilding and repair.
A U.S. Center for Maritime Innovation, with hubs across the country, would work to accelerate next-generation ship design, alternative energy and manufacturing as well.
All these steps seek to help the Navy and American shipbuilding industry that struggles to get new platforms out on time and on budget, while supporting those that are already in the water. The latter has been a massive challenge as the Navy’s fleet ages while demands for more hulls increase. Crumbling shipyards around the U.S. and a limited number of them that can support mainline military vessels is a huge problem that has led to major delays in maintenance, greatly harming available end strength. It is also of major concern if ships were to get damaged in battle during a conflict and need to be regenerated quickly. While some improvements and investments have been made in upgrading shipyards, it is still a glaring and highly concerning issue.
In the shipyards, America’s shipbuilding capacity was in decline even before the end of the Cold War, and shrunk more afterward. It is at a particularly low point, an ebb helped along by the yards’ struggle to attract a sufficient workforce.
“Currently, the United States and China have relative parity in overall economic output,” retired Marine Corps Maj. Jeffrey L. Seavy, noted in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings publication in April. “In terms of shipbuilding, however, China has 46.59 percent of the global market and is the largest builder, with South Korea second at 29.24 percent, and Japan third with 17.25 percent. The United States has a relative insignificant capacity at 0.13 percent.”
To offset domestic shortfalls, Navy leaders have been exploring the possibility of repairing U.S. ships in Korean or Japanese shipyards, although by law American warships can’t be built outside of the states.
The nation’s sealift capacity has been deteriorating as well. U.S. Transportation Command leaders told Congress in April that sealift readiness was a primary concern, and that 17 of the 47 Ready Reserve Force ships were more than 50-years-old, which was dragging readiness rates to alarming levels.
To bolster the U.S. sealift fleet, the bill would allow the U.S. to enter into agreements with treaty allies to meet sealift requirements. Already, the Navy is testing the waters for using Pacific allies for such logistics needs.
The U.S.-flagged international fleet would also grow to 250 ships in 10 years via a “Strategic Commercial Fleet Program” to establish “a fleet of commercially operated, U.S.-flagged, American crewed, and domestically built merchant vessels that can operate competitively in international commerce,” according to a summary of the bill provided by Kelly’s office.
“The United States has fewer than 200 oceangoing vessels of the United States, of which only approximately 80 vessels participate in international commerce, compared with more than 5,500 Chinese documented vessels,” the legislation states.
“In order to increase the fleet rapidly, carriers may also submit a bid to bring a foreign-built vessel into the fleet and reflag it,” the bill states.
In a nod to how U.S. officials view China as a threat beyond its military, the bill also calls for an evaluation of the Chinese government-affiliated National Transportation and Logistics Public Information Platform, or LOGINK.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned in 2022 that LOGINK “potentially provides the Chinese Communist Party access to data collected and stored on the platform and could enable the Chinese government to gain insights into shipping information, cargo valuations via customs clearance forms, and destination and routing information.” LOGINK, which operates in more than 20 global ports, could undercut U.S. firms economically and expose supply chain vulnerabilities, according to the commission.
On the personnel side, the bill would give the Navy secretary additional authority to recruit and retain civilian mariners working under the MSC. These mariners would play a vital role manning ships moving troops and materiel in the event of a war with China, but the command has struggled with finding enough people. MSC announced in November that it would sideline 17 support vessels to ease the strain on the civilian mariner workforce amid personnel shortages, USNI News’ Mallory Shelbourne reported.
Japanese sailors aboard the guided-missile destroyer JS Shimakaze say goodbye to civilian mariners aboard the fleet replenishment oiler USNS Harvey Milk following a replenishment-at-sea in September 2024. (U.S. Military Sealift Command)
To keep such civilian mariners around, the bill would also allow merchant mariners or U.S. shipyard employees to qualify for loan forgiveness if they are employed on an American vessel or shipyard for 10 years. Mariners who have received the Merchant Marine Expeditionary Medal or other mariner medals for service in a designated combat zone would also become eligible for G.I. Bill benefits under the legislation, if they were not already eligible.
To find new talent, the bill would enact targeted recruiting campaigns run by private marketing firms to promote maritime industry careers, and would have military recruiters recommend at-sea or shipyard careers to prospects who don’t qualify for military service.
If passed, the bill would also raise the profile of maritime security affairs by creating a maritime security advisor role within the White House that would lead whole-of-government decisions about American maritime strategy.
The SHIPS Act was introduced last week by co-sponsor Kelly and U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), a supporter of the plan and President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security advisor.
Other sponsors include Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), U.S. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Readiness, and U.S. Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.), chairman of the House’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee whose home state hosts several major shipyards.
NEW: Today I introduced legislation to revitalize America’s ailing maritime industry. It’s one of the biggest problems no one is talking about — and fixing it will create jobs, lower prices, and strengthen our national security. Let me tell you how. pic.twitter.com/KEXHq90eBg
— Senator Mark Kelly (@SenMarkKelly) December 19, 2024
The legislation is paid for via a Maritime Security Trust Fund, similar to existing highway and aviation trust funds. A Kelly spokesperson told TWZ that the bill authorizes $18.1 billion over a decade. The legislation states those funds will come from duties, fees, and penalties imposed on vessels in international commerce, regular tonnage tax proceeds, special tonnage taxes, light money, duties imposed on foreign nations and tariffs, which are all collected by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Industry appears to support the legislation, as its announcement features a bevy of American maritime interests, including shipbuilding associations, shipbuilding corporations, academia and defense groups.
TWZ has regularly reported on the shortfalls of the U.S. shipbuilding industry over the years. A leaked U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence slide revealed in 2023 that China’s shipbuilders are believed to be more than 200 times more capable of producing surface combatants, support ships and submarines than their American counterparts. This is due to the country being a major shipbuilder globally and the ability to use its yards to build military and commercial vessels as needed. Such a revelation underscored longstanding worries about the U.S. Navy’s ability to challenge Chinese fleets, or sustain its forces afloat, during a war.
Reporting at the time explained the significance of that slide:
“The most eye-catching component of the slide is a depiction of the relative Chinese and U.S. shipbuilding capacity expressed in terms of gross tonnage. The graphic shows that China’s shipyards have a capacity of around 23,250,000 tons versus less than 100,000 tons in the United States. That is at least an astonishing 232 times greater than the United States.”
A U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence slide showcases the differing shipbuilding capabilities of the United States and China. (U.S. Navy)
At more than 370 ships by the Pentagon’s latest count, in terms of hulls alone, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) already exceeds the Navy’s battle force fleet of nearly 300. The ONI slide revealed that, by 2035, the gap between Chinese ships and U.S. vessels will widen substantially.
Navy leaders have at times in recent years sought to downplay the numeric differential between the rival fleets, as TWZ reported last year.
Much legislation gets introduced with great fanfare and urgency, only to fall by the wayside once the sausage-making commences. Whether the SHIPS Act suffers the same fate remains to be seen. It would seem to be inline with incoming President-elect Trump’s general view of the need to revitalize American industrial production. Stabilizing the shipbuilding and vessel support base would seem to be part of that general concept, along with the goal of building a stronger Navy.
Either way, it signals that the U.S. maritime universe’s long-chronicled deficiencies are now attracting attempts at meaningful higher-level action.
Contact the author: geoff@twz.com
twz.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz
9. Kiev: Russian Troops Executing Ukrainian Prisoners of War Again
No end to Russian brutality.
Kiev: Russian Troops Executing Ukrainian Prisoners of War Again
military.com · by dpa Published December 23, 2024 at 1:22pm ET · December 23, 2024
KIEV — Russian troops have again been executing Ukrainian prisoners of war, Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets posted on Telegram.
A video showed five Ukrainian prisoners being gunned down by Russians after they were captured, he said.
"Russian war criminals who shoot Ukrainian prisoners of war must be brought before an international tribunal and receive the harshest punishment that the law provides for," Lubinets posted.
Killing prisoners of war is a war crime, and repeated allegations have been made against Russian forces.
In an interview conducted in mid-December, Lubinets put the number of confirmed cases since the start of the war at 177, with the number rising rapidly.
There had been 109 executions this year alone, the ombudsman said.
Putin vows revenge for Kazan attack
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened Kiev with retaliation following Saturday's drone attack on the Russian city of Kazan on the Volga.
"Whoever tries to destroy something here will be faced with a multiple of the destruction on their territory and will come to regret what they have attempted in our country," the Kremlin chief said during a televised video conference.
On Saturday morning, six Ukrainian drones hit residential buildings in Kazan and a seventh struck an industrial facility. No injuries from the attack were officially reported, while media reports indicated that three people suffered cuts from shattered window glass.
Kazan is located more than 1,000 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. Although Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack, it is seen as a response to a Russian missile strike against Kiev.
Drone sets fire to Russian fuel depot
A fuel depot in the western Russian region of Oryol caught fire after a Ukrainian drone attack, regional governor Andrey Klychkov posted on the Telegram platform early Sunday.
"Thanks to quick reactions, it was luckily possible to prevent further consequences of the attack - the fire was quickly localised and has now been fully extinguished," Klychkov posted. He said there were no casualties or serious damage.
According to Klychkov, Russian air defence shot down around 20 drones that were primarily targeting fuel and energy supply facilities.
The Russian Ministry of Defence reported the downing of an overall 42 drones in the regions of Oryol, Rostov, Bryansk, Kursk and Krasnodar. The information cannot be independently verified.
The fuel depot near the village of Stalnoi Kon had been attacked a week ago. Ukraine's military justified the attack by stating that the reservoirs serve the Russian army. The depot also supplies the Druzhba oil pipeline to Europe, however.
©2024 dpa GmbH. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
military.com · by dpa Published December 23, 2024 at 1:22pm ET · December 23, 2024
10. Faulty mortar rounds spark corruption allegations for Ukraine’s defense industry
Faulty mortar rounds spark corruption allegations for Ukraine’s defense industry
Stars and Stripes · by David L. Stern and Serhiy Morgunov · December 23, 2024
Ukrainian soldiers prepare to fire 120mm mortar toward Russian position on the front line at undisclosed location in Donetsk region, Ukraine, June 4, 2024. (Oleg Petrasiuk, Ukraine 24th Mechanized Brigade via AP)
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian anti-corruption activists are calling for a criminal investigation into Ukraine’s top defense institutions for alleged state treason, over allegations that tens of thousands of Ukrainian-produced mortar rounds critical to the country’s defense against Russian troops are failing to fire or badly misfiring.
The accusations of corruption that have dogged Ukraine’s defense sector are also a potential roadblock for future aid — and future investment into the country’s burgeoning defense industry — from Kyiv’s international allies.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center, one of Ukraine’s leading independent anti-corruption watchdogs, on Monday filed a petition to Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, calling for an investigation of officials at the country’s Defense and Strategic Industries ministries as well as Ukroboronprom, the state defense industry conglomerate.
Officials in these government bodies “committed a series of acts” that prevented the mortar rounds from being used for their intended purpose, so as to “damage Ukraine’s defense capability,” the center said in its petition.
“From the facts already exposed it is beyond reasonable doubt that officials in charge for quality control were aware of the malfunction of the mortar rounds but intentionally allowed them to be sent to the Ukrainian armed forces,” said Daria Kaleniuk, the center’s executive director, in an interview.
Vitaliy Shabunin, head of the center’s board, posted the petition on Facebook on Monday. He also posted another one to Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, an independent government agency tasked with battling graft, for the alleged overpayment of some $90 million to a Polish firm for weapons.
The cases were “the two bloodiest corruption schemes in 2024,” Shabunin wrote.
Last month, Ukrainian media outlets reported that a significant portion of 120-mm caliber mortar rounds and a smaller number of 82-mm shells that had recently arrived at the front line were defective. The two mortar rounds are a key element of Ukraine’s defense against Russian infantry assaults.
Soldiers in one unit said that only one out of every 10 120-mm rounds managed to explode successfully, according to local media.
The allegations come at a sensitive time for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. Ukrainian forces are struggling with shortages of equipment and manpower while trying to hold back Russian advances along numerous points on the front line in Ukraine and Russia’s western Kursk region — and Zelensky, after years of vowing to fight for every inch of Ukrainian territory, has recently signaled a greater openness to entering into negotiations to end the war.
The accusations of corruption in its defense sector are also a key talking point among Republican politicians in the United States who oppose providing further military support to Ukraine, though the allegations do not apply to Western-donated weaponry.
Olena Tregub, a member of a group at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry that monitors defense sector procurements, emphasized that this was only one instance in the country’s burgeoning, multibillion-dollar domestic defense industry.
“I don’t want to play into the narrative that we are a corrupt, failed state because it’s not true,” she said. Still, the situation with the mortar rounds was “horrible and dangerous,” Tregub said.
“We are concerned because, we need those [rounds] on the front lines,” said Tregub, who also heads an independent commission that tracks corruption in the defense sphere, adding that it is “a critical situation if they’re not reaching their targets.”
The Defense Ministry last month issued a statement acknowledging the “malfunction of 120-mm mortar rounds,” which it said it was actively investigating.
Preliminary results suggested that the defects were caused by “low-quality powder charges or violations of ammunition storage conditions,” the ministry said, adding that “appropriate personnel decisions” would be made for officials found responsible.
The ministry said it had suspended the use of the affected batches of ammunition and that imported rounds would be used instead. The State Bureau of Investigation had also opened a criminal case, the ministry said.
However, the ministry did not provide details of how many mortar rounds were defective, or which officials were being investigated. The name of the company that produced the rounds has not been released for national security reasons, defense officials say.
Out of one shipment of 54,000 120-mm caliber rounds, almost half needed to be replaced, Strategic Industries Minister Herman Smetanin told Ukraine’s parliament in November. It was not clear what percentage this was of the total number of rounds that were defective, however.
Ukrainian media outlets reported the total number of faulty 120-mm mortar rounds to be closer to 100,000. While this figure could not be independently confirmed, a Ukrainian defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said: “The original contract was for hundreds of thousands of mortar rounds, and now there is need to import about 20 percent of this quantity.”
The official also said that while the investigation into the production of the faulty rounds is underway, the company that produced them has not been blacklisted and is now sending proposals to produce “millions of shells of different calibers.”
The question at the center of the anti-corruption agency’s petition is whether Ukraine’s quality control bodies were aware, or should have been aware, of the shells’ defects.
The mortar rounds’ flaws were “obvious for anybody, who had ever worked with such kind of munition,” said Kaleniuk, the watchdog’s executive director, who also is involved in lobbying Ukraine’s allies for needed weapon systems. “And those on the production lines, as well as in authorized government bodies, obviously knew about it.”
The center was not accusing the entire Defense Ministry or Ministry of Strategic Industries, which oversees Ukraine’s domestic military production, Kaleniuk said — but rather “officials inside these agencies, who were engaged in decision-making” regarding the contract to produce mortar rounds.
Oleksandr Zavitnevych, the head of parliament’s national security, defense and intelligence committee, and a member of Zelensky’s political party, said that the defective rounds would be replaced at the expense of the manufacturer and that “quality control has been intensified across all production facilities.”
Those involved in Ukraine’s domestic arms industry are also concerned about what effect the allegations over shoddy quality control could have on Western investment into Ukraine’s defense industry.
As Ukrainian officials brace for what could be severe cutbacks in Western military aid next year, Kyiv’s international partners are funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Ukrainian arms producers — including $800 million from the United States to help Ukraine produce long-range drones. Kyiv also hopes to become a major arms exporter in the years to come.
“Even one single mis-procurement can destroy the trust” of Western partners, said Maryna Bezrukova, the head of the Defense Ministry agency responsible for weapons procurement. “We should fix the mistake and show that this situation will not repeat in the future.”
“Sometimes production mistakes and technological mistakes happen in the U.S. and in Europe,” she said. “It also happens in Ukraine because we are under pressure and we are a country at war.”
Stars and Stripes · by David L. Stern and Serhiy Morgunov · December 23, 2024
11.The New American Imperialism
I am surprised it took this long to see the "I" word in print. I don't know who James is but he seems to be the first I have seen to call out the US for imperialism.
This is an irreverent and satirical description of what James thinks the new administration's foreign policy will be..
War By Other Means
This is where I occasionally write about things related to military conflict. Or literature. Or films I guess.
By James · Over 1,000 subscribers
The New American Imperialism
The Strong Doing Whatever Dumb Thing They Want
https://othermeans.io/p/the-new-american-imperialism?utm
James
Dec 23, 2024
I should be clear up front here that I have nothing substantive to say about the recent ideas floated in Trumpworld to annex the Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada, and to launch a special military operation to de-cartelize Mexico. They’re all absurdist and defy any measured consideration of their merits. It’s all stupid.
I highly doubt any of these things come to fruition as Trump and his administration are already a shambolic infighting mess before he’s even taken office—wherein this amounts to mere sound and fury, rather than serious policy proposals. It’s not as though we don’t already have a decade of meaningless erratic tweets from Trump.
However, it’s worth noting what it says about something that might be called the central idea illuminating his foreign policy which could be called a New American Imperialism.
His national security team thus far in my opinion has three main traits that he’s been selecting for. First is that they fundamentally have no regard for even maintaining a pretense of international law or America’s adherence to international norms. The idea that America should not be restrained by international systems dates back to his first administration, with his former National Security Advisor John Bolton having once famously proclaimed that all international laws are invalid, meaningless attempts to constrain American power.
People like Pete Hegseth or Elbridge Colby are fundamentally no different from this stance. Hegseth is a notable defender of every war criminal that the United States military has (rightfully) found guilty, and Colby has made his living with vague musing on how the United States should bomb TSMC factories.
The second idea underpinning his national security agenda is that the United States has no actual commitments to other countries themselves. When it comes to bilateral relations built up and formalized through legal treaties, none of it matters. In the model of the German Chancellor who once sneeringly referred to Britain’s obligation to defend Belgium as a mere scrap of paper—Trump’s vision of America is of a country that has no actual formal obligation to anything.
With his views towards tariffs or his seeming interest in unilateral military operations targeting allied countries, he’s clearly signaling that his administration has no regard for legal treaties that have been ratified. The Special Military Operation to Decartelize Mexico for instance would be a blatantly illegal military operation, as would any invasion of the Panama Canal. Setting aside the first point about international law, we have treaties with these countries themselves. Similarly, with tariffs on Canada or Mexico, we have a trade deal with them already that he himself fucking negotiated.
A willingness to not give a shit about American guarantees of security for other treaties we’ve negotiated—for instance NATO—is also a clear aspect of this tendency. To his incoming national security team, things like NATO are seen entirely through a prism of whether or not America can extract concessions to increase our own power, and if they don’t, they have no value.
The third (and possibly most important) part of the qualifiers for his national security team is that all choices have to be weighed in terms of how they would most directly economically benefit the United States in a zero-sum sense. While obviously, all States attempt to engage in economically beneficial behavior—his team sees all economic behavior as a zero-sum activity that either enhances or weakens American power.
I’d put it this way. Most people would say we should defend Taiwan because we have a shared set of ideals around liberal democracy, and the United States should work to protect that. We’d probably also mostly agree that TSMC is a vitally important corporation, and it would be bad if the global supply of semiconductors was interrupted. Both of those things can be true.
However, I think most of us don’t just view the Taiwanese people through a prism of how they can best benefit the American people. We don’t see Taipei in the same way the British saw Capetown. It isn’t an economic colony exporting semiconductors back to the Imperial homeland. For Trump’s team (and I’m thinking of Elbridge Colby here) the defense of Taiwan is mostly a product of defending American economic interests—ideals mean nothing. Taiwan is disposable the second another source of semiconductors becomes available.
It is to reduce the citizenry of non-American countries to little more than rational economic units that are partitioned among Great Powers. It is nothing more than the imperial logic of the 19th Century wherein the United States must exert power so that we control a share of the economic output of the Globe. In my opinion, this also underpins stuff like Greenland—it is merely a piece of real estate to be mined for resources.
Rather than standing by our legal or ideological obligations, everything is now transparently a coercive short-term game of extracting concessions to increase our power. It is—much like Russia under Putin—a return to Imperialism of the old school and a complete repudiation of the international system established in the 20th century.
The national security agenda of the Trump administration is now that the strong can do what they want—and since we’re the strongest—everything is up for sale, renegotiation, or annexation. The weak? Well. Fuck them.
12. Putin Chose Ukraine Over Syria
I wonder if there are lessons for others here about abandoning friends, partners, and allies.
Excerpts:
Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine will help Putin, and Russians more broadly, ignore inconvenient questions about Syria, such as what happened to the money and resources Russia put into the country, or why the Russian security services, which now effectively run the country, have been repeatedly caught off guard: by Ukraine's readiness to resist, by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, by this fall’s Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, and now the rapid fall of the Assad regime. Russia’s partners elsewhere, however, will ask these questions. It has become clear that Russia is incapable of providing its allies with military support and economic development as it wages war, and regimes that previously turned to Russia for support will take notice. Russia is now promoting the narrative that it saved Assad’s life and freedom, thus fulfilling its guarantee by sparing him the fate of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. But Moscow’s allies clearly expect much more from an exporter of regime stability and security.
Rulers who hope for Russia’s help may be unpleasantly surprised by how quickly it seeks to establish contacts with Syria’s new leaders. Even before Assad's departure, Russian television stopped calling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization. More recently, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, clearly with Kremlin approval, has proposed removing the “terrorist” label from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the government has allowed the Syrian embassy in Moscow to raise the rebel flag. Now, Moscow is establishing direct contact with the new Syrian government, trying to win its favor by emphasizing that, despite previous attempts to prop up a secular leader against religious fundamentalists, it sees itself as a global bastion of religious conservatism.
Putin has tried to present Russia’s failure in Syria as a victory, claiming that Russia had prevented the creation of a “terrorist enclave” in the country. But Assad’s fall (and Russia’s indifference to the collapse of his regime) suggests that concern for Syria or any other client state has been subjugated by Putin to his overriding focus on dealing Ukraine a decisive defeat. At the same time, Putin’s decision to prioritize Ukraine should not be confused for a complete abandonment of Russian ambitions outside its immediate neighborhood. Rather, the loss of Syria has simply raised the stakes of the war in Ukraine. In Putin’s schema, Ukraine has become a tipping point in a global struggle between the Western elite and a new, Russian-led order: once Ukraine falls, Russia hopes to take Georgia and whatever other territory it desires, and to once again sell itself as a strong patron to countries around the world. In the meantime, however, Moscow’s promises will ring hollow.
Putin Chose Ukraine Over Syria
Foreign Affairs · by More by Alexander Baunov · December 26, 2024
Other Russian Clients May Conclude That They Can’t Rely on Moscow
Alexander Baunov
December 26, 2024
A Russian military convoy in Latakia, Syria, December 2024 Umit Bektas / Reuters
Alexander Baunov is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a visiting fellow at the European University Institute.
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In 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Syria at the request of dictator Bashar al-Assad, he had several goals in mind. He wanted to help Russia escape the international isolation it endured following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. He sought to return Russia to a position of influence in the Middle East, where its presence had waned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he wanted to establish Russia as a global power capable of supporting its allies and halting efforts to topple friendly governments. The intervention in Syria also allowed Russia to assume the role of protector of Christians in the Middle East—a role that, in Putin’s view, decadent Western powers had abdicated, and a mission that fit neatly with Putin’s desire to present Russia as Europe’s last bastion of Christian values.
In the wake of the rapid collapse of the Assad regime, Putin has little to show for this triple agenda. Russia faces the loss of its military bases in the Middle East and showed little concern for the Syrian Christians it claimed to protect as Assad’s secular government was toppled by the Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. And Russia’s isolation from the international community has only intensified since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
At the core of Russia’s intervention was a message to smaller countries not tightly aligned with Western powers: align with us, and we will shield you from Western-backed regime changes. For nearly a decade, that message seemed credible. Now, however, things look different. Putin’s single-minded focus on achieving total victory over Ukraine has consigned Russia’s other foreign policy objectives to secondary status and cost it one of its greatest foreign policy successes. Assad’s fall invalidates Russia’s claim to be a guarantor of regime stability for allied governments. As long as the war in Ukraine continues, it will remain unable to export security abroad.
HIGHLY REQUESTED PRESENCE
From the beginning, Russia’s involvement in Syria was linked to Ukraine. Moscow perceived the Arab Spring in the 2010s as extensions of the Maidan protests in Kyiv and the “color revolutions” that had rocked post-Soviet countries a decade earlier—all of which Putin saw as possible rehearsals for an eventual bid to topple his own regime. Outwardly, of course, Putin framed Russia’s intervention in Syria as a counterterrorism operation. Although the West rejected Russia’s overture of partnership against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria, it accepted the reality of Russia’s involvement in the war against a common—or at least overlapping—enemy. The United States, Turkey, and several Gulf states established military communication channels with Russia, which ceased to be discussed solely as an international pariah, as it had after its annexation of Crimea.
Meanwhile, in order to support the Assad regime, Russia deepened its relationship with Iran, establishing a joint military commission, delivering S-300 missiles to Tehran despite U.S. objections, and working to bypass international sanctions. Putin also did not shy away from arguments with Turkey over its support for Syrian rebel forces, going so far as to levy trade sanctions against Ankara. Nevertheless, its military intervention never escalated into the conflict with regional Sunni states that Putin’s critics had predicted. Although the Russian-Turkish relationship vacillated between hostility and friendship (Putin supported Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an attempted coup in 2016), Gulf states respected Moscow’s display of military might in a troublesome conflict that had previously proven difficult to manage. Assad was reinstated in the Arab League, high-level contacts between Russia and Gulf countries became more frequent, trade between Russia and the United Arab Emirates increased, and Saudi Arabia and Russia began coordinating on oil policy.
This warm reception extended beyond the Middle East. Countries in Africa, Central Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America found Moscow’s ability to defend an allied regime from domestic turbulence and toppling reassuring. Russia had previously had trouble marketing itself as a convincing investor or exporter of technology, outside of building nuclear plants, and supplying arms. But its successful defense of Assad allowed the Kremlin to sell itself as an exporter of security, both officially through the Russian armed forces, and unofficially, through mercenaries such as the Wagner paramilitary company, which fought on the ground alongside the Syrian army, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as the Russian Armed Forces operated primarily in the air.
The pitch was effective: African governments, including regimes in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and South Sudan, and secular post-Soviet regimes in Central Asia such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have made use of the offer of Russian troops and mercenaries in their struggles against armed guerrillas and Islamist and separatist groups, as well as for training local armed forces and protection services. For the Central Asian governments, Russia has long been seen as a protector against internal unrest caused by Islamists and Western-backed political opposition, and the Syrian intervention strengthened this perception.
By preventing the overthrow of Assad and returning to Assad’s control most of the territory Syria had lost to rebels, Russia demonstrated that it could influence and even reverse the course of events in the region. At the same time, Gulf countries were offered investment projects in Russia and given diplomatic support from the Kremlin. In 2018, the United Arab Emirates signed a strategic partnership agreement with Russia, and by 2021, it had become Russia’s closest partner in the Middle East, with trade turnover between the two countries rising to $9 billion in 2022. Qatari investment in Russia have reached $13 billion. Previously chilly relationships between the Soviet Union and Gulf monarchies, attributable to Soviet support for revolutionary groups and governments in the region, as well as post-Soviet tensions caused by Russia’s war in Chechnya, hydrocarbon market competition, and Putin’s closer ties with Iran, gave way to rapprochement. The Syrian intervention was the catalyst for a durable new Russian role in the Middle East.
UNABLE TO DELIVER
Russia’s abandonment of the Assad regime to marshal more resources for the fight against Ukraine vividly illustrates that Putin is ready to sacrifice everything for total victory in the war. Although Putin tries to portray himself as a realist, he has become consumed with Ukraine, to the exclusion of almost all other foreign policy imperatives.
In much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, Russia had managed to sell its war in Ukraine as a fight for a shared cause: a less Western-centric world order, greater independence in and decentralization of the financial system, and the ability to disregard Western criticism of human rights violations and antidemocratic governances perceived by some non-Western countries as hypocritical. Many countries, including China, India, Vietnam, and the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, saw opportunities in Russia’s isolation from the West. When Western firms and investors closed up shop in Russia, non-Western players entered the Russian market and helped Russia to circumvent sanctions. The fall of Assad will not have an immediate effect on the attempts by these businesses and governments to profit from Russia’s isolation. But the spectacle of a Russian ally’s rapid collapse may change their willingness to align with Russia at the expense of relations with the West.
Russia’s ability to provide military force to its allies meant its security services were in demand in both the Middle East and Africa, but the fall of Assad is likely to dent that demand. Russia’s military bases in Syria, to which it may lose access, enabled it to refuel ships and planes and supply troops to both regions. Without a physical presence in the Middle East, that would be much harder. The rebels’ success in Syria also shows the limitations of Russia’s security and economic offerings to allies all over the world. Moscow was successful in helping Assad regain military and political control over most of the country but proved unable to deal a decisive blow to the resistance in the long run.
Russia also failed to promote economic development in Syria or to replace the Western investment that flooded into the country in the early years of Assad’s rule before drying up during the Arab Spring. Syria never escaped the economic black hole into which it fell during the civil war, when per capita GDP decreased two- to threefold. In areas controlled by Islamist rebels backed by Turkey, living standards eventually surpassed those in the regions ruled by Damascus backed by Russia and Iran. In rebel-run Idlib, there was electricity, fuel, water, and far fewer food shortages. Russia’s total trade with Syria never exceeded $700 million a year, less than Turkey’s trade with the relatively tiny pockets of rebel-held territory.
MONOMANIA
Russia will ultimately weather the fall of Assad and the possible loss of its military bases in the Mediterranean. Russians have always viewed the Syrian expedition with caution and indifference; the idea of sending soldiers to a distant Muslim country was never popular and evoked memories of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Russians were content with a small, high-tech, primarily air war conducted with limited forces on the ground. Coverage of the Syrian intervention helped shape expectations for the “special military operation” in Ukraine as a swift victory somewhere far away, a quick source of pride that required few societal sacrifices or the involvement of nonprofessional soldiers. When the invasion was not an immediate success, the distant successes in Syria became an unpleasant contrast to the grim reality of the war in Ukraine. As the war enters its third year, Putin has lost yet another Syrian success: his citizens’ confidence in Russia’s ability to swiftly win wars through technological superiority.
Russia, Iran, and many other countries criticize U.S. military interventions as arrogant, ignorant of local context, and unable to fashion either stable regimes or effective security structures. Russia, with its role as a counterweight to Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, and Iran, a regional heavyweight, might have been expected to understand local dynamics. But they failed to foster economic growth in Syria and attract others to Assad’s cause. Investors from Gulf countries, India, and China did not flock to Syria under Russian and Iranian security guarantees. Now, as Russia turns to Erdogan for help in evacuating its military and civilian personnel from Syria, it finds itself in the very role in which it once portrayed the United States as playing: a country distant from the region’s affairs and dynamics, pushed out by local political players uninterested in the presence of outsiders.
Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine will help Putin, and Russians more broadly, ignore inconvenient questions about Syria, such as what happened to the money and resources Russia put into the country, or why the Russian security services, which now effectively run the country, have been repeatedly caught off guard: by Ukraine's readiness to resist, by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, by this fall’s Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region, and now the rapid fall of the Assad regime. Russia’s partners elsewhere, however, will ask these questions. It has become clear that Russia is incapable of providing its allies with military support and economic development as it wages war, and regimes that previously turned to Russia for support will take notice. Russia is now promoting the narrative that it saved Assad’s life and freedom, thus fulfilling its guarantee by sparing him the fate of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. But Moscow’s allies clearly expect much more from an exporter of regime stability and security.
Rulers who hope for Russia’s help may be unpleasantly surprised by how quickly it seeks to establish contacts with Syria’s new leaders. Even before Assad's departure, Russian television stopped calling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization. More recently, the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, clearly with Kremlin approval, has proposed removing the “terrorist” label from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the government has allowed the Syrian embassy in Moscow to raise the rebel flag. Now, Moscow is establishing direct contact with the new Syrian government, trying to win its favor by emphasizing that, despite previous attempts to prop up a secular leader against religious fundamentalists, it sees itself as a global bastion of religious conservatism.
Putin has tried to present Russia’s failure in Syria as a victory, claiming that Russia had prevented the creation of a “terrorist enclave” in the country. But Assad’s fall (and Russia’s indifference to the collapse of his regime) suggests that concern for Syria or any other client state has been subjugated by Putin to his overriding focus on dealing Ukraine a decisive defeat. At the same time, Putin’s decision to prioritize Ukraine should not be confused for a complete abandonment of Russian ambitions outside its immediate neighborhood. Rather, the loss of Syria has simply raised the stakes of the war in Ukraine. In Putin’s schema, Ukraine has become a tipping point in a global struggle between the Western elite and a new, Russian-led order: once Ukraine falls, Russia hopes to take Georgia and whatever other territory it desires, and to once again sell itself as a strong patron to countries around the world. In the meantime, however, Moscow’s promises will ring hollow.
Alexander Baunov is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a visiting fellow at the European University Institute.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Alexander Baunov · December 26, 2024
13. State Department’s disinformation office to close after funding nixed in NDAA
How will we proceed to deal with disinformation and psychological warfare as well as cyber threats (when the incoming administration cuts CISA as well). Yes the GEC was problematic but what is the plan to defend the US from disinformation and psychological warfare.
State Department’s disinformation office to close after funding nixed in NDAA
The Global Engagement Center, which tracks and exposes foreign disinformation narratives in foreign countries, will see its authority to operate expire Dec. 24.
By
Derek B. Johnson
December 23, 2024
cyberscoop.com · by djohnson · December 23, 2024
The State Department’s center for fighting global disinformation received a lump of coal in its Christmas stocking this week as congressional lawmakers excluded new funding and authorization for the office beyond this year.
The Global Engagement Center, which tracks foreign disinformation, will lose its authority on Dec. 24. Despite a concerted push by State officials to lobby Congress for an extension, a measure to extend the center’s authority into 2031 was stripped out of the final version of defense authorization legislation that passed through the Senate.
“The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024,” a State Department spokesperson told CyberScoop in an email. “The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps.”
According to figures provided by State, the GEC has a staff of approximately 120 and an annual budget of $61 million. The spokesperson did not address questions about what will happen to the center’s personnel and technology following the closure.
The shuttering will leave the State Department without a dedicated office for countering disinformation abroad for the first time since 2016. The closure comes at the end of a year when U.S. officials, foreign political leaders and private companies tracking disinformation have alleged that Russia and China have engaged in concerted propaganda campaigns targeting democratic elections in Taiwan, Moldova, Georgia, Romania and other countries.
“This is extremely frustrating,” Mark Montgomery, former executive director of the Cyberspace Solarium and a supporter of extending the center’s authority, told CyberScoop. “On a bipartisan basis, both political parties know that Russia, China and, to a lesser degree, Iran and other non-state actors, conduct information operations against us spreading lies, and the GEC was a good tool for ensuring that the truth, as we see it, came out.”
While the center does not focus on disinformation targeting the United States, its work with related organizations faced criticism from congressional Republicans and Elon Musk, who accused the center in 2023 of being “the worst offender in U.S. government censorship [and] media manipulation.”
Musk is now an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump and was placed in charge of an advisory board for cutting programs and reducing government spending.
Additionally, Republicans on the Hill raised questions about the GEC’s value, suggesting its work might duplicate existing analysis from the private sector and other parts of government.
In interviews with CyberScoop and FedScoop last month, GEC leaders pushed back on those views, calling their work “critical” to combatting foreign propaganda campaigns in allied countries and emphasizing that they take active steps to exclude data on U.S. persons from their analysis.
“We are really the first analytical unit in the U.S. government that takes this kind of comprehensive approach of looking at threat actors — Iranians, [China], the Russians — and try to understand … what their influence is broadly on the information space in different geographic regions,” said Carrie Goux, GEC’s acting deputy coordinator.
Lindsay Gorman, a former White House official under the Biden administration, told CyberScoop that there is “a lack of recognition in Congress that the wars democracies are fighting with autocrats overseas are no longer only in the physical domain, but in the cyberspace realm of 1s and 0s.”
“Whether their goal is to marshal support for invading neighbors or undermine U.S. credibility overseas, the U.S. needs a means to fight back. One way is to expose covert campaigns for what they are — important work the GEC is doing,” said Gorman, now at the nonprofit German Marshall Fund. “GEC has been the eyes and ears on the ground when it comes to information threats overseas, tracking where autocratic strategic objectives lie and how tactics are evolving to guide responses.”
Gorman stressed that Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns “aren’t going away” and are increasingly leveraging social media and emerging technologies like generative AI “to sow discord and undermine democracy around the world.”
GEC officials also said their limited budget has hindered efforts to acquire advanced technology needed to support their work, including tools to detect AI-manipulated media.
State Department documents obtained by FedScoop detail a range of solutions and tools the center hoped to acquire if it was reauthorized, including a system for detecting photoshopped images, a “meme detection” model to help analyze and contextualize imagery, a detector for imagery created through Stable Diffusion, and a tool to detect AI-generated assets in video.
Montgomery said that with Republicans set to take control of the State Department and both houses of Congress next month, they are positioned to shape the GEC’s mission and operations to address any concerns about impinging on domestic U.S. issues.
“The frustration is, why not give it an extension now that you’re basically responsible?” Montgomery asked.
Written by Derek B. Johnson
Derek B. Johnson is a reporter at CyberScoop, where his beat includes cybersecurity, elections and the federal government. Prior to that, he has provided award-winning coverage of cybersecurity news across the public and private sectors for various publications since 2017. Derek has a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Hofstra University in New York and a master’s degree in public policy from George Mason University in Virginia.
cyberscoop.com · by djohnson · December 23, 2024
14. Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians
Long painful read.
I am skptical about any reports on rules of engagement that quantify the acceptable number of civilian casutlties estimates as the basis for operational decisions.
Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians
Surprised by Oct. 7 and fearful of another attack, Israel weakened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants, allowing officers to endanger up to 20 people in each airstrike. One of the deadliest bombardments of the 21st century followed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-bombing.html
By Patrick KingsleyNatan OdenheimerBilal ShbairRonen BergmanJohn IsmaySheera Frenkel and Adam Sella
The reporters interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials in Israel, dozens of victims of the strikes in Gaza, and experts on the rules of armed conflict.
At exactly 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military leadership issued an order that unleashed one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.
Effective immediately, the order granted mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza. Officers could now pursue not only the senior Hamas commanders, arms depots and rocket launchers that were the focus of earlier campaigns, but also the lowest-ranking fighters.
In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians.
The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history. Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.
It meant, for example, that the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside.
In previous conflicts with Hamas, many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt. Sometimes, officers could risk killing up to five civilians and only rarely did the limit rise to 10 or above, though the actual death toll was sometimes much higher.
On Oct. 7, the military leadership changed its rules of engagement because it believed that Israel faced an existential threat, according to a senior military officer who answered questions about the order on the condition of anonymity.
Hours earlier, Hamas-led terrorists had stormed into southern Israel, seizing towns and army bases, committing atrocities, firing thousands of rockets at civilian areas, killing up to 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. As Israelis battled Hamas fighters inside their borders, the officer said, Israel’s leaders also feared an invasion from the group’s allies in Lebanon and believed that they had to take drastic military action.
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Israeli soldiers carrying a body at a kibbutz after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
“All of the places where Hamas was deployed, in this city of evil, all of the places where Hamas has been hiding and operating from — we will turn them into rubble,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a speech on Oct. 7.
An investigation by The New York Times found that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.
The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets. Collectively, their accounts provide an unparalleled understanding of how Israel mounted one of the deadliest air wars of this century. Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on a subject of such sensitivity. The Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.
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The Gazan health ministry says that more than 45,000 people have been killed. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
In its investigation, The Times found that:
- Israel vastly expanded the set of military targets it sought to hit in pre-emptive airstrikes, while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. That led Israel to fire nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks, more than in the next eight months combined. In addition, the military leadership removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians that its strikes could endanger each day.
- On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.
- The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale.
- The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cellphone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.
- From the first day of the war, Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks, or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an imminent attack. And when it could have feasibly used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military goal, it sometimes caused greater damage by dropping “dumb bombs,” as well as 2,000-pound bombs.
The air campaign was at its most intense during the first two months of the war, when more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed — or roughly a third of the overall toll, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
From November 2023 onward, amid a global outcry, Israel began to conserve ammunition and tighten some of its rules of engagement, including by halving the number of civilians who could be endangered when striking low-ranked militants who posed no imminent threat. But the rules remain far more permissive than before the war. Since those early weeks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and while Israel disputes the ministry’s figures, the total continues to climb.
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Israel vastly increased the number of military targets in Gaza, and increased the number of civilians who could be endangered in strikes. Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
Provided a summary of The Times’s findings, the Israeli military acknowledged that its rules of engagement had changed after Oct. 7 but said in a 700-word statement that its forces have “consistently been employing means and methods that adhere to the rules of law.”
The changes were made in the context of a conflict that is “unprecedented and hardly comparable to other theaters of hostilities worldwide,” the statement added, citing the scale of Hamas’s attack; efforts by militants to hide among civilians in Gaza; and Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.
“Such key factors,” the statement said, “bear implications on the application of the rules, such as the choice of military objectives and the operational constraints that dictate the conduct of hostilities, including the ability to take feasible precautions in strikes.”
The relatives of Shaldan al-Najjar, a senior commander in a militia allied with Hamas that joined the Oct. 7 attacks, were among the first casualties of Israel’s loosened standards.
When the military struck his home in a war nine years earlier, it took several precautions to avoid civilian harm — and no one was killed, including Mr. al-Najjar.
When it targeted him in this war, it killed not just him but also 20 members of his extended family, including a 2-month-old baby, according to his brother Suleiman, who lived in the home that was hit and witnessed the immediate aftermath. Some relatives were blown from the building. His niece’s severed hand was found in the rubble.
“Blood was splattered all over the neighbor’s wall — as though some sheep had just been slaughtered,” the brother recalled.
Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it complies with international law by taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties, often by ordering evacuations of whole cities before strikes, and by dropping leaflets over neighborhoods and posting online maps about imminent operations.
Israel says that Hamas’s military strategy makes bloodshed more likely. The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.
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A photograph taken during an escorted tour of a tunnel the Israeli military said was built by Hamas underneath a school.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Unlike Hamas, which fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas, Israel and all Western armies operate under a multilayered oversight system that assesses the legality of planned strikes. Each attack plan is usually meant to be analyzed by a group of officers, which often includes a military lawyer who can advise on whether strikes might be unnecessary or unlawful.
To comply with international law, officers overseeing airstrikes must conclude that the risk of civilian casualties is proportional to the target’s military value, and take all feasible precautions to protect civilian life. But officers exercise significant discretion because the laws of armed conflict are vague about what counts as a feasible precaution or an excessive civilian toll.
After the shock of the Oct. 7 attack, a dozen officers recalled, some Israeli officers involved in the counteroffensive became less stringent about adhering to military protocol. While some commanders tried hard to maintain standards, five senior officers used the same phrase to describe the prevalent mood inside the military: “harbu darbu.”
It is an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint.
Why Civilians Were at Higher Risk
The Israeli military first targeted Shaldan al-Najjar during the war in August 2014. He was a senior commander in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had conducted suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel for decades.
Before that strike in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, the air force gave his neighbors three chances to escape, according to his brother Suleiman.
Israeli officers called one neighbor, and then another, with warnings of an upcoming strike on a nearby target that the military did not identify. Then the military dropped a small projectile on the house, what it calls a “roof knock,” standard practice then before strikes on targets believed to hold ammunition or tunnel entrances. That was enough for everyone, including Shaldan al-Najjar, to escape unharmed.
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The Najjars’ home after it was hit in Deir al Balah.Credit...Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
But seven hours after Hamas attacked Israel last year, the order from Israel’s high command made roof knocks optional. In practice this meant the procedure was rarely used, officers said.
There were no warnings before an Israeli fighter jet fired at Shaldan al-Najjar on the evening of Oct. 10, 2023, as he visited his siblings’ home. The explosion killed Mr. al-Najjar, along with his stepmother, four children, a younger brother, a sister-in-law, 13 nephews and nieces, including the 2-month-old baby boy, named Zein, and at least one neighbor, according to records compiled by Gaza’s health authorities.
The Israeli military confirmed that it had been targeting a member of Islamic Jihad, but declined to release more information.
Under Israeli military protocols, there are four categories of risk for civilian casualties: Level Zero, which forbids soldiers to put any civilians at risk; Level One, which allows up to five civilian deaths; Level Two, which allows up to 10; and Level Three, which allows up to 20 — and became the standard on Oct. 7.
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Shaldan al-Najjar, a commander in Palestinian Islamic Jihad.Credit...via Facebook
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Fins from a guided bomb that the Najjar family said it had found in the rubble.Credit...Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
Suddenly, officers could decide to drop one-ton bombs on a vast array of military infrastructure — including small ammunition stockpiles and rocket factories — as well as on all Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. The definition of a military target included lookouts and money changers suspected of handling Hamas’s funds, as well as the entrances to the group’s underground tunnel network, which were often hidden in homes.
Authorization from senior commanders was required only if the target was too close to a sensitive site, like a school or health facility, though such strikes were regularly approved too.
The effect was swift. Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, documented 136 strikes that each killed at least 15 people in October 2023 alone. That was almost five times the number the group has documented during any comparable period anywhere in the world since it was founded a decade ago.
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A U.N.-run school that housed displaced Palestinians and was damaged by an Israeli bombardment. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were occasionally permitted to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved, according to four Israeli officers involved in target selection. Three of them said those targeted included Ibrahim Biari, a senior Hamas commander killed in northern Gaza in late October, in an attack that Airwars estimated killed at least 125 others.
Another order, issued by the military high command at 10:50 p.m. on Oct. 8, provides a sense of the scale of civilian casualties deemed tolerable. Strikes on military targets in Gaza, it said, were permitted to cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.
Military officials characterized the order as a precautionary measure intended to cap the number of strikes that could take place each day. A scholar at West Point consulted by The Times, Prof. Michael N. Schmitt, said it risked being construed by mid-ranking officers as a quota that they had to reach.
In any case, the limit was removed two days later — allowing officers to sign off on as many strikes as they believed were legal. The Gazan authorities later reported occasional daily tolls of more than 500, but it was unclear how many were civilians or if their deaths had occurred over several days.
The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war. By November, two officers said, the air force had dropped so many one-ton bombs that it was running low on the guidance kits that transform unguided weapons, or “dumb bombs,” into precision-guided munitions.
Munitions fired by Israel into Gaza
Around 30,000
munitions fired in
first seven weeks
50,000
40,000
30,000
20,000
10,000
Oct.
Nov.
Dec.
Jan.
Feb.
March
April
May
June
2023
2024
This forced pilots to rely on unguided and less accurate bombs, the officers said. They were also increasingly dependent on outdated Vietnam-era bombs that can fail to detonate, according to two U.S. military officials briefed on Israel’s arsenal.
The air force used the one-ton bomb to destroy whole office towers, two senior Israeli military officials said, even when a target could have been killed by a smaller munition.
While declining to comment on specific incidents, the Israeli military said that its “choice of munitions” was always governed by the rules of war. The senior military official said that heavy munitions were required to hit Hamas’s tunnels.
The Najjar family was struck by a precision-guided one-ton bomb — an American-made JDAM, according to a Times assessment of a guidance fin that the family said it had found in the rubble. The bomb completely destroyed their three-story building, flattening five apartments as well as a car workshop on the ground floor, according to the brother and two other surviving members of the family.
“After the dust and smoke cleared, I looked at my building,” said Suleiman al-Najjar, who said he survived because he was on his way back from the hospital. “There was no building.”
A Depleted Target Bank
Throughout the war, hundreds of Israeli intelligence officers spread across several military bases scrambled to find and strike new targets, relying on an automated surveillance system that enabled them to work exponentially quicker.
In earlier wars in Gaza, officers had typically worked their way through a “target bank” — a database of hundreds of militants and locations that already had been methodically researched and vetted. In this war, the air force raced through much of the list within days, 11 officers and officials said, putting intelligence officers under intense pressure to find new targets.
Many were encouraged to propose a certain number of targets each day, according to five officers.
Several elite intelligence units, officials said, were given more time to find small numbers of high-value targets, like senior Hamas political leaders and top military commanders. Other units focused on rocket launch sites and ammunition stores. One unit looked specifically for civilians who provided financial services to militant groups.
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The remains of a vehicle in Rafah, southern Gaza, in January.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But most intelligence units, particularly those in infantry divisions preparing to invade Gaza, were given very little time to build a much longer list of targets, officials said. That mainly involved trying to locate tens of thousands of low-ranking militants.
Israel has long maintained databases, one of which was code-named “Lavender,” that list phone numbers and home addresses of suspected militants, according to 16 soldiers and officials. Israel also controls Gaza’s telecom networks, allowing it to tap and track Palestinian phones. By listening to calls made by phones associated with the militants, intelligence officers tried to work out where they were, officials said.
But the databases sometimes included outdated data, according to six officers, increasing the likelihood that officers would misidentify a civilian as a combatant. There were also too many calls for the officers to manually track.
To speed up the process, officers used artificial intelligence.
In recent years, the Israeli military had developed computing systems, one of which was known as “The Gospel,” that could automatically cross-reference information from several different sources, including phone conversations, satellite imagery and mobile phone signals.
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Israel controls Gaza’s telecoms networks, allowing it to tap and track Palestinian phones.Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the chaotic opening weeks of the war, different intelligence units harnessed these automated computing systems in varied ways to triangulate data and locate militants.
One common method involved automatically cross-referencing the location of a phone with its owner’s home address. When a phone appeared to be in roughly the same place as an address linked to its owner, the system flagged and recorded the owner’s phone calls.
Arabic-speaking soldiers then listened to these calls to determine whether a wanted militant had been found. Some units used speech-to-text software to translate the conversations automatically.
The military said officers always verified the information provided by the automated systems and it denied that artificial intelligence was ever more than the starting point of a human-led verification process. But the amount of verification varied from unit to unit, according to at least eight officers.
Some officers said they would only confirm someone as a militant if they overheard the person speaking about their involvement in Hamas’s military wing.
In other units, three officers said, an individual was considered a confirmed militant if he was simply listed in Lavender. Details of that process were previously reported by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian news website; the Israeli military has denied that was military policy and said that any analyst who relied solely on Lavender would have been overruled by superiors.
Once officers were satisfied that they had confirmed a legal target, they would begin planning an attack, such as a missile strike if the target seemed to be staying the night at home, the soldiers said.
The first step was to gauge the civilian risk.
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Removing a body out of the rubble of a house in Khan Younis in December 2023.Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times
In the most rigorous version of that assessment, officers sometimes hacked a target’s phone handset to listen to the conversations taking place nearby, in order to build a better picture of whom he was with, according to three officers familiar with the process. In some cases, the hacking allowed officers to pinpoint the target’s location as well as which way he was facing, how many floors he had climbed and how many steps he had recently taken.
As an additional precaution, officers sometimes attempted to trace the phones of the buildings’ other known prewar residents — a laborious process that could take more than an hour.
But the military was pursuing so many targets that officers often lacked the time or resources for such sophisticated surveillance, particularly when tracking low-ranking militants early in the war, according to seven officials and soldiers.
Officers could still intercept calls and determine a phone’s rough location by checking which cellphone towers received its signals. That information was less precise — and it was more difficult to ascertain who was nearby.
Overlooked Civilians
In the absence of more accurate data, Israeli intelligence officers routinely used a simplistic model to estimate the number of civilians who might be killed in an airstrike, according to 17 soldiers and officials.
The military divided Gaza into 620 sectors, most the size of a few city blocks, and estimated the number of working phones in each using the signals received by cellphone towers. After comparing phone and Wi-Fi usage with prewar levels, the military then estimated the proportion of residents who remained in each sector.
To gauge the number of civilians inside a particular building, officers typically assumed that the building’s prewar residents had fled at the same rate as the surrounding neighborhood.
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Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been injured since the war began, according to Gazan health officials.Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Even at its best, the model provided information that might be out of date by the time of an airstrike. The volume of attacks meant that there was often an hourslong gap between the assessment of civilian risk and the actual strike on the target, according to eight officers.
When the air force tried to kill a money changer connected to Islamic Jihad in mid-November 2023, for example, seven hours had passed since intelligence officers last checked where he was and who he was with, according to an official familiar with the attack. The strike killed two women — but the target survived because he was no longer there, according to the official and a second person familiar with the incident.
The model also suffered from fundamental flaws.
It relied, for example, on people having enough electricity to power their phones — and a working phone network. But power and network outages in Gaza often made that impossible.
The location of handsets also cannot be determined with complete accuracy based on phone signals; phones that seem to be in one neighborhood may be in an adjacent one. And the model also ignored how, during times of war, people often cluster together in large groups, three officers said.
Starting in November, senior officers in the American Joint Special Operations Command repeatedly raised concerns about the model’s accuracy with their Israeli counterparts, warning that it was leading to catastrophically imprecise assessments, according to the two senior U.S. military officials familiar with the conversations.
Some within the Israeli military also sounded the alarm. Throughout November and December, Israeli Air Force analysts urged colleagues to use more extensive drone surveillance to check for the presence of civilians, according to internal military assessments. Little to no action was taken, at least for several weeks, according to those assessments. The air force was supposed to recheck estimates of civilian presence but did not always do so.
Even when conducting after-action reviews, the military rarely tried to count how many civilians had been killed, making it almost impossible for officers to assess the model’s accuracy, according to 11 officers involved in target selection.
The Israeli military’s statement to The Times did not address questions about the model, but it said that in general the military’s methods “adhere to the rules of law, whether it be the choice of munitions or the use of digital technologies to support this effort.”
Israel’s strike on a residential street on the edge of Gaza City on Nov. 16, 2023, exemplified how inaccurate the model could be. The military told The Times in a statement that it was trying to destroy one of the many tunnels used by Hamas’s military wing. In the process, it hit a large house.
Before the war, 16 members of the extended Malaka family lived in the three-story building, according to two surviving brothers, Hazem and Nidal Malaka. After the war began, dozens of other relatives moved in, they said.
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Nidal Malaka, left, and his brother Hazem.Credit...Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
At the moment of the strike, 52 people — including Hazem and Nidal Malaka — were crammed into the bottom two floors. The brothers drew a family tree for The Times that detailed their names and backgrounds, and provided photographs of many of them. The oldest was the 64-year-old family patriarch, Jamal, and the youngest was his 2-year-old granddaughter, Sham.
By this point in the war, the surrounding neighborhood, Zeitoun, was largely depopulated. Israel’s formula for assessing the building’s occupancy, based on phone usage in the wider neighborhood, would have suggested there was only a handful of civilians left.
And several hours before the strike, phone reception was lost across Gaza, service providers announced at the time. That meant that a manual attempt to track the handsets of the building’s prewar residents may have suggested there was no one there at all.
The first reports of the strike emerged only after the network outage ended, three days later on Nov. 19.
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The remains of the Malaka home in Gaza City.Credit...via Malaka family
By the brothers’ count, at least 42 people were killed and just 10 survived. Hazem Malaka said that most of them were not officially recorded as dead because the victims’ bodies were left trapped in the rubble instead of being taken to the nearest hospital where deaths are registered.
Hazem Malaka, 40, lost his pregnant wife, son and daughter. To the best of his knowledge, he said, their bodies still lie crushed “under three floors of concrete.”
Tightening the Reins
About two months ago, Israel struck a hospital compound in central Gaza where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. Several burned to death, including Shaaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old university student, who was filmed flailing helplessly in his tent as the flames engulfed him.
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Shaaban al-Dalou, 19, burned to death after Israel struck a hospital compound.Credit...Al-Dalou family, via Associated Press
Israeli officials blamed Hamas for the blaze, saying it likely occurred after an Israeli missile, targeting a Hamas command center, hit munitions that the group had stored in the hospital compound.
“All I wanted was for him to look at me one last time,” said Mr. al-Dalou’s father, Ahmed, as he recalled watching his son burn to death.
The attack occurred about 500 yards south of where the militant commander Shaldan al-Najjar was killed a year and four days earlier.
Still, the military has steadily used fewer munitions over the past 12 months, according to officers and records reviewed by The Times. The average number of munitions used by Israel each month in Gaza fell from a high of nearly 15,000 in October and November 2023 to less than 2,500 from February through May. (The Times was unable to verify the number of munitions fired since June.)
In relative terms, Israel has also tightened its rules of engagement.
On Nov. 5, 2023, the military leadership decreed that officers needed special permission to endanger more than 10 civilians in strikes on low-ranking militants who posed no imminent threat to Israeli infantry. By late January, officers needed special permission for nearly all such deadly strikes, except for those targeting the most senior Hamas commanders.
But the rules were still far looser than they were before Oct. 7.
Mid-ranking officers could still sign off on most strikes that endangered 10 civilians or less — a threshold far higher than the prewar norm.
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The hospital complex where Mr. al-Dalou was killed. Israel said it had targeted a Hamas command center.Credit...Ramadan Abed/Reuters
And many strikes proved far deadlier.
In July, Israel fired several missiles at Hamas militants, including a top commander, Muhammad Deif, killing at least 57 people, according to Airwars.
Israeli officers have also acted with near impunity. Only two officers are known to have been fired for their role in the air campaign, after they oversaw a drone strike that killed several foreign aid workers whom the officers had confused for militants.
The military said that a panel appointed by the military chief of staff was investigating the circumstances of hundreds of strikes.
No one has been charged.
Abu Bakr Bashir, Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. More about Patrick Kingsley
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. More about Ronen Bergman
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel
15.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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