Quotes of the Day:
“You stand up because you believe, not because you want to win. I don't want you add more hate to this world. We have enough.”
- Dave Connis, Suggested Reading
"There is no higher honor than to serve free men and women."
- President George H.W. Bush
"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can't take it all in at once."
- Coco Channel
1. China’s Political System in Charts: A Snapshot Before the 20th Party Congress
2. Why Xi Jinping could be overthrown as China's Communist leader
3. Senate passes stopgap funding bill, avoiding shutdown
4. PGM: Iran's greatest threat to Israel after nuclear program - opinion
5. U.S. has rock solid commitment to help Taiwan defend itself -official
6. Army reports the most racist extremism cases, Marines the most anti-government
7. ‘We just feel it’: Racism plagues US military academies
8. Confidence in military continues to fall after Afghanistan withdrawal: survey
9. The three ghosts haunting US foreign policy
10. Ending Strategic Ambiguity Won’t Help Taiwan
11.Iran’s Quest for Soleimani’s Revenge Goes to Latin America
12. ‘Toyotas of War’ is the photo archive we never knew we needed
13. Large scale Russian offensive possible in January, Ukraine says
14. Getting Competition Wrong: The US Military's Looming Failure
15. Taliban release decree saying women must consent to marriage
16. DeSantis proposes a new civilian military force in Florida that he would control
17. The final, anguished years of a warrior-scholar who exposed torture by U.S. troops
18. Lawyer for Philippines’ Nobel Peace Prize winner Ressa ‘confident’ about Oslo trip
19. In the annual football uniform dispute, 2021 Army trumps Navy
20. The China Initiative, US crackdown on Chinese economic espionage, is a mess. We have the data to show it.
1. China’s Political System in Charts: A Snapshot Before the 20th Party Congress
This should serve as a useful baseline and good source of references for China watchers.
China’s Political System in Charts: A Snapshot Before the 20th Party Congress
November 24, 2021
This report provides a visual representation of China’s leading political institutions and current leaders in the form of 16 CRS-created organization charts and accompanying explanatory text. The charts present China’s political system as it emerged from the Communist Party of China’s (CPC’s) 19th Congress in October 2017 and the First Session of China’s 13th National People’s Congress in March 2018. The CPC is scheduled to convene its 20thCongress in the second half of 2022. Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is widely expected to seek to extend his time in power at that congress, possibly by seeking a third term as general secretary. That would break a norm established by his two predecessors that general secretaries serve two terms and then step down. Xi is also widely believed to be seeking appointment to a third term as state president at the First Session of the 14th National People’s Congress in March 2023.
China’s polity is a Party-state, featuring interlocking Communist Party and state hierarchies under Xi’s increasingly personalized leadership. In addition to serving concurrently as general secretary of the CPC’s Central Committee and state president, Xi also serves as chairman of the CPC and State Central Military Commissions and as the “core” of the Central Committee and the Party as a whole. Below him in the Party hierarchy are the Central Committee’s elite 7-man Political Bureau (Politburo) Standing Committee, of which Xi is a member, and the Central Committee’s broader 25-person Politburo, from which the Standing Committee is drawn.
The Central Committee’s 204 voting members elect the General Secretary, Politburo Standing Committee, and Politburo, ratify the Party’s choices for members of the CPC’s Central Military Commission, and approve the Politburo Standing Committee’s nominations for the Party Secretariat. TheSecretariat oversees the powerful Central Committee bureaucracy, which keeps a tight grip on portfolios the Party deems critical to its survival. They include the security services, media and culture, and personnel appointments across the political system. The Party’s Central Military Commission overseesChina’s armed forces. The Party tasks its Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the state’s National Supervisory Commission, whose operations are fused, with rooting out wrongdoing among public servants and enforcing loyalty to the Party Central Committee and to Xi.
The CPC presents itself as “coordinating the work of all sides,” and assuming “the role of leadership core among all other organizations at the corresponding level [of government].” Other hierarchies in China’s political system are those headed by China’s unicameral legislature, the National People’s Congress; an administrative body, the State Council; an adjudicatory body, the Supreme People’s Court; a prosecutorial body, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate; and what China calls a “political consultation” body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). At every level of government, the heads of those bodies serve concurrently as senior Party officials at the same level. The Secretary of the Party Committee for each level of government is the most senior official at that level. The Party also operates “leading Party members groups” or Party committees within the other institutions, and requires the institutions to report to higher Party bodies.
Since ascending to the top position in Chinese politics in 2012, Xi has worked to bolster both the Party’s authority and his own. His 2018 reorganization of the Party and state bureaucracies served to strengthen the Party at the expense of the state. Also in 2018, the Party under Xi ordered the establishment of the National Supervisory Commission, which works jointly with the Party’s discipline inspectors to investigate public servants. In 2015, Xi reorganized China’s Party military, the People’s Liberation Army. The organization charts in this report reflect those changes.
2. Why Xi Jinping could be overthrown as China's Communist leader
Hmmmm.... I did not see this cited in the CRS report. Nothing about coups, revolutions, being overthrown, or ousted.
Why Xi Jinping could be overthrown as China's Communist leader
Why Xi Jinping's iron-grip over China faces its biggest threat yet with rising fears he could be OVERTHROWN amid the weakest economic growth in 45 years - and how Australia stands to benefit
- Xi Jinping could face a challenge to his leadership from within Communist Party
- Chinese President's crackdown on billionaires risks hurting economic growth
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute said President Xi facing an internal revolt
PUBLISHED: 03:16 EST, 3 December 2021 | UPDATED: 04:18 EST, 3 December 2021
Daily Mail · by Stephen Johnson, Economics Reporter For Daily Mail Australia · December 3, 2021
Xi Jinping's position as China's President could be threatened from within his Communist Party if economic growth plunges, a national security expert says.
The authoritarian leader's crackdown on billionaires as part of a 'Common Prosperity' drive could destroy economic growth while a curb on essential exports could see other countries like Australia create their own supply chains to diversify away from China.
While China is the top trading partner for 130 nations, its trade sanctions on Australia have backfired, with a ban on coal for political reasons causing widespread blackouts this year.
Oxford Economics is forecasting China's growth plunging to just one per cent in 2022 should property giant Evergrande's debt woes spread to other parts of the economy.
This would be the weakest gross domestic product expansion since 1976, the year China's Cultural Revolution ended with the death of Communist dictator Mao Zedong.
At that rate, the economy would also be growing at less than half the 2.3 per cent pace of 2020 when China went into a hard lockdown.
Michael Shoebridge, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's director of defence, strategy and national security, said the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian legitimacy depended on them delivering economic prosperity.
Scroll down for audio
Xi Jinping's position as China's President could be threatened from within his Communist Party if economic growth plunges, a national security expert says. The authoritarian leader's crackdown on billionaires as part of a 'Common Prosperity' program could destroy economic growth while a curb on essential exports could see other countries like Australia create their own supply chains to diversify away from China
'The Communist Party's legitimacy since the death of Mao has come from the economic growth that it's been delivering to the Chinese population,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'The bargain that the party has made to stay in power is, "You let us stay in power, you stay out of politics and other discussion of sensitive topics and in return the Chinese economy will deliver wealth to you".'
Mr Shoebridge said President Xi, in power since 2013, was more likely to face a challenge from within his Chinese Communist Party rather than an uprising among the people should the economy slow significantly.
'I think the more likely thing is internal Chinese Communist Party disquiet would happen,' he said.
'At its peak, it could mean his power gets challenged inside the party if he's damaging the party's ability to continue to rule, it's more likely they'd be an internal challenge to his leadership but he's been ruthless in purging a whole lot of other potential power centres in the party.'
While many Communist Party officials would be fearful, President Xi could also end up being less aware of his political situation, having had the two-term limit on being leader abolished in 2018.
'The risk here is that he's closing off other voices who would give him uncomfortable advice and when you do that, you don't get the news about people organising things against you,' Mr Shoebridge said.
President Xi was seen as being more likely to face a challenge from within his Chinese Communist Party rather than an uprising among the people should the economy slow significantly (he is pictured at the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2016)
Michael Shoebridge, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's director of defence, strategy and national security, said the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian legitimacy depended on them delivering economic prosperity (pictured is a blackout at Shenyang in China's north-east in September following a ban on Australian coal)
'He's closing down his channels of information about disquiet in the party and that's creating the environment where this could happen.'
Joe Hockey, Australia's former ambassador to the United States after serving as treasurer, told the Washington-based Hoover Institute at Stanford University that social upheaval could challenge President Xi's authority.
'Don't forget there have been insurrections against authority in China on numerous occasions over many years,' he said.
'So it's not something that would be new. It's something to be feared.'
Mr Hockey, whose speech was observed by The Australian Financial Review, said the Chinese government's crackdown on business was a sign of fear.
Oxford Economics is forecasting China's growth plunging to just one per cent in 2022 should property giant Evergrande's debt woes spread to other parts of the economy. This would be the weakest gross domestic product expansion since 1976, the year China's Cultural Revolution ended with the death of Communist dictator Mao Zedong (pictured is an Evergrande development in Hong Kong)
'Beijing still thinks that if they lose control of the flow of capital, then they lose control of the economy and that's what scares them,' he said.
'China can't cope with a recession.'
The likes of billionaire Jack Ma, the founder of online retail giant Alibaba, have gone into hiding.
Mr Shoebridge said this crackdown on the rich was likely to diminish China's domestic economic activity as it became harder to maintain high growth with a bigger middle class.
'Some of the internal economic troubles that are already happening - the property sector, the finance sector, the energy sector are already struggling and some of that is because of Xi's decision making,' he said.
Joe Hockey, Australia's former ambassador to the United States after serving as treasurer, told the Washington-based Hoover Institute at Stanford University that social upheaval could challenge President Xi's authority (he is pictured with his wife Melissa Babbage)
'He's damaging their prosperity. His idea for the Chinese economy is to rely more on domestic demand and consumption and less on needing to export goods and services - but if your domestic economy is struggling more, if your anti-corruption campaign is telling people who spend lavishly they may well be subject to corruption charges, it's very hard to stoke that consumer demand domestically.'
Mr Shoebridge said China's export curbs would worsen global inflationary pressures and encourage other countries to develop their own supply chains.
'It will drive shortages but it will also push others to start building alternative supply chains,' he said.
'We've already seen that happen in the case of rare earths because China did exactly this, threatening to stop exports of rare earths to Japan.'
China's aggression has led to the formation of Quad, also known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, between Australia, Japan, India and the United States.
China has this year banned exports of urea, a phosphate needed to run diesel motors, in a bid to keep a lid on fertiliser prices and contain food inflation.
The National Road Transport Association said Australia only had two months' supply of urea left.
With half Australia's long-haul truck fleet having a diesel engine, board member Allan Thornley said logistics transport would come to a halt, causing a supply chain shutdown.
'We've got no transport service, your entire supply network collapses,' he told Melbourne radio 3AW broadcaster Neil Mitchell.
'All late model trucks use the additive.'
China's attempts last year to punish Australia over its calls for a Covid inquiry appear caused coal futures in October to high a record highs of $US271 per tonne after Chinese cities were plunged into blackouts from having less of the energy commodity available.
Even before the pandemic in 2019, Australian coal was barred from being unloaded at Chinese ports after telecommunications giant Huawei was banned from installing Australia's next generation 5G network.
Daily Mail · by Stephen Johnson, Economics Reporter For Daily Mail Australia · December 3, 2021
3. Senate passes stopgap funding bill, avoiding shutdown
Congress (barely) living up to its responsibilities.
Senate passes stopgap funding bill, avoiding shutdown
The Senate passed a stopgap spending bill Thursday that avoids a short-term shutdown and funds the federal government through Feb. 18 after leaders defused a partisan standoff over federal vaccine mandates. The measure now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.
Earlier in the day, congressional leaders announced they had finally reached an agreement to keep the government running for 11 more weeks, generally at current spending levels, while adding $7 billion to aid Afghanistan evacuees.
Once the House voted to approve the measure, senators soon announced an agreement that would allow them to vote on it quickly.
“I am glad that in the end, cooler heads prevailed. The government will stay open and I thank the members of this chamber for walking us back from the brink of an avoidable, needless and costly shutdown,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The Senate approved the measure by a vote of 69-28.
The Democratic-led House passed the measure by a 221-212 vote. The Republican leadership urged members to vote no; the lone GOP vote for the bill came from Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
Lawmakers bemoaned the short-term fix and blamed the opposing party for the lack of progress on this year’s spending bills. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said the measure would, however, allow for negotiations on a package covering the full budget year through September.
“Make no mistake, a vote against this continuing resolution is a vote to shut government down,” DeLauro said during the House debate.
Before the votes, Biden said he had spoken with Senate leaders and he played down fears of a shutdown.
“There is a plan in place unless somebody decides to be totally erratic, and I don’t think that will happen,” Biden said.
Some Republicans opposed to Biden’s vaccine rules wanted Congress to take a hard stand against the mandated shots for workers at larger businesses, even if that meant shutting down federal offices over the weekend by blocking a request that would expedite a final vote on the spending bill.
It was just the latest instance of the brinkmanship around government funding that has triggered several costly shutdowns and partial closures over the past two decades. The longest shutdown in history happened under President Donald Trump — 35 days stretching into January 2019, when Democrats refused to approve money for his U.S-Mexico border wall. Both parties agree the stoppages are irresponsible, yet few deadlines pass without a late scramble to avoid them.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Democrats knew last month that several Republicans would use all means at their disposal to oppose legislation that funds or allows the enforcement of the employer vaccine mandate. He blamed Schumer for not negotiating and for ignoring their position.
If the choice is between “suspending nonessential functions” or standing idle while Americans lose their ability to work, “I’ll stand with American workers every time,” Lee said.
Lee and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., authored an amendment that prohibited federal dollars being spent to implement and enforce a series of vaccine mandates put in place by the Biden administration. The amendment went down to defeat with 48 yes votes and 50 no votes. But having the vote opened the door to taking up the full spending bill immediately.
Lee said millions were being forced to choose between an unwanted medical procedure and losing their job.
“Their jobs are being threatened by their own government,” Lee said.
“Let’s give employers certainty and employees peace of mind that they will still have a job this new year,” Marshall urged before the vote.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., countered that the federal government should be using every tool to keep Americans safe and that is why the Biden administration has taken steps to urge employers to make sure their workers are fully vaccinated or test negative before they come to the workplace.
“No one wants to go to work and be worried they might come home to their family with a deadly virus,” Murray said.
The White House sees the vaccinations as the quickest way to end a pandemic that has killed more than 780,000 people in the United States and is still evolving, as seen Wednesday with the country’s first detected case of a troubling new variant.
Courts have knocked back against the mandates, including a ruling this week blocking enforcement of a requirement for some health care workers.
For some Republicans, the court cases and lawmakers’ fears about a potentially disruptive shutdown were factors against engaging in a high-stakes shutdown.
“One of the things I’m a little concerned about is: Why would we make ourselves the object of public attention by creating the specter of a government shutdown?” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a GOP leader.
The administration has pursued vaccine requirements for several groups of workers, but the effort is facing legal setbacks.
A federal judge this week blocked the administration from enforcing a vaccine mandate on thousands of health care workers in 10 states. Earlier, a federal appeals court temporarily halted the OSHA requirement affecting employers with 100 or more workers.
The administration has also put in place policies requiring millions of federal employees and federal contractors, including military troops, to be fully vaccinated. Those efforts are also under challenge.
Polling from The Associated Press shows Americans are divided over Biden’s effort to vaccinate workers, with Democrats overwhelmingly for it while most Republicans are against.
Some Republicans prefer an effort from Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., to vote to reject the administration’s mandates in a congressional review action expected next week, separate from the funding fight.
Separately, some health care providers protested the stopgap spending measure. Hospitals say it does nothing to shield them from Medicare payment cuts scheduled to go into effect amid uncertainty about the new omicron variant.
4. PGM: Iran's greatest threat to Israel after nuclear program - opinion
Excerpts:
All of this is now occurring with the backdrop of renewed nuclear negotiations between Iran and world powers. Israel would like nothing more than to see an agreement that truly shuts down Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapon. But the Biden administration’s negotiations are not talking about such a comprehensive deal. Nor are they talking about ending the PGM program as part of these talks. This leaves Israel with no choice but to continue to wage its war between wars.
Washington understands Israel’s position. The White House is quietly ignoring the shadow campaign, while insisting that Iran could still return to negotiations and quickly evolve into a responsible stakeholder in the Middle East. This means that Israel has a window, perhaps a closing window, to deal with the PGM threat. It can do so with the tacit approval of Washington and with the almost-open endorsement of the Russians and the Syrians.
The war between wars campaign has been heating up for years. But it is now reaching new levels of intensity. Israel sees this is the only way to defend against Iran’s threats to the region. For the first time, other actors may quietly agree.
PGM: Iran's greatest threat to Israel after nuclear program - opinion
It is by now well established that most of those incidents in Syria are Israeli strikes targeting Iranian personnel or the transfer of precision-guided munitions, PGMs.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz shocked Israelis last week when he revealed details of a 2018 security incident during which an Iranian drone had crossed into Israeli airspace. The Israelis downed the drone, which originated at the T4 Air Base in Syria. This much was known. But Gantz revealed that the drone was actually intended to deliver explosives to terrorist groups in the West Bank.
The episode was only one among many on the Syrian-Israeli border in recent years. The Israelis have worked overtime to battle Iranian efforts to exploit the fog of war to smuggle a wide variety of advanced weapons to terrorist groups, primarily Hezbollah in Lebanon, but apparently other groups and jurisdictions, too.
In fact, the number of Israeli operations, according to foreign press reports, has increased recently. Not a week goes by without reports of something going “boom” in Syria. It is by now well established that most of those incidents are Israeli strikes targeting Iranian personnel or the transfer of precision-guided munitions, PGMs.
The Israelis call this the “war between wars” campaign. It is a concerted and sustained effort, launched in 2012, to enforce Israel’s red lines in war-torn Syria. Jerusalem has made it clear that it will not allow Iranian personnel or Iran’s terrorist proxies to operate on Syrian soil. This includes Hezbollah, but also a significant number of Shi’ite militias that answer to their paymasters in Tehran.
Israel also insists that Syria cannot become a transshipment point for what are often euphemistically described as “game-changing weapons.” More often than not, the Israelis are referring to PGMs, PGM parts, production machines or the personnel responsible for transferring knowledge of PGM production.
WAVING THE Hezbollah flag in Marjayoun, Lebanon. (credit: AZIZ TAHER/REUTERS)
With Iran’s help, Hezbollah has been manufacturing PGMs or retrofitting older, guided rockets to convert them to PGMs – all with the goal of targeting Israel. Reports suggest that they have successfully produced several dozen of these deadly munitions, or even several hundred. But they have paid a heavy price. The casualties continue to mount, and the number of shipments that have been destroyed are by now in the thousands.
Israeli officials at first kept quiet about their war between wars for fear of stoking a wider conflict. But beginning in 2019, they have lifted the veil on these activities. Political and military officials alike have revealed more and more about the thousands of targets that Israel has destroyed in Syria over the last few years.
The message appears to be tailored to one particular audience: the regime in Iran. Regime officials have repeatedly expressed their goal of hastening Israel’s demise. Such rhetoric has been constant since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. But in 2009, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei began directing his lieutenants to invest heavily in the research and development of PGMs with the understanding that these weapons would truly be “game changers.” They would enable the regime or its proxies to strike Israeli targets within 20 feet of their intended mark. They would also potentially be able to outmaneuver Israel’s advanced air defenses. The goal would be to hit targets that would have a meaningful impact on Israeli security.
Accordingly, the IDF has declared the PGM threat to be the country’s second most dire, subordinate only to the Iranian nuclear program. Increasingly, Israel sees these two programs as interconnected. They are part of a long-term Iranian plan. Both must be stopped for Israel to live in peace. The shadow operations against both programs continue apace.
Interestingly, the Russians, who operate anti-aircraft weapons in Syria with the permission of the ruling regime, are not complaining about the ongoing Israeli strikes. Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett have invested considerable time and effort in convincing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers that it is in Russia’s national interest to oust Iran from Syria. The Russians are open to the idea. After all, Israel has made it clear to Putin that as long as the PGM threat continues, and as long as Iran violates Israel’s “red lines,” the strikes will continue.
Without stability in Syria, the Russian investments there will be at risk. Putin understands this reality. Whether he is willing to take steps to edge Iran out of the country remains to be seen.
The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad itself, which would not be in power were it not for Iranian intervention in the country’s civil war, is also quietly cheering on the Israeli strikes. The Iranians have simply outstayed their welcome in Syria, violating the sovereignty of an allied nation to use it as a jurisdiction for smuggling these deadly weapons.
It is for this reason that Syria has started to engage in diplomacy with Arab states, led by the United Arab Emirates, to come in from the cold. But in order for that to happen, Assad must break from Iran. This is easier said than done.
Among other reasons, the Arab states are also increasingly concerned over how the Iranian PGM project threatens Lebanon. The country is on the verge of political and economic collapse. Should the PGM smuggling to Hezbollah continue, Israel may have no choice but to destroy them. This could start a war that would devastate the country that was once considered a bastion of liberalism and wealth in the Middle East.
All of this is now occurring with the backdrop of renewed nuclear negotiations between Iran and world powers. Israel would like nothing more than to see an agreement that truly shuts down Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapon. But the Biden administration’s negotiations are not talking about such a comprehensive deal. Nor are they talking about ending the PGM program as part of these talks. This leaves Israel with no choice but to continue to wage its war between wars.
Washington understands Israel’s position. The White House is quietly ignoring the shadow campaign, while insisting that Iran could still return to negotiations and quickly evolve into a responsible stakeholder in the Middle East. This means that Israel has a window, perhaps a closing window, to deal with the PGM threat. It can do so with the tacit approval of Washington and with the almost-open endorsement of the Russians and the Syrians.
The war between wars campaign has been heating up for years. But it is now reaching new levels of intensity. Israel sees this is the only way to defend against Iran’s threats to the region. For the first time, other actors may quietly agree.
Brigadier General (Res.) Professor Jacob Nagel is a former Israeli acting national security adviser. He is now a visiting professor at the Aerospace Faculty of the Technion and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president at FDD, a former terrorism finance analyst at the United States Department of the Treasury, and author of the new book Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War.
5. U.S. has rock solid commitment to help Taiwan defend itself -official
Excerpt:
Assistant Secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink, speaking in Singapore during a visit to Southeast Asia, said the U.S. has a rock solid commitment to assist Taiwan.
"As the threat and coercion from the People's Republic of China increases, I think we need to respond as well in an appropriate way," Kritenbrink told reporters in Singapore, specifically citing support over self-defence and trade.
U.S. has rock solid commitment to help Taiwan defend itself -official
Flags of Taiwan and U.S. are placed for a meeting in Taipei, Taiwan March 27, 2018. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
SINGAPORE, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Threats and coercion by China towards Taiwan increase the need for the United States to help Taiwan maintain a credible self-defense, the top U.S. diplomat for Asia said on Thursday.
Assistant Secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink, speaking in Singapore during a visit to Southeast Asia, said the U.S. has a rock solid commitment to assist Taiwan.
"As the threat and coercion from the People's Republic of China increases, I think we need to respond as well in an appropriate way," Kritenbrink told reporters in Singapore, specifically citing support over self-defence and trade.
"We intend to live up to our obligations, our rock solid obligations and commitments," he added.
Kritenbrink also said he had spoken to counterparts in Malaysia about the country doing more to enforce laws it has in place to combat human trafficking and labour abuses.
"We believe Malaysia needs to do more ... to protect victims and crack down on traffickers," he said.
This year the U.S. State Department downgraded Malaysia to the worst ranking in its human trafficking watchlist. read more
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has banned six Malaysian firms, including rubber glove makers and palm oil producers, in the last two years from selling their products to the United States after finding evidence of forced labour.
Kritenbrink said he had also spoken to Southeast Asian leaders about putting more pressure on the military junta in Myanmar, without going into specifics.
Reporting by Joe Brock; Editing by Ed Davies, Martin Petty
6. Army reports the most racist extremism cases, Marines the most anti-government
Depressing to read. It is no wonder trust in the military is declining.
Army reports the most racist extremism cases, Marines the most anti-government
Even before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Congress ordered the Defense Department to do a better job reporting and tracking extremist behavior among troops. The first public release of available statistics shows hundreds of investigations carried out in the first nine months of the year, according to a DoD inspector general report published Wednesday.
The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act required DoD to standardize its policies so that allegations of extremism are referred to the DoD inspector general, as well as an annual implementation progress report.
The report includes events from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 of this year.
Though Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a one-day standdown for the entire department and stood up a working group earlier this year, he hasn’t given any guidance to the services on standard practices for reporting and tracking extremism activity.
The services have taken a piecemeal approach for years, generally working with the FBI when allegations are made and deferring to the Justice Department when charges are brought, but never centrally tracking the number of their personnel who had been investigated.
After it became clear that a disproportionate number of Jan. 6 Capitol rioters were either currently serving or former members of the military, DoD struggled to provide any numbers on extremist activity because there were no tracking mechanisms in place.
Similarly, the FBI declined to provide data on service members it had investigated.
As part of its report, DoD IG asked for this data.
“The Military Departments reported issues with compiling and validating their data and, in some cases, the reported numbers were conflicting,” according to the report.
But what they were able to find is illuminating. The Army reported 33 allegations of “racially motivated violent extremism,” while the Navy had 30, the Marine Corps had seven and the Air Force reported none.
In the anti-government/anti-authority category, there were 34 Army reports, 14 Navy reports, 25 Marine Corps reports and none from the Air Force.
The Air Force, instead, wrapped all of its violent extremism cases ― 102 ― into a category dubbed “domestic violence extremism participation,” according to a DoD IG spokeswoman, which is not clearly defined.
The Air Force did not immediately respond to a request to define the term.
The Air Force was also the only service to report “trespassing at the U.S. Capitol,” of which they had 10 allegations.
RELATED
In order to root out extremism, the military is going to have to define it.
Anti-government extremism was much more common in the Marine Corps.
For example, Marine Corps and Naval Criminal Investigative Service numbers did not match those that the Navy Department submitted.
Now, with a congressional mandate, the department has drafted guidance for the military departments, according to the IG, but it hasn’t been finalized or distributed.
“That policy memorandum provides guidance regarding the reporting requirements of Section 554(b) and instructs the Secretaries of the Military Departments to draft and submit their own policies to the USD(P&R) office for review, within 120 days.”
The IG, likewise, found that the services have struggled to collect their own data without any clear direction from the defense secretary’s office.
The report found that each service has their own efforts underway: The Army requires all extremism investigations to be reported to Army Criminal Investigation Command; the Navy wants to track extremism court-martial proceedings centrally; the Marine Corps has put out guidance for all of the avenues to report extremist behavior; and the Air Force is creating an identifying code for its legal case management system to tracking extremist allegations.
For the IG’s part, those constituted steps toward fulfilling the 2021 NDAA requirements. So did the working group, which is tasked with creating a new definition for extremism.
That report was due to Austin in July.
“The report is nearing completion,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told Military Times in October, adding, “And it will, as we’ve talked about, it will include a new definition set of what extremist activity comprises.”
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT
7. ‘We just feel it’: Racism plagues US military academies
‘We just feel it’: Racism plagues US military academies
By Aaron Morrison, Helen Wieffering and Noreen Nasir
Dec 3, 06:33 AM
Eight years after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Geoffrey Easterling remains astonished by the Confederate history still memorialized on the storied academy’s campus – the six-foot-tall painting of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the library, the barracks dormitory named for Lee and the Lee Gate on Lee Road.
As a Black student at the Army academy, he remembers feeling “devastated” when a classmate pointed out the slave also depicted in the life-size Lee painting. “How did the only Black person who got on a wall in this entire humongous school — how is it a slave?” he recalls thinking.
As a diversity admissions officer, he later traveled the country recruiting students to West Point from underrepresented communities. “It was so hard to tell people like, ‘Yeah, you can trust the military,’ and then their kids Google and go ‘Why is there a barracks named after Lee?’” he said.
The nation’s military academies provide a key pipeline into the leadership of the armed services and, for the better part of the last decade, they have welcomed more racially diverse students each year. But beyond blanket anti-discrimination policies, these federally funded institutions volunteer little about how they screen for extremist or hateful behavior, or address the racial slights that some graduates of color say they faced daily.
In an Associated Press story earlier this year, current and former enlistees and officers in nearly every branch of the armed services described a deep-rooted culture of racism and discrimination that stubbornly festers, despite repeated efforts to eradicate it.
Less attention has been paid to the premiere institutions that produce a significant portion of the services’ officer corps – the academies of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Merchant Marine.
Some graduates of color from the nation’s top military schools who endured what they described as a hostile environment are left questioning the military maxim that all service members wearing the same uniform are equal.
That includes Carlton Shelley II, who was recruited to play football for West Point from his Sarasota, Florida, high school and entered the academy in 2009. On the field, he described the team as “a brotherhood,” where his skin color never impacted how he was treated. But off the field, he said, he and other Black classmates too often were treated like the stereotype of the angry Black man – an experience that brought him to tears at the time.
“I was repeatedly in trouble or being corrected for infractions that were not actually infractions,” he said. “It was a very deliberate choice to dig and to push on certain individuals compared with other cadets — white cadets.”
Xavier Bruce, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1999 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during his 24 years of duty, said that for him, it was the ongoing slights directed at him as a Black man, rather than openly racist behavior, that cut deep.
“We just feel it, we feel the energy behind it, and it just eats us away,” he said.
Some students of color have spotlighted what they see as systemic racism and discrimination at the academies by creating Instagram accounts — " Black at West Point,” " Black at USAFA " and " Black at USNA " — to relate their personal experiences.
“I was walking with a classmate and we were both speaking Spanish when a white, male upperclassman turned around and said ‘Speak English, this is America,’” a 2020 Air Force Academy graduate wrote in one post.
RELATED
Austin, who broke racial barriers throughout his four decades in the Army, said military leaders must set the right example to discourage and eliminate extremist behavior.
In response to the AP’s findings, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said the service academies make it a policy to offer equal opportunities regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. He said the DOD formed a special team in April to advance progress on diversity, equity and inclusion across the entire department, including the academies.
West Point did not respond to repeated requests for comment, beyond reiterating the importance of diversity to its admissions process and to preparing cadets for leadership.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which sparked protests around the globe, a group of prominent West Point alums had released a 40-page letter urging the academy to address “major failures” in combatting intolerance and racism. “Though we are deeply disturbed, we hold fast to the hope that our Alma Mater will take the necessary steps to champion the values it espouses,” the letter said.
An appendix offered anonymous testimonials gathered last year from West Point cadets about incidents they said went unaddressed by school officials. “I had a racist roommate that would call me the n-word and spit on me,” one cadet wrote. “I told the 4th Regimental Tactical Officer about it, and they did nothing.”
Shelley acknowledges West Point has become more racially diverse, but said the academy has significant work to do to retain and support students of color. In his class, he estimated about 35 Black students graduated — “some crazy low number,” he said. “And we started with a lot more.”
In a sense, the tributes to Lee that still dot the West Point campus illustrate the academy’s dichotomy: Cadets studying military history are taught that Confederate soldiers were no heroes, yet the references to Lee — a West Point graduate who later became the academy’s superintendent — remain.
The latest annual defense spending bill mandated that the Defense Department survey all its military properties for references or symbols that potentially commemorate the Confederacy, including at West Point, which the commission overseeing the work picked as its first site to visit earlier this year. But the deadline to act on any recommendations is still more than two years away.
FILE - United States Military Academy graduating cadets sit during their graduation ceremony of the U.S. Military Academy class 2021 at Michie Stadium on Saturday, May 22, 2021, in West Point, N.Y. The U.S. military academies provide a key pipeline into the leadership of the armed services and have welcomed more racially diverse students. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, File)
The U.S. armed forces were segregated until the mid-1950s, when an influx of fighters were needed for the Korean War. Now, the collected services applaud themselves for 200 years as “the greatest military force in history,” attracting men and women who represent all creeds, religions, races, ethnicities and sexual orientations.
At the academies, integration happened much earlier, following the abolition of slavery. During Black History Month at West Point, honor is paid to Henry O. Flipper, a formerly enslaved man who became the academy’s first Black graduate in 1877. But the West Point that Flipper attended was rife with prejudice: His white classmates and professors refused to acknowledge his presence.
Today, the academies are a growing pathway to officer status for Black cadets, 2019 data from the Under Secretary of Defense shows, with about 13% of Black active-duty officers commissioned through the five institutions, compared to 19% of white active-duty officers.
Most students who enroll — about 60-70% — are nominated by U.S. senators or representatives from their home states as part of a system created in the 1840s to build a politically and geographically diverse officer corps. But today, the changed demographics of the U.S. mean the system gives disproportionate influence to rural congressional districts that tend to be whiter, the AP found.
Only 6% of nominations to the Army, Air Force and Naval academies made by the current members of Congress went to Black candidates, even though 15% of the population aged 18 to 24 is Black, according to a report on the service academies released in March by the Connecticut Veterans’ Legal Center. Eight percent of congressional nominations went to Hispanic students, though they make up 22% of young adults, the report said.
The diversity of nominations has improved slightly in the past 25 years, but the report noted that 49 Congress members did not nominate a single Black student during their time in office and 31 nominated no Hispanic candidates.
In Texas, nominations to the service academics from senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn included 23% and 20% people of color, respectively — among the lowest levels in the Senate compared to the demographics of their state, where more than 60% of young adults are Black, Asian American, Hispanic or Latino.
Cruz’s press secretary, Dave Vasquez, said the senator rejects that race should be factored in when selecting academy nominees and that names, race and other personal information are all removed before an external review board considers applications to Cruz’s office, selecting candidates “on objective merits such as SAT/ACT scores, GPA, and community-service involvement.” Cornyn’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Curtis Harris said he was awarded one of just three nominations to West Point out of more than 300 applications to his congressman. He graduated in 1978 and became the first in his family to rise to the officer ranks, initially becoming a platoon leader overseeing 35 people and equipment worth millions of dollars at the age of just 21. His uncles had enlisted in the Army and his stepfather was a Navy cook, but they had few options for advancement as Black servicemen, he said.
West Point remains a point of pride for Harris: He hasn’t missed an Army-Navy football game in 40 years, and he helps review applications for nominations for U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York. He also visits high schools and junior high schools to encourage candidates of diverse backgrounds to apply.
In a society where opportunity is not given out equally, Harris said, the academy provides the “ammunition” to be successful. Yet diversifying West Point is “not going to happen by itself,” he said. “I just think that particularly people of color should know that this opportunity exists.”
The Naval, Air Force, Merchant Marine and Coast Guard academies have generally become more diverse over the past two decades, according to data supplied by the four schools after the AP asked for 20 years of student body demographic data. West Point did not provide historical records, but Col. Deborah McDonald, the academy’s admissions director, said it is welcoming more and more diverse students, with 37% of the class of 2024 identifying as nonwhite. A decade ago, that proportion was more like 25%, she said.
Non-white racial groups did not see appreciable changes at some academies. For instance, while the number of Hispanic cadets increased in the past two decades at the Coast Guard and Naval academies, Black cadets showed no noticeable increase during that time. In the class of 2000, there were 73 Black midshipmen in the Naval Academy — and just 77 in 2020. At the Coast Guard Academy, there were 15 Black cadets in the 2001 class. And in 2021? Merely 16.
According to the data provided to the AP, graduation rates between racial groups at the Naval and Coast Guard academies continued to show gaps. At the Naval Academy, for example, Black midshipmen still had the lowest graduation rate of any racial group at 74%, compared to the 2020 school-wide rate of 87%. And the Black graduation rate of 65% at the Coast Guard Academy between 2011 and 2020 lagged about 20 percentage points behind other racial groups.
Only data from the Navy and Coast Guard was complete and detailed enough to look at graduate rate trends by race.
Two of the five academies — West Point and the Air Force Academy — now have their first Black leaders. But Easterling, the West Point graduate, noted that the faculty there remains mostly white, meaning that students who “don’t see themselves, and don’t want to stay” can find it hard to ask for help.
Greg Elliott said he often found himself in trouble as a midshipman at the Merchant Marine Academy and was asked to leave without graduating. He doesn’t blame the academy for his mistakes and he said he never faced overt racism, but he wonders if a more diverse faculty and student body could have changed his course by making him feel he belonged.
He remembers a fellow Black alum telling him to just plow through with his head down and realize the academy was “a terrible place to be at, but it’s a great place to be from.”
Both Easterling and Shelley said they also saw signs of extremism during their time in the Army — for Easterling, it was a member of his unit wearing a symbol for the Three Percenters, an anti-government paramilitary group. Both said the academies — and the military — need stronger guidelines for recognizing and confronting language and symbols that suggest an extremist path.
Kyle Bibby, a Naval Academy graduate who served for six years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer, said those who characterize white supremacism only as extreme behavior miss the insidious damage that casual racism and discriminatory attitudes can inflict.
“We view white supremacy as like, you know, somebody’s got the cross in the truck and they’re rolling to your crib to go burn it,” said Bibby, who co-founded the Black Veterans Project, which advocates for racial justice in the armed services. But the cuts are much more subtle, he said.
At the Naval Academy, he said he once was told that he was “the whitest Black guy” one of his white classmates had ever met because of his skill at trivia games. Another white classmate, unaware Bibby was in earshot, remarked that he didn’t care that his sister was dating a Filipino guy but would “kill” her if she dated a Black guy.
Timothy Berry, a former Army field artillery officer who graduated from West Point in 2013 and served as class president, said he never felt comfortable reporting racist incidents while at the academy, fearing it would draw unwanted scrutiny to him not being a “perfect cadet,” however minor his shortcomings might be.
An inspector general’s report last year found the Coast Guard Academy had mishandled nearly a dozen race-based harassment allegations between 2013 and 2018 and also noted that harassment was underreported in part because of “concerns about negative consequences.”
Lt. Cmdr. Kimberly Young-McLear, a Black woman who taught at the academy from 2014 to 2019, said she herself faced years of harassment and retaliation on campus, which she has detailed in congressional testimony. She said she continues to hear from cadets, faculty and staff at the academy who are afraid to speak out about their negative treatment.
“They truly are reaching out because they don’t have anywhere else to turn,” she said. “This isn’t about cadets just whining and complaining. They’re going against a very powerful institution.”
Cadets salute during the National Anthem prior to the NCAA college football game between the Army Black Knights and Massachusetts at Michie Stadium, Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021, in West Point, N.Y. The U.S. military academies provide a key pipeline into the leadership of the armed services and have welcomed more racially diverse students each year for the better part of the last decade. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)
Although the academies play a big role in the diversity of military leadership, some have argued that the pipeline begins even earlier, at the high school level.
The Department of Defense sponsors Junior ROTC programs at high schools around the country where students can learn the values of the armed services, run drills and wear the uniforms. According to a 2017 study sponsored by the Secretary of Defense, the programs are often located at high schools with larger-than-average populations of students of color.
Though it may not be an official recruitment program, Junior ROTC promotes the military branches as a pathway to excellence.
Cadet handbooks for the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marine Corps all stipulate non-discrimination policies with regard to race and gender, and emphasize treating everyone with dignity and respect.
But former Junior ROTC instructor Cardelle Anthony Hopkins said little was done after one of his students at Lake Brantley High School in Florida alerted him to social media posts by her fellow cadets making racist comments about Hopkins, a retired Black master sergeant. The language was crude and threatening: One comment said he needed to be “tar and feathered.” “No n ------ in my corps,” read another.
The students also created a fake Instagram account impersonating Hopkins that included posts making fun of cadets. And ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, someone posted a sign on his classroom door reading “Blood and Soil,” a white supremacist slogan.
“I was so intimidated even walking to my car. I’m thinking, I’m a grown man … I’ve never been this terrified,” Hopkins said. “In my entire 23 years in the military, I had never been called a n ----- ever. And here I am being called that by my students.”
Near the end of 2019, Hopkins said he noticed a change in the types of students enrolling in the JROTC program. In one of his freshman classrooms, for instance, every white student wrote a message in support of President Donald Trump while working on an art project to decorate ceiling tiles, he said.
“I could see that these students were a different breed,” he said, noting that their behavior prompted the parents of one of his Black students to remove their daughter from the program.
Hopkins said he complained about the harassment but that it wasn’t until other students went directly to Lake Brantley Principal Brian Blasewitz saying they knew who was responsible that administration officials acted to track down the two main students involved.
Hopkins said the students eventually received four-day suspensions. Blasewitz told the AP that the incidents were taken seriously, but would not disclose any disciplinary measures.
Hopkins contacted the officer then heading the Air Force Junior ROTC, who he said expressed sympathy but took no other action, other than saying Hopkins could request a transfer to a new school.
“We have roughly 120,000 cadets in Air Force JROTC alone,” Hopkins said. “This one colonel sitting in his office has the ability to put out a message to every last Air Force Junior ROTC school if he wants to that says ‘We will not tolerate anything like this’ and really get on top of this.’”
In an email to the AP, the current Air Force Junior ROTC director, Col. Johnny R. McGonigal, said the responsibility for addressing the incidents fell on the high school, writing that “the instructors are employees of the school and the school district is responsible for investigating and resolving disciplinary matters such as this one.”
Feeling defeated and isolated, Hopkins said his father — a veteran and also a former JROTC instructor — advised him to leave, telling him “there’s no reason to put yourself through this.”
After briefly holding the same job at another school, he stepped away from JROTC altogether and abandoned a lawsuit he had filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He’s joining a Tampa, Florida, high school as a teacher’s assistant — a job that doesn’t capitalize on his more than 20 years of military experience.
Hopkins said his ordeal leaves him unsettled about the future of the JROTC and, ultimately, the U.S. military.
“It just feels like a breeding ground for hatred,” he said of JROTC. “And it’s not being checked.”
AP writers James LaPorta in Miami and Kat Stafford in Detroit and data intern Jasen Lo in Chicago contributed to this story.
Wieffering is a Roy W. Howard Investigative Fellow.
8. Confidence in military continues to fall after Afghanistan withdrawal: survey
I think it is more than just Afghanistan that is causing the decline in confidence and trust in the military.
Excerpts:
When asked to elaborate on their choices, it came down to two camps: Those who are confident in the military report they are so because of confidence in service members, while those who aren’t confident have several reasons why, without a clear prevailing opinion.
“But political leadership is at the top of that list,” Hoff said. “So that could range from anything from presidents of the United States ― whether that’s the current president, the previous president ― it could range from the way that our political leaders, say in Congress, talk about the military, the politicization of military leadership more broadly.”
Similarly, only 40% of respondents were confident the military could act in a “professional and non-political manner.”
A focus group would probably be the right forum to dig down into why Americans are losing confidence in the military, Hoff added.
Confidence in military continues to fall after Afghanistan withdrawal: survey
For the third year in a row, since it launched in 2018, the Reagan Institute’s national defense survey found a declining percentage of its 2,500 respondents who reported high confidence in the military, across political, gender, age and other demographics. The survey also has questions about confidence in Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, law enforce, the media and other institutions.
“... we’ve tested over the last three years a number of public institutions and institutional trust is declining overall in American society,” Rachel Hoff, the Reagan Institute’s policy director, told reporters Wednesday. “That’s perhaps not surprising, but the way that the military is falling so much more quickly than the other institutions, we think is notable, particularly in the light of the real understanding that the American people have about the national security threats we face.”
Confidence in the military began to fall in 2019, from 70% to 63%, and then down to 56% earlier this year. In the nine months since that last survey, confidence dropped down to 45%, the sharpest decline and the lowest level of confidence in the military since the survey began.
Along party lines, every group reported a declining confidence, but it was more stark for Republicans: a 17% drop versus 9% for independents and 6% for Democrats.
When asked to elaborate on their choices, it came down to two camps: Those who are confident in the military report they are so because of confidence in service members, while those who aren’t confident have several reasons why, without a clear prevailing opinion.
“But political leadership is at the top of that list,” Hoff said. “So that could range from anything from presidents of the United States ― whether that’s the current president, the previous president ― it could range from the way that our political leaders, say in Congress, talk about the military, the politicization of military leadership more broadly.”
Similarly, only 40% of respondents were confident the military could act in a “professional and non-political manner.”
A focus group would probably be the right forum to dig down into why Americans are losing confidence in the military, Hoff added.
But the survey does break out some issues that give a glimpse. One is the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which 62% disapproved of, along with 59% of respondents who characterized U.S. involvement there generally as a failure.
The reasons why were varied. While 47% agreed with the decision to withdrawal, 70% thought that troop levels ― roughly 2,500 before the April announcement ― should have stayed steady rather than fully withdrawn.
Just under half attributed the issues with the withdrawal to poor judgment by President Joe Biden.
The survey also explores two other indicators: Confidence in the military’s ability to keep the U.S. safe, and confidence in military capabilities.
While 57% of respondents were very confident about safety, they were less confident in the U.S.’s ability to deter war, at 42%, and yet less confident in the ability to win a war overseas, at 40%.
Along those lines, 43% said they believed the U.S. military’s capabilities are the best in the world, while another 45% rated them as “one of the best.”
Within that category, conventional and high-tech weaponry were rated higher than leadership: 33% said the U.S. has the best military leadership, with another 42% rating it “one of the best.”
RELATED
The Defense Department had no announcements to report about the global posture review's results.
One of the most bipartisan issues in the survey was China, and its perceived status as the No. 1 outside threat to the U.S.
“It is now majority of American people believe that China is the country that poses the greatest threat to the United States,” Reagan Institute director Roger Zakeim told reporters. “That was not the case just a few months ago, in February, and certainly, when we started this, in 2018.”
Fifty-two percent of respondents — 64% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats ― put the country as a bigger threat than Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran.
“You know, the shift toward the focus on the China threat may be driven by Republican opinion, which is a little bit out ahead of independents and Democrats, but independents and Democrats now agree that China’s the single greatest country threat that the U.S. faces,” Hoff said.
Along those lines, the majority of survey respondents said the U.S. should focus its military presence in East Asia, where previously respondents had leaned more toward the Middle East.
The Pentagon on Monday announced the completion of its global posture review, meant to specifically address where U.S. assets should be placed.
While deterring China, and Russia, continues to be a cornerstone of DoD policy, the classified results of the review mean that its findings and recommendations won’t be publicized until after they’re manifested, if ever.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT
9. The three ghosts haunting US foreign policy
Christmas past, present, and future?
Excerpts:
Instead, like tormented souls that can find neither rest nor respite in death, these ghost-ideas carry on as shades of their former selves, haunting the corridors of power in and beyond Washington, often in consequential ways.
And what are these ghostly holdovers from the past? Well, the first is the ghost-idea of appeasement, a specter from the interwar period that has had a long career in U.S. foreign policy circles. When used in a geopolitical sense, of course, appeasement generally refers to the supposedly naïve practice of offering concessions to an aggressor in the hopes of defusing conflict and preventing war.
...
The second ghost haunting the American geopolitical imagination is the is the ghost of the Cold War. During that moment of bipolar ideological struggle, American policymakers came to view world politics in Manichaean terms, with the virtuous United States locked in an existential struggle with the evil Soviet Union.
...
The final ghost-idea is that of American primacy, a product of the post-Cold War unipolar moment when the United States found itself the only superpower left standing
The three ghosts haunting US foreign policy
The Hill · by Andrew Latham, Opinion Contributor · December 2, 2021
The calls for the U.S. to do something in, about or for Ukraine are growing by the day. The U.S. must stand up to Russia, stand by our Ukrainian “ally,” resist Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bullying tactics and otherwise defend the freedom-loving peoples of eastern Europe — even to the point of deploying troops to the region. Failure to do so, we are told, will not only compromise American interests in the region, but undermine its position in the wider world as well.
Such calls are typically couched in terms of “realpolitik,” or power politics. In reality, however, the impulse to do something – anything – on Europe’s eastern marches has little to do with a clear-eyed understanding of the current distribution of power in the international system, U.S. interests, the limits of American power, actual Russian motives or anything else required by a realpolitik approach properly understood. Rather, that impulse is being driven by something far less rational — and far less realistic. It is being driven by what I will call the ghosts of world orders past.
What I mean is that, to a considerable degree, today’s debates about foreign policy in general and Russia in particular are being shaped by ideas that were born in the unique circumstances of earlier world orders – the interwar period, the Cold War, the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” – and that should have died with the passing of those orders but didn’t.
Instead, like tormented souls that can find neither rest nor respite in death, these ghost-ideas carry on as shades of their former selves, haunting the corridors of power in and beyond Washington, often in consequential ways.
And what are these ghostly holdovers from the past? Well, the first is the ghost-idea of appeasement, a specter from the interwar period that has had a long career in U.S. foreign policy circles. When used in a geopolitical sense, of course, appeasement generally refers to the supposedly naïve practice of offering concessions to an aggressor in the hopes of defusing conflict and preventing war.
Its origins are to be found in the failed effort of European statesmen to appease Adolf Hitler in the late-1930s by acceding to his demands that Czechoslovakia surrender the Sudetenland to Germany. As this concession had the perverse effect of further whetting Hitler’s geopolitical appetite, ultimately leading to the Second World War, the term originally entered the lexicon of international relations as a part of cautionary tale: Don’t make concessions to illiberal dictators, as it will only encourage them.
The second ghost haunting the American geopolitical imagination is the is the ghost of the Cold War. During that moment of bipolar ideological struggle, American policymakers came to view world politics in Manichaean terms, with the virtuous United States locked in an existential struggle with the evil Soviet Union. In response, they developed the strategy of containment, a full-spectrum effort to limit the Soviet bloc’s contact with the global economy, frustrate Moscow’s diplomacy and stymie its military efforts to expand its influence abroad. Squeezed in this way, the logic ran, the Soviet-communist regime would first “mellow” and then collapse, effectively ending the Cold War and making the world safe for American democracy.
The final ghost-idea is that of American primacy, a product of the post-Cold War unipolar moment when the United States found itself the only superpower left standing. Reflecting the realities of the moment, a new idea crystalized in the U.S foreign policy establishment — that Washington should expand the largely Western “free world” that had emerged victorious at the end of the Cold War into a truly global Liberal International Order.
And a corollary of this was the idea that the United States was the “indispensable nation,” the one country that had both the power and the providential calling to defend that liberal order against all threats — especially those posed by “rogue states” that failed to internalize the now putatively universal norms of liberal democracy, free markets and human rights.
And that brings us back to Ukraine. The various world orders of the past century are no more. This is not 1938, and Putin is not Hitler, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and the unipolar moment has long since passed. But the ideas spawned by those world orders – appeasement, containment and primacy– live on, haunting the debate over what to do about Russia and Ukraine.
The specter of appeasement, for example, is clearly visible in the portrayals of Putin as a Hitleresque figure dissatisfied with the post-Cold War settlement. Putin, like Hitler, insists that the West accept a redrawing of “illegitimate” borders on pain of war. But if it wants “peace in our time,” this specter reminds us, the West cannot make the same mistake with Putin that it did with Hitler. This time, the West must stand up to the bully — for, as the ghost-idea of appeasement counsels us, failing to do so will only embolden the aggressor and lead to the very war we seek to avoid.
Similarly, the ghost-idea of containment can be detected in calls to take whatever steps necessary to frustrate Moscow’s diplomacy and stymie Putin’s military efforts to expand Russia’s influence abroad. This includes incorporating Ukraine into NATO, originally the cornerstone of Washington’s Cold War strategy of containment. The logic, now as then, is not merely to check Russian expansionism but to induce Putin’s regime first to mellow and then collapse, opening the door for a more democratic regime willing to coexist peacefully with its neighbors.
Finally, the phantom of U.S primacy can also be detected lurking behind the claim that American leadership is essential if the international effort to resist Putin’s malign policies in Eastern Europe are to succeed. But why should this be the case? Why can’t the European Union take the lead in balancing Russia? If this isn’t a case for greater European strategic autonomy – for Europe managing its own strategic affairs rather than always relying on the United States – it’s not clear what would be.
Why does this matter? Because these three ghosts are not only misleading; they’re dangerous. They’re misleading in that they frame the situation in Ukraine as an important U.S. national security issue when it clearly isn’t. Ask yourself: Is American security, freedom or prosperity even remotely contingent on what happens in Ukraine? The answer, obviously, is no. But if you listen to the ghosts of appeasement, containment and primacy, you hear a very different answer.
And they’re dangerous in that they demand action — the expansion of NATO, the provision of arms, the deployment of troops, the drawing of bright red lines. Faced with a revisionist bully trying to recreate the Soviet empire at the expense of an innocent neighbor, the indispensable nation must do whatever is necessary to contain the threat and perhaps even foment regime change — or so these ghosts would have us believe. The problem is that any such action is just as likely to provoke a (needless) war over Ukraine as deter one.
Appeasement, containment and primacy all had their day. But in each case that day has come and gone. It would be a mercy now if we would just let these baleful ghosts finally, finally rest in peace.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.
The Hill · by Andrew Latham, Opinion Contributor · December 2, 2021
10. Ending Strategic Ambiguity Won’t Help Taiwan
Excerpts:
1.
Foremost among the range of steps Washington can take in the near term is to launch a robust foreign military financing program to increase Taiwan’s security.
2.
The administration might also deploy a multi-domain training program with Taiwan’s military that is more aligned with the scope of the operational challenge it faces.
3.
Finally, the administration should seek to expedite arms exports to Taiwan.
Ending Strategic Ambiguity Won’t Help Taiwan
Here are three better steps to take.
America’s position in the Indo-Pacific is tied in many ways to stability across the Taiwan strait, and China’s growing ability to seize Taiwan is not a problem we can put off. We need a strategy to heighten Beijing’s perception of the risks of taking the island, and we need to deploy it within two to three years. Some say the solution is as simple as adjusting Washington’s policy of strategic ambiguity, but a surer approach would increase military assistance to Taiwan, launch a multi-domain training program, and hasten delivery of arms already purchased by Taipei.
The potential consequences of a war over Taiwan are difficult to overstate. They include the devastation of Taiwan’s democracy, its free people, and its economy; and instability across the first island chain and beyond. Indeed, a conflict that begins over Taiwan may not end there. A military clash could reshape Japan’s southwestern islands and even extend to strikes on bases in northern Australia or naval clashes in the Indian Ocean region. Moreover, given the contributions of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, to the global economy, a conflict over Taiwan would cause supply-chain disruptions in ways that would dwarf those of the COVID pandemic.
Some military leaders have tried to put a timeline on the potential for conflict. But viewing the problem as a shot-clock is an unhelpful way to think about when Beijing’s capabilities and intentions may align. Instead, we should seek policies that continue to persuade Beijing that taking Taiwan is too costly and therefore not worth the risk.
One policy recommendation that has become fashionable this past year is to abandon Washington’s longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan in favor of a simple declaration that the United States would intervene if China moves to take the island by force. But changing the policy would only create greater uncertainty about our intentions. It would elevate this issue to a policy question that each presidential candidate would need to take a position on—and likely, each administration when Taiwan elects its own new president. The confusion and political uncertainty would undermine any positive effect it may have on deterrence. Moreover, the central issue at hand is not whether Beijing believes Washington will intervene – it certainly has to plan for this assumption – but whether Beijing believes Washington and Taipei can successfully deny Beijing’s military objectives. Given this, Washington is better served by continuing to be strategically ambiguous on the specifics of its hypothetical action while introducing more tactical clarity about its intentions through a range of other policies with Taipei that can directly improve cross-strait deterrent posture.
Foremost among the range of steps Washington can take in the near term is to launch a robust foreign military financing program to increase Taiwan’s security. Washington already conducts similar programs with Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Like these countries, a security assistance program for Taiwan—ideally led by the State Department, with planning support from the Pentagon—could start with five years of annual aid of about $1 billion to $2 billion. This would not seek to replace Taipei’s current defense budget but to accelerate and bolster their asymmetric investments in key ways that can help delay, degrade, and deny attempts by People’s Liberation Army forces to operate in and around the Taiwan Strait and adjoining seas.
In the past, I have been suspicious of recommendations to provide more resources to a government in Taipei that has underfunded its defenses for too long. But the situation has deteriorated in recent years to the point that we cannot afford to stand on the sidelines hoping for a more ideal situation to emerge. If the security of Taiwan and stability in the Indo-Pacific are as critical as many now agree, we must be willing to further assist Taipei by directing more resourcing to this challenge today.
Senator Risch and his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have introduced the Taiwan Deterrence Initiative, which would seek to operationalize a State-led military financing program for Taiwan. Senator Hawley’s Arm Taiwan Act takes a similar approach but seeks to use Pentagon security assistance funding. Given this growing interest from Congress, another advantage of this approach is that it provides a unique opportunity for both parties to work together on the hill and with the Biden administration to take bipartisan action in 2022 to increase stability in the Taiwan Strait.
The administration might also deploy a multi-domain training program with Taiwan’s military that is more aligned with the scope of the operational challenge it faces. To this point, training with Taipei has been minimal, targeted, and only focused on several military domains. An expanded training regime could push into the maritime domain, add cyber and electronic warfare efforts, and conduct more senior-leader bilateral war games that could eventually include Japan and Australia.
Finally, the administration should seek to expedite arms exports to Taiwan. Taipei has bought a range of systems in recent years, but it will take four to six years—in one case, eight—before many of these orders can be fulfilled, because other countries are at the front of the line. An effort to review and adjust these timelines could have an outsized impact on Taiwan’s defenses during the 2020s.
The level of attention Washington is now devoting to Taiwan and stability across the strait is encouraging. The challenge now for policymakers is to devote their newfound focus to a set of policies that can be effective and imminent.
Eric Sayers is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously worked as a professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and as a consultant to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, where he worked as special assistant to the commander.
11. Iran’s Quest for Soleimani’s Revenge Goes to Latin America
Excerpt:
Given all the above, there is no reason to assume that recent failures, such as the Colombia murder plot, will deter Iran from trying again. And the Western Hemisphere will continue to be a target of choice. Iran has spent four decades patiently laying the groundwork to make the region a battlefield against its ideological adversaries. The Islamic Republic’s desire for revenge and the regime’s ability to deliver it, alas, make it likely that more plots will unfold in Latin America.
Iran’s Quest for Soleimani’s Revenge Goes to Latin America
Shortly after a U.S. strike killed Iran’s most senior general, Qassem Soleimani, in Baghdad in January 2020, both Iran and its terror proxy Hezbollah swore revenge. Nearly two years later, Iran and Hezbollah have not meaningfully struck back at their enemies, particularly the United States and Israel — but not for want of trying. On November 28, Kenyan and Israeli media reported the arrest of an Iranian businessman by Kenyan, whom they suspect was plotting attacks against both local and Israeli targets. These revelations emerge only weeks after Colombia’s daily El Tiempo revealed another Iranian failed terror plot, highlighting how Latin America remains a playground for Iranian mischief.
According to El Tiempo, an Iranian national recruited two prison inmates while sharing a cell in Dubai sometime between 2017 and 2021, where the three were serving time for prior convictions. According to the Israeli daily Israel Hayom, the recruiter was apparently a member of Iran's Quds Force, the overseas operations unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Once released in March 2021, the two criminals came to Colombia and began scouting two Israeli businessmen and their families, identifying their homes, workplace, and routine movements. They reportedly also established contact with local hitmen to carry out an assassination, but Colombian intelligence foiled their plots.
On November 14, during a visit to Israel by Colombia’s president, El Tiempo revealed further details of the assassination plot, which reportedly sought to target U.S. diplomats as well, noting that Colombian authorities had arrested and expelled two Hezbollah operatives — likely the same two guns-for-hire recruited in Dubai. Colombian authorities, according to El Tiempo, had already expelled the two, whose nationality remains publicly unknown.
The Colombian hit is part of a string of attacks that so far have failed to come to fruition. In January 2021, Iranian proxies in New Delhi remotely detonated an explosive device in front of Israel's embassy but caused no injuries. And in October, media reports revealed the arrest of an Azerbaijani citizen traveling to Cyprus with a Russian passport. Israel said he was an Iranian proxy tasked with assassinating Israeli businessmen on the Mediterranean island.
Failure will not deter Iran and Hezbollah from trying again, and it might be easier to do so in Latin America than elsewhere. Colombia, for example, hosts a large Iranian propaganda operation; is home to a strong Lebanese Shiite community with a history of involvement in terror finance; and borders Venezuela, Iran’s closest ideological ally in Latin America. Colombia also enjoys close commercial, diplomatic, and security ties to both the United States and Israel, offering a target-rich environment.
Iran and Hezbollah’s terror plots in the Western Hemisphere worry Washington, and with good reason, given Iran’s infrastructure, support, and capabilities. In his March 2020 Posture Statement before Congress, Southern Command’s Admiral Craig Faller raised the alarm about possible retaliatory attacks: “Some Hezbollah supporters cache weapons and raise funds, often via charitable donations, remittances, and sometimes through illicit means, such as drug trafficking and money laundering. Having a footprint in the region also allows Iran to collect intelligence and conduct contingency planning for possible retaliatory attacks against the U.S. and/or Western interests."
A year later, in his March 2021 Posture Statement, Admiral Faller declared, “Hizballah’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), its external operations arm, is responsible for at least three high-profile attacks in the region and three other planned operations that were disrupted.” Preparedness and the resolve to carry out attacks, when combined, mean that the risk remains high.
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, Tehran’s primary external operations unit for exporting the Islamic Revolution, maintains operatives in foreign embassies, charities, and religious and cultural institutions to enhance ties globally,” Admiral Faller added. Both Iran and Hezbollah rely on these extensive networks for any potential contingency, including, when needed, to help terror cells plan their deadly plots.
The success of Iran and Hezbollah in developing such extensive infrastructure partly stems from the friendly ties that Tehran has developed with authoritarian, ideologically like-minded countries such as Venezuela, which has become Iran's forward operating base in South America. Tehran's agents benefit from access to genuine Venezuelan identity documents and passports, which enable them to travel freely in the entire region. Meanwhile, Iran has established cultural centers and mosques across Venezuela, recruiting and radicalizing locals.
But even without this type of ideological convergence, both Iran and Hezbollah have benefited from the benign neglect of regional governments, even those friendly to the United States and Israel. Iran’s influence ops through cultural centers thrive in virtually every Latin American country, from Mexico to Chile, regardless of the political leanings of local governments. And Shiite mosques, whether serving Lebanese and Iranian Shiite expatriates or Latin American converts to Shiite Islam, are overwhelmingly under the control of Iranian and Hezbollah-friendly clerics.
While the extensive Iranian infrastructure built over time makes it possible for Tehran to plan and carry out attacks, there is another reason why Latin America remains a preferred target for Iran’s revenge operations: Their agents incur minimal risk despite their activities.
In most cases, the local legal framework makes it virtually impossible to yield terrorist convictions, and corruption can buy a get-out-of-jail-free card. As a result, caught operatives get expelled and sent back to their country of origin — hardly a disincentive. As reported by El Tiempo, the recent case of two Iran-hired operatives in Colombia provides one of many examples of this phenomenon.
In another case, Colombian authorities also expelled — rather than prosecute — a Hezbollah agent, Abdallah Rada Ramel, in 2017, on account of his extensive illicit finance activities.
Similarly, Peru arrested a Hezbollah agent, Mohammed Ghaleb Hamdar, in 2014 and put him on trial after a foreign intelligence service — likely Israel's Mossad — tipped off local authorities about his likely plans to carry out a mass casualty attack in Lima. Though Hamdar is a U.S.-sanctioned Hezbollah terrorist with proven ties to Hezbollah’s External Security Organization, he was still able to elude a terrorism conviction, ending up serving a shorter sentence for immigration fraud instead.
Given all the above, there is no reason to assume that recent failures, such as the Colombia murder plot, will deter Iran from trying again. And the Western Hemisphere will continue to be a target of choice. Iran has spent four decades patiently laying the groundwork to make the region a battlefield against its ideological adversaries. The Islamic Republic’s desire for revenge and the regime’s ability to deliver it, alas, make it likely that more plots will unfold in Latin America.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan research institute based in Washington, DC. An earlier version of this article appeared in Akhbar Al Aan on November 19, 2021.
12. ‘Toyotas of War’ is the photo archive we never knew we needed
One word: Ubiquitous.
As a side note we tried to break the mold in the Philippines. We wanted our logistics contractor to provide us with Ford Rangers. Why? because they had a factory in the Philippines and we thought that would be good for the economy. But instead our logistics contractor (Dyncorp) decided to do what was best for them for profit of course and bought Toyotas in Thailand to be imported in the Philippines). This of course caused a delay due to shipping and then due to customs issues. So we continued the tradition of Toyotas in conflict areas
‘Toyotas of War’ is the photo archive we never knew we needed
No one can argue that Toyota vehicles are dependable, affordable, and abundant. But ask any veteran of the last 50 years and they’ll tell you these Japanese automobiles are vehicles of war.
In fact, there was even a Toyota War fought in the late 80s between Libya and Chad, named thus for the Toyota Hilux and the Toyota LandCruiser, which the Chadians selected for their durability and mobility in battle.
But one man, Chris, 26, has made it his life’s work to chronicle the use of Toyotas in combat through his Instagram page @ToyotasofWar.
“While working for a defense company that was building out Toyotas, I become obsessed with learning and gathering as much info on them as possible,” Chris told Military Times. “Part of that process was compiling any photos I came across. Over time, the page morphed into a way for guys and gals to share their own photos and stories of trucks from deployment.”
His fascination with the vehicle’s history is what fuels the feed, which he views as a form of photojournalism. Chris compiles the photographs and archives their unique histories.
“I believe the page has morphed into a unique combination of car content and photo-based wartime journalism,” he said. “In a social media world, we provide a nice change of pace. The ‘mall crawler’ and ‘overlander’ content is played out. Too many vehicles have turned into a rolling gear catalogue. We like to focus on the vehicles and how they are used.”
His favorite part of running the page, Chris said, is when someone converts to being a Toyota-buyer.
“I love sharing stories of Toyota reliability and how much abuse they can take,” he said. “I always get a kick out of the DMs saying, ‘Congrats, I will now be buying a Toyota. —Current Nissan owner.’”
Toyota’s DNA, he said, is based upon military vehicle designs. The staying power of Toyota from the Korean War through contemporary conflicts, however, comes down to its adaptability.
“Reliability and availability,” Chris said. “They work — and when they don’t, parts are widely available. It’s also important to understand the history of Toyota. [The company] received the design for the Model BM truck and the Willys Jeep from the U.S. Army as part of the Korean War effort. Eventually, Toyota’s version of the Jeep morphed into what is known as the modern day ‘LandCruiser.’”
And in fact, his favorite Toyota is the 79 series LandCruiser.
“As an American, it’s the proverbial ‘forbidden fruit,’” he added.
But it’s the white Toyota pickup truck that became somewhat synonymous with the War on Terror. However, according to Chris, it’s more a mix of coincidence and strategy.
“Statistically, white cars are popular worldwide,” he noted. “Last numbers I saw, close to 40 percent of the cars sold in the Middle East were color white. White paint stays cooler in the sun (up to 15 degrees cooler), plus they are are easier to maintain visually (don’t show scratches, and have a higher resale value). Tactically — white provides a decent base color that can be masked/camouflaged with mud mix.”
And it’s not just pickup trucks, he added. Toyotas of all shapes and sizes are seen in combat around the world.
“Vehicles in all forms are used,” he said. “Sedans, vans, scooters, I have even come across a forklift in use.”
This was the case on Aug. 29 when the U.S. Defense Department authorized a drone strike after commanders mistakenly thought they found a white Toyota sedan packed with explosives driven by an Islamic State operative. It turns out that the driver was an aid worker transporting water for his family. The hellfire strike killed seven children and three adults.
The review, carried out by Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami Said, found issues of communication and in the process of identifying and confirming the target ofn the strike, Military Times previously reported. Ultimately, however, it was concluded that the mistaken strike happened despite prudent measures to prevent civilian deaths.
The U.S. is moving now to make financial reparations to the family, and possibly help them seek asylum outside Afghanistan.
Chris’ last name was omitted from this story to protect the privacy of the @ToyotasofWar account manager.
Observation Post is the Military Times one-stop shop for all things off-duty. Stories may reflect author observations.
Sarah Sicard is a Senior Editor with Military Times. She previously served as the Digital Editor of Military Times and the Army Times Editor. Other work can be found at National Defense Magazine, Task & Purpose, and Defense News.
13. Large scale Russian offensive possible in January, Ukraine says
Large scale Russian offensive possible in January, Ukraine says
December 3, 2021
8:06 AM EST
Last Updated 8 minutes ago
Newly appointed Defence Minister of Ukraine Oleksii Reznikov attends a session of parliament in Kyiv, Ukraine November 4, 2021. REUTERS/Oleksandr Klymenko
KYIV, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Russia has massed more than 94,000 troops near Ukraine's borders and may be gearing up for a large-scale military offensive at the end of January, Ukraine's Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov told parliament on Friday, citing intelligence reports.
Reznikov said Ukraine would not do anything to provoke the situation but was ready to fight back if Russia launched an attack.
Ukraine and its NATO allies have sounded the alarm about Russian troop movements near Ukraine's borders this year, sparking worries that a simmering conflict in eastern Ukraine could erupt into open war.
"Our intelligence analyses all scenarios, including the worst," Reznikov said. "It notes that the likelihood of a large-scale escalation from Russia exists. The most likely time to reach readiness for an escalation will be the end of January."
Ukraine has pressed its European Union and NATO allies this week to prepare a tough package of sanctions to ward off Russia from launching an offensive.
Moscow in turn has accused Ukraine and the United States of destabilising behaviour and suggested that Kyiv might be preparing to launch its own offensive in eastern Ukraine, which Ukrainian authorities strongly deny.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday warned Moscow of the "severe costs" Russia would pay in case of an escalation, urging his Russian counterpart to seek a diplomatic exit from the crisis. read more
Blinken said it was likely that Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin would speak soon.
Work is under way to arrange a video call between them, the Kremlin said on Friday, a day after their top diplomats met to discuss the Ukraine crisis. read more
Ukraine's ties with Russia collapsed in 2014 after Moscow-backed forces seized territory in eastern Ukraine that Kyiv wants back. Kyiv says some 14,000 people have been killed in fighting since then.
Since the latest crisis started, Moscow has set out demands for legally binding security guarantees from the West that NATO will not admit Ukraine as a member or deploy missile systems there to target Russia.
Ukraine says Russia has no say over its ambitions to join the NATO alliance and dismissed any security guarantees as illegitimate.
"Escalation is a likely scenario, but not inevitable, and our task is to prevent it," Reznikov said. "We must make the price of escalation unacceptable for the aggressor."
Reporting by Natalia Zinets; writing by Matthias Williams; editing by John Stonestreet
14. Getting Competition Wrong: The US Military's Looming Failure
"Expeditionary scouts."
Conclusion:
Two questions remain, however: Will the US military recognize the importance of expeditionary scouts in the new great game, with a mandate to understand the nuances of the playing field? And, if so, will it divert expenditure away from unreasonably expensive technology and weapons platforms (which are all too often obsolete before they are actually fielded) and invest in relevant and timely capabilities?
Getting Competition Wrong: The US Military's Looming Failure - Modern War Institute
A new great game is underway. The United States’ unipolar moment is coming to a close. As a hegemon on borrowed time, we must compete to secure our interests. China offers an alternative vision of the future. Russia seeks a return to faded glories. Iran envisions a fundamentally different Middle East. Regional powers like Turkey, India, and Brazil chart their own, independent paths into the future.
Confronted with global uncertainty, America faces two critical challenges: how to understand this new environment, and how to optimize its military to compete therein. On both counts, consensus has been reached. On both counts, it is wrong.
Conceptually, we have adopted the paradigm of strategic competition. In this framing, the world is a playing field for elite rivalry. Africa is where we compete with China. Eastern Europe is where we counter Russia. The Middle East is where we battle to maintain a marginally favorable status quo, in the face of a hostile Iran and opportunistic encroachment by Russia and China alike. Southeast Asia (and, remarkably, Latin America) are places where we attempt to check Chinese expansion.
At first glance, this may seem logical. Our geopolitical interests are contested by a short list of opponents. They are our competitors, and it is a competition we must win. Our focus, consequently, is on their objectives, capabilities, words, and deeds.
This opponent-centric worldview has set the US military on a distinct trajectory. The buzzwords of the day are “lethality” and “large-scale combat operations.” Hardly a press conference goes by without a reference to technological innovation and force modernization. We are zeroed in on our competitors, whom we seek to deter or, in the event of escalation to armed conflict, defeat in a head-to-head clash, abetted by futuristic weapons platforms.
If we maintain this course, America will continue its twenty-first-century losing streak—and there will be a tragic continuity to our inevitable decline and fall. Our post-9/11 strategic debacle (which each of the authors witnessed firsthand) was born of a mentality that focused overwhelmingly on adversaries and threats, at the expense of understanding the context in which they had metastasized.
We lost the war in Afghanistan, not for lack of ability to best the Taliban in open battle, but because we failed to understand Afghanistan itself. Most critically, we failed to grasp the societal dynamics that enabled the Taliban to shrug off two decades of cutting-edge kinetic power, and that rendered useless our half-hearted attempts at nation building. In Iraq, we proved unable to navigate a maze of societal and political fault lines, while being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Iran (who leveraged a superior contextual understanding of their neighbor, which more than compensated for their comparatively meager resources). Time and again, throughout the “Global War on Terrorism,” our enemies adapted and regenerated, sustained via root structures deep within local communities and social networks—root structures that the US military failed to investigate, understand, and disrupt.
It is a truism that all politics is local. Domestically, Americans grasp this instinctively. For reasons unknown, we have systematically failed to operationalize this in our foreign policy. This is the failure that must be corrected in order to recalibrate American foreign policy and military strategy.
Our current strategic landscape must not be viewed as a contest among rival powers, where the features of the playing field are secondary. This framing is precisely backward. From the Black Sea to the Sahel to the Mekong River basin, local dynamics set the stage for the new great game. Victory will go to whoever masters those details: knowing precisely when, where, why, and how to take action—or, equally important, to abstain.
This reframing of our strategic outlook requires a realignment of the US military’s priorities. Our most urgent task is not transformation or modernization. Instead, it is to remedy a weakness that doomed our post-9/11 campaigns: the inability to make sense of facts on the ground, and to translate that knowledge into action.
The US military flounders in the human domain of conflict, with respect to foes, friends, and bystanders alike. Failure to engage with the building blocks of humanity—culture, society, politics, economics, and religion—leaves our strategies and plans untethered to reality. The result has been on display to the world for decades. The Afghan collapse provided a final exclamation point.
At present, we are engaged in global competition with China (and, to a much lesser extent, Russia). We are engaged in a regional contest with Iran. Global jihadist networks remain a potent threat. That said, we do ourselves a devastating disservice when we approach the rest of the world on the basis of its utility in these contests.
American policy in Ukraine is downstream of our rivalry with Russia. The same is true for our engagement in Iraq with respect to Iran, and across much of the Global South vis-à-vis China. We instrumentalize bilateral relationships with smaller powers in pursuit of advantage against our rivals, while neglecting the local details that define the strategic landscape. This instrumentalization is readily apparent to those on the receiving end, provoking cynicism and frustration from Kyiv to Baghdad and beyond. Ultimately, it is exploitative and self-defeating—just as it was during the Cold War, when this same mentality led us to disaster from Vietnam to Nicaragua.
The new great game will be won or lost based, above all else, on contextual understanding, partnerships, and alliances. It is not America’s responsibility to solve intractable problems in distant lands. However, we absolutely must understand said problems (as we have demonstrably failed to do over the past twenty years), so that we might manage our entanglements and the expenditure of finite resources.
Across much of the globe, this task falls to the US military. The Department of State is understaffed, and isolated from ground truth by crippling risk aversion. The intelligence community’s priorities lie elsewhere. From sub-Saharan Africa to the South China Sea, the military is often our principal point of contact with contested terrain.
If we accept that the playing field is paramount, and acknowledge that our military offers unmatched global coverage, then we must realize the need for a quite different set of capabilities than those emphasized within the current zeitgeist. The United States needs granular, actionable knowledge not only of what is happening on key terrain, but why. The military is positioned to provide these insights, but neither trained nor equipped to deliver. The Human Terrain System was decommissioned, unable to withstand a cost-benefit analysis. Capabilities like civil affairs remain marginal, unfocused, and under-resourced. The Asymmetric Warfare Group and University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies are being shut down.
There is no technological, data-driven solution: understanding at the push of a button is fantasy. People are required to make sense of the human condition. We speak of soldiers as sensors, but our frontline personnel are calibrated only to gather data, not to make sense of what they see before them. Contextual insight remains a sideshow—as evidenced by the fact that there is still no viable framework to explain contextual dynamics on the ground, nor a practicable process to develop that understanding.
Resolving this dilemma should be a top priority from the Pentagon to the White House to Capitol Hill. Globally scalable results could be achieved for far less than the nearly $10 million annual sustainment cost of a single F-35—via realignments of our intelligence architecture (to integrate contextual understanding of the playing field into our opponent-centric lens) and the adoption of fit-for-purpose investigative methodologies (to replace fundamentally unsuitable frameworks currently in place like the ASCOPE/PMESII crosswalk).
Two questions remain, however: Will the US military recognize the importance of expeditionary scouts in the new great game, with a mandate to understand the nuances of the playing field? And, if so, will it divert expenditure away from unreasonably expensive technology and weapons platforms (which are all too often obsolete before they are actually fielded) and invest in relevant and timely capabilities?
Colonel Arnel P. David is a US Army strategist assigned to the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. First Sergeant Sean A. Acosta is a civil affairs noncommissioned officer, and was the US Army’s 2018 NCO of the year. Dr. Nicholas Krohley is the principal of FrontLine Advisory.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Thomas Calvert, US Army
15. Taliban release decree saying women must consent to marriage
The Taliban is trying to change the narrative. But can they change their culture? Are they even going to try to change? Or is the priority only on the narrative?
Taliban release decree saying women must consent to marriage
Women wearing burqas walk in a second-hand market where people sell their home appliances and other belongings, in Kabul, Afghanistan October 9, 2021. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
ISLAMABAD, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban government on Friday released a decree on women's rights which said women should not be considered "property" and must consent to marriage but failed to mention female access to education or work outside the home.
The Taliban has been under pressure from the international community, who have mostly frozen funds for Afghanistan, to commit to upholding women's rights since the hardline Islamist group took over the country on Aug. 15.
"A woman is not a property, but a noble and free human being; no one can give her to anyone in exchange for peace...or to end animosity," the Taliban decree, released by spokesman Zabihillah Muhajid, said.
It set out the rules governing marriage and property for women, stating women should not be forced into marriage and widows should have share in their late husband's property.
Courts should take into account the rules when making decisions, and religious affairs and information ministries should promote these rights, the decree said.
However, it made no mention of women being able to work or access facilities outside the home or education, which have been major concerns from the international community.
During its previous rule from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban banned women from leaving the house without a male relative and full face and head covering and girls from receiving education.
The Taliban say they have changed and high schools for girls in some provinces have been allowed to open. But many women and rights advocates remain sceptical.
The international community, which has frozen billions in central bank funds and development spending, has made women's rights a key element of any future engagement with Afghanistan.
The country, which is also suffering from a banking liquidity crisis as the cash flow dries up due to sanctions, is facing the risk of economic collapse since the Taliban took over.
Reporting by Charlotte Greenfield; Editing by Angus MacSwan
16. DeSantis proposes a new civilian military force in Florida that he would control
I guess he wants his own army. I suppose business will be good for private military contractors to provide the training for this new force.
DeSantis proposes a new civilian military force in Florida that he would control
CNN · by Steve Contorno, CNN
St, Petersburg, Florida (CNN)Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control.
DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines.
But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be "not encumbered by the federal government." He said this force would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.
The move by DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied.
Democrats in Florida immediately expressed alarm at DeSantis' announcement. US Rep. Charlie Crist, who is running as a Democrat to challenge the governor in 2022, tweeted, "No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police."
Read More
State Sen. Annette Taddeo, another gubernatorial candidate, wrote on Twitter that DeSantis was a "wannabe dictator trying to make his move for his own vigilante militia like we've seen in Cuba."
The Florida State Guard was created in 1941 during World War II as a temporary force to fill the void left behind when the Florida National Guard was deployed to assist in the US combat efforts. It was disbanded after the war ended, but the authority for a governor to establish a state defense force remained.
States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis' plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis' office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York.
"Reestablishing the Florida State Guard will allow civilians from all over the state to be trained in the best emergency response techniques and have the ability to mobilize very, very quickly," DeSantis said during a visit to Pensacola on Thursday.
State defense guards are little-known auxiliary forces with origins dating back to the advent of state militias in the 18th century. While states and the Department of Defense share control of the National Guard, state guards are solely in the power of a governor.
State guards are typically deployed to respond during a disaster, though governors have found other reasons to call them into action.
In 2015, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott used the Texas state guard to monitor federal military exercises in his state, responding to what was at the time a fast-growing conspiracy theory that the federal government was using Walmart parking lots to prepare for a future state of martial law. Abbott said the guards were just collecting information to keep Texans safe during the multi-week exercises.
Florida law authorizes the governor to maintain a defense force as "necessary to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order," meaning DeSantis would have another force to respond to unrest that may erupt in the future. DeSantis swiftly deployed the Florida National Guard to major cities after protests and violence broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
DeSantis has also stationed Florida National Guard troops at the Texas-Mexico border and sent them to Washington, DC, to help protect the US Capitol during the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
The announcement on Thursday came during a broader rollout of DeSantis' plan to bolster Florida's National Guard, which included $100 million in funding proposals to establish three new armories, build a new headquarters for the National Guard Counter Drug Program and provide support for Florida National Guardsmen seeking higher-education degrees.
CNN · by Steve Contorno, CNN
17. The final, anguished years of a warrior-scholar who exposed torture by U.S. troops
More details on this tragic story.
I am confused by this. How was he being treated and of course the unknown, how did he die?
After many public outbursts in his hometown of Newberry, Mich., a court ordered him put into treatment and on medication. He was placed in an adult foster care facility. His sister and friends started a GoFundMe campaign to get Fishback moved to a private psychiatric treatment program. At the same time, they lobbied the VA to find space for him — but the coronavirus pandemic has made an already critical shortage of mental health care even worse. On the evening of Nov. 18, a "Veterans Services Navigator" from Southwest Michigan Behavioral Health visited Fishback. The next morning, Fishback was found dead. The cause is still unclear.
The final, anguished years of a warrior-scholar who exposed torture by U.S. troops
Retired Special Forces Maj. Ian Fishback graduated near the top of his West Point class, deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, and was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in 2005 for blowing the whistle on torture by the U.S. military.
He died broke, virtually homeless and medicated with heavy antipsychotic drugs in an adult foster care center near Kalamazoo, Mich., on Nov. 19 at age 42, as his friends and family scrambled to find him mental health care.
"He was Captain America," says Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official who was at Human Rights Watch when Fishback reached out in 2005.
"It's just hard for me to comprehend that this is how the life of Captain America would end, in mental anguish while being forcibly medicated in some facility," Garlasco says. "It's a real damning, damning statement on 20 years of war and how we treat the veterans of this country."
Fishback grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He wasn't an obvious candidate for a military career, says his boyhood friend Justin Ford.
"There was no indication until he decided one day he'd go to West Point," Ford says. "A lot of those people have to plan most of their high school career for that. He got almost all of that through just hard work. Nothing ever came easy for him — he worked and got everything."
Fishback graduated from West Point with a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern studies in 2001 and later deployed to Afghanistan and then Iraq with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. It was in Iraq that he saw troops using "enhanced interrogation" tactics, including breaking prisoners' bones and stripping them naked in the freezing cold.
"It wasn't just a problem that we weren't following the Geneva Conventions, it was a problem that there was no clear standard to replace the Geneva Conventions. So people were just basically making their own stuff up," Fishback later told the Hi-Phi Nation podcast.
By that time, the world had seen pictures from the Abu Ghraib scandal, but then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Congress it was a simple matter of bad apples who would be punished, not a systematic problem with new U.S. military policy.
"My concern was that these soldiers were being scapegoated and that we weren't being honest to Congress," Fishback told Hi-Phi Nation.
Fishback protested within his Army chain of command and continued to raise the issue for more than a year. Then he called Garlasco.
Garlasco says Fishback was concerned about the Iraq victims of torture but also his own soldiers. "He was worried about the moral injury that they had sustained, having participated in the torture of human beings," Garlasco notes.
Conversations with Human Rights Watch led Fishback to send a letter to Sen. John McCain, which closed, "If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is 'America.' "
Being a whistleblower put Fishback in a delicate position, just as he was completing the arduous selection process for the Army's Special Forces. His sister, Jazcinda Jorgensen, says it was typical of Fishback to push on despite the headwinds.
"There's a right and there's a wrong, and you do what's right regardless of the cost. He's kind of stood by that throughout his life. And so when he recognized it, he wasn't intimidated necessarily by the size of the opposing force," she says.
Fishback always kept different parts of his life compartmentalized, according to Jorgensen.
"My role in his life was sister. So he left a lot of professional stuff behind. A lot of people kind of viewed him as serious, but he was goofy," she says, recalling how he would read books to her children and his own daughter. (Fishback's marriage in 2001 to a fellow soldier ended in divorce.)
"He would read to the kids at night from Harry Potter or Winnie the Pooh, and it was so much fun to hear him do the voices," Jorgensen says.
Fishback deployed twice more to Iraq, with Special Forces, and lost none of his moral rigidity, according to Army Lt. Col. James Vizzard. Vizzard would join Fishback in daily briefings to the commanding U.S. general in Baghdad, where it was often Fishback's job to refuse the general's requests of the Special Forces group.
"A lot of times, you know, our general wanted them to do things that frankly wasn't within their mission," Vizzard says. "And so here is a very young captain facing a two-star general, and a lot of times he had to basically say, 'No, we're not going to do that.'"
But Fishback was losing faith in how the U.S. was fighting the war in Iraq, focusing too much on direct action and not enough on building up Iraqi forces.
"It was like being in Catch-22, except you don't have the overall justification of beating the Nazis because you're not accomplishing anything. You're at best kicking the can down the road," he told Hi-Phi Nation.
And Fishback felt that a few of his teammates distrusted him or thought he was soft on the enemy. He told the podcast that he got called a coward for opposing one mission but then reckless for suggesting another.
"I said, 'Look, man, I can't be cowardly and reckless at the same time. You got to pick. And the difference between these two missions is the last one was you got to go shoot stuff and fly around in helicopters and this one you don't. This is the most important type of mission for our sector, so get on the truck,' " Fishback told Hi-Phi Nation.
In 2014, he left the military and pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Michigan. That's how he met Georgetown professor Nancy Sherman.
"I knew him both as a warrior-scholar, a philosopher of just-war ethics, and as someone who turned to me as a confidant when he was troubled," says Sherman.
She and other friends and family were starting to notice the strain. Fishback was speaking nationally about philosophy and war and completing his doctoral thesis, but his behavior veered toward paranoia. He claimed that other academics were stealing his work and talked about U.S. government agencies pursuing him. Considering his credentials, friends didn't immediately doubt him.
"One of the problems with Ian was that some of his paranoia seemed very reasonable," says Ford, his boyhood friend. "You know, like if the FBI is watching him and that seems plausible, right? I mean, but if a normal person from the street told you that, you think they're crazy."
Sherman thinks Fishback's mental illness could have been triggered during his Iraq tours with Special Forces, an intense, fraternal group where he did not always feel completely trusted.
"Where there's a real sense of trust betrayals, it can lead to a kind of paranoia. You know, as the years went on, I saw this in Ian, and it broke my heart," says Sherman.
His sister says he was on and off medication, at turns refusing to get care from the Department of Veterans Affairs or accepting that he needed help.
After many public outbursts in his hometown of Newberry, Mich., a court ordered him put into treatment and on medication. He was placed in an adult foster care facility. His sister and friends started a GoFundMe campaign to get Fishback moved to a private psychiatric treatment program. At the same time, they lobbied the VA to find space for him — but the coronavirus pandemic has made an already critical shortage of mental health care even worse. On the evening of Nov. 18, a "Veterans Services Navigator" from Southwest Michigan Behavioral Health visited Fishback. The next morning, Fishback was found dead. The cause is still unclear.
Hours after he died, according to his sister, the VA Medical Center in Battle Creek, Mich., called her to offer him help.
"I'll have my friend in my heart forever, but I think that the nation did lose a very powerful voice," Justin Ford says.
"Going into the future, he was becoming a very talented philosopher. We all remember the McCain incident, but he was really becoming a very powerful voice for the morality of how we go to war. And I think he would have been a really good voice for the morality of how we handle mental illness."
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
18. Lawyer for Philippines’ Nobel Peace Prize winner Ressa ‘confident’ about Oslo trip
It would be a huge mistake for Duterte to prevent her travel to receive the award.
Lawyer for Philippines’ Nobel Peace Prize winner Ressa ‘confident’ about Oslo trip
- Marie Ressa, co-founder of Rappler website and critic of President Duterte, applied to three courts for permission to travel to December 10 ceremony
- She was awarded the prize in October for efforts to ‘safeguard freedom of expression’; still waiting for one court to rule, but ‘green light’ from other two
+ FOLLOW
Published: 6:35pm, 3 Dec, 2021
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE South China Morning Post2 min
Investigative journalist Maria Ressa, from the Philippines, in November 2021. Ressa is a co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Photo: AP
A lawyer for Philippine Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, who faces multiple court cases, said on Friday he was “confident” the journalist would be allowed to travel to Oslo to collect the award in person.
Ressa, co-founder of news website Rappler, and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov were given the award in October for their efforts to “safeguard freedom of expression”.
The former CNN correspondent, who is on bail pending an appeal against a conviction last year in a cyber libel case, applied to three courts for permission to travel to Norway for the December 10 ceremony.
03:19
Philippine journalist Maria Ressa wins 2021 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Russia’s Dmitry Muratov
The Court of Appeals, which is handling the cyber libel case, on Friday gave her the green light after rejecting government lawyers’ claims that she was a “flight risk”.
Ressa has already received permission from a regional trial court hearing another case, according to Francis Lim, one of her lawyers.
She is still waiting for the Court of Tax Appeals to rule on her travel application, but Lim said: “We are confident that it will be granted.”
Ressa has been a staunch critic of President Rodrigo Duterte and his government’s policies, including a drug war that has killed thousands.
Since Duterte was swept to power in 2016, Ressa and Rappler have endured what media advocates say is a grinding series of criminal charges, investigations and online attacks.
She faces a total of seven court cases, including the appeal against a conviction in the cyber libel case, for which she faces up to six years in prison.
Ressa, who is also a US citizen, returned to the Philippines on Thursday after a court-approved trip to the United States.
19. In the annual football uniform dispute, 2021 Army trumps Navy
Yes, I am biased. They are damn good looking uniforms.
In the annual football uniform dispute, 2021 Army trumps Navy
Every year, West Point’s Black Knights and the Naval Academy’s Midshipmen duke it out on the football field to fanfare mostly stemming from the rivialry between Naval and Army officers. It’s a weekend that gives service members a good reason to drink, watch sports and argue over which branch is the greatest.
But more importantly, the teams unveil new uniforms for the game each year. While some of these get-ups are absolutely magnificent, like the Army’s sexy 2018 black and red alternates, others quite honestly suck (here’s looking at you, 2020).
This year, however, both teams stepped up their sartorial game.
The Navy, we think, chose to honor the F/A-18 Super Hornets. It’s that or the seafaring branch is paying homage to Top Gun before its springtime sequel release. Frankly, we’re not sure. Either way, the solid dark blue uniforms have pops of patriotism, though the Midshipmen clearly weren’t interested in branching out color-wise. The current roundel, in the form of a white star sandwiched between one red and two white stripes posted on each shoulder, screams Americana, as do the pants with matching red and white stripes down each side. Hooyah.
The coolest part of the Midshipmen’s 2021 look is definitely found on their heads and hands (which they’ll need to use in equal measure if they want to beat the Black Knights this year). The helmets feature gold wings earned by Navy pilots, flight officers and aircrew, with a shiny Super Hornet painted on one side.
Their gloves read “Fly Navy” and they carry the unit patch for the Strike Fighter Wing, U.S. Atlantic Fleet out of Oceana, Virginia, on their chests.
And while those uniforms are snazzy and heavy on Independence Day-styled patriotism, the Army’s uniforms are just... so much more.
The Black Knights pay tribute to what has been a rough year for service members and veterans, marking not only the end of the “forever war” in Afghanistan but the 20-year anniversary of 9/11. West Point clearly took those events into consideration when crafting this downright masterpiece of a uniform.
Though the ensemble isn’t as in-your-face as the Navy’s, its symbolism is much heavier.
Each jersey carries an “Army” patch and a mirror patch emblazoned with the words “De Oppresso Liber,” which is Latin for “from being an oppressed man to being a free one.” It is the motto for Army Special Forces. The jerseys also carry the collar devices — really sticking with that utilities trend — worn by members of the Special Forces, showcasing crossed arrows and the letters “U” and “S.”
“United We Stand” replaces the word “Army” found on the back of regular season uniforms.
Army’s helmets also bear the Special Forces crest and crossed arrows, an American flag, and unit insignia for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s Night Stalkers. The date of the 2001 terrorist attacks are located front and center.
Similar to the way small details are important in any military uniform inspection, the special touches found on the Black Knights’ cleats take the cake this year.
On top of each boot is a pentagon-shaped logo with the twin towers of the World Trade Center in red, white and blue.
While the Navy’s uniforms are sure to please crowds and a couch-stomping Tom Cruise, the Army’s uniforms, like its formidable 2021 team, command respect.
Observation Post is the Military Times one-stop shop for all things off-duty. Stories may reflect author observations.
Rachel is a Marine Corps veteran, Penn State alumna and Master's candidate at New York University for Business and Economic Reporting.
20. The China Initiative, US crackdown on Chinese economic espionage, is a mess. We have the data to show it.
Excerpts:
“We've heard stories of young PhD students who are not thinking at all of applying to jobs in the United States: they want to go to Europe, they’re going to Asia,” he said. “They don’t want to stay in the United States. Some of these people are the best and brightest in their fields.”
“The US is losing some of its most talented people to other countries because of the China Initiative,” he said. “That’s bad for science, and that’s bad for America.”
The China Initiative, US crackdown on Chinese economic espionage, is a mess. We have the data to show it.
The US government’s China Initiative sought to protect national security. In the most comprehensive analysis of cases to date, MIT Technology Review reveals how far it has strayed from its goals.
By Eileen Guo Jess Aloe Karen Hao
December 2, 2021
A visiting researcher at UCLA accused of hiding his connection to China’s People’s Liberation Army. A hacker indicted for breaking into video game company servers in his spare time. A Harvard professor accused of lying to investigators about funding from China. And a man sentenced for organizing a turtle-smuggling ring between New York and Hong Kong.
For years, the US Department of Justice has used these cases to highlight the success of its China Initiative, an effort to counter rising concerns about Chinese economic espionage and threats to US national security. Started in 2018, the initiative was a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s hardening stance against China.
Now, an investigation by MIT Technology Review shows that the China Initiative has strayed far from its initial mission. Instead of focusing on economic espionage and national security, the initiative now appears to be an umbrella term for cases with almost any connection to China, whether they involve state-sponsored hackers, smugglers, or, increasingly, academics accused of failing to disclose all ties to China on grant-related forms. To date, only about a quarter of defendants charged under the initiative have been convicted, and about half of those defendants with open charges have yet to see the inside of an American courtroom.
Although the program has become a top priority of US law enforcement and domestic counterintelligence efforts—and an unusual one, as the first country-specific initiative—many details have remained murky. The DOJ has not publicly defined the initiative or answered many basic questions about it, making it difficult to understand, let alone assess or exercise oversight of it, according to many civil rights advocates, lawmakers, and scholars. While the threat of Chinese intellectual property theft is real, critics wonder if the China Initiative is the right way to counteract it.
Today, after months of research and investigation, MIT Technology Review is publishing a searchable database of 77 cases and more than 150 defendants. While likely incomplete, the database represents the most comprehensive accounting of the China Initiative prosecutions to date.
Our reporting and analysis showed that the climate of fear created by the prosecutions has already pushed some talented scientists to leave the United States and made it more difficult for others to enter or stay, endangering America’s ability to attract new talent in science and technology from China and around the world.
Here’s what we found:
- The DOJ has neither officially defined the China Initiative nor explained what leads it to label a case as part of the initiative.
- The initiative’s focus increasingly has moved away from economic espionage and hacking cases to “research integrity” issues, such as failures to fully disclose foreign affiliations on forms.
- A significant number of research integrity cases have been dropped or dismissed.
- Only about a quarter of people and institutions charged under the China Initiative have been convicted.
- Many cases have little or no obvious connection to national security or the theft of trade secrets.
- Nearly 90% of the defendants charged under the initiative are of Chinese heritage.
- Although new activity appears to have slowed since Donald Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election, prosecutions and new cases continue under the Biden administration.
- The Department of Justice does not list all cases believed to be part of the China Initiative on its webpage and has deleted others linked to the project.
Two days after MIT Technology Review requested comment from the DOJ regarding the initiative, the department made significant changes to its own list of cases.
Lawmakers say our findings are “startling.”
The Justice Department is “intentionally obtuse with us and will not address specific cases,” said Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat from California. “Whenever we ask for data, they usually don’t give it back to us. What you have are numbers, and it is startling to see what [they] are.”
Two days after MIT Technology Review requested comment from the DOJ regarding the initiative, the department made significant changes to its own list of cases, adding some and deleting 39 defendants previously connected to the China Initiative from its website. This included several instances where the government had announced prosecutions with great fanfare, only for the cases to fail—including one that was dismissed by a judge after a mistrial.
Our findings highlight “the disconnect between the theory behind the China Initiative and the prosecutions that are brought in practice,” said Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.
They also demonstrate the “disproportionate impact on Asian Americans and the immigrant community,” said Gisela Kusakawa, a staff attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AJC, an advocacy group. “Essentially, national security issues are being used as a pretext to target our community.
“This is resulting in a brain drain from and distrust towards the United States, which is counter-productive to national security.”
What our data show
Our database of China Initiative cases draws primarily on the press releases that have been added to the DOJ’s China Initiative webpage over the last three years, including those recently removed from its public pages. We supplemented this information with court records and interviews with defense attorneys, defendants’ family members, collaborating researchers, former US prosecutors, civil rights advocates, lawmakers, and outside scholars who have studied the initiative.
Here’s what we’ve learned from our analysis:
The China Initiative has no official definition
Though considered one of the DOJ’s flagship efforts, the department has never actually defined what constitutes a China Initiative case. Wyn Hornbuckle, the deputy director of the DOJ public affairs office, said it had “no definition of a ‘China Initiative’ case other than the goals and priorities we set out for the initiative in 2018."
Goals and Priorities of the China Initiative
-
A fact sheet the Department of Justice released on November 1, 2018, states that these were the China Initiative’s priorities:
• Identifying, resourcing, and completing priority trade secret cases.
• Developing an enforcement strategy on what the government has termed “non-traditional collectors,” referring to anyone—not just traditional spies—who could collect sensitive information on behalf of China, including, in the DOJ’s words, “researchers in labs, universities, and the defense industrial base.”
• Educating colleges and universities about “influence efforts on campus.”
• Applying and enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
• Equipping the nation’s attorneys to properly counter the China threat.
• Implementing the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act.
• Address supply chain threats in telecommunications, especially with regard to 5G.
• Identify Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases.
• Improve China’s collaboration on Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement requests.
• Evaluate whether additional legislative/administrative authorities are necessary.
A former senior DOJ official, who we are not naming so as to share their full perspective, said the China Initiative was an attempt to tell law enforcement that “these are the types of crimes we’re seeing run rampant” and that “these are important crimes to investigate, these are worthy of your time and resources.”
Former US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Andrew Lelling, a founding member of the initiative’s steering committee, said his interpretation was that “all cases involving researchers got in,” and that, “if the tech was going to China, I’m certain they would categorize that as in the China Initiative.”
There's a decreasing focus on economic espionage
The China Initiative claims to be centered on countering economic espionage, yet our database finds that only 19 of the 77 cases (25%) include charges of violating the Economic Espionage Act (EEA). The EEA covers both theft of trade secrets, which can benefit any outside entity that does not own the intellectual property, and economic espionage, which has additional burden of proof requirements that the theft is ultimately for the benefit of a foreign government.
Eight of the 19 China Initiative cases specifically charged economic espionage, while the remaining 11 alleged only theft of trade secrets.
The number of charges filed under the EEA has remained steady each year, but the increasing focus on other areas means that the proportion of economic espionage charges has decreased over time: In 2018, 33% of new cases (four out of 12) announced included violations of the EEA. By 2020, only 16% of new cases (five out of 31) included EEA violations.
Research integrity cases grew to dominate China Initiative
In addition, some of the project’s stated goals have never been met. When announcing the initiative in 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said it would also focus on countering covert efforts to influence US leaders. But there has been just one case of an attempt to influence American lawmakers on behalf of the People’s Republic of China—that of Elliott Broidy, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. He pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government in October 2020. President Donald Trump pardoned Broidy three months later, on his last day in office—the only China Initiative defendant who has been pardoned to date.
There's an increasing focus on "research integrity"
While the proportion of EEA cases has decreased, 23 of the 77 cases (30%) have involved questions of “research integrity.” Most of these involve prosecutors accusing academics of failing to fully disclose all Chinese affiliations and sources of income in various forms—although whether these were deliberate attempts to hide Chinese ties or the result of unclear rules has been heavily contested by defense attorneys and outside critics.
Related Story
A new study of economic espionage cases in the US says people of Chinese heritage are more likely to be charged with crimes—and less likely to be convicted.
Our analysis shows a significant shift in focus toward academics beginning in 2019 and continuing through 2020. In 2018, none of the cases were about research integrity. By 2020, 16 of the 31 (52%) of newly announced cases were. (One research integrity case in 2020 also included a charge of violating the EEA.)
At least 14 of these research integrity cases began due to suspicions arising from links to “talent programs,” in which Chinese universities provide financial incentives for academics to conduct research, teach, or bring other activities back to the sponsoring institution, on a part- or full-time basis. (At least four cases of trade secret theft also involve alleged talent program participation.)
Federal officials have repeatedly said that participation in talent programs is not illegal—though they have also called them “brain gain programs,” in the words of Bill Priestap, former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence, that “encourage theft of intellectual property from US institutions.”
Cases charged under the China Initiative by year
National security links are sometimes weak.
The initiative’s increasing focus on research integrity has included several cases of academics working on topics such as artificial intelligence or robotics, which may have national security applications. But most of the work in these areas is basic research, and many disciplines in which cases have been brought have no clear links to national security.
Nine of 23 research integrity cases involve health and medical researchers, including people studying heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer; six of those centered on researchers funded by NIH—a reflection of the institute’s aggressive stance on countering “inappropriate influence by foreign governments over federally funded research,” said a representative of the NIH Office of Extramural Research. NIH’s efforts predate the China Initiative, and the representative referred questions on the initiative to the Justice Department.
Funding agencies allegedly defrauded in research integrity cases
Instead, the national security implications seem to center around concerns that any individuals with links to China could serve as “non-traditional collectors,” which the China Initiative fact sheet describes as “researchers in labs, universities, and the defense industrial base that are being coopted into transferring technology contrary to US interests.” But as our database shows, only two of 22 researchers were ever accused of trying to improperly access information or smuggle goods into China. The charges were later dropped.
China Initiative cases aren’t as successful as the DoJ claims
Three years after the program’s start, less than a third of China Initiative defendants have been convicted. Of the 148 individuals charged, only 40 have pleaded or been found guilty, with guilty pleas often involving lesser charges than originally brought. Almost two-thirds of cases—64%—are still pending. And of the 95 individuals still facing charges, 71 are not being actively prosecuted because the defendant is in an unknown location or cannot be extradited.
In particular, many of the cases concerned with research integrity have fallen apart. While eight are still pending, seven cases against academics have ended in dismissal or acquittal while six have ended in a guilty plea or conviction. That’s a sharp contrast to the usual outcomes of federal criminal cases, where the vast majority end in a guilty plea, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal statistics.
Outcomes for defendants charged under the China Initiative
Nearly 90% of all cases are against people of Chinese origin
One of the earliest and most persistent criticisms of the China Initiative was that it might lead to an increase in racial profiling against individuals of Chinese descent, Asian Americans, and Asian immigrants. DOJ officials have repeatedly denied that the China Initiative engages in racial profiling, but individuals of Chinese heritage, including American citizens, have been disproportionately affected by the initiative.
Our analysis shows that of the 148 individuals charged under the China Initiative, 130—or 88%—are of Chinese heritage. This includes American citizens who are ethnically Chinese and citizens of the People’s Republic of China as well as citizens and others with connections to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and long-standing Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.
Defendants of Chinese heritage
These numbers are “really high,” said Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University who has written extensively about the China Initiative. “We knew that it’d be a majority,” she added, but this “just underscores that the ‘but we’re prosecuting other people too’ argument…is not convincing.”
New cases are still being brought under the Biden administration
The initiative was launched under the Trump administration, and while the number of cases explicitly linked to the China Initiative has fallen since President Joe Biden took office, they have not stopped.
For example, Mingqing Xiao, a mathematics professor in Illinois, was charged in April 2021 with failing to disclose ties to a Chinese university on his application for a National Science Foundation grant. And an indictment against four Chinese nationals for hacking dozens of companies and research institutions was unveiled in July.
Meanwhile, federal attorneys have continued to push prosecutions forward. The trial of Charles Lieber, a Harvard chemistry professor accused of hiding his ties to Chinese universities, is scheduled to begin in mid-December. Prosecutors are planning to go to trial in cases against high-profile academics in Kansas, Arkansas, and elsewhere in the first few months of 2022.
New China Initiative cases brought in 2021
How it began
Concerns about Chinese economic espionage targeted at the US have been growing for years, with estimates of the cost to the American economy ranging from $20 billion to $30 billion to as high as $600 billion. Enforcement began rising dramatically under the Obama administration: in 2013, when the administration announced a new strategy to mitigate the theft of US trade secrets, China was mentioned more than 100 times.
In 2014, the Justice Department filed cyberespionage charges against five hackers affiliated with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army—the first time state actors had been prosecuted by the US for hacking. Then in 2015, the United States and China signed a historic agreement committing not to conduct commercial cybertheft against each other’s businesses.
But it was not until 2018, as part of the Trump administration’s far more confrontational approach to China, that the department formally launched its first country-specific program.
The effort was “data-driven,” according to the former Justice Department official, and ”born out of the intelligence briefings to the attorney general and senior DOJ leaders from the FBI that, day after day, showed that the PRC and affiliated actors across the board [were] deeply involved in hacking, economic espionage, trade secret theft, subverting our export controls, and engaging in nontraditional collection methods.” He said this included Chinese consulates helping to “mask the actual backgrounds of Chinese visa applicants to avoid visa rejection based on their affiliations with the PRC military.”
Trump, however, had campaigned partly on anti-Chinese and anti-Communist rhetoric— infamously saying at one rally in 2016, “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing.”
This was the backdrop when Sessions announced the launch of the China Initiative on November 1, 2018.
Related Story
In the global economy, companies that steal trade secrets rarely face the consequences
“We are here today to say: enough is enough,” the attorney general told reporters, before announcing the unsealing of an indictment in a dramatic, years-long saga of high tech trade theft: three Taiwanese individuals who had been charged with allegedly stealing trade secrets from an Idaho-based semiconductor company, Micron, for the ultimate benefit of a Chinese state-owned enterprise.
The three worked for the Taiwanese chipmaker UMC, which had made a deal with a Chinese counterpart to jointly develop memory chips using a type of semiconductor technology known as dynamic random-access memory. UMC, which said it wasn’t aware of its employees’ actions, pleaded guilty to theft of trade secrets in October 2020 and agreed to pay a $60 million fine. The case against the three individuals has not yet been resolved.
The Micron case was meant to signal the types of trade theft the new initiative would focus on, but our data show that it was far from the norm.
Chilling effects
Only one research integrity case linked to the China Initiative has gone to trial, and it ended in a high-profile acquittal. Anming Hu, a professor of nanotechnology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, originally was accused of defrauding NASA by failing to disclose all of his overseas affiliations and was ultimately charged with six counts of wire fraud and false statements. After a mistrial, a judge threw out the government’s attempt to retry Hu and acquitted him of all charges.
“Without intent to harm, there is no ‘scheme to defraud,’” the judge wrote in his decision, noting that NASA also received the research that it paid for. (NASA declined to comment for this story.) Hu’s case was one of those removed from the China Initiative webpage after MIT Technology Review reached out with questions.
Other cases have been dismissed more quietly. In the space of one week in July 2021, shortly after the collapse of Hu’s trial, the government dismissed five cases against Chinese researchers accused of lying about their military affiliations on visa applications. The government did not explain in court filings why it dropped the cases, but the dismissals came after doubts arose about whether the forms’ questions about military service clearly covered the defendants, who were civilians working at military universities.
On November 19, those cases were also removed from the China Initiative webpage, after MIT Technology Review submitted a list of questions to the Justice Department. Last year, the government had spotlighted those same cases in a statement marking the initiative’s two-year anniversary.
“I am most concerned about how the initiative will deny the USA access to the world’s best science and technology talent.”
—Randy Katz, former vice chancellor of research, UC Berkeley
The effect of all these cases on Chinese, Chinese American, and scientific communities has been profound.
A member survey of more than 3,200 physicists carried out in September by the American Physical Society found that more than 43% of foreign early-career researchers now consider the United States to be unwelcoming for international students and scholars. Less than 25% believe that the US federal government does a good job of balancing national security concerns with the research requirements for open science.
Another survey of nearly 2,000 scientists at 83 research institutions carried out by Arizona State University found that 51% of scientists of Chinese descent, including US citizens and noncitizens, feel considerable fear, anxiety, or both, about being surveilled by the US government. This compares to just 12% of non-Chinese scientists.
Some respondents in the Arizona State University study indicated that this climate of fear has affected how—or what—they choose to research. One said they were limiting their work to only use data that is publicly available rather than collecting their own original data; one indicated that they would no longer host visitors from China; another said they would focus on what they call “safer” topics rather than “cutting edge” research.
The effects of the initiative stretch even further. No one knows the exact number of scientists who have returned to China as a result of investigations or charges, but in late 2020, John Demers, then the assistant attorney general for national security, said that “more than 1,000 PLA-affiliated Chinese researchers left the country.” An additional group of 1,000 Chinese students and researchers had their visas revoked that September due to security concerns. How their security risks or affiliations with the People’s Liberation Army of China were determined, however, has not been explained.
Randy Katz, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley who served as the university’s vice chancellor for research until earlier this year, says the initiative will have a grave impact on US innovation.
“I am most concerned about how the initiative will deny the USA access to the world’s best science and technology talent,” he said in an email. “Recently, as [many] as 40% of our international graduate students were from China. These students are heavily represented in the STEM fields, are highly competitively selected…and represent a critical component of our research workforce. We want them to come and we want them to stay and innovate in the USA.”
Changing course?
After three years of prosecutions and fear, the tide may be turning.
Criticism of the initiative has ramped up in recent months, particularly after Anming Hu’s acquittal and the decision to drop several cases against academics. In July, Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, and 90 members of Congress sent an open letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to investigate the “repeated, wrongful targeting of individuals of Asian descent for alleged espionage.”
Related Story
Anming Hu’s case was meant to be a victory for the “China Initiative,” a US effort to root out spies. Instead, it turned more attention on the FBI.
Even former DOJ officials are advocating for a change in direction.
Demers reportedly considered a proposal for amnesty programs that would allow researchers to disclose previously undisclosed ties with no fear of prosecution—though this plan was quickly shot down by Republican lawmakers.
Meanwhile Lelling, the former Massachusetts prosecutor, said he also believes that “general deterrence has been achieved.” “If the message was, ‘Make sure you are utterly transparent about your foreign collaboration,’ all right, everyone gets it,” he said. “There’s no need to prosecute another 23 academics.”
This fall, a group of lawmakers sat down with Garland to discuss the China Initiative as well as the rise in anti-Chinese hate during the pandemic. Garland did not commit to ending the project, but he did promise that he would restart the implicit bias trainings at the DOJ that had stopped under Trump.
Garland has also indicated in Congressional testimony that Matt Olsen, the newly confirmed assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s national security division, is planning a review of all programs under his portfolio, as Hornbuckle, the DOJ spokesperson, shared when MIT Technology Review first reached out for comment. Hornbuckle did not, however, respond to a follow-up question on whether the review was intended to address specific criticisms of the China Initiative.
Today, the DOJ continues to announce new indictments and move forward with existing prosecutions, while the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is considering a Trump-era presidential directive on strengthening the security of federally funded research.
In the meantime, the people caught up in the China Initiative have been left to deal with the damage done to their lives and careers—even if their cases were ultimately thrown out.
Hu, the professor who was acquitted after a mistrial, has been offered his old job at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville; he is a Canadian citizen, however, and it is still unclear whether he will be allowed to remain and work in the United States. MIT Technology Review found that some American and Chinese citizens who intended to stay in the US have moved overseas, primarily to China, and some who were fired by their US employers are now conducting their research elsewhere—in some cases leading the laboratories to which they were once accused of hiding their affiliation.
Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management who has spoken about many China Initiative cases, says that the long-term costs of these investigations is only starting to be felt.
“We've heard stories of young PhD students who are not thinking at all of applying to jobs in the United States: they want to go to Europe, they’re going to Asia,” he said. “They don’t want to stay in the United States. Some of these people are the best and brightest in their fields.”
“The US is losing some of its most talented people to other countries because of the China Initiative,” he said. “That’s bad for science, and that’s bad for America.”
Do you have more information, or questions you'd like answered, about the China Initiative? Please reach out to us at tips@technologyreview.com.
Additional reporting by Tate Ryan-Mosley, Bobbie Johnson, Patrick Howell O'Neill, Alyssa Wickham, and John Emerson.
This story has been updated to clarify that the DOJ shared statements from Attorney-General Merrick Garland when first contacted for comment.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
