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Quotes of the Day:
"I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them - one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking."
– Ray Bradbury
"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."
– David Hume
"We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent."
– John Steinbeck
1. Army win in Independence Bowl is record-breaking, illogical in today's college football
2. Fear That China Rules the Waves Jolts U.S. to Pursue Maritime Revival
3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 29, 2024
4. Iran Update, December 29, 2024
5. The secret US soldiers who trained for WWIII by free-falling with a NUKE between their legs
6. Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence
7. Ukraine risks losing all the Russian land it seized within months, US officials say
8. US to send $1.25 billion in weapons to Ukraine, pushing to get aid out before Biden leaves office
9. Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.
10. How America First will transform the world in 2025
11. Syria will never be unified
12. Jimmy Carter: A Declassified Obituary | National Security Archive
13. Inside China's paramilitary force that could be key in an invasion of Taiwan
14. Unexpected Conscience (China book recommendation)
15. Putin's presidential plane visit to US sparks questions
16. China sanctions 7 US military companies and relevant executives over arms sales to Taiwan region
17. The Role of Social Media in Facilitating Terrorism: A Growing Threat to Global Security
18. Russia’s hybrid warfare could cause ‘substantial’ casualties, senior NATO official says
19. Japan Cabinet OKs record defense budget as it pushes strike-back capability to deter regional threat
1. Army win in Independence Bowl is record-breaking, illogical in today's college football
Army win in Independence Bowl is record-breaking, illogical in today's college football
shreveportbossieradvocate.com · by Brian McCallum | Staff writer
There would seem to be no way the Army football program from West Point set an Independence Bowl record, NCAA record and oh-by-the-way the biggest record in Black Knights history on Saturday in Shreveport.
And, thinking logically, there's no way the team should have won a 2024 bowl game, beating Louisiana Tech, 27-6 at Independence Stadium on Saturday, a national ESPN audience looking on.
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Army defeated LA Tech in the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl on Saturday in Shreveport.
None of the Black Knights got Name, Image and Likeness money this year, as it isn't allowed for players at service academies. And the program isn't able to take advantage of the transfer portal, which has turned NCAA football upside down and has allowed programs to fill holes more quickly and with proven veterans.
Those are beyond the longstanding restrictions on what kind of players the program can sign, requiring a commitment to military service, for example.
The team shouldn't be able to reach No. 19 in the Associated Press rankings and win bowl games, but here it was, winning and setting records along the way.
Start with the most important record of them all. The Black Knights won 12 games for the first time ever, losing only to Notre Dame and Navy. This is a program that goes back to 1890, and even the 1944 team that won a national championship played just nine games, winning all of them.
Granted, those were radically different times for college football, or any kind of football, for that matter.
Yet, if you take a longer look — or maybe it doesn't take that long — this Army team is about as close as you'll get to a program from the 1940s, more than just about any other in the country.
The approach on the field is more like most you'll find anywhere. Featuring the running game nearly exclusively, the Black Knights offense harkens back to the 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust era, though Army showcased more of a 5.12-yards-in-a-cloud-of-rubber-particles against the Tech defense on Independence Stadium's artificial surface.
The drive that told the story of Army football was a record-setter. The 21-play, second-quarter drive was the longest in Independence Bowl history in terms of plays, and this is a bowl with 48 games so far. The drive covered 75 yards and ran 12:21 off the clock, leaving Louisiana Tech with just 2:17 of the period.
"It definitely feels like forever when you're out there for 21 plays," running back Hayden Reed said. "That's kind of what this culture's about, putting your head down and being the tougher team and not getting tired."
On the drive, Army went to at least third down on all but one series, going to fourth down three times and converting all three.
Another prominent record set on the night was by Army quarterback Bryson Daily, who scored three touchdowns himself. He set the NCAA record for rushing touchdowns by a quarterback with 32, passing the 2013 mark of 31 by Navy's Keenan Reynolds.
On the other hand, based on the postgame description coach Jeff Monken gave of West Point training and the brotherhood it builds, maybe the success of the program comes from the assets the program does have.
"It's because of the commitment that these guys and their classmates and all of our men and women that serve, have," Monken said. "These guys were fighting as hard as they could for each other and to be able to get this 12th victory tonight."
shreveportbossieradvocate.com · by Brian McCallum | Staff writer
2. Fear That China Rules the Waves Jolts U.S. to Pursue Maritime Revival
Fear That China Rules the Waves Jolts U.S. to Pursue Maritime Revival
Collapse of U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding poses national-security risk, says growing chorus in Washington
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/fear-that-china-rules-the-waves-jolts-u-s-to-pursue-maritime-revival-2c4bd8ab?st=4S68Jh&reflink=article_imessage_share
China is the dominant force in both shipping and shipbuilding. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By Daniel MichaelsFollow
Dec. 29, 2024 9:00 am ET
Rising tensions with China are prompting Washington to revisit America’s roots as a trading nation of the seas.
Protecting merchant sailors and their cargo was what compelled Congress to commission the U.S. Navy’s first new warships. That was in 1794, targeting North African Barbary pirates. The young republic’s seaborne traders, a linchpin of economic growth, were vital to national security.
The Navy became a mighty global fighting force. America’s commercial cargo fleet has withered almost to nonexistence.
Now politicians are once again linking national security to a vibrant maritime sector—nonmilitary aspects of the seas—and the benefits it brings to everything from shipbuilding to logistics chains. Washington is seeking ways to reverse its collapse by tapping examples from other industries, encouraging links with shipbuilding allies and plumbing the writings of America’s greatest sea strategist.
The Philly Shipyard, a rare U.S. producer of commercial ships, recently passed into South Korean ownership. Photo: Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg News
No nation has ever successfully ranked as a world naval power without also being a global maritime power. Countries that tried but failed to project seaborne might without robust commercial sea networks include the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Spain before the Spanish-American War.
Not long ago, America led the world in sea freight. At the end of World War II, the U.S. commercial marine fleet accounted for about half of the world’s cargo-shipping capacity. An American entrepreneur in the 1950s pioneered the shipping container, which revolutionized international commerce.
The Navy today expends vast resources from the Red Sea to the South China Sea defending the freedom of navigation, but few ships being protected fly the American flag.
U.S. commercial ships today account for less than 1% of the world fleet. U.S. ports are racked by strikes and battles over the type of automation that has supercharged expansion of container terminals across the globe. The Navy struggles to find commercial vessels to support its far-flung operations.
China, meanwhile, dominates both shipping and shipbuilding. Beijing heavily subsidizes its maritime sector, in turn boosting the efficiency of its breakneck naval shipbuilding campaign. President-elect Donald Trump recently expressed a desire to regain control of the Panama Canal, pointing to China—a top user of the waterway—as part of his thinking.
U.S. private shippers succumbed to economic forces of globalization after the Cold War, when government support shrank. Now calls are increasing for Washington to help resurrect U.S. commercial shipbuilding and freight hauling.
Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro has advocated a focus on “maritime statecraft,” stressing commercial shipping’s importance to the Navy in tasks including refueling ships and carrying vital military supplies. He has pushed to support American shipyards that build not just warships but also commercial vessels.
And he has championed expanding the U.S. Merchant Marine, a corps of commercial sailors who can assist the Navy in wartime and whose ranks have plunged over recent decades. Government and industry officials estimate the U.S. now has fewer than 10,000 merchant mariners, compared with roughly 50,000 in 1960.
“I’m not foolish enough to think it’s going to be easy,” said Del Toro in an interview aboard a Navy cargo ship. “But we’ve got to start somewhere.”
That start, Navy and industry officials hope, is a piece of legislation recently introduced by Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.) and two House members, the Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security for America Act. If passed, it would be the first major piece of maritime legislation since 1936.
The SHIPS Act, as it is known, aims to revitalize shipbuilding and shipping over more than a decade while rebuilding the merchant marine. It calls for resources and White House-level involvement comparable to policies on energy, semiconductors and aviation. Del Toro, whose term ends with the Biden administration, and his advisers helped shape the legislation. Dozens of other government offices and trade groups also weighed in.
Trump’s choice for Navy secretary, John Phelan, a newcomer to naval issues, hasn’t commented on the bill.
The USS Connecticut set off from Virginia in 1907 and returned in 1909 as part of the Great White Fleet that traveled the world to showcase American naval might.
Bettmann Archive, Naval History and Heritage Command
Kelly, a Navy veteran and the first graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy to serve in Congress, said he was motivated by what he sees as a dangerous imbalance: China has more than 5,500 oceangoing merchant vessels in international trade while the U.S. has 80.
“It’s a major problem for us, especially if we wound up in a conflict or we wind up in a situation where China decides for whatever reason that they want to, you know, stop our economy and put brakes on it in a big way,” Kelly said in an interview. “They have the ability to do that.”
The bill’s prospects in a fractious Congress are uncertain. Supporters say its sponsorship from both parties and both houses is a positive. A sign that it may win favor from the incoming Trump administration is that Kelly’s early partner in drafting the bill was Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.), whom Trump has nominated as his national security adviser.
Waltz, in a September discussion of maritime strategy alongside Kelly, said that China is expanding its navy on the back of massive investment in commercial shipbuilding. “So a shipyard that can produce one of the world’s largest containerships can then pretty easily flip and produce an aircraft carrier, and do it at scale with the workforce, the steel, the aluminum, and the know-how that has been invested and paid for by their commercial shipbuilding industry,” he said.
Note: The U.S. Maritime Administration stopped publishing employment data in 2000.
Since the Cold War, most official U.S. thinking about presence on the seas focused on warships and what military strategists call “force projection,” or the ability to act militarily far from home. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and smaller conflicts, Navy ships played a critical role.
China’s rise as a military rival to the U.S. prompted a push to modernize and expand the Navy. In late 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term, his administration called for a surge in Navy shipbuilding.
The Biden administration has followed its own plans toward similar objectives. Del Toro, while working to improve the Navy’s fighting capacity, has encouraged South Korea and Japan to invest in the U.S. maritime sector. South Korean conglomerate Hanwha on Dec. 19 closed a $100 million takeover of the Philly Shipyard, one of the country’s last producers of commercial ships, from Norwegian investors.
Commercial shipping’s importance to national security gained renewed attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the U.S. and allies faced shortages of necessities as basic as surgical masks. Alarm grew in Western capitals about China’s domination of the sea-freight business, ports and obscure specialties such as tracking cargo data.
Navy Secretary Del Toro, in a 2023 speech at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, presented his vision of maritime statecraft, which he said should be based on more than a strong Navy and Marine Corps.
Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro. Photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
“It should also be equally strong on engagement in areas of economic development, trade and climate diplomacy to enable us to compete more successfully on a global scale,” he said.
Del Toro cited the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval strategist who died in 1914 and whose work is drawing fresh attention. Mahan “argued that naval power begets maritime commercial power, and control of maritime commerce begets greater naval power,” Del Toro said.
China’s leadership, he said, “has read and studied Mahan’s theory, and their actions show it.”
Mahan died just as the U.S. was becoming a great naval power. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 had sent 16 destroyers, dubbed the Great White Fleet, on a two-year, round-the-world show of force.
America was then already a great maritime power. In the 1830s, East Coast shipwrights had developed clippers, speedy ships that let their users grab business by delivering cargo faster than rivals could.
To showcase U.S. shipbuilding prowess in 1851, the newly formed New York Yacht Club entered an English race attended by Queen Victoria, the Hundred Guinea Cup. The club’s innovation-packed yacht, America, blew past competitors from the era’s greatest naval power. The America’s owners took their trophy home and renamed it the America’s Cup.
Nearly a century later, during World War II, shipyards sprouted around the U.S. to make not just warships but also cargo carriers, known as Liberty Ships, designed to be built quickly. Rivalry among yards slashed production time from over seven months per ship to around six weeks.
Liberty Ships were among the vessels that Allied forces deliberately sank to create breakwaters to aid the D-Day landings. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
At war’s end, the U.S. had roughly 4,500 commercial cargo ships and 75,000 merchant mariners. Those numbers shrank as ships grew in size and efficiency while international competition increased. Decisions by the Reagan administration in the 1980s to end subsidies for shipping and shipbuilding, in part to focus shipyards on a Navy expansion, accelerated the domestic industry’s decline.
Today the U.S. is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, but doesn’t have a single LNG ship in its fleet, notes Carleen Lyden Walker, who leads a maritime trade group and this year helped draft a plan to support the sector, titled Zero Point Four, referring to the percentage of the world fleet of oceangoing cargo ships in U.S. hands.
“Our nation suffers from sea blindness,” said Lyden Walker, who works to promote high-paying but unfilled marine jobs. She said audiences she addresses have no idea that clothes, cellphones, fuel and fruit move by ship.
Advocates of maritime-industry support say quick action is vital because progress would be slow.
“One of the hardest things to do in this country is recreate a heavy industry,” said James Watson, a retired U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral who works with Lyden Walker and sees renewed attention to the sector as past due.
“Not thinking of the maritime industry as an important part of your economy, that’s kind of crazy,” he said.
Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com
3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 29, 2024
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 29, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-29-2024
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explicitly rejected two suggestions reportedly considered by US President-elect Donald Trump's team in early November 2024 as conditions for ending the war in Ukraine – the delay of Ukraine's membership in NATO for 20 years and the deployment of European peacekeepers in Ukraine. Lavrov stated in an interview with Kremlin newswire TASS published on December 29 that Russia is "not satisfied" with the Trump team's reported early November 2024 proposals to delay Ukraine's membership in NATO for 20 years and to station a European peacekeeping contingent in Ukraine. Lavrov is amplifying Russian President Vladimir Putin's December 26 explicit rejection of the Trump team’s reported suggestion to delay Ukraine's membership in NATO for 20 years. Lavrov stated that any agreements to end the war in Ukraine "must eliminate the root causes" of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and "must establish a mechanism to make it impossible to violate them." Lavrov claimed in an interview on December 26 that the two main "root causes" of the war are NATO's alleged violation of obligations to not advance eastward and "aggressive absorption" of areas near Russia's borders and the Ukrainian government's alleged discrimination against ethnic Russians and Russian language, media, and culture in Ukraine. Lavrov's statements are part of ongoing senior Russian officials' statements that the Kremlin refuses to consider any compromises on Putin's late 2021 and early 2022 demands. These demands include forcing Ukraine to become a permanently neutral state that will never join NATO, imposing severe limitations on the size of the Ukrainian military, and removing the Ukrainian government.
Russian President Vladimir Putin enshrined his alleged policy of Ukrainian "denazification" in a new state strategy document about countering extremism, demonstrating how Putin continues to make the same demands for the removal of the Ukrainian government that he made in 2022 when launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin signed on December 28 a new Strategy for Countering Extremism in Russia. Putin signed Russia's last iteration of such strategy in 2020. The 2024 strategy includes mentions of "Russophobia" for the first time, which the document defines as the "unfriendly, biased, and hostile" attitudes and "discriminatory actions" towards Russian citizens, language, and culture by states that are unfriendly to Russia. The 2024 document, unlike the 2020 version, also lists Ukraine as a main source of extremism and accuses Ukraine of disseminating neo-Nazi ideas. The documents states that Russia needs to "eliminate" the source of extremist threats that come from Ukraine. Putin claimed in February 2022 when he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Russia was pursuing the "denazification" of Ukraine – an attempt to justify the removal of the legitimate, democratically elected government of Ukraine. Putin has made similar statements recently reiterating his refusal to consider compromises on his late 2021 and early 2022 demands. The document's mentions of "Russophobia" and "discrimination" against Russian citizens, language, and culture also align with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's recent talking point that such alleged discrimination by the current Ukrainian authorities is a "root cause" of Russia's war against Ukraine that any future negotiations must address. The Kremlin will likely exploit this new strategy document to justify its calls for the removal of the Ukrainian government as "anti-extremist" measures.
Key Takeaways:
- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explicitly rejected two suggestions reportedly considered by US President-elect Donald Trump's team in early November 2024 as conditions for ending the war in Ukraine – the delay of Ukraine's membership in NATO for 20 years and the deployment of European peacekeepers in Ukraine.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin enshrined his alleged policy of Ukrainian "denazification" in a new state strategy document about countering extremism, demonstrating how Putin continues to make the same demands for the removal of the Ukrainian government that he made in 2022 when launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused Russia of shooting the Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 passenger flight over the Republic of Chechnya on December 25 and of attempting to cover up Russia's responsibility for the plane's crash in Kazakhstan — effectively rejecting Russian President Vladimir Putin's lackluster apology.
- Ukrainian forces are successfully innovating to combat Russian guided glide bomb strikes against Kharkiv Oblast.
- The US delivered its first liquified natural gas (LNG) shipment to Ukraine on December 27.
- Salome Zurabishvili announced her departure from the Georgian presidential palace on December 29 but stated that she considers herself to be Georgia's "legitimate" president.
- Russian forces recently advanced near Pokrovsk and Vuhledar and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
- Russia reportedly continues to face labor shortages that Russian military recruitment and persistent demographic problems are likely exacerbating.
4. Iran Update, December 29, 2024
Iran Update, December 29, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-december-29-2024
Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) leader Ahmed al Shara detailed a three-to-four-year timeline for building new Syrian state, during which he presumably would rule and could heavily influence the allocation of political power. Shara articulated this vision, marking his most detailed articulation of the state formation process yet, in an interview with Saudi-owned al Arabiya. He said that he expects writing a constitution will take three years and organizing elections will take four years. Shara justified the long election timeline by emphasizing the need to conduct a “comprehensive population census” for election results to be “valid.” Shara acknowledged that he has appointed HTS members to most major ministries as a “necessity” but that the “National Dialogue Conference” will fully represent Syria’s diversity and be empowered to vote to rebuild the Syrian legal code. This interview is the latest in Shara’s effort to portray himself to international audiences as a moderate leader and distance himself from his extremist al Qaeda in Iraq and al Nusra Front background. Shara and his HTS-led interim government have yet to enact the tangible and irreversible steps toward implementing the type of representative democracy described in his interview at this time.
The HTS-led interim government is negotiating with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to integrate it politically and militarily into the future Syrian state. Shara said that these negotiations are meant to resolve the “crisis” in northeastern Syria. Turkey and HTS have tried in recent weeks to disarm and integrate the SDF into the HTS-led government by threatening the SDF with a full-scale assault. Shara reiterated that, under a potential agreement, there will be no federalism in Syria and noted that the SDF would be integrated into the new Syrian Defense Ministry. It is unclear whether Shara intends to re-flag SDF units and thus retain them as cohesive units or disperse individual SDF members across the Syrian armed forces. Shara and other Syrian former opposition leaders met on December 24 and agreed to dissolve and “merge” their armed factions under the Syrian Defense Ministry.
Key Takeaways:
- Syria: HTS leader Ahmed al Shara detailed a three-to-four-year timeline for building a new Syrian state, during which he presumably would rule and could heavily influence the allocation of political power.
- Syria: The HTS-led interim government is negotiating with the US-backed SDF to integrate it politically and militarily into the future Syrian state. It is unclear whether such integration would involve re-flagging SDF units or dispersing SDF members across the new Syrian armed forces.
- Iran: Baloch Salafi-jihadi militia Ansar al Furqan claimed a suicide bombing targeting the head of political intelligence in Bandar Lengeh in southern Iran. The attack is notably deep into Iran given that most Baloch militancy in Iran occurs around the border with Pakistan.
5. The secret US soldiers who trained for WWIII by free-falling with a NUKE between their legs
Jack Murphy's new book is getting some attention. His book also features DET A in Berlin and DET K in Korea as well.
Photos at the link.
The secret US soldiers who trained for WWIII by free-falling with a NUKE between their legs
By RUTH WALKER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Published: 19:41 EST, 29 December 2024 | Updated: 19:41 EST, 29 December 2024
It was a warm, clear night in 1983 when about a dozen elite Green Berets jumped down from the back of a two-and a-half-ton truck at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina.
They were met by two mysterious men in black flight suits. No patches or insignia indicated what branch of the military they represented, but they were clearly in charge
‘This is a classified operation,’ one of them told the special ops team. ‘From this point forward, we have command and control.’
As they finished briefing the group, another vehicle pulled up, containing a box the men were more than familiar with.
They had been training for one like it for many hours; or at least, an inert version of it. This time, however, they were about to use the real thing.
The SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) was a top secret nuclear weapon no different from the one dropped on Hiroshima, but with one crucial difference: it was small enough to fit inside a rucksack.
In his new book We Defy, about the lost chapters of Special Forces history, Jack Murphy reveals the US military's special nuclear program - called Green Light - was developed in 1962, in preparation for World War III, and remained an active part of its training until 1986.
Three hours into their flight, the Green Berets were informed of their target: one of the largest hydroelectric dams in Cuba. Its destruction was intended to disrupt the country’s power supply, cripple the economy and cause widespread chaos.
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Soldiers may have played it down as a mere ‘backpack nuke’ but, after various iterations, it weighed close to 70 pounds and was extremely unwieldy
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The weapon was no different from the one dropped on Hiroshima, but with one crucial difference: it was small enough to fit inside a rucksack
Secret soldiers trained to fly with a NUKE between their legs
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Only once they had parachuted to the target and were preparing to detonate the bomb were they suddenly informed this was just a training exercise.
It turned out they were on a drop zone somewhere in New Mexico, more than a thousand miles from Cuba.
‘The Green Berets were still reeling, their adrenaline pumping,’ writes Murphy. ‘They had assumed they were deep behind enemy lines until moments previously.
‘“It was absolutely real,” a team member said.’
Jumping with the SADM was no easy task. Its operators may have played it down as a mere ‘backpack nuke’ but, after various iterations, it weighed in at close to 70 pounds and was extremely unwieldy.
‘Really experienced jumpers had a really hard time flying that bomb properly,’ said Tommy Shook, a team sergeant in the mid-1970s.
‘You didn't jump the bomb; it jumped you.’
Murphy writes: ‘In about 90 percent of his team’s freefall jumps with the weapon, [Shook] and his teammates missed the drop zone and ended up in the woods.’
Add to that the complicated logistics and it was not a mission for the faint hearted.
‘When infiltrating the SADM by parachute, one man jumped in with the bomb and another jumped in with the planewave generator that would detonate it,’ writes Murphy.
‘A third team member carried a conventional shaped explosive charge to destroy the SADM to prevent it from falling into enemy hands if the team were compromised.
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The freefall team's patch (left) and dark humor from the Green Light scuba unit
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‘Each Green Light team also had to carry a 23-pound shaped charge to destroy the SADM before it could fall into enemy hands,’ he writes.
‘Using the emergency destruction charge would spread uranium and plutonium across the environment, causing a far greater ecological disaster than a low-yield nuclear detonation.’
Don Alexander, who spent a decade training on the program, told Murphy: ‘It was so in-extremis, that their concern was more the destruction of the technology than the localized contamination that would happen.’
Many of those involved also believed they were being trained for a one-way mission - they saw no plans for their escape to safety after detonating the bomb and, as one member said: ‘You were under the impression that you were expendable.’
One conspiracy theory had it that the timer didn't work, and at the moment it was detonated, it would wipe out the Special Forces team with it.
Some even joked, darkly, that, when they unlocked the SADM to arm it for real, along with the bomb they would find 12 Medals of Honor and a bottle of Jack Daniels inside.
‘The rationale for this theory was that the US government would not want a handful of operators who could be captured running around behind enemy lines with knowledge about a nuclear bomb that was ticking down.’
If they survived, their orders were to ‘remain behind enemy lines, attempt to recruit Soviet military deserters, raise a guerrilla army and wage unconventional warfare.’
The SADM went into development in 1960, writes Murphy, ‘but the specifications were amended the following year to include a waterproof pressure case so that the device could be emplaced by frogmen.'
It entered military service in April 1963 with the Army eventually stockpiling nearly 300 by the mid 1960s.
Highly trained soldiers practiced swimming, kayaking and skiing with the nuke.
The most dreaded training exercises were those that combined both parachuting and scuba - requiring the soldier to jump not just with the weapon but also carrying two oxygen tanks.
And, while no SADM was ever activated, almost all of those involved said that, at times, they fully believed their training exercises were genuine.
Former NCO Mike Taylor recalled one particular episode that occurred during the Reagan administration.
‘His team got called in and put into an isolation facility to begin planning for a mission to Europe, parachuting in straight from a flight from the United States,’ writes Murphy.
‘They were not told what country they were going to. The entire team thought it was the real deal, but after four days the team was sent home with no explanation.’
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A Green Light swimmer suits up for SADM delivery
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'I always thought that this was a psychological tool... to let the Russkies know that they had weird dudes and Green Berets running around with a nuke in their pocket'
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The most dreaded training exercises were those that combined both parachuting and scuba - requiring the soldier to jump not just with the weapon but also carrying two oxygen tanks
Did the DoD ever really intend to use nuclear weapons on key targets during the Cold War?
At least one person close to the program was convinced he would never see active combat.
‘I always thought that this was a psychological tool that was used at much higher levels just to let the Russkies know that they had weird dudes and Green Berets running around with a nuke in their pocket,’ said Captain Bill Flavin.
Others, though, were not so sure, pointing to the detailed targets outside Europe as evidence that the US was targeting enemies closer to home than Russia.
One veteran said his team would regularly review slide decks and aerial photography of targets in Latin America.
‘I can tell you where every intersection on the Cuba highway, where every military base, where every naval port was, where every dam was,’ he told Murphy.
Another suggested that the Panama Canal had been in their sights.
‘I'm just glad we never had to do it for real,’ said Scott Wimberley, who swam the bomb into position during an exercise in the mid-1970s. ‘It was going to be a suicide mission.’
Decades on, some of those who served on Green Light are still convinced that was the case.
Mike Adams, who was a young sergeant when he took part in a mission in 1985, retired as a Sergeant Major and was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 50.
He believes he was exposed to radiological material during his service, and filed a claim with Veterans Affairs only to have it denied.
‘My doctor at Yale wrote a letter [to Veteran's Affairs] stating that there is no reason on planet Earth why a person as young and healthy as you are,’ should have certain types of cancer, Adams told Murphy.
‘He was adamant that we should have known to tie that to [Green Light].’
After a decade long fight with cancer, Mike Adams died on August 18, 2024.
Edited from We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History by Jack Murphy
Cuba
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6. Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence
Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence
A Times investigation shows how extensively Israel penetrated the Lebanese militia, closely tracking the group’s commanders and culminating in the assassination of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-nasrallah-assassination-intelligence.html
By Mark MazzettiSheera Frenkel and Ronen Bergman
Reporting from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
Right up until he was assassinated, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him.
As he hunkered inside a Hezbollah fortress 40 feet underground on Sept. 27, his aides urged him to go to a safer location. Mr. Nasrallah brushed it off, according to intelligence collected by Israel and shared later with Western allies. In his view, Israel had no interest in a full-scale war.
What he did not realize was that Israeli spy agencies were tracking his every movement — and had been doing so for years.
Not long after, Israeli F-15 jets dropped thousands of pounds of explosives, obliterating the bunker in a blast that buried Mr. Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah commanders. The next day, Mr. Nasrallah’s body was found in an embrace with a top Iranian general based in Lebanon. Both men died of suffocation, the intelligence found, according to several people with knowledge of it.
The death of Hezbollah’s feared leader, who for decades commanded a Lebanese militia in its fight against the Israeli state, was the culmination of a two-week offensive. The campaign combined covert technological wizardry with brute military force, including remotely detonating explosives hidden in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, as well as a withering aerial bombardment with the aim of destroying thousands of missiles and rockets capable of hitting Israel.
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The Dahiya, on the southern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, in October. The Israeli campaign against Hezbollah this year combined covert technological wizardry with brute military force and deep intelligence.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
It was also the result of two decades of methodical intelligence work in preparation for an all-out war that many expected would eventually come. A New York Times investigation, based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American and European officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, reveals just how extensively Israeli spies had penetrated Hezbollah. They recruited people to plant listening devices in Hezbollah bunkers, tracked meetings between one top commander and his four mistresses, and had near constant visibility into the movements of the militia group’s leaders.
It is a story of breakthroughs, as in 2012 when Israel’s Unit 8200 — the country’s equivalent of the National Security Agency — stole a trove of information, including specifics of the leaders’ secret hide-outs and the group’s arsenal of missiles and rockets.
There were stumbles, as in late 2023 when a Hezbollah technician got suspicious about the batteries in the walkie-talkies.
And there were scrambles to save their efforts, as in September, when Unit 8200 collected intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were concerned enough about the pagers that they were sending some of them to Iran for inspection.
Worried that the operation would be exposed, top intelligence officials persuaded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to give the order to detonate them, setting in motion the campaign that culminated in the assassination of Mr. Nasrallah.
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Lebanese soldiers outside a hospital where injured people were being taken after a wave of pager explosions in September in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.Credit...Wael Hamzeh/EPA, via Shutterstock
Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah was a significant victory for a country that, one year earlier, had suffered the greatest intelligence failure in its history, when Hamas-led fighters invaded it on Oct. 7, 2023, killed more than 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.
The Hezbollah campaign, part of a broader war that has killed thousands of people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million, defanged one of Israel’s greatest adversaries and dealt a blow to Iran’s regional strategy of arming and funding paramilitary groups bent on Israel’s destruction. The weakening of the Iran-led axis reshaped the dynamics in the Middle East, contributing to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.
The contrast between Israel’s approaches to Hezbollah and to Hamas is also stark and devastating. The intense intelligence focus on Hezbollah shows that the country’s leaders believed that the Lebanese militia group posed the greatest imminent threat to Israel. And yet it was Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group Israeli intelligence believed had neither the interest nor the abilities to attack Israel, that launched a surprise attack and caught the nation unprepared.
Israel was in a standoff with Mr. Nasrallah and his top commanders of Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” for decades, and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that it will take years, possibly more than a decade, for the group to rebuild after their deaths. The group of leaders now in charge has far less combat experience than the earlier generation.
And yet the new leaders, like Hezbollah’s founders, are driven by a central animating principle: conflict with Israel.
“Hezbollah can’t continue to get support and funding from Iran without being in a war against Israel. That’s the raison d’être for Hezbollah,” said Brig. Gen. Shimon Shapira, a former military secretary for Mr. Netanyahu and the author of “Hezbollah: Between Iran and Lebanon.”
“They will rearm and rebuild,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
Building a Network of Sources
The 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah was a bloody stalemate. Israel withdrew from Lebanon after 34 days of fighting, which began after Hezbollah kidnapped and killed two Israeli soldiers. The war, which did not achieve Israel’s objectives, had been something of a humiliation, forcing an investigation panel, resignations of top generals and a reckoning inside Israel’s security apparatus about the quality of its intelligence.
But operations during the war, based on Israeli intelligence gathering, formed the foundation for the country’s later approach. One operation planted tracking devices on Hezbollah’s Fajr missiles that gave Israel information about munitions hidden inside secret military bases, civilian storage facilities and private homes, according to three former Israeli officials. In the 2006 war, the Israeli Air Force bombed the sites, destroying the missiles.
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In the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Israeli aircraft struck and destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
In the years after the war, Mr. Nasrallah projected confidence that Hezbollah could win another conflict against Israel, likening the nation to a spider web — menacing from afar but a threat that could be easily brushed aside.
As Hezbollah rebuilt, the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, expanded a network of human sources inside the militia, according to 10 current and former American and Israeli officials.
Specifically, the Mossad recruited people in Lebanon to help Hezbollah build secret facilities after the war. The Mossad sources fed the Israelis information about the locations of hide-outs and assisted in monitoring them, two officials said.
The Israelis generally shared Hezbollah intelligence with the United States and European allies.
A significant moment came in 2012, when Unit 8200 obtained a trove of information about the specific whereabouts of Hezbollah leaders, their hide-outs and the group’s batteries of missiles and rockets, according to five current and former Israeli defense and European officials.
That operation raised confidence within Israeli intelligence agencies that — should Mr. Netanyahu make good on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear sites — the Israeli military could help neuter Hezbollah’s ability to retaliate.
Mr. Netanyahu visited the Tel Aviv headquarters of Unit 8200 shortly after the operation. During the visit, the head of Unit 8200 made a show by printing out the trove of information, producing a tall stack of paper. Standing next to the material, he told Mr. Netanyahu, “You can now attack Iran,” according to two current and former Israeli defense officials with knowledge of the meeting.
Israel did not attack.
During the years that followed, Israeli spy agencies worked to refine the intelligence gathered from the earlier operation to produce information that could be used in the event of a war with Hezbollah.
According to two Israeli defense officials with knowledge of the intelligence, when the 2006 war ended, Israel had “target portfolios” for just under 200 Hezbollah leaders, operatives, weapons caches and missile locations. By the time Israel launched its campaign in September, it was tens of thousands.
Turning Pagers Into Deadly Devices
To gain an advantage in an eventual war with Hezbollah, Israel also developed plans to sabotage the militia from within. Israel’s Unit 8200 and Mossad championed a plan to supply Hezbollah with booby-trapped devices that could be detonated at a future date, according to six current and former Israeli defense officials.
Within the Israeli intelligence community, the devices were known as “buttons” that could be activated at Israel’s moment of choosing.
Designing and producing the buttons was relatively straightforward. Israeli engineers mastered placing PETN explosives within the batteries of electronic devices, turning them into small bombs.
The more difficult operation fell to the Mossad, which for nearly a decade tricked the group into buying military equipment and telecommunication devices from Israeli shell companies.
In 2014, Israel seized an opportunity when the Japanese technology company iCOM stopped producing its popular IC-V82 walkie-talkies. The devices, originally assembled in Osaka, Japan, were so popular that replicas were already being made across Asia and sold in online forums and in black market deals.
Unit 8200 discovered that Hezbollah was specifically searching for the same device to equip all of its frontline forces, according to seven Israeli and European officials. They had even designed a special vest for their troops with a chest pocket tailored for the device.
Israel began manufacturing its own replicas of the walkie-talkies with small modifications, including packing explosive material into their batteries, according to eight current and former Israeli and American officials. The first Israeli-made replicas arrived in Lebanon in 2015 — and more than 15,000 were eventually shipped, some of the officials said.
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A man holding an iCOM walkie-talkie after he removed the battery.Credit...Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In 2018, a female Israeli Mossad intelligence officer drafted a plan that would use a similar technique to implant explosive material into a pager battery. Israeli intelligence commanders reviewed the plan, but determined that Hezbollah’s use of pagers was not widespread enough, according to three officials. The plan was shelved.
Over the next three years, Israel’s increasing ability to hack into cellphones left Hezbollah, Iran and their allies increasingly wary of using smartphones. Israeli officers from Unit 8200 helped fuel the fear, using bots on social media to push Arabic-language news reports on Israel’s ability to hack into phones, according to two officers in the agency.
Worried about smartphones being compromised, Hezbollah’s leadership decided to expand its use of pagers. Such devices allowed them to send out messages to fighters but did not reveal location data nor have cameras and microphones that could be hacked.
As it did, Hezbollah began looking for pagers hardy enough for combat conditions, according to eight current and former Israeli officials. Israeli intelligence officers reconsidered the pager operation, and worked to build a network of shell companies to hide their origins and sell the products to the militia.
Israeli intelligence officers targeted the Taiwanese brand Gold Apollo, well known for pagers.
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Workers at the factory of Gold Apollo, a pager manufacturer in Taiwan. An Israeli front company bought a license from Gold Apollo to produce its own pagers.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
In May 2022, a company called BAC Consulting was registered in Budapest. One month later, in Sofia, Bulgaria, a company called Norta Global Ltd. was registered to a Norwegian citizen named Rinson Jose.
BAC Consulting bought a licensing agreement from Gold Apollo to manufacture a new pager model known as the AR-924 Rugged. It was bulkier than the existing Gold Apollo pagers, but it was promoted as waterproof and with a longer-lasting battery life than competitors’ devices.
The Mossad oversaw production of the pagers in Israel, according to Israeli officials. Working through intermediaries, Mossad agents began marketing the pagers to Hezbollah buyers and offered a discounted price for a bulk purchase.
The Mossad presented the gadget, one without any hidden explosives, to Mr. Netanyahu during a meeting in March 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. The prime minister was skeptical about their durability, and asked David Barnea, the Mossad chief, how easily they might break. Mr. Barnea assured him they were sturdy.
Not convinced, Mr. Netanyahu abruptly stood up and threw the device against the wall of his office. The wall cracked, but the pager did not.
The Mossad front company shipped the first batch of pagers to Hezbollah that fall.
Conducting War Games
The pager operation was not fully in place in October 2023, when the Hamas-led attacks ignited a fierce debate within the Israeli government about whether Israel should launch a full-scale war against Hezbollah.
Some, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, argued for striking at Hezbollah, which began launching missiles at Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas. It was an opportunity, he said, to deal with the “hard enemy” of Hezbollah before turning to what he considered the less difficult enemy of Hamas, according to five Israeli officials familiar with the meetings.
After a phone call with President Biden on Oct. 11, 2023, Mr. Netanyahu, along with his newly formed war cabinet, decided for the time being against opening another front with Hezbollah, effectively ending high-level debate about the topic for months.
Even as Israel focused on Hamas, military and intelligence officials continued to refine plans for an eventual war with Hezbollah.
Israeli intelligence analysts, who were constantly monitoring the use of the devices, discovered a potential problem with the operation. At least one Hezbollah technician began to suspect that the walkie-talkies might contain hidden explosives, according to three Israeli defense officials. Israel dealt with it swiftly this year, killing the technician with an airstrike.
For nearly a year, Israeli intelligence and the air force also ran roughly 40 war games built around killing Mr. Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah leaders, said two Israeli officials. They wanted to be able to target them at the same time, even if they were not in the same place.
Along the way, Israel collected mundane and intimate details about Hezbollah commanders, including the identities of the four mistresses of Fuad Shukr, a founding member of Hezbollah long ago identified by the U.S. government as one of the planners of the 1983 bombing of the barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 American Marines.
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Hezbollah fighters carrying the coffin of Fuad Shukr, a founder Hezbollah, earlier this year.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
At one point this year, apparently feeling uncomfortable about his situation, Mr. Shukr sought assistance from Hezbollah’s highest religious cleric to marry all four women, according to two Israeli officials and a European official. The cleric, Hashem Safieddine, arranged four separate phone-based wedding ceremonies for Mr. Shukr.
The simmering conflict boiled over this summer, when a Hezbollah rocket attack in July killed a dozen Israelis, including schoolchildren, in Majdal Shams, a town in the Golan Heights.
Israel responded days later with an airstrike in Beirut that killed Mr. Shukr. It was a provocative step to take, to assassinate a top commander of Hezbollah’s forces.
‘Use It or Lose It’
After the back-and-forth attacks, the debate renewed inside Israel’s government about opening a “northern front” against Hezbollah. The Israeli military and the Mossad drew up different strategies for a campaign against Hezbollah, according to four Israeli officials.
In late August, Mr. Barnea, the Mossad chief, wrote a secret letter to Mr. Netanyahu, according to a senior Israeli defense official. The letter advocated a two-to-three-week campaign that included eliminating more than half of the group’s missile abilities and destroying installations within about six miles of the Israeli border. At the same time, senior military officials began their own effort to lobby Mr. Netanyahu to intensify a campaign against Hezbollah.
New intelligence disrupted the planning. Hezbollah operatives had become suspicious that the pagers might be sabotaged, according to several officials.
On Sept. 11, intelligence showed that Hezbollah was sending some of the pagers to Iran for examination, and Israeli officials knew it was only a matter of time before the covert operation would be blown.
On Sept. 16, Mr. Netanyahu met with top security chiefs to weigh whether to detonate the pagers in a “use it or lose it” operation, according to four Israeli security officials. Some opposed it, saying it might prompt a full Hezbollah counterattack and possibly a strike by Iran.
Mr. Netanyahu ordered the operation. The following day, at 3:30 p.m. local time, the Mossad ordered an encrypted message to be sent to thousands of the pagers. Seconds later, the pagers detonated.
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The remains of exploded pagers.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At the time the pagers exploded, Mr. Jose, the Norwegian who was the head of one of the Mossad front companies, was attending a technology conference in Boston.
Within days, Mr. Jose was identified in news articles as a participant in the operation, and the Norwegian government announced that it wanted him back in Norway for questioning.
Israeli officials secretly pressured the Biden administration to ensure that Mr. Jose could leave the United States without going back to Norway, according to one Israeli and one American official.
Israeli officials would not disclose Mr. Jose’s location. One senior Israeli defense official said only that he was in a “safe place.”
Approving an Assassination
After the pager operation, the Netanyahu government, with the support of high-ranking defense officials, opted for all-out war, a campaign marked by a series of escalations.
The day after detonating the pagers, the Mossad blew up the walkie-talkies, most of which were still in storage because Hezbollah leaders had not yet mobilized fighters for a battle against Israel.
In all, dozens of people were killed by the pager and walkie-talkie explosions, including several children, and thousands were wounded. Most of the casualties were Hezbollah operatives, sowing chaos among the top ranks of the group.
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Lebanese soldiers gathered outside a damaged cellphone shop in September in Sidon, Lebanon. The day after detonating the pagers, Israel blew up walkie-talkies. Credit...Mohammad Zaatari/Associated Press
Days after, on Sept. 20, Israeli jets struck a building in Beirut where commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force were meeting in a bunker, killing several of them along with Ibrahim Aqeel, the head of Hezbollah’s military operations.
On Sept. 23, the Israeli Air Force conducted a major campaign, hitting more than 2,000 targets aimed at Hezbollah’s stores of medium and long-range missiles.
The most consequential decision remained: whether or not to kill Mr. Nasrallah.
As senior Israeli officials debated, intelligence agencies received new information that Mr. Nasrallah planned to move to a different bunker, one that would be far more difficult to hit, according to two Israeli defense officials and a Western official.
On Sept. 26, with Mr. Netanyahu set to fly to New York for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the prime minister gathered with his top political, intelligence and military advisers to discuss approving the assassination. They also had to decide whether to tell the Americans in advance.
Mr. Netanyahu and other top advisers opposed notifying the Biden administration. They believed that U.S. officials would push back against the strike, but that regardless, the United States would come to Israel’s defense in case Iran retaliated.
They agreed to keep the Americans in the dark.
Mr. Netanyahu approved the assassination the next day, after he landed in New York and only hours before standing at the podium at the United Nations.
In his speech, he spoke about the grip that Hezbollah had over Lebanon. “Don’t let Nasrallah drag Lebanon into the abyss,” he told the presidents and prime ministers gathered.
Soon after, the Israeli F-15 jets above Beirut dropped thousands of pounds of explosives.
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During a speech at the United Nations in late September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke about the grip that Hezbollah had over Lebanon. “Don’t let Nasrallah drag Lebanon into the abyss,” he said.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Adam Goldman contributed reporting from Washington.
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A. More about Mark Mazzetti
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. More about Ronen Bergman
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 29, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israeli Agencies Burrowed Deep Into Hezbollah. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: The Israel Hamas War, Hezbollah, Mossad, Hassan Nasrallah
7. Ukraine risks losing all the Russian land it seized within months, US officials say
Ukraine risks losing all the Russian land it seized within months, US officials say
Stars and Stripes · by Natalia Drozdiak · December 27, 2024
Ukrainian law enforcement officers inspect the remains of a drone in the courtyard of a damaged residential building following an attack in Kharkiv late on Dec. 20, 2024. (Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images/TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — After a surprise offensive earlier this year, Ukraine’s forces have lost about half the territory seized in Russia’s Kursk region and may lose the rest in a matter of months, according to U.S. officials, potentially depriving Kyiv of important leverage for ceasefire talks with Russia.
Ukraine’s military is already grappling with a lack of manpower and uncertainty about the future flow of supplies from the U.S. and other allies, even as it struggles to fend off Russian advances in its east. In Kursk, the region in western Russia where Ukrainian forces seized a swath of land, Ukrainian troops are also facing off against about 12,000 North Korean troops reinforcing the Russians.
With a more concerted effort by Moscow to push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk, possibly as soon as next month, Kyiv’s forces may only be able to hold the land until spring before they are forced to retreat — or risk being encircled — the U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss their confidential assessments.
The timing is significant because Ukrainian officials have said they hoped to use territory seized in Kursk as a bargaining chip in any negotiations. While president-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, has said he wants to bring the war to a rapid end, it may take months for the two sides to agree to a ceasefire, given the complexity of both Ukrainian and Russian demands.
The Ukraine president’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that he isn’t familiar with a reported proposal from the incoming Trump administration to freeze the war in place if Russia is given guarantees that Ukraine won’t join the NATO military alliance in the next decade or two. Such a deal definitely wouldn’t work for Russia, Putin said.
With Russia currently enjoying the upper hand on the battlefield, it may have an incentive to stall talks as it seeks to claw back as much terrain as possible from Ukraine before negotiations and a possible truce freeze the front lines.
At the same time, Ukraine’s forces have already managed to hold on to land in Kursk longer than some initial predictions, aided in part by the U.S. decision to allow Kyiv to fire its long-range missiles into Russia, one of the officials said.
Another official cautioned that Ukraine’s intent in Kursk was never to keep it but rather for the shock value of its counter-invasion and to further reduce Russia’s forces. So a retreat could still be portrayed as a tactical success. Two of the officials expressed hope that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will order a retreat from Kursk soon enough to avoid suffering high casualties.
‘Massed Assaults’
Despite the possible Ukrainian retreat, the incursion has already imposed a heavy cost on both Russian and North Korean forces.
John Kirby, spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, told reporters Friday that the North Koreans backing Russia are conducting “massed, dismounted assaults against Ukrainian positions in Kursk,” resulting in more than 1,000 killed or wounded in just the past week.
It’s always been clear that Russia could retake Kursk if it chose to, said George Barros, who leads the Russia and Geospatial Intelligence teams at the Institute for the Study of War. But the Kursk incursion has shown that Russia’s international border isn’t fully protected and could be breached again at other points, he said, and that using U.S.-made equipment inside Russia didn’t result in catastrophic escalation.
“In going after Kursk, the Ukrainians demonstrated the war was not hopelessly stalemated but is indeed quite dynamic,” Barros said, which showed allies it was still worth support to further erode Russia’s military and economic resources.
If Russian forces embark on an effective counter-offensive in Kursk, they’d probably target key roads and towns to force a Ukrainian retreat and could send in additional North Korean troops, one of the officials said. North Korea could provide about 8,000 more soldiers to support Russia’s effort by spring, the official said, but cautioned that assessment was “low confidence,” intelligence jargon indicating a firm conclusion can’t be made based on the information collected.
Even without North Korean forces, Russia is still able, for now, to compensate for its own significant losses — averaging about 1,200 personnel per day, according to U.S. assessments. Yet that’s not a level that can be sustained indefinitely without a new mobilization, one of the officials said. Putin wants to avoid a repeat of the unpopular September 2022 callup of 300,000 reservists.
Amid the uncertainty over Kursk, Russian forces continue to make progress in Ukraine’s east, toward the town of Pokrovsk, an important logistics hub from which Kyiv moves troops to and from the front.
While Ukrainian troops may be able to bolster defenses and hold Pokrovsk for some time, one of the U.S. officials said it was a question of time whether Russian forces could envelope it, creating a dilemma for Ukrainian forces to either retreat or surrender.
With assistance from Skylar Woodhouse and Volodymyr Verbianyi.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
Visit bloomberg.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Stars and Stripes · by Natalia Drozdiak · December 27, 2024
8. US to send $1.25 billion in weapons to Ukraine, pushing to get aid out before Biden leaves office
US to send $1.25 billion in weapons to Ukraine, pushing to get aid out before Biden leaves office
apnews.com
US to send $1.25 billion in weapons to Ukraine, pushing to get aid out before Biden leaves office | AP News
Politics
A Ukrainian AS-90 self-propelled artillery vehicle fires towards Russian positions at the frontline on Pokrovsk direction, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
By LOLITA C. BALDOR and MATTHEW LEE
Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is expected to announce that it will send $1.25 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, U.S. officials said Friday, as the Biden administration pushes to get as much aid to Kyiv as possible before leaving office on Jan. 20.
The large package of aid includes a significant amount of munitions, including for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems and the HAWK air defense system. It also will provide Stinger missiles and 155 mm- and 105 mm artillery rounds, officials said.
The officials, who said they expect the announcement to be made on Monday, spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public.
The new aid comes as Russia has launched a barrage of attacks against Ukraine’s power facilities in recent days, although Ukraine has said it intercepted a significant number of the missiles and drones. Russian and Ukrainian forces are also still in a bitter battle around the Russian border region of Kursk, where Moscow has sent thousands of North Korean troops to help reclaim territory taken by Ukraine.
Earlier this month, senior defense officials acknowledged that that the Defense Department may not be able to send all of the remaining $5.6 billion in Pentagon weapons and equipment stocks passed by Congress for Ukraine before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in.
Trump has talked about getting some type of negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, and spoken about his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many U.S. and European leaders are concerned that it might result in a poor deal for Ukraine and they worry that he won’t provide Ukraine with all the weapons funding approved by Congress.
The aid in the new package is in presidential drawdown authority, which allows the Pentagon to take weapons off the shelves and send them quickly to Ukraine. This latest assistance would reduce the remaining amount to about $4.35 billion.
Officials have said they hope that an influx of aid will help strengthen Ukraine’s hand, should Zelenskyy decide it’s time to negotiate.
One senior defense official said that while the U.S. will continue to provide weapons to Ukraine until Jan. 20, there may well be funds remaining that will be available for the incoming Trump administration to spend.
According to the Pentagon, there is also about $1.2 billion remaining in longer-term funding through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which is used to pay for weapons contracts that would not be delivered for a year or more. Officials have said the administration anticipates releasing all of that money before the end of the calendar year.
If the new package is included, the U.S. has provided more than $64 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022.
apnews.com
9. Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.
A long read. What can we learn from this?
Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza.
Years before the Gaza war, Israel transformed its intelligence unit into an AI testing ground, triggering a debate among top commanders about whether humans were sufficiently in the loop.
Yesterday at 5:10 a.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/29/ai-israel-war-gaza-idf/?utm
(Rob Dobi for The Washington Post)
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
After the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces deluged Gaza with bombs, drawing on a database painstakingly compiled through the years that detailed home addresses, tunnels and other infrastructure critical to the militant group.
But then the target bank ran low. To maintain the war’s breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence tool called Habsora — or “the Gospel” — which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets.
The use of AI to rapidly refill IDF’s target bank allowed the military to continue its campaign uninterrupted, according to two people familiar with the operation. It is an example of how the decade-long program to place advanced AI tools at the center of IDF’s intelligence operations has contributed to the violence of Israel’s 14-month war in Gaza.
The IDF has broadcast the existence of these programs, which constitute what some experts consider the most advanced military AI initiative ever to be deployed. But a Washington Post investigation reveals previously unreported details of the inner workings of the machine-learning program, along with the secretive, decade-long history of its development.
The investigation also reveals a fierce debate within the highest echelons of the military, starting years before Oct. 7, about the quality of intelligence gathered by AI, whether the technologies’ recommendations garnered sufficient scrutiny, and if the focus on AI weakened the IDF’s intelligence capabilities. Some internal critics argue the AI program has been a behind-the-scenes force accelerating the death toll in Gaza, which has claimed 45,000 lives, more than half of whom were women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Gaza Health Ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. In a statement, the IDF said the Ministry is controlled by Hamas and its data “is replete with inconsistencies and false determinations.”
People familiar with the IDF’s practices, including soldiers who have served in the war, say Israel’s military has significantly expanded the number of acceptable civilian casualties from historic norms. Some argue this shift is enabled by automation, which has made it easier to speedily generate large quantities of targets, including of low-level militants who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.
This report draws on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the systems, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the details of top secret national security topics, as well as documents obtained by The Post.
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“What’s happening in Gaza is a forerunner of a broader shift in how war is being fought,” said Steven Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who researches the use of AI in war. He noted that the IDF appeared to have lowered its threshold for the acceptable civilian casualty rate during the Gaza war. “Combine that with the acceleration these systems offer — as well as the questions of accuracy — and the end result is a higher death count than was previously imagined in war.”
The IDF said claims that its use of AI endangers lives are “off the mark.”
“The more ability you have to compile pieces of information effectively, the more accurate the process is,” the IDF said in a statement to The Post. “If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process.”
The IDF requires an officer to sign off on any recommendations from its “big data processing” systems, according to an intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Israel does not release division leaders’ names. The Gospel and other AI tools do not make decisions autonomously, the person added.
The overhaul of the IDF’s vaunted signals intelligence division, known as Unit 8200, has intensified since 2020 under current leader Yossi Sariel, transforming the division’s work and intelligence gathering practices.
Sariel championed development of the Gospel, a machine-learning software built atop hundreds of predictive algorithms, which allows soldiers to briskly query a vast trove of data known within the military as “the pool.”
Reviewing reams of data from intercepted communications, satellite footage, and social networks, the algorithms spit out the coordinates of tunnels, rockets, and other military targets. Recommendations that survive vetting by an intelligence analyst are placed in the target bank by a senior officer.
Using the software’s image recognition, soldiers could unearth subtle patterns, including minuscule changes in years of satellite footage of Gaza suggesting that Hamas had buried a rocket launcher or dug a new tunnel on agricultural land, compressing a week’s worth of work into 30 minutes, a former military leader who worked on the systems said.
Palestinians from the Abu Anza family search under the rubble of their house after an Israeli airstrike targeted it, killing 14 people in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on March 3, 2024. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)
Another machine learning tool, called Lavender, uses a percentage score to predict how likely a Palestinian is to be a member of a militant group, allowing the IDF to quickly generate a large volume of potential human targets. Other algorithmic programs have names like Alchemist, Depth of Wisdom, Hunter and Flow, the latter of which allows soldiers to query various datasets and is previously unreported.
Several of the division’s officers have long held concerns that the machine learning technology, which sped decision-making, concealed underlying flaws. Reports delivered to senior leadership did not indicate how intelligence was derived — whether from human analysts or AI systems — making it difficult for officials to evaluate a finding, according to one former senior military official. An internal audit found some AI systems for processing the Arabic language had inaccuracies, failing to understand key slang words and phrases, according to the two former senior military leaders.
The IDF’s machine learning technology also predicts how many civilians might be affected by attacks, helping Israel comply with a key tenet of international law. In the Gaza war, estimates of how many civilians might be harmed in a bombing raid are derived through data-mining software, using image recognition tools to analyze drone footage alongside smartphones pinging cell towers to tally the number of civilians in an area, two of the people said.
In 2014, the IDF’s acceptable civilian casualty ratio was one civilian for a high-level terrorist, said Tal Mimran, a former legal adviser to the IDF. In the Gaza war, the number has grown to about 15 civilians for one low-level Hamas member and “exponentially higher” for mid- and high-level members,” according to the Israeli human rights organization Breaking the Silence, citing numerous testimonies from IDF soldiers. The New York Times reported the number as 20 earlier this week.
The IDF says its assessments of collateral damage adhere to the Law of Armed Conflict, which mandates nations differentiate between civilians and combatants and take precautions to protect lives.
Some proponents of Israel’s use of the technology argue that aggressively deploying innovations such as AI is essential for the survival of a small country facing determined and powerful enemies.
“Technological superiority is what keeps Israel safe,” said Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, who was briefed by the IDF’s intelligence division on its AI capabilities in 2021. “The faster Israel is able to identify enemy capabilities and take them off the battlefield, the shorter a war is going to be, and it will have fewer casualties.”
In addition to concerns over the quality of AI-derived intelligence, the use of the technology has triggered a divisive paradigm shift within the IDF, usurping an intelligence culture that has historically prized individual reasoning for one that prioritized technological prowess, according to three of the people. 8200 had long empowered low-level analysts to bypass their immediate bosses and issue direct warnings to senior commanders.
Under the command of Sariel and other intelligence leaders, 8200 has restructured to emphasize engineers, cutting Arabic language specialists, removing several leaders considered resistant to AI, and disbanding some groups not focused on data-mining technology, according to three of the people. By Oct. 7, 60 percent of the unit’s employees were working in engineering and tech roles, twice as many as a decade earlier, according to one of the people.
The IDF’s intelligence practices are under scrutiny. Genocide charges against Israel brought to The Hague by South Africa question whether crucial decisions about bombing targets in Gaza were made by software, an investigation that could hasten a global debate about the role of AI technology in warfare.
And in Israel, Sariel said in September that he plans to step down from the IDF under increased questioning of the intelligence failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack.
Two former senior commanders said they believe the intense focus on AI was a significant reason Israel was caught off-guard that day. The department overemphasized technological findings and made it difficult for analysts to raise warnings to senior commanders.
“This was an AI factory,” said one former military leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe national security topics. “The man was replaced by the machine.”
Palestinians inspect their homes after Israeli strikes hit the Al-Masry Tower on March 9, 2024, in Rafah, Gaza. (Loay Ayyoub for The Washington Post)
The “human bottleneck”
Sariel, through the IDF, declined requests for comment. He did not respond to requests for comment sent to his personal email.
In 2019, two years before taking over as intelligence commander, Sariel spent a sabbatical year at the National Defense University, a Pentagon-funded institution in Washington that trains national security leaders from all over the world. A professor at NDU, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to describe a personal relationship, said he and Sariel shared a radical vision of AI in the battlefield, arguing that Israel should blaze ahead of more cautious U.S. allies.
“Yossi was in this world of, ‘This thing is moving fast, faster than anybody realizes. And we better get everybody on board,’” the professor said.
A book Sariel wrote during the sabbatical and published under a pen name lays out a vision for infusing national security establishments with automation. In “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence,” Sariel describes how the actions of lone-wolf terrorists could be predicted in advance by unleashing algorithms to analyze phone locations, social media posts, drone footage and intercepted private communications.
In Sariel’s expansive vision, AI would touch all aspects of defense, in both peacetime and war. By using AI surveillance technologies, Israel’s borders would become “smart borders.” By collecting digital trails, armies could build advanced “target banks” with names, locations and behavior patterns of thousands of suspects. These technologies could replace 80 percent of intelligence analysts that specialize in foreign languages in just five years, he concluded.
Sariel returned to Israel brimming with plans to bring his ideas to fruition. In summer 2020, he was appointed by Aviv Kohavi, then the army’s chief of staff and a huge proponent of AI tools, to take over the 8200 unit, the IDF’s largest and most prestigious division. Former commanders huddled to share their worries about the “religious attitude toward AI” developing in the unit under Sariel’s tenure, two people said.
Kohavi declined to comment.
When Sariel officially became commander, in February 2021, 8200 had been experimenting with data science for more than seven years, five former military leaders said, contending with an explosion of digital communications that provided a gold mine for national security agencies. The elite unit had developed a reputation for collecting an array of DMs, private messages, emails, call logs, and other online breadcrumbs using in-house cyber technologies considered the best in the world.
But 8200’s cyber experts needed ways to make sense of the data they’d harvested.
After communication failures during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israeli military recalculated its strategy for sharing information and data. At the time, intelligence units typically didn’t share information with soldiers on the battlefield, said Ben Caspit, an Israeli columnist for Al Monitor, who is writing a book about the 8200 unit. To prevent such silos, the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, and 8200 developed a database — “the pool” — to house all military intelligence in one repository.
As a “big data” boom got underway in Silicon Valley, Israeli engineers had begun to experiment with off-the-shelf data mining tools that could translate and analyze Arabic and Farsi. The unit’s leaders debated whether to contract with experts, such as the Silicon Valley data-mining firm Palantir, or build their own software.
The latter approach won out. But the technologies, while widely recognized as promising, had limitations. Sometimes the sheer volume of intercepts overwhelmed 8200’s analysts. For example, Hamas operatives often used the word “batikh,” or watermelon, as code for a bomb, one of the people familiar with the efforts said. But the system wasn’t smart enough to understand the difference between a conversation about an actual watermelon and a coded conversation among terrorists.
“If you pick up a thousand conversations a day, do I really want to hear about every watermelon in Gaza?” the person said.
As he moved into senior leadership, Sariel sped up the data-mining efforts. He championed a broad reorganization that divided intelligence efforts into what the commanders referred to as “AI factories” located in a newly created “targets center” at the Nevatim Airbase in the south of Israel. Each division designed hundreds of purpose-built algorithms and machine learning technologies, sharing software predictions across the intelligence chain of command.
The military invested in new cloud technologies that processed algorithms quickly, in preparation for an anticipated conflict with Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border. An app called Hunter allowed soldiers on the battlefield to directly access information. It built another mobile app called Z-Tube where IDF soldiers in battle could review live video of areas that they were about to enter, and another called Map It, which provided real-time estimates of potential civilian casualties in a specific area that had been evacuated.
8200 had long maintained a target bank: a list of precise GPS coordinates of Hamas and Hezbollah infrastructure and human targets, geolocated to a specific tunnel or apartment building floor. Maintaining the target bank was labor-intensive. Analysts were required to confirm their findings with at least two independent sources and to refresh the information continuously, according to three people familiar with the program. Before officially entering the bank, a proposed target had to be “validated” by a senior officer and a military lawyer to ensure it would comply with international law, five people said.
Intelligence leaders, led by Sariel, believed machine learning could dramatically speed up that painstaking process, said two of the people.
“It took the IDI [intelligence directorate] years to achieve a bank of those kinds of targets, but what happens if you trained AI to imitate the work of the targeting officer?” said another former military official familiar with the new target formation process.
The effort involved collecting billions of signals from sensors placed on drones, F-35 aircraft and subterranean seismic monitors, as well as from intercepted communications. These were paired with databases that housed phone numbers, social media profiles, known contacts, chat groups and internal documents. The information was fed into software that could read patterns and make predictions about who and what could be targeted.
An image recognition algorithm was trained to search thousands of satellite photographs to identify a specific type of fabric that Hamas militants used to conceal digging for a buried rocket. The tools compressed a week of work into 30 minutes, the former military officer said.
“They really did believe with all the sensors they had all around and above Gaza, I won’t say total informational awareness, but that they had a very good picture of what was happening inside,” said Misztal, who leads an organization focused on security cooperation between the United States and Israel. He noted that the military emphasized its rigorous systems for checking targeting recommendations during his 2021 briefing.
Israeli tanks patrol southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on May 8, 2024. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Lavender, an algorithmic program developed in 2020, pored over data to produce lists of potential Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, giving each person a score estimating their likelihood to be a member, three people familiar with the systems told The Post. Factors that could raise a person’s score included being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, switching addresses and phone numbers frequently or being named in Hamas files, the people said.
Lavender’s existence and details about its scoring system were first reported by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian news site.
Estimates from the various algorithms fed into the umbrella system, Gospel, which could be queried by intelligence analysts.
Some of the department’s leaders worried about the accuracy of these algorithms. One audit of a language-processing technology revealed that the software prediction was not as accurate as a human officer would have been, according to two of the people.
Others worried that predictions from the software were being given too much weight. Typically, the research division would produce daily intelligence reports for senior commanders to review potential targets. But though an individual analyst could double-click to see the information that led to the prediction, senior commanders were not informed whether a recommendation was derived through an algorithm or through human sourcing.
“Everything was treated as the same,” another former senior official said. “I’m not even sure the person preparing the report knew the difference between the pieces of information.”
Two former senior military leaders told The Post the emphasis on technology eroded 8200’s “culture of warning,” where even low-level analysts could easily brief top commanders about concerns. This shift, they added, is a significant reason Israel was surprised by the Oct. 7 attack: An experienced female analyst who had surfaced Hamas’s battlefield plans for breaking into Israel’s borders was unable to get a meeting with the unit’s top commanders in time.
“The bottom line is, you can’t replace the guy who screams, ‘Listen, this is dangerous,’” with all the advanced AI technologies in the world,” said Caspit, the Israeli journalist who has interviewed every living 8200 commander for his book. “This was the hubris that infected the entire unit.”
In 2023, the army’s just-retired chief of staff, Kohavi, bragged to a media outlet that the new AI systems gave the IDF a sophisticated real-time intelligence apparatus “akin to the movie ‘The Matrix.’” Before the Gospel, analysts could produce 50 new targets in Gaza per year to put into the target bank. “Once the machine was activated,” he said, it generated 100 targets per day.
In his book, Sariel argued that AI would be especially useful in wartime, when it could speed up target formation and “blast open” the “human bottleneck” that slowed everything down.
In June 2021, Israel had its first chance to unleash the new algorithm-powered target bank. As an 11-day war broke out between Israel and Hamas, the IDF used data science to hit 450 targets, including a Hamas squad missile commander and one of the group’s antitank missile units, according to a talk an 8200 commander gave at Tel Aviv University.
Senior leaders seized the moment as a promotional opportunity to discuss the AI revolution taking place at Nevatim, and inside 8200 headquarters just north of Tel Aviv. All the senior commanders “wanted to talk about was ‘the world’s first AI war,’” Misztal said.
Plumes of smoke from Israeli airstrikes are seen over Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza on Dec. 15, 2024. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
A target factory on overdrive
International Humanitarian Law requires warring nations to balance the anticipated military advantage of an attack with the expected collateral damage to civilians, known as proportionality or the “reasonable military commander” standard.
The treaties, which Israel has only partially ratified, are silent on artificial intelligence. The military’s intelligence data processing “[meets] the international law definition for a lawful target,” the IDF said in a statement this summer.
By Israel’s own admission, AI has played a big part in the targeting process in Gaza. Within days of the Oct. 7 attacks, U.S.-manufactured 2,000-pound Mark 80 munitions soon rained onto the territory.
In a Nov. 2, 2023, press release, the IDF announced that Gospel had helped it bomb 12,000 targets in Gaza. Set to dramatic music and a video of buildings exploding, the release touted “a first-of-its-kind collaboration” in which intelligence from the AI target factory was being fed in real time to forces on the ground, in the air and at sea — enabling hundreds of attacks to be “carried out in an instant.”
Adam Raz, an Israeli historian who has interviewed soldiers and commanders about 8200’s use of AI, said he calculated that the IDF was hitting roughly two targets per minute at the height of the bombing — what he called an “astonishing” rate.
One intelligence officer told The Post that he witnessed the IDF using AI to cut corners to make targeting decisions. The soldier spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is a crime to describe military technology without government approval in Israel.
In the early days of the war the target factory was working on overdrive, staffed with about 300 soldiers operating around-the-clock. Many of the analysts were required to vet recommended targets from the Gospel and Lavender, a process that could take anywhere from three minutes to five hours.
The rule mandating two pieces of human-derived intelligence to validate a prediction from Lavender was dropped to one at the outset of the war, according to two people familiar with the efforts. In some cases in the Gaza division, soldiers who were poorly trained in using the technology attacked human targets without corroborating Lavender’s predictions at all, the soldier said.
At certain times the only corroboration required was that the target was a male, according to another person familiar with the efforts.
“You start with Lavender, and then you do the intelligence work,” the person said. “In the beginning of the war, they cut the work in half — which is okay, because it’s war. The problem was that then they sometimes cut all the work.”
To quickly trace the people Lavender had flagged as likely Hamas members, the IDF obtained real-time photos of people in their homes using a method the soldier declined to describe. Custom-built facial recognition tools enabled them to cross-reference the photos with existing images of Hamas members in the Lavender database.
While the matches appeared to be accurate, the person said, some soldiers grew concerned that the military was relying solely on the technology without corroboration that the people were still active members of the terrorist organization.
Concerns about proportionality also took a back seat: Some people captured in the photographs might have been family members, and IDF commanders accepted that those people also would be killed in an attack, the soldier said.
At one point, the soldier’s unit was ordered to use a software program to estimate civilian casualties for a bombing campaign targeting about 50 buildings in northern Gaza. The unit’s analysts were given a simple formula: divide the number of people in a district by the number of people estimated to live there — deriving the former figure by counting the cellphones connecting to a nearby cell tower.
Using a red-yellow-green traffic light, the system would flash green if a building had an occupancy rate of 25 percent or less — a threshold considered sufficient to pass to a commander to make the call about whether to bomb.
The soldier said he was stunned by what he considered an overly simplified analysis. It took no account of whether a cellphone might be turned off or had run out of power or of children who wouldn’t have a cellphone. Without AI, the military may have called people to see if they were home, the soldier said, a manual effort that would have been more accurate but taken far longer.
AI systems have built-in inaccuracies that make them inappropriate for a life-and-death context such as war, said Heidy Khlaaf, a vocal critic of Israel and chief AI Scientist at the AI Institute, a New York-based nonprofit that produces policy recommendations. Khlaaf noted that the autonomous vehicles industry has spent the past decade trying to get its machine learning algorithms to 100% accuracy, with little success.
Mimran, the former IDF lawyer, said he still believes militaries in the West must embrace AI tools to combat rivals such as China, but he worries about the accuracy of AI-enabled decision-making in the high-pressure fog of war.
“For pace, it’s a game changer. But is it a game changer in terms of quality?” Mimran said. “I don’t think so.”
8200 is also currently making efforts to hire back more Arabic-language analysts and software auditors, three people said.
And Israeli officials no longer brag about their use of AI. In his 2023 interview, even Kohavi appeared to acknowledge the challenges. AI can “possess far more knowledge than any individual,” he said, “potentially relying on its own decisions more than on ours.”
Shane Harris contributed to this report.
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By Elizabeth Dwoskin
Lizza joined The Washington Post as Silicon Valley correspondent in 2016, becoming the paper's eyes and ears in the region. She focuses on social media and the power of the tech industry in a democratic society. Before that, she was the Wall Street Journal's first full-time beat reporter covering AI and the impact of algorithms on people's lives. follow on X@lizzadwoskin
10. How America First will transform the world in 2025
US as a revisionist power?
How America First will transform the world in 2025
In different ways, the US, Russia and China have all become revisionist powers that are seeking radical change to the status quo
Financial Times · by Gideon Rachman · December 27, 2024
The inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the US will take place on January 20 — the same day as the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Since the end of the cold war, the annual Davos meeting — which brings together business and political leaders from all over the world — has become a symbol of elite-driven globalisation.
But Trump is a sworn enemy of what he calls “globalism”. Davos-goers promote free trade; Trump says that “tariff” is his favourite word. The WEF hosts innumerable forums about international co-operation; Trump believes in “America First” nationalism.
For three decades, the world’s major powers broadly embraced the Davos worldview. This was a period when economic interdependence drowned out geopolitical rivalries. Trump, President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia have all spoken at the World Economic Forum in the past.
What is at stake is the west’s monopoly [of power] which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union
But now, in different ways, the US, China and Russia have all become revisionist powers that are seeking radical change to the current world order.
When Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he sacrificed his country’s economic ties to the west in favour of his vision of Russian grandeur. Xi’s China has become more nationalistic and more menacing in its behaviour towards Taiwan. And Trump is demanding fundamental changes to the international trading system and to America’s relationship with its allies.
It is not terribly surprising that Russia and China are demanding changes to the world order. Russia is a former superpower that is striving to rebuild its lost influence. China is a rising superpower that wants the world to accommodate its ambitions. It is American revisionism that is both most puzzling and most far-reaching in its consequences.
President Vladimir Putin visits a rehabilitation centre for soldiers wounded in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In choosing to launch the attack, Moscow sacrificed its economic ties to the west © FT Montage: Valery Sharifulin/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
The US is still the world’s most powerful country and the world’s largest economy. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency and the American alliance system underpins the security of Europe, Asia and the Americas. If the US is serious about fundamentally rethinking its international commitments, then the entire world will have to adapt.
And yet that appears to be what is happening. According to John Ikenberry of Princeton University, a leading theorist of international relations, “a revisionist state has arrived on the scene to contest the liberal international order . . . it is the United States. It’s Trump in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world.”
As Ikenberry sees it, Trump is poised to contest “almost every element of the liberal international order — trade, alliances, migration, multilateralism, solidarity between democracies, human rights”.
As a result, rather than supporting the international status quo, the US is poised to become the leading disrupter. “Every talk I’ve ever given on the geopolitical risks that we face in the world started with China and Russia,” says Ivo Daalder of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But the biggest risk is us. It’s America.”
America’s traditional allies are among the countries that feel most threatened by a change in the way that the US exercises its power. Middle-power democracies such as the UK, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Germany and the entire EU have got used to a world in which American markets are open — and the US provides a security guarantee against threatening authoritarian powers.
Dutch and German soldiers take part in a Nato military exercise in Pabradė, Lithuania. Trump’s recent comments have raised questions over whether the US would defend its Nato allies © FT Montage: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
But Trump is promising to impose tariffs on America’s closest allies and has called into question US security guarantees — including Nato’s Article 5, its mutual-defence clause. On one notorious occasion this year, the president-elect remarked that he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with Nato countries that failed to meet their spending commitments on defence.
The threat posed by Trump to allied interests is already leading to agonised debates in some of the countries that he is targeting. When Chrystia Freeland resigned as Canada’s finance minister this month, she accused Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, of failing to recognise the “grave challenge” posed by America’s “aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 per cent tariffs”. Canada, she suggested, needed to keep its fiscal powder dry to prepare for a “coming tariff war”.
The question of whether and how to respond to Trump tariffs is exercising diplomatic minds across the western world. Finding an answer is all the more difficult because Trump’s true intentions remain unclear. Is the former and future president best understood as a dealmaker? Or is he a revolutionary — intent on blowing up the system, come what may?
The EU’s initial response will be to hope that Trump’s tariff threats are simply a negotiating tactic — and that a reasonable deal can be reached, well before an all-out trade war breaks out. But if Trump goes ahead with his threatened tariffs for a prolonged period, Brussels is likely to hit back.
A container ship is loaded at the port in Lianyungang, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province. Trump’s re-election has sparked fears of new trade wars © FT Montage: STR/AFP via Getty Images
Other American allies such as Britain and Japan may respond differently. The UK government will hope that the Trump administration spares it from tariffs, perhaps because the US has a small trade surplus with the UK. Even if Britain is hit, the depth and importance of the security relationship between London and Washington will make any UK government think very hard before entering a trade war with the US.
Japan, which has a large trade surplus with the US, is a much more obvious potential target for Trump tariffs. But Japanese officials think it unlikely that Tokyo would hit back. Like the British, the Japanese would be very reluctant to do anything that tempted a Trump administration to put American security guarantees on the table — as Washington’s next chip in a negotiation.
The need for America’s allies to balance trade priorities and national security reflects the fact that it is not just the global economic order that is under challenge. In Europe and Asia, the established balance of power is also under threat.
When it comes to security, Russia and China are the most dangerous revisionists — because they are the nations that are demanding changes to international borders and adjustments to the global and regional security order.
Both Putin and Xi clearly see opportunities in the current global situation. In a recent speech to the Brics summit in Russia, Xi hailed the emergence of a new global era, “defined by turbulence and transformation”. Putin struck a similar note in a speech that he gave in Sochi on November 7, two days after Trump’s election, proclaiming: “Before our eyes, an entirely new world order is emerging.”
President Xi of China, seated left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, right, attend the G20 leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro last month © FT Montage: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg
At times, Putin and Trump sound like they are reading from the same anti-woke hymn sheet. In his Sochi speech, the Russian leader defined his enemy as “liberal and globalist messianism” — sentiments that Trump could easily have echoed.
But while Trump believes that the new world order should increase America’s wealth and power, Putin’s central aim is to cut the US down to size. He told his audience in Sochi that “what is at stake is the west’s monopoly [of power] which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union”.
Xi also sees the decline of western power as a central and desirable feature of the emerging new world order. The Chinese leader is fond of proclaiming that “the east is rising while the west is declining”. Both Russia and China are hoping to build up the Brics as a counterweight to the western-dominated G7.
Beyond the generalities, both Putin and Xi have specific territorial demands in mind. In Washington and Brussels, it is now assumed that Russia is determined not just to hang on to the Ukrainian territory it has occupied, but also in effect to end the country’s independence by gaining a veto over Ukraine’s foreign and security policies, as well as setting up a Moscow-friendly government in Kyiv.
A mother and daughter wait at an evacuation point in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine this month. Many believe the war will have made Russia’s president even more radical in his thinking © FT Montage: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images
Western officials also note that Putin’s prewar demands extended well beyond Ukraine. In an ultimatum that the Kremlin issued in December 2021, Russian demands included the withdrawal of all Nato forces from the eastern European countries that joined the alliance after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
The assumption inside Nato is that the war in Ukraine — and the immense losses inflicted on Russian forces by the western-backed Ukrainian forces — will have made Putin even more radical in his thinking. One senior European official says: “We need to understand that Russia thinks it is already at war with us.” An American counterpart adds that a Russian victory in Ukraine would present a “huge threat” to Nato.
A perceived Russian victory in Ukraine would also resonate around the world, and particularly in China. One obvious possibility is that it would embolden Xi to pursue his own revisionist ambitions in Asia. Professor Steve Tsang of Soas, University of London, argues that Xi believes “taking Taiwan” is fundamental to his “China dream”. For Xi, victory in Taiwan would mark “the advent of China as the pre-eminent power” in the Indo-Pacific and ultimately the world.
Pedestrians in the Wanhua shopping area of Taipei, Taiwan. Unlike Trump, President Joe Biden promised that the US would defend the self-governing island in the event of an invasion © FT Montage: An Rong Xu/Bloomberg
Beijing’s position is that Taiwan is internationally recognised as part of the People’s Republic of China. But the island is self-governing and its de facto independence could only be ended by intense Chinese pressure — or an invasion. In Beijing, Taiwan’s political leadership is portrayed as dangerous separatists. There has been much speculation in America that Xi has told his military to be ready to conquer the island by 2027. The date the Chinese leader himself has spoken of in public is 2050. On the other hand, Xi is now 71 years old. He may be tempted to try to secure his legacy relatively soon.
President Joe Biden has said several times that the US is prepared to go to war to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, though Trump has made no such commitment. And while the incoming president is surrounded by China hawks, he himself has campaigned as a peace candidate — and has frequently expressed his admiration for both Xi and Putin.
The questions about how Trump will interpret his revisionist America First agenda are made even more complex by the fact that he will not be operating in an international vacuum. The US president will also have to respond to the actions and reactions of other foreign powers — in particular the revisionist leaders in Moscow and Beijing.
Trump supporters participate in a caravan rally in Florida days before the US election. The former president’s victory is already leading to agonised debates among America’s traditional allies © FT Montage: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images
Given all the elements involved, there can be no certainties about how the new world order will evolve, only scenarios. So here are five possibilities.
A new great power bargain: Trump’s transactional nature, his determination to avoid war and his contempt for democratic allies leads the US to strike a new grand bargain with Russia and China. The US tacitly grants Russia and China spheres of influence in their regions. America concentrates on asserting dominance in its own region — pushing around Mexico and Canada, and seeking to take back the Panama Canal and gain control over Greenland. Trump forces a peace deal on Ukraine without accompanying security guarantees. Sanctions against Russia are relaxed and Putin is welcomed to Thanksgiving dinner at Mar-a-Lago. A possible bargain with China would involve the easing of American tech restrictions and tariffs on Beijing, in return for Chinese purchases of American goods and sweetheart deals in China for US companies such as Tesla. Trump would also signal his lack of interest in fighting to defend Taiwan. US allies in Europe and Asia would be left scrambling to provide for their own defence in a new atmosphere of insecurity.
War by accident: The western allies have a trade war with each other. Political instability spreads in Europe, with the rise of populist forces sympathetic to both Trump and Putin. A ceasefire is agreed in Ukraine — but there is widespread fear in Europe that Russia will resume hostilities at some point. Trump himself repeatedly calls into question America’s willingness to defend its allies. China, Russia or North Korea — or some combination of these powers — decide to take advantage of western disarray by launching military action in Asia and Europe. But they miscalculate. Asian and European democracies fight back, and eventually the US gets drawn into the conflict, as happened twice in the 20th century.
Anarchy in a leaderless world: The US, China, Russia and the EU avoid direct conflict. But Trump’s America First policies on trade, security and international institutions create a leadership vacuum. Economic growth is depressed across the world by Trump’s trade wars. Civil conflicts in countries such as Sudan and Myanmar intensify. The UN is debilitated by big power rivalry and is powerless to intervene. Instead conflicts are fuelled by competing regional powers that are seeking advantage and resources. More countries such as Haiti slide into violent anarchy. Refugee flows to the west increase. Populist parties, contemptuous of liberal democracy, flourish in an atmosphere of social and economic insecurity.
Globalisation without America: The US retreats behind tariff walls and leaves the World Trade Organization. Prices rise in America and goods get more shoddy. The rest of the world responds to American autarky by accelerating economic interdependence. The EU ratifies its new trade deal with Latin America and signs new agreements with India and China. Europe also opens its market to Chinese electric vehicles and green tech, in return for the Chinese setting up factories across the EU and restraining Russian aggression against Europe. The global south’s integration with the Chinese economy deepens further and the Brics gain new members and influence. The use of the dollar as the global currency declines.
America First succeeds: Trump’s faith in the irresistible nature of American power is vindicated. Investment is driven to the US, increasing America’s lead in tech and finance. The Europeans and Japanese sharply increase spending on their own defence and this is enough to deter Russian and Chinese aggression. American tariffs dramatically reduce Chinese growth, sending the Chinese system into crisis. The Iranian regime is finally felled by some combination of military, economic and domestic pressure. Trump’s prestige soars at home and abroad. American liberals are cowed into silence and some of Trump’s enemies are jailed. The stock market hits a new high.
The reality of the next four years is likely to be some strange amalgam of all of the above scenarios, plus several other unforeseen developments. As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, writing during the late 1920s, famously put it: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Financial Times · by Gideon Rachman · December 27, 2024
11. Syria will never be unified
Conclusion:
Perhaps the Syrians are best left alone to rebuild their state as they see fit. But if benevolent Western officials do intervene, they should not automatically favour a unitary and centralised state — a preference unfortunately shared even by American officials who come from a federal state. A confederal Syria would be a much better alternative.
Syria will never be unified
Western busybodies should be wary
unherd.com · by Edward Luttwak · December 27, 2024
Damascus in ruins. (Credit: Chris McGrath/Getty)
AssadHistoryMiddle EastPoliticsSyriaUS
Edward Luttwak
December 27, 2024 5 mins
The foreign busybodies in the State Department, Foreign Office and the French foreign ministry, who are already now pressing for the reconstruction of a unitary Syrian state, should reflect on the country’s history. Syria was never meant to function as a unitary state. Nor under Sunni Arab majority rule, as it is likely to now.
The distinct national identities of its Alawite, Arab Christian-Orthodox, Druze, Kurdish, Armenian, Ismaili and Arab Shia populations were all recognised under Ottoman rule. And when France obtained the territory in 1919, it strove to accommodate plural identities by creating two separate states: an Alawite one in north-west Syria and a Druze one in the south-east.
But when the French gave up their attempt to control Syria in 1946, a Sunni Arab, Shukri al-Quwatli, became the country’s president. He did not discriminate against the minorities, but he did send troops with Transjordan and Egypt to invade Israel in 1948 in the name of Sunni Arab solidarity. He had high hopes of conquering the Galilee, because the Syrians had tanks and artillery left behind by the French, while the Jews only had rifles, some machine-guns, and a couple of antique 1906 howitzers.
The ensuing Arab defeat came as a terrible humiliation, which prompted the first of Syria’s many coups. The next president, General Husni al Zaim, only ruled for 137 days but set enduring precedents: although he had been in charge of the fighting as the Army Chief of Staff, he blamed civilian politicians for Syria’s defeat, and second, he was not an Arab but a Kurd — the first of a series of non-Sunni Arab rulers, found in no other Arab country.
During the next 21 years, 17 presidents followed one another. And three of those years were under Egyptian rule. In 1958 Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the very embodiment of Arab nationalism, had been invited to rule Syria as well, in what became the United Arab Republic. The Syrian elite, desperate for stability, had simply given up on independence.
This experiment in Arab unity lasted for three years and 219 days, long enough to teach the Syrian elite both civil and military that the rule of much larger but much poorer Egypt was very costly. A military coup dissolved the United Arab Republic on 29 September 1961, and six more presidents tried to rule Syria. But stability would come in November 1970 when Hafez al-Assad took control as military dictator before naming himself the president in February 1971.
With Hafez al-Assad there was no more beating around the bush on the question of ethnicity, never even mentioned by all his predecessors. He was an Alawite, therefore only a very nominal Muslim (they drink wine and believe in the transmigration of souls), and he relied very largely on fellow Alawites to control the levers of power, from the command of air force squadrons and every armoured unit within reach of Damascus, to the customs service that generated revenue much more reliably than taxes, and the police which recruited informants in every part of Syrian society.
It was Hafez-al Assad’s father, Suleiman, who had laid the basis of subsequent Alawite power over Syria. In June 1926, along with other notable Alawites, he sent a letter to the French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to explain why his people — mostly peasant farmers in those days — could never live under Muslim rule. “The spirit of hatred and intolerance plants its roots in the heart of Muslim Arabs toward everything that is non-Muslim,” he wrote, warning of the risk to Syrian minorities if France granted independence. At the time the French were organising their colonial army for Syria, and thought it prudent to favour Alawite applicants along with Druzes, Ismailis and a few Christians, all much more likely to be loyal to France against majority Arab Sunni demands for independence.
The disproportionate number of Alawites in the officer corps allowed Hafez al-Assad to seize control of the armed forces in 1970. But the elevation of Alawite farmers into the ruling class would ultimately undo the 54-year long regime of Assad father and son that finally collapsed two weeks ago. The sons of farmers moved into Damascus and other Syrian cities to exploit their Alawite connections to occupy lucrative government positions or work in state-connected firms, and were less and less willing to serve as soldiers, gendarmes and spies to protect the regime from its enemies.
For many years this enfeeblement of the Alawites was masked by the rise of Iran’s power in Syria. Tehran’s militantly Shia rulers needed bases in Syria to build up Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to claim overall Muslim leadership against Israel. They therefore chose to accept the exceedingly heretical Alawites as both Muslim and Shia.
Iran’s support allowed the Assad regime to cling to power for years, even in the face of the mass “Arab Spring” protests led by the Sunni Arab majority that started in December 2010. The Revolutionary Guards trained Shia recruits from Iraq and as far as Afghanistan to repress the Sunni majority rebels all over Syria, while relying on higher grade Hezbollah units to reconquer strongly held towns and city quarters, with bombing support from Syrian aircraft and Russian fighter-bombers.
“Iran’s support allowed the Assad regime to cling to power for years.”
Determined to resist by all means possible including the use of chlorine and mustard gas, the regime survived for another 14 years. But it could not survive Israel’s demolition of Hezbollah, and its clear-cut aerial victory right over Tehran. The thousand or so Sunni fundamentalist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham who drove into Aleppo on 29 November, would easily have been stopped by a Hezbollah battalion in the past, but not this time. And neither could Iran’s Revolutionary Guards be flown to support the regime because the Israelis would not have allowed it. After Iran’s air force did not even try to resist Israel’s 26 October attack near Tehran, the entire edifice of Iran’s military power was exposed as a sham. Assad fled just in time to avoid certain death.
The Foreign Office, State Department Near East Bureau, and French Quai d’Orsay should pause to reconsider this history. The Alawites might be beaten down but not the Kurds in the north-east, nor the Druzes in the south-east.
There are other ways to accommodate plural identities. Switzerland, for example, once the scene of civil war, caters to the diverse preferences of its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious population with 26 different cantons, each of which has its own government, constitution, and primary language. The last time Swiss took up arms against each other was in 1847, but the newest canton, French-speaking Jura, only acquired its independence in 1979.
Of course, there are glaring differences between ultra-prosperous and perfectly tranquil Switzerland and war-ravaged Syria, but the former’s accommodation of diversities at the local level is far better than any attempt at nation-wide ethnic/religious accommodations, as in India, where the original idea of helping the lowest-caste “untouchables” that started under British rule has escalated over the years into a system of privileges (including in university admissions) for whatever group is strong enough at the ballot box, including a newer “Other Backward Classes” category that embraces almost a third of the population. A unitary Syrian state without strong local governments would be disastrous, especially because each city and some larger towns has its own distinct urban culture shared by most ethnicities and religions.
Perhaps the Syrians are best left alone to rebuild their state as they see fit. But if benevolent Western officials do intervene, they should not automatically favour a unitary and centralised state — a preference unfortunately shared even by American officials who come from a federal state. A confederal Syria would be a much better alternative.
Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.
ELuttwak
unherd.com · by Edward Luttwak · December 27, 2024
12. Jimmy Carter: A Declassified Obituary | National Security Archive
A lot of fascinating history to unpack. Here is my favorite excerpted memo from Brzezinski to the President with his responses in margins.
Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, “NSC Weekly Report #55,” April 21, 1978
Apr 21, 1978
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-128-9-14-10-4
In this memo, he holds forth on an issue that “has been gnawing at me recently,” his weakly disguised impatience with the president for failing to make use of some of the more Machiavellian tools of statecraft. These included the “demonstration of force,” the need to “infuse fear,” to “manipulate,” and to utilize “black propaganda.”
Carter’s responses in the margins of these memos are often highly revealing of his own thinking but also of his relationship with his controversial aide. Here, the president poses several blunt, one-word ripostes in the form of questions next to Brzezinski’s suggestions. Next to the idea of a “demonstration of force,” he writes “Like Malaguez?” a (misspelled) reference to the Mayaguez incident, an utterly disastrous 1975 forcible rescue operation of a merchant ship off the Cambodian coast that resulted in over 40 U.S. soldiers losing their lives while the ship’s crew were already being released somewhere else.
Then commenting on Brzezinski’s recommendation about “saying publicly one thing” while “negotiating something else,” Carter writes simply: “Lying?” The allusion would have been excruciatingly obvious to Brzezinski – a harkening back to Carter’s frequent campaign promise in the wake of the public dishonesty of the Nixon/Kissinger years: “I will never lie to you.”
Finally, when Brzezinski volunteers to develop some of these notions further, the president tells him: “You’ll be wasting your time.”
Jimmy Carter: A Declassified Obituary | National Security Archive
Highest-level national security documents reveal tough-minded, detail-oriented president
Handwritten notations could be severe — once chided Brzezinski: “Lying?” “You’ll be wasting your time”
President privately complained Kissinger was a “liar,” “irresponsible” over U.S. treatment of Shah
nsarchive.gwu.edu
Published: Dec 29, 2024
Briefing Book #
881
By Malcolm Byrne with Autumn Kladder
For more information, contact:
202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Carter greets Begin at Camp David (NLC-WHSP-C-07259-09A)
President Carter shakes hands with General Omar Torrijos of Panama after signing the Panama Canal Treaty, September 7, 1977. (U.S. National Archive, ARC Identifier 176083)
President Carter is flanked by his two famously divided advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, August 14, 1977 (U.S. National Archives, NAID: 175908)
Carter, the mediator, observes an exchange between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during a break at Camp David, September 5, 1978 (White House photographer William Fitz-Patrick)
President Carter, former President Richard Nixon, and Chinese Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping at the White House, January 29, 1979, shortly after the two powers established formal diplomatic relations on January 1 (Bettman/Corbis reproduced at Richard Nixon Foundation)
President Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II treaty in Vienna, Austria, June 17, 1979. The subdued expressions on the American side reflect the ambivalence of many observers that accompanied the event. (Center for Strategic and International Studies (Flickr account))
Washington, D.C., December 29, 2024 – The late President Jimmy Carter, contrary to the views of some critics, was typically focused, knowledgeable, and strong-willed on matters of foreign policy, often responding sharply to attempts by his most senior aides to bend his thinking, according to a review of the voluminous documentary record on Carter’s presidency.
A case in point is Carter’s relationship with his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Every week, Brzezinski sent the president a memo intended to combine both factual reporting and personal observations on global affairs. Carter often wrote brief marginal notes on those memos in reply, which in retrospect open a window into his own thinking about the world and approaches to foreign policy.
A revealing example is Brzezinski’s April 21, 1978, “NSC Weekly Report,” an 8-page memo that immediately launches into a page-and-a-half appeal to modify and toughen administration foreign policy by doing more than just “negotiating agreements and devising formulas.” What was missing in the U.S. approach, Brzezinski wrote, was a hardnosed effort to “influence attitudes and to shape political events.” Sounding for all the world like his famously realpolitik predecessor, Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski called for a slew of other tactics, including an occasional “demonstration of force ... to infuse fear;” “saying publicly one thing and quietly negotiating something else;” “letting problems fester until they are ripe for action;” and using “black propaganda to stimulate difficulties for our proponents.” “The world,” he ended, “is just too complicated and turbulent to be handled effectively by negotiating ‘contracts’ while neglecting the need also to manipulate, to influence and to compel.”
Carter’s handwritten replies to most of these ideas are no more than a few words but they are graphic in conveying the president’s disapproval and even sarcasm regarding Brzezinski’s ideas. Next to the mention of force, he writes “Like Malaguez?” – a reference to a forcible rescue operation of a merchant ship (the Mayaguez) off Cambodia in 1975 that ended disastrously. Next to “saying publicly one thing,” he scribbles “Lying?” – an allusion to his core campaign pledge to reject the public dishonesty of the Nixon/Kissinger years and never to lie to the American people. In other places, he simply underlines the passage and puts a question mark in the margin. Finally, reacting to Brzezinski’s statement that he plans to develop some of these ideas further for the president, Carter writes: “You’ll be wasting your time.”
Carter was no gentler on critics, like Kissinger. In a memo to the president, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance describes his predecessor as behaving in a “very heavy-handed manner” concerning the Shah’s situation shortly after the U.S. Embassy seizure in Tehran. (Kissinger was extremely outspoken in this period about the administration’s supposed failure to stand by an ally in need.) Carter responds in the margin, “H.K. is a liar & also irresponsible. We must prepare to tell the truth about him.”
These exchanges are among hundreds between the president and his most senior advisers that have been archived at the Carter presidential library and, over the years, declassified for posterity. Today, in the wake of Carter’s death, the National Security Archive is posting a sampling of these records to give some insight into Carter’s personality, his relationship with top aides, and his approach to foreign policy.
Many of these documents are part of a just-released publication in the award-winning Digital National Security Archive series (from the academic publisher ProQuest). The collection, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981: Highest-Level Memos to the President, features every declassified daily or weekly memo to the president from his national security advisor and from his two secretaries of state, Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie. The collection also includes every publicly available meeting record of the National Security Council and its two subgroups – the Policy Review Committee and the Special Coordination Committee – in an effort to reconstruct the daily flow of events at the top rungs of U.S. policymaking during a tumultuous period in world history.
The top-level records in this posting are not just snapshots of the administration’s foreign policy agenda, they are often detailed expositions of the personal worldviews, attitudes, and inclinations of the most senior U.S. officials -- Carter's foreign policy alter egos -- of that time. As such, they are rich with insights into how the United States approached an array of global crises (not all of the president's own making, by any means): the Arab-Israel conflict; revolutions that ousted loyal American allies in Nicaragua and Iran; the subsequent Tehran hostage crisis and failed rescue mission; the decline of détente with Moscow culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan; instability in the Horn and elsewhere in Africa; the rise in global activism by Moscow’s partner, Cuba; the energy crisis; and more.
The sampling of records selected for this posting are artefacts of a turbulent period and emblematic of how Jimmy Carter approached the foreign policy trials of his presidency. While not a complete portrait of the former president, this selection of documents provides a fascinating glimpse into Carter’s character and his approach to the issues. Regardless of one’s views of his policies or choices, it is no longer in doubt that his presidency and its consequences were far more sweeping and significant than was once assumed.
The Documents
Document 1
Warren Christopher to the President, Secret, February 18, 1977
Feb 18, 1977
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLJC-07-003
As President Carter’s nominally senior foreign policy adviser, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance took to sending a weekly series of memoranda to keep the president abreast of issues occupying the secretary’s attention. Sometimes the topics were broad, at other times highly specific. Carter was obviously a close reader and used these messages to give direct, immediate feedback, as evidenced here.
In this case, the memo is actually from Vance’s deputy, Warren Christopher, who used to step in as correspondent while serving as acting secretary. The main topic of the day – and one of the new president’s highest foreign policy priorities early in his administration – was to return the Panama Canal to Panamanian control, thus relieving the U.S. of an increasingly costly and politically controversial burden. In fact, during the 1976 presidential campaign, Carter had spoken against returning the canal. It was Vance and other diplomats who persuaded him after the election to reconsider. While he was pilloried by the right wing in the United States for eventually signing the treaty because it was cast by some as a sign of weakness, Carter sounds anything but frail as he reacts irritably to the report that the Panamanians are adopting a “tough ... attitude,” writing by hand to Christopher, “We can’t let them push us around.”
Document 2
Presidential Directive / NSC-6, Subject: Cuba, March 15, 1977, Secret, 2 pp.
Mar 15, 1977
Source
The National Security Archive Press Alert from May 15, 2002
This declassified Presidential Directive, signed by Jimmy Carter less than two months after his inauguration, reflects his pursuit of normalized relations towards nations deemed enemies of the United States--in this case Castro's Cuba. The directive marked the first time a U.S. president had made normalization of U.S.-Cuba ties an explicit foreign policy goal. Twenty-five years later, on May 12, 2002, Carter became the first U.S. leader, current or former, to visit the island since the 1959 revolution. He returned to Cuba a second time in April 2011. His visits unofficially continued a dialogue that formally began with the distribution of this two-page document in March 1977. Carter's efforts helped lead to the restoration of full diplomatic relations and the reopening of embassies under Barack Obama in 2015.
Document 3
Cyrus Vance to the President, Secret, May 3, 1977
May 3, 1977
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-128-12-8-2-6
In this memo to his secretary of state, after responding to most of Vance’s points, the president raises one of his own that spotlights a political and personal priority from his presidential campaign – human rights. After the realpolitik years of Nixon and Kissinger, Carter had planned to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy. (That he repeatedly gave a pass to serial civil rights offenders like the Shah of Iran left him open to widespread criticism.)
In his closing comment to Vance, Carter refers to a bill proposed by Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Father Robert Drinan to amend the stridently anti-Communist McCarran Act, a relic of the 1950s Red Scare. The president can be seen here exploring ways to avoid the very charges the U.S. was leveling at the Soviets – that they were in violation of the Helsinki Final Act. Signed in 1975 by most of Europe, including the USSR, as well as the United States, the Helsinki Accords committed signatories, at least in principle, to wide-ranging codes of conduct abroad and at home. It became a key lever for applying pressure on the Kremlin to observe the rights of Soviet citizens, and Carter was understandably anxious not to give away the moral high ground.
Document 4
Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, “NSC Weekly Report #34,” Top Secret / Sensitive / Contains Codeword, October 28, 1977
Oct 28, 1977
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-15-126-1-6-9
In February 1977, Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, proposed submitting weekly reports to the president on the state of the world, along with Brzezinski’s own thoughts on a variety of foreign policy topics. In total, he wrote 162 such reports over four years, some of them marked by their attempt to provide not-so-subtle counsel to the commander-in-chief on the intricacies of foreign affairs or the principles of grand strategy – a favorite pastime of Brzezinski’s.
In this memo, several months into the administration, Brzezinski sounds out his boss on how he thinks the NSC process is working and how his senior White House foreign policy aide has been handling his job. “Rather than offering an opinion this week, I would like to ask yours. Specifically, I would like to ask you to comment on the operation and activities of the NSC, my role and your involvement.” He adds: “The truth may hurt, but it will assist us in assisting you.”
Brzezinski’s wording is uncharacteristically self-deprecating, perhaps because he knows Carter is not shy about being direct. The president does answer bluntly in a couple of instances but overall seems pleased. Asked if he is receiving too much material, he writes: “Not too many items,” but then adds: “Often too verbose.” But he finds Brzezinski’s weekly reports useful and the opinions they often contain are “good.” Reflecting his attention to detail, Carter gets quite specific in some of his comments. In his final handwritten notation, he shows that he understands his aide pretty well: “You & your top staff are much more interested in strategy & foreign affairs. Defense matters are neglected, & because of [the] nature of DOD (closed) vs. State (more open to scrutiny) this is a mistake.”
Document 5
Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, “NSC Weekly Report #55,” April 21, 1978
Apr 21, 1978
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-128-9-14-10-4
In this memo, he holds forth on an issue that “has been gnawing at me recently,” his weakly disguised impatience with the president for failing to make use of some of the more Machiavellian tools of statecraft. These included the “demonstration of force,” the need to “infuse fear,” to “manipulate,” and to utilize “black propaganda.”
Carter’s responses in the margins of these memos are often highly revealing of his own thinking but also of his relationship with his controversial aide. Here, the president poses several blunt, one-word ripostes in the form of questions next to Brzezinski’s suggestions. Next to the idea of a “demonstration of force,” he writes “Like Malaguez?” a (misspelled) reference to the Mayaguez incident, an utterly disastrous 1975 forcible rescue operation of a merchant ship off the Cambodian coast that resulted in over 40 U.S. soldiers losing their lives while the ship’s crew were already being released somewhere else.
Then commenting on Brzezinski’s recommendation about “saying publicly one thing” while “negotiating something else,” Carter writes simply: “Lying?” The allusion would have been excruciatingly obvious to Brzezinski – a harkening back to Carter’s frequent campaign promise in the wake of the public dishonesty of the Nixon/Kissinger years: “I will never lie to you.”
Finally, when Brzezinski volunteers to develop some of these notions further, the president tells him: “You’ll be wasting your time.”
Document 6
Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, “NSC Weekly Report #81,” Secret, December 2, 1978
Dec 2, 1978
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-96-122
Carter’s overall satisfaction with Brzezinski (see Document 03) does not mean that his national security advisor is exempt from reproach. In this memo, Brzezinski vents his frustration at what he sees as significant problems with the way other U.S. officials are conducting key international negotiations, but Carter is not in the mood for this passing of the buck: “Zbig, you comment as though you’ve not been involved in the process & that everyone has been wrong except you. J”
Further down, his comments continue to sound terse and annoyed. He points out that an approach to Cuba which Brzezinski disparages was in fact “your proposal.” When Brzezinski complains the U.S. has “failed to respond in any concrete way” to Israeli actions in the West Bank, Carter wants to know: “What have you suggested?”
Curiously, the president does not respond at all (at least on this document) to a commentary from Brzezinski that takes up almost a page-and-a-half and will become one of his signature concepts – the existence of an “Arc of Crisis” across Southwest Asia, including Iran, which is already engulfed in revolution although top U.S. officials are only just focusing on the prospect of the Shah’s collapse at this time. A few weeks earlier, U.S. Ambassador to Tehran William Sullivan sent a famous cable entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable,” which raised the possibility of the end of Pahlavi rule. It came as a shock to the White House and Carter almost fired Sullivan for not warning Washington sooner. It’s possible the subject was still too uncomfortable to deal with (or a distraction from the Camp David process); it would be another month before the administration finally decided it was time to part ways with the Shah.
Document 7
Special Coordination Committee, Summary of Conclusions, “Iran,” Top Secret, November 20, 1979
Nov 20, 1979
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-SAFE 39 B-30-94-13-0
On November 4, 1979, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by a group of student followers of Ayatollah Khomeini brought changes to Iran, the region, U.S. politics, and American foreign policy that continue to resonate today. In this summary of a high-level administration meeting, the anxiety is unmistakable as the group has cleared its normal calendar of business to concentrate entirely on the fate of dozens of American hostages.
Of main interest here is Carter’s reaction to a slew of proposals for “influencing the course of political developments” in Iran. These options came out of a meeting of a deputies-level group, known by various labels including the Black Room, to discuss possible covert action opportunities. The choices are stark, ranging from cooperating with local tribes or exile groups in establishing a new government to “direct overt US intervention.” Even though Brzezinski, who wrote the attachment to the SCC summary, declares flatly that “We are never going to be able to work with the Khomeini regime [and] might as well recognize that fact,” Carter is hesitant at this stage. “Be extremely cautious about U.S. action for now,” he writes at the bottom of the memo, “but assess options within CIA. Let them give me analysis of all potential Anti-Khomeini elements. J”
Neither Carter nor any of his successors as president, as far as is known, ever approved a direct campaign or operation to oust Khomeini or subsequent rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In April 1980, Carter did authorize Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages, but that ended in disaster, very much like the Mayaguez incident, as Carter recognized more than 18 months earlier in another handwritten note to Brzezinski (see Document 01).
Document 8
Memorandum from Cyrus Vance to the President, Secret, November 23, 1979
Nov 23, 1979
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-128-14-13-17-2
Iran was not the only country where the U.S. faced a violent diplomatic crisis in this extraordinary period. Shortly after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, demonstrators in Pakistan attacked the Embassy in Islamabad. In that instance, the Pakistani government pledged to work with Washington to investigate and try to resolve the incident, a far cry from the response of the Khomeini government.
But the principal point of interest in this memo relates not to Pakistan but to Iran. Specifically, it shows the depth of Carter’s anger at the actions of Henry Kissinger, the one-time secretary of state and national security advisor to Carter’s predecessors, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Kissinger, along with other Republican luminaries such as David Rockefeller, had put enormous pressure on the Carter administration to back the Shah both before and after his departure from Iran, often through public statements designed to restrict Carter’s political options. Going against his instincts, Carter finally agreed to admit the Shah to the United States for medical treatment for lymphoma, a decision that led directly to the taking of American hostages two weeks later.
In his comment on page 2 of this memo regarding the Shah’s current medical state and his possible departure for Mexico, Carter reacts bitterly to the characterization that Kissinger has been acting “in a very heavy-handed manner” in demanding U.S. government action on the Shah’s behalf. “HK is a liar & also irresponsible,” the president writes. “We must prepare to tell the truth about him.”
A week later, Mexico surprisingly refuses to permit the ailing monarch to enter the country. He eventually travels to Panama then to Cairo where he dies on July 27, 1980.
Document 9
Zbigniew Brzezinski to the President, “Daily Report,” Secret, January 29, 1980
Jan 29, 1980
Source
Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, NLC-2-25-2-2-8
While this posting focuses on foreign affairs, it is worth remembering that Jimmy Carter had many accomplishments on the domestic front. He developed a sweeping energy policy including establishing the Department of Energy, created the Department of Education, undertook major civil service reform and promoted economic deregulation. He also invested significant capital in advancing the roles of women and minorities, notably on the federal bench.
In this memo, Carter takes Brzezinski to task for what he sees as (at best) an anemic attempt to boost minority employment on the NSC staff. Among his comments is the notation “B.S.” where Brzezinski pleads powerlessness because of the requirement to keep the staff “under 100.” At the end of the memo, the president writes: “Zbig – This is an inadequate [he initially adds “& evasive” before crossing it out] answer. Do not propose the filling of any vacancies without minority representation being at least 50%. J”
Note
Similarly, in a marginal note to Secretary of State Vance during the first week of his presidency, Carter demanded greater gender equality in the U.S. ambassador corps: “Cy – In future we need many more women. J.C.” (See Cyrus Vance memorandum to the President, Secret, January 26, 1977.)
nsarchive.gwu.edu
13. Inside China's paramilitary force that could be key in an invasion of Taiwan
Excerpts:
Military experts and defense officials see signs — like China's rapid modernization of its armed forces over the past two decades and drills around Taiwan — that suggest that China could take action within a few years.
But the form of that action is a matter of debate, from a blockade to a full-scale invasion.
During a 2021 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Phil Davidson, then the US Indo-Pacific commander, said Taiwan was "clearly" one of China's "ambitions" and that he believed the threat would be "manifest" within the next six years.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in October, as part of the country's anniversary celebrations, that reunification with Taiwan was "where the greater national interest lies, and it is what the people desire."
"The wheel of history will not be stopped by any individual or any force," he added.
Goldstein of Defense Priorities, who described himself as a bit of an outlier, said he believes China is ready to take over Taiwan now "if they choose to," and that the PAP's Special Operation Forces would likely play a significant role.
They "will be in very high demand in a Taiwan scenario," he said.
He added that China regards Taiwan as internal security. "So, for them, the use of these forces is entirely legitimate."
Inside China's paramilitary force that could be key in an invasion of Taiwan
Thibault Spirlet29 dec 2024
businessinsider.nl · December 29, 2024
- China is readying forces that could seize Taiwan in a future attack, analysts and officials say.
- Any military operation is likely to rely partly on China's militarized police.
- The People's Armed Police has been training in a wide range of conditions, including water.
China is preparing its militarized police for kinds of combat that would play a key role in any invasion of Taiwan.
A September report from China Central Television shows what appears to be the People's Armed Police Force, or PAP, simulating attacks from inflatable boats.
Footage and pictures from Chinese state-run outlets show the extent of the combat training and battlefield simulation — blockade breakthroughs, grenade throwing, battlefield rescue, and group tactics in cold, hot, and high-altitude conditions.
This training indicates PAP soldiers "are getting ready" for a takeover of Taiwan, said Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia Engagement at the Defense Priorities think tank in Washington, DC.
Clandestine movement by water would be an essential capability to quell resistance in Taiwan's populated areas near the coast and rivers.
"From my observation, they train hard; they are well equipped and disciplined, and they're given stringent ideological training for the reason that they are probably, in my view, the primary reserve force for section invasion," Goldstein said.
"If they went forward with a full-up invasion, I think an amphibious assault is not just conceivable but is quite a possibility," he added.
Urban training
Since its founding in 1982, China's PAP has been firmly placed under the country's military.
These armed police are a shock force in China's vast state security apparatus. The force plays a key internal security role, mostly in law enforcement, counterterrorism, disaster response, and maritime rights protection.
Beijing also regularly uses them for propaganda. One likely goal of publicizing the recent training was to intimidate Taiwan and its backers.
China's People's Armed Police could be used in the later stages of an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Foto: REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Alessio Patalano, a professor of war and strategy in East Asia at King's College London, said the PAP's inclusion in any takeover of Taiwan would make sense given their urban training.
He told BI the PAP keeps "highly skilled" special forces at hand who are involved in surgical operations to capture strategic goals where mobility, speed, and familiarity with operating in urban areas are key.
PAP special forces maintained security at Beijing Olympic venues in 2008, conducted drills in Shenzhen near Hong Kong in 2019, and have engaged in multiple counter-terrorism operations in China's Xinjiang region over the years, according to Chinese state-run media.
"To that extent, whether in decapitation scenarios or early stages of operations to seize key port and airport infrastructures, the use of PAP should be regarded as a viable, if not preferable, option," Patalano said.
A supporting role
It's unlikely that the PAP would participate in the first stages of any island landing.
"That is the purview of the PLA," said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University in DC. The PLA is China's main military — the People's Liberation Army.
He said that the PAP would instead initially participate in operations to firm up internal security in mainland China, including suppressing signs of social unrest, protecting critical infrastructure, and clearing out national highways to facilitate the delivery of supplies to regions near Taiwan.
Any attempt to seize Taiwan, a self-ruled island of 23 million that Beijing views as a breakaway province, would require warships, armored vehicles, and heavy firepower, to answer Taiwan's advanced missiles, tanks, and F-16 fighter jets.
China's People's Armed Police could play a key role in any invasion of Taiwan. Foto: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
However, if PLA's operations in Taiwan didn't go according to plan, and it faced a protracted campaign, Wuthnow said the PAP's Special Operation Forces could be mobilized to institute military governance through missions in urban areas like Taipei.
Another aspect of the PAP's response could involve China's Coast Guard, which it oversees.
The coast guard is already "very much" on the front lines of China's "coercive" campaign against Taiwan, Wuthnow said, and its role seems to be increasing.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's mountainous terrain, as well as its few major land routes and numerous river crossings, would make it difficult for any invading forces to move.
"If the population of Taiwan were not compliant with a PRC-led occupation authority, the period where the PRC would need to rely on their own police might be quite prolonged," said Philip Shetler-Jones, a senior research fellow in the International Security team at the UK's Royal United Services Institute, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China.
The more PAP forces can take over the "public order" task, the more it frees up combat troops, he added.
An imminent invasion
Military experts and defense officials see signs — like China's rapid modernization of its armed forces over the past two decades and drills around Taiwan — that suggest that China could take action within a few years.
But the form of that action is a matter of debate, from a blockade to a full-scale invasion.
During a 2021 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Phil Davidson, then the US Indo-Pacific commander, said Taiwan was "clearly" one of China's "ambitions" and that he believed the threat would be "manifest" within the next six years.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in October, as part of the country's anniversary celebrations, that reunification with Taiwan was "where the greater national interest lies, and it is what the people desire."
"The wheel of history will not be stopped by any individual or any force," he added.
Goldstein of Defense Priorities, who described himself as a bit of an outlier, said he believes China is ready to take over Taiwan now "if they choose to," and that the PAP's Special Operation Forces would likely play a significant role.
They "will be in very high demand in a Taiwan scenario," he said.
He added that China regards Taiwan as internal security. "So, for them, the use of these forces is entirely legitimate."
Read the original article on Business Insider
businessinsider.nl · December 29, 2024
14. Unexpected Conscience (China book recommendation)
I am going to take Dr. Watson's advice and read this book.
Unexpected Conscience
https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/unexpected-conscience?utm
Worth a read
Cynthia Watson
Dec 29, 2024
I have a strong recommendation for a lengthy study worth reading if you want to understand how the CCP has governed China over the past three quarters of a century. Bob Suettinger, former National Security Council staffer and intelligence officer, published an extremely insightful volume earlier this year entitled The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.
You do not either have to be a China scholar or an academic of any type to enjoy this easily accessible subject as Suettinger presents it. If you simply want to know one view on how we got to the tensions we currently have with the CCP and the people of China, this is a strong starting place.
Many China skeptics will deny that the Communist Party ever had a conscience. Suettinger indeed discusses in almost 400 page detail (replete with another sixty pages of citations) the cruelties, the lies, the self-justifications, and assorted other repugnant behaviors. It’s seductive to forget that the Party won the Civil War against the Kuomindang, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, because they too engaged in pretty abominable behavior while the dominant rulers for twenty years. Suettinger (nor I) justify the horrors unleashed by leadership against the opposition during this struggle nor, more importantly, against the public caught scraping through horrible conditions.
Suettinger, hardly “soft” on China, delved into archives (before Xi Jinping closed them à la the behavior I discussed yesterday regarding closing virtually any form of transparency under CCP rule), to provide considerable clarity for why Chinese youth were so angry at the leadership’s treatment of this founding figure in the PRC as upon his passing from leadership. Indeed, too often forgotten in the west is that it was Hu’s April 1989 death and resulting Party elder fears of how his memory galvanized students that ultimately led to the 4 June massacre in Tian’anmen; the “goddess of democracy” and student protests followed demands that Hu receive appropriate respect for his role as a reformer and a CCP political denizen.
The Conscience of the Party is especially valuable for its detail on the shifting political relationships within the CCP elite between the 1930s in Yan’an and the late 1980s. Suettinger is direct and harsh in discussing many of the confrontations between Mao and those who opposed his never ending efforts to assure his own dominance, regardless of the ridiculous nature of many of the Great Helmsman’s policy prescriptions. But the author also manages to unwrap details on Party debates beyond Mao’s determination to dominate.
These details offer a clearer understanding of how China reached the “reform era” while illustrating to me, at least, why that era likely could not continue in perpetuity. Mao was narcissistic but far from the only Party senior figure of who neither brooked other opinions nor tolerated policies seen as fraught for the CCP hold on power. Hu’s role in offering prescriptions tinged with supposed danger to absolute CCP control became problematic, ultimately career-ending.
Suettinger’s confident style opens the reader’s understanding into a system too often discussed in grandiose all-or-nothing terms. He is sympathetic to his subject but honest about this complicated figure doubting the CCP’s commitment to the new China it so often predicted.
It’s winter, you likely live somewhere you will have some dreary cold days ahead (we certainly did yesterday). If you want to learn more about both a society and governing Party mowing down that country’s educated children, it’s worth reading Suettinger’s perceptive work. Or, if you simply want to know more about a country with whom we have the potential for on-going turbulence in the years ahead, take a look. I don’t write book reviews often though I have occasionally mentioned some of what I read. I definitely encourage you to consider this study.
I welcome your thoughts, questions, comments, or rebuttals on Hu Yaobang, this volume or the six overtime sessions required for the University of Toledo football squad to defeat the University of Pittsburgh the other night. I don’t have all of the answers but am keenly interested in hearing what actions and consequences you are following these days.
Thank you for your time today or any other day. I also greatly appreciate the subscribers who support Actions with their contributions as every bit of it advances our discussion.
You may well be somewhere rainy, snowy, or warm enough for a backyard swim today. In any case, I wish you a delightful Sunday as we round the bend for this final weekend of 2024. Be well and be safe. FIN
Robert L. Suettinger, The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2024.
15. Putin's presidential plane visit to US sparks questions
Carrying an emissary to engage the next administration?
Putin's presidential plane visit to US sparks questions
Newsweek · by Ellie Cook · December 30, 2024
Moscow downplayed the visit of a special diplomatic flight from the Kremlin's presidential fleet to the U.S. in late December, as speculation swirls over how the new U.S. administration will handle the fraught dynamics with Russia.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed the aircraft had traveled from Russia to the U.S., but said it was carrying "another rotation of diplomats," in remarks reported by Russian media.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian foreign ministry for further comment via email and to the White House.
Why It Matters
Russia's relationship with the U.S. is at its worst point in decades, and took a dive after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nearly three years into the war, nuclear rhetoric is seeping into the conflict as Washington consistently backs Kyiv.
President-elect Donald Trump, now less than a month from his inauguration, has vowed to end the war in Ukraine in just a day. NATO officials have predicted the incoming president may try to do a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he has said he has a good relationship.
Some officials worry the deal could be one that damages Kyiv, and there are concerns about how an end to active fighting would change the situation on NATO's eastern border in Europe.
The Il-96 carrying Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan on Nov. 27, 2024. Flight tracking data shows an Il-96 with the Rossiya Special Flight Squadron went to New York in recent days. The Il-96 carrying Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan on Nov. 27, 2024. Flight tracking data shows an Il-96 with the Rossiya Special Flight Squadron went to New York in recent days. Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
What to Know
Flight tracking data shows an Il-96 with the Rossiya Special Flight Squadron departed from Moscow to St Petersburg on December 25, before leaving Russia's second city on December 26 and arriving in New York.
The aircraft then flew from New York to Washington, D.C., the same day, according to FlightRadar24. On December 28, the Il-96 left Washington for New York, before flying back to Moscow.
The Rossiya Special Flight Squadron is responsible for transporting Putin and "the country's top officials," according to Russian state media.
Roughly 2,500 people make up the Rossiya Special Flight Squadron, operating Russian Il-96 and Tu-214 aircraft, as well as Mi-38 helicopters, according to the state-run Tass news agency. FlightRadar24 tracks 60 aircraft belonging to the Special Flight Squadron, including 13 Il-96 aircraft and and five Tu-214 planes.
The unit is also referred to the 235th Separate Aviation Detachment.
According to the news agency, the unit was formed in 1956 when the then-Soviet leadership opted to use airliners, rather than military aircraft, to move Kremlin officials around the world.
The unit was based at Vnukovo airport, just southwest of the capital, Tass reported.
What Happens Next
With just weeks until Trump strides back into the White House, transitional work will likely continue in the background in preparation for January 20.
Newsweek · by Ellie Cook · December 30, 2024
16. China sanctions 7 US military companies and relevant executives over arms sales to Taiwan region
From a CCP mouthpiece.
CHINA / DIPLOMACY
China sanctions 7 US military companies and relevant executives over arms sales to Taiwan region
Countermeasures serve as reminder of redline to bilateral ties: expert
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202412/1325889.shtml
By Liu Xin
Published: Dec 27, 2024 09:08 PM Updated: Dec 28, 2024 12:47 AM
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning Photo: fmprc.gov.cn
China's Foreign Ministry on Friday announced its decision to take countermeasures against seven US military companies and relevant senior executives over recent military assistance and arms sales to China's Taiwan region.
Recently, the US announced another substantial package of military assistance and arms sales to China's Taiwan region. Its "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025" includes multiple negative sections concerning China. These seriously violate the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués, interfere in China's internal affairs, and undermine China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, according to the Foreign Ministry's announcement.
Pursuant to Articles 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 15 of the Law of the People's Republic of China on Countering Foreign Sanctions, China hereby decides to take the countermeasures against seven companies: Insitu, Inc., Hudson Technologies Co., Saronic Technologies, Inc., Raytheon Canada, Raytheon Australia, Aerkomm Inc. and Oceaneering International, Inc., and relevant senior executives, according to the statement.
Their movable and immovable properties, and other kinds of assets within China shall be frozen. All organizations and individuals within China shall be prohibited from engaging in transaction, cooperation and other activities with them, read the statement.
This decision will come into force from December 27, 2024, according to the Foreign Ministry.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a press conference on Friday that seeking "Taiwan independence" is bound to fail. What the US has done to assist the "Taiwan independence" attempt by arming Taiwan will only backfire. Its relevant act containing negative articles on China is filled with Cold War zero-sum mentality and ideological bias.
Without factual basis, the US plays up the "China threat" narrative, trumpets for military support to Taiwan and finds pretext for increasing military expenditure and maintaining hegemony, which disrupts regional peace and stability, said Mao.
We urge the US to abide by the one-China principle and the provisions in the three China-US joint communiqués, especially the August 17 Communiqué of 1982, immediately stop arming Taiwan in any form, view China's development and China-US relationship objectively and rationally, not to implement these negative articles concerning China and stop wrong words and deeds that harm China's interests. China will continue to take all measures necessary to firmly safeguard our sovereignty, security and development interests, said Mao.
China's countermeasures against US military-industrial companies and their executives express a firm stance - China strongly opposes any violation of the three China-US joint communiqués through arms sales to Taiwan region and actions that undermine its national interests and threaten peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits, Li Zhenguang, deputy director at the Institute of Taiwan Studies at Beijing Union University, told the Global Times on Friday.
As the US prepares for the presidential transition, China's countermeasures also serve as a reminder of the redline on China-US relations to the US side and to American companies of their responsibilities in managing ties with Taiwan island, said Li, adding that the US side should avoid destabilizing the Taiwan Straits and refrain from actions that undermine China-US relations.
Recently, different departments and ministries in China respectively refuted the US' signing into law of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 and its content related to China's Taiwan region. For example, Chen Binhua, a spokesperson for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a regular press conference on Wednesday that Taiwan is China's Taiwan, and that the Taiwan question is purely China's internal affairs that will not tolerate any external interference.
17. The Role of Social Media in Facilitating Terrorism: A Growing Threat to Global Security
What capability exists to deal with this threat?
Conclusion:
The threat posed by terrorist organizations using these platforms demands urgent attention and action. The world community must come together, with tech companies playing a central role, to find meaningful solutions to combat this growing menace.
The Role of Social Media in Facilitating Terrorism: A Growing Threat to Global Security
Social media has become a double-edged sword in the modern world. While it offers unprecedented connectivity, it has also emerged as a powerful tool for terrorist organizations.
By
Dr. Hamza Khan
By
Dr. Hamza Khan
December 29, 2024
moderndiplomacy.eu · by Dr. Hamza Khan · December 29, 2024
Social media has become a double-edged sword in the modern world. While it offers unprecedented connectivity, facilitates communication, and serves as a platform for global discourse, it has also emerged as a powerful tool for terrorist organizations. Terrorist groups, including globally recognized outfits like Al-Qaeda (AQ) and ISIS, have adeptly exploited social media to further their ideologies, recruit new members, and plan attacks. These groups have taken advantage of the anonymity, wide reach, and instant communication capabilities of social media platforms to expand their networks, manipulate vulnerable individuals, and spread their messages of violence.
Over the years, the influence of terrorist organizations has spread to regional groups, particularly those operating within specific geopolitical boundaries. Groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) have strengthened their capabilities through the guidance and training of larger terrorist factions like AQ and ISIS in Afghanistan. Reports from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Monitoring Team have revealed that many of these groups are being trained in Afghanistan, with their operations increasingly facilitated by digital platforms. The level of coordination and sophistication exhibited by these organizations in using social media for recruitment, propaganda, and operational coordination is both alarming and a cause for concern.
The threat posed by the use of social media by terrorist groups is not just regional but global. Terrorist activities facilitated through platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and others have enabled these organizations to create international networks that transcend borders, making it more challenging for governments to combat them effectively. Even though individual countries are making strides to regulate and monitor the use of these platforms, the scale and complexity of the issue require a more comprehensive and cooperative approach.
While some countries, particularly developed nations, have taken steps to counter this threat by implementing stricter regulations on social media companies, the problem remains particularly difficult for developing countries. These nations, often struggling with limited resources, face significant challenges in controlling the flow of extremist content online, and their efforts are sometimes undermined by the lack of global cooperation and technological expertise.
It is now crucial for the world’s leading technology superpowers to step up and offer their assistance to countries that are on the frontlines of the global fight against terrorism, particularly those like Pakistan. As a nation deeply affected by terrorist activities, Pakistan has become a key battleground in the struggle against extremist forces, including groups such as the TTP and BLA. Given the scale of the challenge and the complex nature of modern terrorism, Pakistan, like other frontline states against terrorism, requires more than just financial or military aid. The rapid evolution of technology and the role of social media in facilitating terrorist networks calls for enhanced collaboration in the cyber domain. Tech giants, with their advanced capabilities in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and real-time monitoring, have the resources to help combat online radicalization, detect terrorist propaganda, and shut down extremist networks operating on digital platforms. By offering tangible support in the form of technology-sharing agreements, joint task forces, and capacity-building programs, these superpowers can empower nations like Pakistan to better protect their citizens, disrupt terror cells, prevent the spread of extremist ideologies across borders and ensure global security. However, their efforts so far have been insufficient. While companies like Meta, Twitter, and Google have developed content moderation policies, terrorist groups often find ways to circumvent these safeguards, continuing their operations with minimal disruption.
The growing influence of terrorist groups on social media platforms presents a dire challenge to global security. As the tactics of these organizations evolve, so too must the responses from the international community. It is imperative for tech giants, governments, and law enforcement agencies to work together to create more effective frameworks that can detect, dismantle, and prevent the use of social media by terrorist entities. Without tangible solutions, the world risks further radicalization, the spread of violence, and the destabilization of regions already vulnerable to extremist activities.
The threat posed by terrorist organizations using these platforms demands urgent attention and action. The world community must come together, with tech companies playing a central role, to find meaningful solutions to combat this growing menace.
moderndiplomacy.eu · by Dr. Hamza Khan · December 29, 2024
18. Russia’s hybrid warfare could cause ‘substantial’ casualties, senior NATO official says
Russia’s hybrid warfare could cause ‘substantial’ casualties, senior NATO official says
Politico · by Sam Clark · December 29, 2024
Moscow has ramped up unconventional attacks against the West since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has ramped up its campaign of so-called hybrid attacks throughout Europe. | Vano Shlamov/AFP via Getty Images
December 29, 2024 12:08 pm CET
By
Moscow's campaign of hybrid warfare against NATO countries is getting close to the point of causing "substantial" casualties, a senior official at the defense alliance warned.
“What really worries me is that one of these attacks … will break through in a big way,” James Appathurai, the military alliance’s deputy assistant secretary general and head of hybrid and cyber threats, told Sky News in an interview published Sunday.
“There is a real prospect of one of these attacks causing substantial numbers of casualties or very substantial economic damage,” Appathurai said.
Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has ramped up its campaign of so-called hybrid attacks — such as arson, cyber and information campaigns, or sabotage — throughout Europe.
Recent examples include the alleged cutting of energy and communications cables in the Baltic Sea, which German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius described as “sabotage.” In that case, as in many other examples of hybrid attacks, it is difficult for governments to quickly and definitively attribute the attacks to Moscow.
The number of these types of attacks has reached a level that would previously have been considered “utterly unacceptable,” Appathurai said. “We can definitely count dozens. Up to 100 for sure. But then there's a lot of foiled plots,” he said.
NATO is updating its strategy on hybrid warfare, first written in 2015, so it can be clearer about what type of attacks would trigger a full-scale military response.
“What we need to do now is be clearer among ourselves and then decide how we communicate that also to the Russians, that there are no-go areas,” Appathurai said.
19. Japan Cabinet OKs record defense budget as it pushes strike-back capability to deter regional threat
Japan Cabinet OKs record defense budget as it pushes strike-back capability to deter regional threat
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Updated 10:36 PM EST, December 26, 2024
apnews.com
Japan Cabinet OKs record defense budget as it pushes strike-back capability to deter regional threat | AP News
World News
This photo shows an exterior view of the Defense Ministry of Japan with its sign at the main entrance in Tokyo on Sept. 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Hiro Komae, File)
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year]
TOKYO (AP) — The Japanese Cabinet on Friday approved a record 8.7 trillion yen ($55 billion) defense budget for 2025 as Japan accelerates building up its strike-back capability with long-range cruise missiles and starts deploying Tomahawks to fortify itself against growing threats from China, North Korea and Russia.
The Cabinet-endorsed draft defense budget marks the third year of Japan’s ongoing five-year military buildup under the national security strategy adopted in 2022. The defense spending is part of the more than 115 trillion yen ($730 billion) national budget bill — also a record — that requires parliamentary approval by March to be enacted.
Japan is preparing to deploy U.S.-made Tomahawks late in the fiscal year 2025 as part of its ongoing effort to acquire strike-back capability with long-range missiles that can hit distant targets. The budget allocates 940 billion yen ($6 billion) for the so-called “standoff” defense system that also includes long-range missiles, satellite constellation and other arsenals.
The cost includes 1.8 billion yen ($11.4 million) for the purchase and addition of equipment to launch Tomahawks from an Aegis-class destroyers.
In order to reinforce its missile defense system, Japan plans to spend another 533 billion yen ($3.37 billion) that includes purchases of interceptors and a mobile reconnaissance radar to be placed on Okinawa, where more than half of about 50,000 American troops are based.
Under the defense strategy, Japan aims to eventually double its annual military spending to around 10 trillion yen ($63 billion), making it the world’s No. 3 military spender after the United States and China.
As part of the military buildup, Japan is pushing to strengthen its largely domestic defense industry by participating in joint development and promoting foreign sales.
For 2025, Japan plans to spend 314.8 billion yen ($2 billion) to build three 4,800-ton new multi-purpose compact destroyers, or FFM, that require 90 crew members, less than half the crew size currently needed as a result of automation and labor-saving design — the platform Japan wants Australia to choose for their future frigates. They are upgraded Mogami-class destroyers equipped with long-range missiles, reinforced anti-submarine warfare functions and high stealth performance, officials say.
The destroyers built by the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is one of two candidates shortlisted by Australia for its Sea 3000 frigate project and is competing against Germany’s MEKO A-200 offered by Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems. Japan would jointly develop and produce frigates for the Australian Navy.
The project not only serves to further deepen cooperation between Japan and Australia but contributes to enhancing Japan’s warship capabilities, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said last month.
Japan, whose only treaty ally is the United States, has developed close ties with Australia and considers it a semi-ally as they face China’s growing threat in the region.
Japan is desperate to win the deal after it lost to France in the 2016 submarine deal with Australia. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s Cabinet has already approved foreign sales of Mogami-class FFM to Australia in hopes it is selected, and set up a joint panel of government and industrial officials to step up its campaign drive to Canberra.
Japan is also jointly developing a next-generation fighter jet with Britain and Italy for deployment in 2035 and allocated 108.7 billion yen ($690 million) in the budget for the project.
As the country’s population continues to shrink, Japan focuses on unmanned weapons and artificial intelligence to make up for the declining number of servicemembers and allocated 111 billion yen ($703 million). Separately, the budget also government this week also adopted a plan to reinforce the “human base” by significantly improving salary, working conditions and support for career paths for the Self Defense Force to attract more applicants.
apnews.com
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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