Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called "wars of liberation," to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the U.S.

Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 06, 1962

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"An organization without respect for the truth is like a body without blood, or a brick fence without mortar. An organization without sympathy and love for its principles, its members and its leaders will eventually fail no matter how rich or strong it is today."

– Ahn Chang-ho (1878-1938) (Korean freedom fighter)

"Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some."

– Charles Dickens

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

– John Locke

1. Why Ukraine Is Not a Universal Resistance Model

2. On the High Seas, a Pillar of Global Trade Is Under Attack

3. A New Global Tax Is About to Raise Billions. The U.S. Is Missing Out.

4. “A COMPLEX AND SOPHISTICATED STRATEGY” – COUNTERINSURGENCY IN THE WORDS OF A CRITIC by JOHN NAGL , PAUL YINGLING

5. Naval Special Warfare Will Have to Fight Differently

6. One Team. One Fight By Keith Nightingale

7. U.S. irregular warfare experts to brief industry next month on enabling technologies for counter-terrorism

8. Countering Disinformation Effectively: An Evidence-Based Policy Guide

9. The Human Cost of Failed Deterrence

10. U.S. Support for Ukraine Lacks Intellectual Rigor

11. Why Help Ukraine: An Open Letter to My Congressional Colleagues

12. CIA doubles spending to meet China threat

13. The Pentagon has been learning the wrong lessons for three decades

14. How Should the United States Respond to Iran after the Tower 22 Attack? Lessons from Operation Praying Mantis

15. Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks Too

16. Israel and Lebanon are prepping for a war neither wants, but many fear it's becoming inevitable

17. China Is Quietly Expanding Its Land Grabs in the Himalayas

1. Why Ukraine Is Not a Universal Resistance Model

Excellent analysis from one of our nation's foremost experts on resistance.

Conclusion:

While Russia bungled many aspects of this invasion, Ukraine deserves credit for creating a layered, resilient, and whole-of-society defense. Outside of the direct military combat power enabled by Western support, Ukraine’s national resistance system contains unique ingredients that enabled its scale, breadth, and relative orderliness. For the “Ukraine model of resistance” to be appropriately adopted, these four variables deserve close attention. Indeed, they were overlooked once already by the Russians.

Why Ukraine Is Not a Universal Resistance Model - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Brian Petit · February 1, 2024

Ukrainian national resistance, incontestably lethal and strikingly durable, provides an enticing blueprint for small nations threatened by aggressive powers. The rush to learn lessons, mimic actions, and draw conclusions from Ukraine is an established industry. It should be. Ukraine’s response to Russian conquest serves up an innovative and gutsy trove of tactics and methods to adopt for national defense strategies. Two years into a war that many predicted it would lose quickly, Ukraine deserves this respect and study.

But despite this, it would still be a mistake to treat the “Ukraine model of resistance” as a readily applicable model. Before states adopt Ukrainian methods into their own defense plans — and expect similar outcomes — they should look carefully at the key factors that enabled Ukraine to succeed. There are four areas peculiar to the “Ukraine model” that contributed to their success. If policymakers or practitioners look past these factors, this could lead to false assumptions about a state’s readiness to defend and resist. The four areas are mobilization anomaly, national resistance laws, militia management, and railways.

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Mobilization Anomaly

Ukraine’s mobilization from peace to war is an anomaly. On the day Russia invaded, two inflexible forces combined to funnel the Ukrainian people into a society-wide mobilization.

The first was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion announcement, a feverish fatwa that Ukrainians were a non-people, that Ukraine was a false state, and that any notion that Ukraine is separate from Russia was farcical, ahistorical, and criminal. Was there ever so obvious and incendiary a call to arms for a people? Putin, long a master of obfuscation and surly denials, instead opted for the direct, maximalist declaration. The subsequent Russian military invasion on five axes of advance triggered a fight or flight response for every Ukrainian citizen. However inspiring his words sounded to Russian ears, Putin’s declaration made him Ukraine’s chief mobilization officer.

The second force was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s diktat that men over 18 and under 60 would be prohibited from departing Ukraine and would report for national duty. Zelensky’s writ gave form, direction, and legal casing to a shocked and enraged population.

Taken together, Ukrainian psychological mobilization was in full stride by sunset on Feb. 24. The corporealmobilization was then to follow. To be sure, there remained the difficult details of physics and families to sort out. These wrenching decisions were made en route to territorial defense stations and weapons distribution depots. Ukrainian mobilization was never an if and when question, it was a how and where matter.

While Putin initiated this war with a rebel yell, slow, simmering slides into conflict are more troublesome. Russia used such sleight-of-hand methods successfully in 2008 in Georgia and in 2014 in Crimea. These stuttered starts — staged unrest, subversive riots, diversionary acts, or unattributed acts of terror — are designed to confuse decision-making bodies which in turn defuses mobilization fever. Signals of tension that are not signals of imminent war may well send a fighting-age population to safer shores instead of joining a local defense force. This is not to imply cowardice. Rather, the evidence suggests that the social contract of giving one’s life for their country is not commonplace, especially without a singular and obvious existential threat.

Predicting a population’s will to fight is an inaccurate science. Inside threatened countries, such polls are routinely taken. Even in the previously occupied Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia (a combined population of about 6 million), less than half of respondents say that they would take up arms in the event of an invasion. Astoundingly, these numbers are up as a result of government- and society-wide efforts to psychologically “pre-commit” citizens to national defense. Even so, armed with a Schengen visa, marketable skills, and fluency in Western languages, many European citizens have mobility options that Ukrainians lacked in 2022 and still lack now.

Will such an unambiguous moment occur for states that desire their threatened citizenry to take up arms? It would be unwise to make this assumption. A prudent planner might make the reverse assumption: that a threatened population, with options to fight or flee, may well depart, and leave the fight to the uniformed security forces.

National Resistance Laws and Militia Management

On July 29, 2021, Zelensky signed some of the most aggressive and risky societal defense laws known. Law 5557, “On the Fundamentals of National Resistance,” was paired with Law 5558, an expansion of the territorial forces. These laws clarified how a mobilized society would form and fight. This legislation parsed out roles and responsibilities for domestic security forces, military forces, and citizen-sponsored irregulars. The laws laid broad foundations for chains of command, the authorities to organize and act, and zone and sector management. On the riskier side, the laws gave license and legal operating space for private militias and freelance resistors. Politically, this was and is dangerous: approving fringe movements, private militias, and nongovernment forces to arm and deliver high-end violence. The government of Ukraine took a risk that few states are willing to take. It paid off.

Ukraine was able to craft and pass such a national resistance law because they had a seven-year history of waging warfare against Russia by and with the use of pro-state armed groups coupled with official, uniformed security forces. Does any other country have such experience? Few, if any, come to mind. Those countries that do permit such activities, such as Lebanon, hew closer to failed state status. Indeed, Lebanon, like Sudan,Libya, or Iraq, is grappling with control by militias, whereas Ukraine exerts controls of militias. Ukraine is an anomaly in that it has managed an outlaw culture of resistance that is productive resistance — or at least it has so far.

Ukraine’s national resistance laws were born of the 2014 crisis when Russia launched a surprise invasion of Crimea and, months later, occupied portions of the Donbas. To stop Russian annexation on the eastern front, Ukrainian citizen militias filled the security gaps, principally by responding to Russian-backed separatists annexing and occupying towns and cities. Within weeks, the Ukraine government passed a hasty National Guard law that sanctioned this organic rise of pro-state militias. An unholy but effective alliance ensued. Ukrainian militia groups sought the autonomy of being independent and self-styled resistors, warts and all. The Ukrainian government gave it to them, with boundaries. In exchange, the Ukrainian government gained the force-multiplying power of irregulars capable of high-intensity combat. Seven years later in July 2021, Ukraine proposed law 5557, a new law crafted by legislators, ratified by the parliament, signed by the president, and acted upon by the security and civil sectors. This is a rare breed of kill chain.

One week after Ukraine passed the national resistance law, I participated in a forum in Ukraine that aimed to transmit this new law into something more workable, with explanatory policies, organizational roles, and interoperability paths. The purpose was to explore the methods required to employ growing special operationsand resistance-type capabilities. To my surprise, this law was so novel that its implementation flummoxed even the most experienced Ukrainian leaders from the defense, interior, law enforcement, academia, and policy sectors. With sleeves rolled up, the Ukrainian interministry groups waded into how this “resistance system” might look and work. They never completed that homework, as Russia promptly invaded. The law, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2022, was figured out on the barricades. While imperfect, it worked. Ukrainian society would soon explore and exploit every aspect of this law, defying Russian predictions that Ukraine would fracture and fail to mobilize. While the inspirational leadership of Zelensky and his administration deserves much credit, it was this wonky legal structure that provided the blueprint for the whole-of-society mobilization.

States that envision whole-of-society responses to invasion would do well to examine the risk-reward calculation made by the Ukrainian government and expressed by such laws. Some similar models do exist: Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Singapore, and Israel are among them. In line with the “reveal and conceal” stratagem, not all the mobilization measures and triggers are made public. Even with these compartmented caveats, few countries are willing to tolerate, much less incentivize, the use of quasi-official militias and private entities to deliver violence. Few rule-of-law nations have the lived experience of a full-scale invasion, and so it follows that they are less disposed to entertain the untidy use of irregulars. Latvia’s recently proposed lawallowing foreigners to enlist and fight is one step in this direction but falls short of mustering the massive, distributed combat power that Ukraine’s law enabled.

Ukrainian Railways

Strategic depth means little in war until it is materially exploited. Ukraine’s use of the 15,000-mile-long Ukrzaliznytsia railway system capitalized on its geographic and infrastructural strengths. Ukraine has a vast and comprehensive train system, a happy vestige of the Soviet system that built this railroad to control, to regulate, and to extract natural and mineral resources. In the face of invasion, Ukraine used its rail system to operate defense, perform civil functions, evacuate populations, and provide resupply. The Kremlin decision not to target this rail system at the outset of the war, so as to preserve the network for its own use, is surely at the top of a long list of regrettable military decisions.

The Russians have since targeted the Ukrzaliznytsia rail system and its supporting infrastructure such as electricity, stations, and rail bridges. Russia did so only after the train system enabled a Ukrainian defensive stand that foiled the Russian plan of a rapid seizure and negotiated capitulation. Ukrzaliznytsia has since attenuated its operations to meet wartime demands. This is a striking case study in infrastructure resiliency. Trains, a 19th-century invention, are outperforming 21st-century weaponry that can easily penetrate interior lines.

Ukraine’s interior depth combined with Russian miscalculations gave Ukraine the space to absorb impacts, adapt, and rebound. Leadership and human capital matter too, as demonstrated by the 230,000 Ukrzaliznytsia employees who, under attack themselves, continue to ensure its arterial functioning. For strategic importance, Ukrzaliznytsia is on par with the nation’s air defense, artillery, and intelligence. Few threatened states possess this considerable interiority combined with a weblike railway system. By comparison, Taiwan, with just 1,150 miles of rail, could fit inside Ukraine 17 times. Moreover, in a future war, would anyone expect Russia (or China) to repeat this strategic blunder? Defense planners should not count on it. This was an error born of hubris, not capability.

Conclusion

While Russia bungled many aspects of this invasion, Ukraine deserves credit for creating a layered, resilient, and whole-of-society defense. Outside of the direct military combat power enabled by Western support, Ukraine’s national resistance system contains unique ingredients that enabled its scale, breadth, and relative orderliness. For the “Ukraine model of resistance” to be appropriately adopted, these four variables deserve close attention. Indeed, they were overlooked once already by the Russians.

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Brian Petit, a retired U.S. Army colonel, teaches and consults on strategy, planning, special operations, and resistance. He is a part-time adjunct for the Joint Special Operations University.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Brian Petit · February 1, 2024

2. On the High Seas, a Pillar of Global Trade Is Under Attack

Excerpts:

“Throughout my long career as a naval officer…I have never seen such intense competition on the oceans of the world,” said retired U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, who served as NATO supreme allied commander and wrote his doctoral thesis on the United Nations’ Law of the Sea treaty.

Open oceans allowed a global economy to emerge from the wreckage of two world wars. The freedom for all container ships to safely ferry goods on the high seas helped lift China from poverty, turn the U.S. into a country of middle-class consumers and cement the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Until the 20th century, trading nations competed in blood for the right to ship merchandise to foreign ports; these days they compete on price and quality.

Ships handle more than 80% of global goods, according to the U.N.

On the High Seas, a Pillar of Global Trade Is Under Attack

Security crises from Red Sea to Black Sea pose a troubling question: How much has freedom of navigation been an anomaly?

https://www.wsj.com/world/on-the-high-seas-a-pillar-of-global-trade-is-under-attack-f6e495c5?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Drew HinshawFollow and Daniel MichaelsFollow

Updated Feb. 1, 2024 12:06 am ET

The modern economy rests on a rule so old that hardly anybody alive can remember a time before it: Ships of any nation may sail the high seas.

Suddenly, that pillar of the international order shows signs of buckling.

In the Red Sea, Houthi rebels have stormed onto cargo ships, causing freight rates to quadruple and setting a precedent that American vessels aren’t welcome across one of the world’s most vital transport lanes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned the Black Sea into a gauntlet of warships and mines, navigated by grain-laden bulk carriers sailing under the fragile consent of two warring states.

Near the Horn of Africa or the Strait of Malacca, pirates who had once seemed quelled have roared back, crimping sea traffic. In the South China Sea, Beijing has asserted sovereign control over parts that have long been international waters, while its push to reunite Taiwan with the mainland raises questions about future transit through the Taiwan Strait.

“Throughout my long career as a naval officer…I have never seen such intense competition on the oceans of the world,” said retired U.S. Adm. James Stavridis, who served as NATO supreme allied commander and wrote his doctoral thesis on the United Nations’ Law of the Sea treaty.

Open oceans allowed a global economy to emerge from the wreckage of two world wars. The freedom for all container ships to safely ferry goods on the high seas helped lift China from poverty, turn the U.S. into a country of middle-class consumers and cement the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Until the 20th century, trading nations competed in blood for the right to ship merchandise to foreign ports; these days they compete on price and quality.

Ships handle more than 80% of global goods, according to the U.N.

The crew of a Chinese ship defended against a pirate attack in the Gulf of Aden in 2008. PHOTO: XINHUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Not long ago, the world’s most powerful navies cooperated to secure the seas. When Somali sailors seized two Chinese vessels in 2008, Beijing sent warships to help the U.S. patrol the Horn of Africa. After the Cold War, Russia teamed up with the U.S. military to clean nuclear waste from the Arctic Sea, before melting ice opened new shipping possibilities. For now, there is little chance those three world powers could summon common cause.

The U.S. can still call on allies in Europe or Japan, whose navies once spanned the globe. But today they are lightweights with few warships or skilled personnel they can mobilize in a crisis: The British navy has fewer sailors than it did during the Revolutionary War 250 years ago, when its total population was one-seventh its current size. The U.S. Navy, sidelined during decades of counterterrorism campaigns, is stretched securing not just shipping lanes but also undersea data cables and gas pipelines that have become equally important to economic output.

The upshot: The oceans, once calm, are back on the agenda. An interlocking set of maritime security crises from Europe to East Asia has thrown up a troubling question, say U.S. and European officials, insurers and analysts: How much has freedom of navigation been a historical anomaly, unlikely to endure?

“It’s very worrying,” said Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren. Freedom of navigation “is a matter of principle.”

For much of maritime history from Columbus onward, pirates, privateers and powerful navies set the rules on whose ships could sail where—enforced within cannon range of prowling warships. Which flag fluttered above deck mattered: Barbary pirates from the 1780s onward preyed on American ships after they lowered the British banner for the new Stars and Stripes, prompting the young nation’s first foreign war.

The alternative concept—“freedom of the seas”—dates to at least the 1600s, holding that ships of any nation should be permitted to travel the open ocean. But it only took hold after the U.S. Navy emerged victorious over Imperial Japan in 1945.

At the time, the U.S. Navy boasted about 7,000 ships—alongside a political class populated with former Marines and sailors—and if any foreign adversary harbored a different vision of how the seas should work, it lacked the gunboats to impose it.

Today, America’s navy can field fewer than 300 ships and the world’s largest fleet belongs to Beijing, which is reinforcing its unilateral claim on the vast South China Sea by creating and fortifying artificial islands. Stavridis called it “a preposterous claim that has been rejected by international courts,” but he predicted China will continue “and challenge anyone seeking to conduct freedom of navigation.”

A container ship near Miami Beach. PHOTO: EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Governments from Europe to Asia that have grown prosperous and accustomed to safe seas want to keep maritime chokepoints open, particularly the Suez Canal, the Taiwan Strait and the Horn of Africa. But they aren’t budgeting for enforcement, said Jacques Vandermeiren, chief executive of the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Europe’s second-largest.

“Who is securing free trade in the world now?” said Vandermeiren. “Is it always the U.S.? A global coalition? Who will organize this and who will pay for it?”

In the sweep of history, only eight decades separate the present from a past when most manufactured goods moved by land and a ship was only as safe as the state protecting it. Less than 500 million tons of dry cargo crossed the seas annually in the 1950s. The world was dotted with small manufacturers serving local buyers.

Today, container ships carry about 23 times more tonnage, integrating a global economy of mammoth conglomerates targeting whichever customer on earth offers the most profit, soonest. That integration has driven down costs, allowing IKEA to cheaply sell identical sofas in 59 countries and McDonald’s to fry Idaho’s Russet Burbank potatoes around the world.

But it has also made car factories, big-box retailers, fashion houses and electronics dealers significantly more vulnerable to even the smallest snags: Witness the tens of billions of dollars in trade held up when a single cargo ship, the Ever Given, ran aground in the Suez Canal for six days of 2021. Or the supply-chain breakdown that unfolded as the Covid-19 pandemic left container ships log-jammed outside Asian and American ports.

These might have been a harbinger of how easily the oceans can close.

A Houthi helicopter approaches the Galaxy Leader cargo ship in the Red Sea. PHOTO: HOUTHI MILITARY MEDIA/REUTERS

Guardsmen aboard the USCGC Spencer watched the explosion of a depth charge as a German submarine attacked a convoy in 1943. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Since the Houthis seized the Galaxy Leader, a Japanese-owned car-carrying cargo ship, in November, freight rates from Shanghai to Genoa have quadrupled. Worldwide, the average cost of shipping a 40-foot container has jumped 2.7-fold in that time, to $3,964, according to London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants. Manufacturers from Tesla to Volvo have had to suspend car production at German and Belgian plants while they wait for parts.

The creature comforts of which fresh clothes Europeans will wear in spring—or which new phones they will buy—hang in the balance. More critical damage is creeping in: “The crisis is also reverberating in global food prices,” the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development warned recently.

The U.S. and British navies have stepped forward to try to secure safe passage for ships transiting the Suez Canal, whatever their flag or destination. The last time the U.S. Navy provided such extensive security for non-American ships, the threat was from German U-boats and Japanese torpedoes, said Salvatore Mercogliano, chair of the Department of History, Criminal Justice and Politics at North Carolina’s Campbell University. “You’d have to go back to the world wars for that,” he said. “This is a big change.”

The trouble is, ships linked to, flagged in or owned by America and its allies are targets for Houthi rebels. Last week, shipping company

Maersk said it would stop sending U.S.-flagged vessels through the Red Sea.That means the Red Sea passage that the U.S. is protecting is increasingly being used by ships either carrying Russian oil or flying a Chinese flag. On Monday last week, a senior Houthi leader told a Russian media group chaired by Vladimir Putin’s reputed girlfriend that Chinese and Russian vessels would be spared. Moscow and Beijing have both held back from engaging militarily, emerging as easy winners of a new era where the provenance of a ship matters.

How Cargo Ships Try to Defend Against Houthi Attacks in Red Sea

A New Global Tax Is About to Raise Billions. The U.S. Is Missing Out.

Companies face higher tax rates from international deal struck in 2021

https://www.wsj.com/economy/global/a-new-global-tax-is-about-to-raise-billions-the-u-s-is-missing-out-aefad21f?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Richard Rubin

Follow, Jennifer Williams

Follow and Paul Hannon

Updated Feb. 1, 2024 12:06 am ET

Johnson & Johnson is projecting a roughly 1.5-percentage-point increase in its tax rate as a result of the global minimum tax. PHOTO: MARK KAUZLARICH/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The 15% global minimum tax is here, and it is raising corporate tax payments—just not in the U.S.

Johnson & Johnson, Baxter International and Zimmer Biomet are all warning investors that the 2021 international tax deal will make them pay higher taxes this year as Switzerland, South Korea, Japan and European Union countries implement the accord. U.S. companies that enjoyed single-digit tax rates in some foreign countries now must pay at least 15% in each. But even though Treasury officials were crucial in forging the international accord and President Biden has pushed to implement it, Congress hasn’t changed U.S. tax law to conform to it. Republicans generally oppose the global deal, contending that Biden administration negotiators gave away too much of the U.S. tax base.

So for now, the U.S. isn’t directly collecting any money from domestic or foreign companies because of the deal.

J&J is forecasting a roughly 1.5-percentage-point increase in its tax rate. Joseph Wolk, J&J’s chief financial officer, told analysts recently that the global minimum tax, as it stands now, is “reducing U.S. incentives for innovation and resulting in U.S.-based multinational companies paying more tax revenue to foreign governments.”

Other companies pointing to potentially higher taxes in 2024 include Johnson Controls,

Henry Schein, Teleflex, Enovis, Edwards Lifesciences and Methode Electronics. The corporate warnings mark the first concrete estimates of how the global minimum tax deal is affecting companies—and, by extension, governments—around the world. The agreement was backed by about 140 jurisdictions and hailed by their leaders as a crucial step toward reducing cross-border tax competition and making companies pay more to support governments.

Thirty-six countries have implemented the deal or have new rules in progress, and businesses with global revenues exceeding €750 million—equivalent to about $810 million—could pay new taxes on profits.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which spearheads the minimum tax project, recently estimated that businesses altogether will pay additional taxes of between $155 billion and $192 billion annually, an increase of between 6.5% and 8.1% from current tax payments. Some analysts looking at company projections have said it could be lower.

The U.S. created a minimum tax on companies’ foreign income in 2017, but it applies to their global profits, not country-by-country as required by the international deal. The U.S. created a second minimum tax in 2022, but that, too, doesn’t align with other countries’ levies. China also hasn’t implemented the agreement.

American companies are facing higher tax bills even though the U.S. hasn’t changed its rules. That is because the deal allows countries to make global companies operating in their jurisdictions pay at least 15% there. So Switzerland can make U.S. and Japanese companies pay 15% tax on their Swiss operations.

In many cases, American companies have already maxed out U.S. foreign tax credits. So paying more abroad won’t reduce their U.S. taxes. Instead, they effectively will pay taxes in two countries on the same income.

Meanwhile, the U.S. isn’t benefiting directly. The rules say countries can require that their home companies pay 15% in every country where they operate. So South Korea can ensure that a South Korean company pays 15% in the U.K., the U.S. and France. If it doesn’t pay enough in those countries—for instance, because U.S. research incentives lower its tax rate there—it must pay more to South Korea, not the U.S.

The OECD estimates that the U.S. will get some new revenue even without implementing the global deal. That is because some companies may shift operations and profits to the U.S. as tax rates become more similar around the world.

“I’m not seeing so much of that actually happening yet,” said Jason Yen of Ernst & Young.

Suky Upadhyay, CFO of medical technology company Zimmer Biomet, said the company would see a tax rate increase of about 1.5 percentage points. That is “not devastating but still impactful nonetheless,” he said in an interview.

While that won’t change Zimmer Biomet’s strategy in the short-term, Upadhyay said the company ultimately might consider putting future investment in the Americas rather than Europe because of the shrinking financial gap between the two locations.Write to Richard Rubin at richard.rubin@wsj.com, Jennifer Williams at jennifer.williams@wsj.com and Paul Hannon at paul.hannon@wsj.com

4. “A COMPLEX AND SOPHISTICATED STRATEGY” – COUNTERINSURGENCY IN THE WORDS OF A CRITIC by JOHN NAGL , PAUL YINGLING

Note the response form Gian Gentile. Deja vu all over again?

One of the best debates I ever witnessed was when we hosted John and Gian at the National War College in 2010 or 2011. It was of the most intellectually challenging, cordial, and professional exchanges I have observed.

“A COMPLEX AND SOPHISTICATED STRATEGY”

COUNTERINSURGENCY IN THE WORDS OF A CRITIC

JOHN NAGL , PAUL YINGLING FEBRUARY 1, 2024 8 MIN READ

https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/complex-and-sophisticated/?mc_cid=b61a7f805c&mc_eid=70bf478f36

The piece claims that the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, imposed an “intellectual straight jacket” on the Army that prevented “creative thinking” about strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Having lost wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the United States would do well to reflect on the root causes of those debacles. To its credit, the War Room has contributed to such reflection through its four-part series on the lessons we may learn from war—not only America’s losses in previous conflicts, but also ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Unfortunately, the last installment in this series, “Ukraine, Gaza, and the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Legacy” by Gian Gentile is marred by the contradictory impulses that have long colored the author’s perspective on what is perhaps the most important military strategy of this century.

The piece claims that the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, imposed an “intellectual straight jacket” on the Army that prevented “creative thinking” about strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not, sadly, suggest an alternative to the approach that dramatically reduced violence in both countries, and similarly fails to provide a creative way that the United States might have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Either the straight jacket is so powerful that it has constrained even his thinking, or these wars were really hard, and the United States was completely unprepared for them.

The counterinsurgency critic has been caught in this same conundrum for a very long time. In a Washington Post op-ed in 2004, he argued for a “hard” approach to tactical problems in Iraq without extending his analysis to show how this “hard” approach might be employed at the strategic level of war. The same op-ed described efforts to win the support of the Iraqi people as a “velvet glove” approach but did not explain how the U.S. military operations, bound in an intellectual straight jacket and armed with velvet gloves, resulted in 200,000 civilian deaths. Instead the 2004 article embraced the very counterinsurgency tactics that the War Room article derides, claiming that defeating insurgents “requires a complex and sophisticated strategy that separates the insurgent forces from the Iraqi people, strengthens the rule of law in Iraq, demonstrates the coalition’s will to win, enhances the political legitimacy of the fledgling Iraqi government and uses military force appropriately.”

This approach prescribes a focus on separating the insurgents from the population by increasing the legitimacy of the Iraqi government, meeting the needs of the Iraqi people, and using the minimum possible level of force. This is exactly—exactly—what FM 3-24 dictates. If counterinsurgency doctrine is an intellectual straight jacket, the label should read “As designed in 2004 in the Washington Post, two years before FM 3-24 was published.”

The problem is not with the counterinsurgency strategy but in the fact that it was not universally adopted throughout the theater of combat in Iraq in 2004 as the author recommended. Indeed, it could not have been; the Army had not written COIN doctrine since 1975, had not trained on the doctrine it hadn’t written, and had no conception about what it was trying to accomplish across Iraq other than detaining military age males and leaving as quickly as possible.

Properly limiting the use of force in war—any war—is a legal requirement that has huge implications for the postwar peace. The War Room article quotes Civil War Union General William Tecumseh Sherman that war “is cruelty and you cannot refine it.” Sherman boasted that he would “make Georgia howl”, but the most vexing part of the American Civil War came when the “hard hand of war” was lifted and the attempt to build a better peace began; for all of the howling Sherman forced on Georgia, the South arguably won the postwar, maintaining a caste-based system of oppression of African Americans for the next century. Similarly, Israel’s war against Hamas doesn’t end when the shooting stops and the question of who now governs Gaza begins. War is not just cruelty; it is the use of force to accomplish political objectives. That’s the hard part, and that’s the part that counterinsurgency strategy can help achieve.

As all veterans of that campaign know, Iraq descended into madness at the hands of an American army that did not know how to use force to achieve political objectives in that country for the first three years of the occupation. Violence in Iraq continued to escalate until General David Petraeus, armed with the counterinsurgency manual that he and James Mattis had written over the course of 2006, implemented a comprehensive COIN strategy in Iraq in 2007. Violence dropped by more than 75% over Petraeus’s eighteen months in command as he focused the entire command on implementing “a complex and sophisticated strategy that separates the insurgent forces from the Iraqi people, strengthens the rule of law in Iraq, demonstrates the coalition’s will to win, enhances the political legitimacy of the fledgling Iraqi government and uses military force appropriately.” Petraeus was helped greatly in this accomplishment by the simultaneous emergence of the Anbar Awakening, the Sunni decision to switch sides and fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq; the Anbar Awakening and the new American COIN doctrine were symbiotic, feeding off and reinforcing each other.

Counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan focused on raising, training, and equipping host-nation security forces, creating Afghan security forces that were reliant on long-term American support.

Petraeus later implemented the same strategy in Afghanistan, which he had always considered a more difficult case than Iraq. Counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan focused on raising, training, and equipping host-nation security forces, creating Afghan security forces that were reliant on long-term American support. Reasonable people (including the authors of this piece) may disagree on the wisdom of sustaining this approach for decades to come, but it was certainly fiscally and militarily sustainable over the long term. Instead, the Trump Administration’s deal with the Taliban and the Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal produced a rapid collapse of Afghan security forces. An earlier and more focused effort to build capable security forces there, coupled with a generational commitment of American advisors and support, would have kept the Taliban out of Kabul with beneficial results for the Afghan people, the region, and global counterterrorism efforts.

There are significant lessons from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan for today’s conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, but they are not the ones that the War Room article suggests. It argues that the Russian war against Ukraine shows the importance of preparing for “sustained large-scale combat between two conventional forces” while ignoring the fact that the United States is not directly engaged in combat in just such a conflict, instead providing security force assistance to Ukraine by aiding Kiev in organizing, training, equipping, and employing its forces.

This practice of developing host nation security forces is a continuation of the security force assistance operations that the U.S. developed in Iraq and Afghanistan; it is, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted correctly some years ago, perhaps the most important of all American military tasks today. Gates told the Association of the United States Army in 2007, “arguably the most important military component in the War on Terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries. The standing up and mentoring of indigenous armies and police—once the province of Special Forces—is now a key mission for the military as a whole.” Our failure to get that task right in Afghanistan underlines the truth of Gates’s assertion, as does the success of Ukraine–with American help and weaponry–today. Similarly, building capable Palestinian security forces is key to any lasting peace in Gaza.

Gates also pulled the rug out from under those who pine for a return to big wars of attrition; in the same speech, he noted that “our enemies and potential adversaries — including nation states — have gone to school on us. They saw what America’s technology and firepower did to Saddam’s army in 1991 and again in 2003, and they’ve seen what [improvised explosive devices] are doing to the American military today. It is hard to conceive of any country challenging the United States directly on the ground–at least for some years to come.” True when Gates said it in 2007, there is much more data since then to suggest that future enemies will fight great powers like America in irregular ways, including our ignominious defeat at the hand of insurgents in Afghanistan in 2021 and the horrific defeat Hamas inflicted on the vaunted IDF in 2023.

Gates knows his history; since the advent of nuclear weapons, no great powers have engaged in sustained, large-scale conventional combat with another great power. This pattern is confirmed in numerous Cold War crises—Berlin 1948, Korea 1950-53, Suez 1956, Hungary 1956, Berlin 1961, Vietnam 1965-72, Middle East 1967, Czechoslovakia 1968, Middle East 1973, Nicaragua and Afghanistan 1979. This trend continues today; the U.S. has carefully avoided direct conflict with Russia in Ukraine due to reasonable concerns over nuclear escalation. When the U.S. wishes to confront aggression by a nuclear power, it does so through security force assistance.

The task of fighting irregular forces, armed with high tech weapons and embedded in civilian populations, under the glare of a global media spotlight, is warfare at the graduate level, as we noted in the opening words of the first chapter of the 2006 edition of FM 3-24. It is hard to describe a strategy to defeat that threat better than Gentile himself did back in 2004; “winning requires a complex and sophisticated strategy that separates the insurgent forces from the Iraqi [Palestinian] [Afghan] people, strengthens the rule of law in Iraq [Gaza] [Afghanistan], demonstrates the coalition’s will to win, enhances the political legitimacy of the fledgling Iraqi [Gazan] [Afghan] government and uses military force appropriately.” That is a complex and sophisticated strategy with a good chance of working—when well implemented. While it’s messy and slow, it’s the best chance we’ve got to win the kind of wars that we’re likely to keep having to fight.

John Nagl is Professor of Warfighting Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.

Paul L. Yingling is a retired colonel and veteran of five combat tours in the U.S. Army and a professor of security studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Photo Description: U.S. Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus (far right) enjoys a cup of tea with a group of local Afghanis while Interpreter Nasir Ahmad (second to right) waits for his tea at a visit to Camp Kackeran in the province of Zabul, Sept. 13, 2005.

Photo Credit: U.S. Army Photo by Pfc. Leslie Angulo

Tags: Afghanistan COIN counterinsurgency Defense Management Gaza History innovation Iraq lessons learned military history Military Strategy and Campaigning National Security Policy and Strategy Ukraine

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OFFICERS AND GENTLEWOMEN

1 thought on "“A COMPLEX AND SOPHISTICATED STRATEGY” COUNTERINSURGENCY IN THE WORDS OF A CRITIC"

gian gentile says:
February 1, 2024 at 7:26 am
John Nagl and Paul Yingling argue in their War Room rebuttal to my piece that the Army’s counterinsurgency field manual FM 3-24 is, as they explicitly state,
“…perhaps the most important military strategy of this century.”
That is rich but not surprising coming from these two authors.
It is rich because FM 3-24-style population centric counterinsurgency is equivalent to the failed U.S. Army tank destroyer doctrine of WWII.
Yet they arrogantly state with overflowing intellectual elitism that with nearly a quarter of this century complete, their counterinsurgency “strategy” (fyi it was not and never has been a “strategy” and instead a tactical approach to counterinsurgency wars) will “perhaps” turn out to be the most important. An argument that I made in a “Parameters” article in 2009 was that FM 3-24 as the U.S. Army applied it in Iraq during the Surge and after and starting in Afghanistan in 2009 was a “strategy of tactics.”
What Nagl and Yingling do not acknowledge in their rebuttal to my War Room article, and which I point out in it, is that they both were advocates back in those days for the U.S. Army to optimize for counterinsurgency wars which the authors believed would be the way of future wars.
Such a U.S. Army and its soldiers transformed in that way, argued Nagl in a review essay in 2009, will be able to “change entire societies.” Yes, Nagl actually said that in 2009 that the U.S. Army’s soldiers when deployed to the far-flung troubled areas of world in the 21st century would be able to, again as Nagl asserted, “change entire societies.”
If that statement isn’t social science gone wild, I don’t know what is.
As I asked in my War Room article, had the U.S. Army listened to that type of argument then, where would it be today with the major conventional wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the trajectory these wars point to the future?
Sadly, for Nagl and Yingling, they are still marred by, and wear, the FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency straitjacket.
Their article should be read and evaluated by the readers of this important magazine War Room for their use of evidence in support of their argument.
But in my humble opinion, metaphorically speaking of course and in good humor, Nagl and Yingling should wear the Scarlett Letter C on their chests until the end of time.
Gian Gentile

5. Naval Special Warfare Will Have to Fight Differently

Rimland.

Seth states it right up front with his two points.

But this applies to more than SOF: "The U.S. military and the policy establishment have had a “strategy problem” for multiple generations."

Excerpts;

Two points need articulation. First, the revisionist coalition the United States and its allies face, primarily in Eurasia, has weak points; second, special operations forces (SOF) are the best tool to stress these weak points while ensuring high-end conventional assets are available for traditional engagements. These two arguments indicate a third, more profound reality: SOF can demonstrate the necessary link between the operational and the geopolitical in great power war—assuming it is properly resourced. This is true not only for NSW, but also for the broader SOF community.

Conclusion:

More important than hypothetical missions is a fundamental issue: The U.S. military and the policy establishment have had a “strategy problem” for multiple generations. Policy-makers have ceded to military leaders an enormous amount of political authority within ostensibly military tasks, while military leaders have abdicated their responsibility to understand political conditions and retreated to apoliticization to justify their disengagement.

This approach is wholly incompatible with a major power war, as it short-circuits the U.S. strategic apparatus’s ability to coherently grasp the stakes it faces.

SOF are the only element of the U.S. military based solely on economy of force. By reducing mass to such an enormous degree, SOF accrue advantages in deception and surprise that translate into shock. This allows small, highly trained teams of operators to accomplish their mission despite overwhelmingly firepower inferiority.

The nimble nature of SOF and the scale of the missions that great power war would demand indicate a need for a coherent linkage between geopolitics and operational planning in a manner far more fundamental than has been considered in the SOF community since at least the Vietnam War. The result should be an intellectual transformation in naval and military-wide special operations that embraces the need to plan for a truly Eurasian fight. In the long war, NSW’s unique talents could prove decisive if they are employed with coherent strategic skill.

Naval Special Warfare Will Have to Fight Differently

Special operations forces will have to be retooled for a Eurasian rimland war.

By Seth Cropsey

February 2024 Proceedings Vol. 150/2/1,452

usni.org · February 1, 2024

Naval Special Warfare is a crucial strategic tool for the U.S. military. Yet there has been remarkably little public thinking on the role special operations forces might play in a large-scale strategic confrontation. The War of 2026 scenario helps clarify the requirements for Naval Special Warfare (NSW) in such a conflict.

Two points need articulation. First, the revisionist coalition the United States and its allies face, primarily in Eurasia, has weak points; second, special operations forces (SOF) are the best tool to stress these weak points while ensuring high-end conventional assets are available for traditional engagements. These two arguments indicate a third, more profound reality: SOF can demonstrate the necessary link between the operational and the geopolitical in great power war—assuming it is properly resourced. This is true not only for NSW, but also for the broader SOF community.

SOF and Strategic Objectives

Romanian, Ukrainian, and U.S. special operations personnel conduct close-quarters battle training in Romania in May 2021. The most pervasive peacetime SOF mission today is training with U.S. allies and partners globally. DOD Courtesy Photo (Roxana Davidovits)

Special warfare is, by definition, odd. Anglo- American strategic historian Colin Gray once argued that special operations does not fit well into the United States’ political-military taxonomy. It is culturally, strategically, operationally, and tactically distinct from the traditional warfighting arms of any service. While NSW may fall under the Navy Department’s organizational chart, for example, SOF are naturally ground forces, and there will be friction between them and the traditional mechanized and armored forces that predominate.

Twenty years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism transformed U.S. special operations from a niche discipline within a conventional military into a well-known, near-celebrity, almost standalone component of U.S. power. Joint Special Operations Command completely retooled itself during the 2000s and 2010s, becoming a force capable of prosecuting a strategic campaign against a mobile, adaptable, tenacious network of conventional and unconventional forces.

U.S. operators, whether NSW operators, Air Force Special Tactics Airmen, Army Special Forces (including 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, sometimes referred to as “Delta Force”), or Marine Raiders, are extraordinarily well trained, disciplined, and effective soldiers, sailors, and airmen molded into small assault teams. Their light footprint makes them responsive, rapidly deployable, and capable of a breakneck operational tempo. But their transformation into a tactical entity that neutralizes high-value targets has become increasingly irrelevant since the early 2010s. And the cultural hangover from those missions and tactics inhibits strategy making. Special operations can only be retooled for a high-end fight if strategy and tactics can be linked through coherent operational design.

To begin, the entire special operations community, including NSW, should emphasize combined training and presence throughout Eurasia, building competence with potential and current U.S. allies as rapidly as possible. Indeed, its most pervasive peacetime mission today is training with U.S. allies and partners globally.

These limited interactions are useful, leading to some cultural familiarity that, during wartime, can prove the difference between a thrown-together but workable operational relationship and a disconnected coalition attempt. Anglo-American training missions in Ukraine, limited as they were, provided significant elements within the Ukrainian military with the tools and experience to beat back Russia’s initial offensive. They also created cultural familiarity between the British, American, and Ukrainian militaries that eased the first-aid shipments and enabled Ukraine to articulate its needs to the West more easily during the opening months of the war.

Unconventional forces can do more, however. Numerous examples from history show that special operations have a clear role in great power war. During World War II, to take just one, a daring raid by Italian divers on the British fleet in Alexandria, Egypt, in December 1941 disabled two Royal Navy battleships, giving Italy temporary naval supremacy in the Mediterranean.

Ukraine’s experience also is illustrative. During the war’s first year, Ukrainian SOF conducted several direct-action raids in occupied territory, likely operated within Russia, and worked closely with Ukrainian military and domestic intelligence to support saboteurs behind Russian lines. Ukrainian forces benefit from their natural bilingual talent pool—nearly the entire country speaks Russian and Ukrainian—increasing the deniability of Ukrainian external operations in Russia.

Ukraine’s talented spymaster and former special operator Kyrylo Budanov has constructed a coherent deep-strike campaign against Russian logistics and air defenses. As of this writing, the centralization of strike assets under special operations has allowed Ukraine to bottle up the Russian Black Sea Fleet in port despite having essentially no navy of its own, while also destroying multiple air-defense and ammunition sites in Crimea. Moreover, there are even rumors that Ukrainian special operators have deployed in limited numbers to Africa in an effort to undermine private military contractor Wagner’s presence abroad.

Ukraine has at times misused its special operations forces as assault infantry, although during the first few weeks of the war, they played a crucial role as night-fighting raiders conducting deep reconnaissance and harassment attacks against exposed enemy logistics. At present, however, it appears Ukraine has returned the assault infantry function to its airborne, marine, and newly constituted assault brigades, freeing SOF for other missions.

Special operations forces, then, have a role in high-end combat, even if the United States’ SOF community and political culture have generally forgotten how to use them in such a context. To remind U.S. strategists of the role they can play in great power war, it is necessary to identify the political drivers of this coming conflict and the probable adversaries to identify weak points for SOF exploitation.

Stress Fractures

East Coast–based Navy SEALs participate in a special operations interoperability exercise with the guided-missile submarine USS Florida (SSGN-728) and a U.S. Air Force CV-22 Osprey. U.S. Air Force (Westin Warburton)

The United States confronts a revisionist coalition that in many ways resembles the one it faced in the 1930s and 1940s. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are the coalition’s most prominent members, with partners or satellites in Belarus, Venezuela, Cuba, Armenia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and South Africa. Brazil and Pakistan are potentially members, too. The coalition’s core states all chafe under the U.S.-led Eurasian security system and would like it dismantled in toto. Others may object only to part of the broader system despite their increasing alignment with the New Axis.

None of the major challengers have enough independent power to defeat the United States, particularly if it receives support from allies and friends. If each faces the United States independently, each is likely to fail, while a coordinated attempt among all four adversaries to fracture the Eurasian security system might well overload U.S. command and control while also compelling the United States to divert resources to different theaters, reducing its potential margin of superiority in any one.

If this hostile coalition coalesces, it would be very stressful for U.S. forces. At the same time, it would have three fundamental weaknesses. First, it would lack the ideological unity needed to mitigate built-in friction among its members. Second, contradictory interests undeniably exist, particularly between Russia and China, but also Russia and Iran. Third, despite a clear need for Sino-Russo-Iranian coordination, the distances involved make it difficult. Even if China could conclude a formal military alliance with Russia and Iran, long-distance coordination would be its greatest vulnerability. Consider that Imperial Japan never initiated conflict against the Soviet Union, despite that being Nazi Germany’s best hope to increase pressure on the Soviet Union’s broader strategic system, in part because distance encouraged Japan to take a more cautious approach.

The United States’ best chance of success in the War of 2026 would therefore be to disaggregate the Eurasian Axis coalition, reducing the threat to less than the sum of its parts. Exploiting its weaknesses to encourage that disaggregation would require a Eurasia-wide strategy. The choke points and littorals around Eurasia’s rim allow its regions and nations to trade. Hence, they are the prize, not the heartland itself.

Aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, and submarines would be essential to keep the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) bottled up in the first island chain and, ultimately, mount a counterstroke. Conventional air-land forces likewise would be needed to deter or defeat escalation in secondary theaters in Europe and the Middle East. U.S. forces can cope with this challenge, but every element must be properly engaged. Rapidly deployable and deniable assets also would be crucial to imposing costs and increasing stress on the adversary coalition. Here, SOF could serve a crucial supporting role for traditional forces.

Special Operations Missions

Tanks from the People’s Liberation Army in the jungle during a live-fire training exercise in October 2023. Naval Special Warfare would contribute to a great power fight less by confronting armor head on than by attacking the tanks’ logistic tails. @ChinaMilitary (Chi Juncheng)

Seven operational lines of effort can connect to the above strategic objectives. These are organized in descending order of strategic value.

Exploitation of high-value targets in the first island chain: The War of 2026 scenario assumes China would not immediately accomplish all its objectives. This may result in a split decision on Taiwan, under which the PLA maintains a significant lodgment, but U.S. and Taiwanese forces prevent the island from falling. It may also include a situation in which Taiwan is under Chinese air-defense control, but the PLA cannot entirely cut off access to Japan, Korea, and the Philippines.

Regardless of the outcome in the first weeks of fighting, it is probable that both the PLA and the United States would take extensive losses. Great power wars are not merely long; they also include a “broken-backed” phase. The terms is traditionally associated with a stage of conflict that follows massive use of nuclear weapons. It applies in this case when the major powers would likely have taken heavy losses but nevertheless retained enough deployable forces to cause each other damage and achieve meaningful strategic objectives—all while rebuilding larger forces for another offensive in the coming months or years. Gains and losses in the broken-backed phase of a great power war can be decisive in the long run. Britain’s ability to hold Egypt and the Levant despite Axis pressure ensured the long-term coherence of the Western coalition, for example, while the Allied victory at Guadalcanal, despite its difficulties, provided invaluable supporting terrain for future campaigns.

It is thus enormously relevant for the United States to delay Chinese force regeneration by hitting as many ports, dry docks, airfields, and exposed air-naval infrastructure as possible after the first phase to help ensure the United States emerges from the broken-backed phase first. Ideally, the United States would create a strategic situation that either keeps PLA warships tethered to a specific base or splits the PLA Navy in half, enabling the United States to concentrate submarines and strike aircraft against a divided Chinese fleet.

NSW can aid this campaign by mapping, enabling, and, in certain circumstances, carrying out demolition missions against exposed targets. Similarly, there would be other Chinese bases scattered throughout and around the first island chain, such as Ream Naval Base in Cambodia or the PLA’s artificial islands, that could be used as naval bases and would be ripe for special operations targeting and sabotage.

Chinese rimland targets beyond the first island chain: China is well aware of the odds of a long war, even if it were to successfully take Taiwan in a matter of weeks. It has therefore constructed a military and economic pipeline that allows it to exert influence beyond the first island chain and provides it with alternative ports beyond the Malacca and Lombok Straits. These include wholly or partly owned ports in Dhaka, Bangladesh; Gwadar, Pakistan; and Hambantota, Sri Lanka. They also include overseas military bases. Currently, China’s only such base is in Djibouti, but there is potential for others.

The strategy of the New Axis would be to compel the United States to split its resources among theaters, driving overall capabilities below an economy-of-force defensive threshold. This would thereby enable a serious strategic reversal in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East that would push the whole defensive system off balance. The U.S. strategy should be to do something similar by seeking to force the New Axis to commit forces beyond its means.

Most critically, that would require turning China’s port network—sometimes referred to as the String of Pearls—into a noose. This is an ideal sabotage mission for NSW. It is a low-footprint, high-tempo mission that would deny a safe harbor to any Chinese warships beyond Malacca and Lombok. Equally relevant, by disrupting port access, this series of attacks could slowly undermine Chinese power and capacity.

Disruption of New Axis links: The New Axis’s greatest coordination advantage would come from its lines of communication in the Eurasian interior, rather than relying wholly on the littoral for operations and supply. Exploiting that advantage demands vulnerable pipelines, energy and matériel storage facilities, rail and road links, satellite connections, and, potentially, even joint military bases. In general, one might conceive of the relationship as circular. Iran and Russia need Chinese consumer electronics and, in the future, even weapons. China can transport these by sea, but overland routes to Russia using the Sino-Russian border or Central Asia are more insulated from U.S. naval power. Russia and Iran, in return, can export oil and gas to China, both through overland pipelines and dark tankers to secondary ports.

The United States has a strategic interest, first, in curtailing or eliminating as much Russian and Iranian maritime traffic as possible and, second, disrupting the interior linkages. Special operations forces could accomplish both goals, the former through a sabotage campaign against major enemy ports, and the latter through a long-term, direct-action campaign that targets infrastructure in third-party countries. Even without the necessary basing agreements from regional partners, NSW is rapidly deployable. It also is deniable enough to make a relationship with India possible, despite New Delhi’s continued anxiety over confrontation with China.

Commercial disruption: Commerce raiding would be a crucial part of this war for both parties, but particularly for the United States. China dominates the global shipping market by design. As rates skyrocket and flags of convenience become unreliable, Chinese ships would probe any U.S. blockade. It would almost certainly be a waste of resources to use submarines as commerce raiders in a modern naval war, particularly because, unless the current shortfall in submarines is reversed, the U.S. Navy would have only a few dozen for operations in the western Pacific. (See Toti, “You Can’t Win without [More] Submarines,” December 2023, pp. 38–45.) However, a combination of NSW and light warships (such as littoral combat ships) could police the approaches to the straits and disrupt Chinese shipping.

Activity beyond Eurasia: China would undoubtedly encourage actors beyond the core of the New Axis to make strategic trouble for the United States, much as the Soviets sought to do in Latin America and Africa. Venezuela, Cuba, and South Africa come to mind as trouble-making secondary powers. North Korea, in particular, could be considered one as well, were it to spark a crisis on the Korean Peninsula that drew U.S. forces into Chinese missile range.

Frontline U.S. combat units would be at a premium during the War of 2026. Contingencies in tertiary theaters probably would be met only with ad hoc assemblies of units on hand, akin to the British response at the start of the Falklands War. SOF would be crucial in these instances, particularly if the United States seeks to conduct any open-ended, small-war-style suppression or to support friendly governments against Russian-, Chinese-, or Iranian-backed insurgencies.

Support for Taiwanese forces: The fate of Taiwan in a major conflict’s opening weeks is a crucial strategic question and a central moral consideration. In a split decision, under which China holds a major port in Taiwan but lacks full control of the island, NSW and Marine Special Operations Forces (MarSOF) could lead sabotage missions against PLA offloading facilities and occupied ports. If China did hold the island, NSW, MarSOF, or other SOF units could fight as guerrillas and embed with Taiwanese forces to increase their combat power.

The United States’ space-based ISR system is likely to come under severe stress in a major-power war. (See Brown, “The Challenge of Joint Space Operations,” January 2024, pp. 28–35.) Providing SEALs and Marines on Taiwan with a robust terrestrial ISR system that could be rapidly deployed with a light footprint would allow them to cue missiles fired by U.S. warships, aircraft, and submarines at range.

Support for other occupied forces: An Indo-Pacific war is unlikely to remain geographically restricted to Taiwan or be limited to Taiwan, the United States, and China as belligerents. It would likely broaden rapidly to include direct attacks on Japan, alongside activity in Indochina and potentially the Philippines, as well as along the Korean peninsula. U.S. SOF must be prepared to deploy rapidly in support of national militaries and post-assault insurgencies throughout the Eurasian rimland, to both attrit Chinese forces and engage Chinese assets that otherwise could be held in reserve as that country attempts to expand beyond the first island chain.

All these missions require additional funding. But more relevant than the funding itself would be three crucial changes from recent history. First, SOF would need to become far more comfortable with fighting absent rapid strategic mobility, a capability that could be assumed in the global war on terror. Second, SOF would lack robust, consistent, reliable communications with command elements. This would require individual teams to have some strategic understanding of the situation before they deploy, should they be cut off from command guidance but nevertheless need to make crucial operational decisions. Third, SOF would not receive the kind of follow-on support to which it has become accustomed. Air support would be infrequent at best and impossible on certain missions. Follow-on forces for extraction also would be difficult to organize. This would generate an emphasis on speed, effective infiltration, planning, and carefully targeted objectives.

Austere Technology

To be able to carry these missions out in the War of 2026 will require four investments today in technology and adjustments to NSW and SOF practices and structures.

First, the United States must develop new supporting technology for offensively minded NSW and other SOF missions. Conducting distributed operations throughout the Eurasian rimland—and in the interior when possible—will demand clandestine insertion and extraction. A large-scale StarLink-style array of communication and imaging satellites should provide some redundancy for deployed NSW units, while encrypted one-way communication systems would bolster NSW’s ability to gain strategic direction from higher-level headquarters. Logistics and resupply also are central. The United States should invest in a fleet of long-range, medium-payload unmanned aerial vehicles that can fly under their own power to and from the remote operating sites of NSW units.

Second, the United States should invest in a variety of new weapons and organic sensors for NSW units as they insert into enemy territory, as well as some that can be provided quickly and cheaply at standoff range. These include long-range, low-payload loitering munitions, akin to what Russia and Ukraine have employed since mid-2022. Combined with a small footprint, battery-powered ISR unmanned aerial system, this should allow NSW units to apply significant firepower independently, even without ship-based fire support. Moreover, SOF could employ a cueing system that relies on attritable space-based communications to employ a limited number of stand-off weapons, likely stealth cruise missiles.

Third, the United States will need to develop a battle management system that supports these long-range strikes, especially for battle damage assessment. NSW units can be part of a network for post-strike data collection, but there must be some sort of unidirectional communication link between units and headquarters to provide forces on the ground information about the broader operational situation.

Fourth, the SOF community should reconceptualize at least some of its elements for offensive maneuver. SEAL teams should be assigned geographical mission areas and deploy forward, with perhaps half of NSW’s SEAL teams abroad. The other SOF within Special Operations Command should consider breaking their units into company and platoon-sized ones, akin to the NSW model, and deploying them in a similar fashion.

Geopolitical to Operational

This approach is wholly incompatible with a major power war, as it short-circuits the U.S. strategic apparatus’s ability to coherently grasp the stakes it faces.

usni.org · February 1, 2024

6. One Team. One Fight By Keith Nightingale

Thu, 02/01/2024 - 4:44am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/one-team-one-fight

One Team. One Fight

By Keith Nightingale

56 years ago, I was sitting behind a newly ploughed berm at the Xuan Loc Airfield literally repelling hordes of VC as they attempted to storm the city. I was the senior advisor to the 52d Vietnamese Ranger Bn and had just been introduced to the Tet Offensive.

This morning, half the battalion was sent to relieve the province capital of Baria to our South. The move was suddenly halted as a very excited 18th Div CG directed us to cease movement and dig in at the airfield to hold the vital edge of the town defense. For this event, both elements fought at half strength more than thirty kilometers apart.

By 1300, we were fully engaged. It was one of the very few times, as an advisor, that I actively used my weapon. It would not be the last.

The saga of the 52d in Tet is exemplary by the ferocity of the activity as well as its myriad travels in a truly historic event that changed our history. Unlike the US units, the Rangers were shifted throughout the country as a fire brigade to assist/resolve high priority issues. My tale recounts that journey for one unit but is indicative of what the other Ranger battalions did also.

It was the only event during this tour where absolutely no attempt was made to identify whether or not a unit was US or ARVN when it came to ammo resupply, artillery requests or medevac. It was truly One Team. One Fight. Anybody I called for ammo, arty or resupply did what they could without question.

I can say, in reflection, that this experience with these people was one of the most meaningful events of my life. These troops were truly ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

WINDOWS, WAR AND WONDERING-TET WITH THE 52D BDQ

The window was empty save for the concrete wall that it penetrated. It was about four feet tall and three feet wide. It was designed to provide a wide view from the second floor of an as yet unconstructed hotel in Xuan Loc, Vietnam, the capital of Long Khanh Province. Laying in the middle of the unfinished transom was a VC that had managed to scale the scaffolding from the ground floor. As he charged through the open cement frame, he was hit by M16’s from both myself and the battalion commander’s bodyguard. His momentum carried him halfway across the transom to where he fell. His 12 gauge US-acquired MP shotgun lay underneath him and he bled out along the wall and to the floor where his remaining fluid pooled in a large dark ocher puddle. Other than the moment of engagement, his presence was lost in the distraction of other issues. It was about 0200 1 Feb 1968. The town and the 52d Ranger Battalion had been under siege for two days as had most of South Vietnam.

The overall hotel structure was poured concrete walls and ceilings and nothing else. The building was surrounded by the scaffolding of construction-not the neat symmetrical beams and stanchions of the Western world-but curled limbs and cut trunks of local trees augmented by the occasional thick sawn board. The roof was rough and ringed about with protruding rebar, cement bags and the normal detritus of construction. The interior had a cement second floor and internal room walls but nothing else of a finished nature including electricity or water. This was Fortress Xuan Loc for the 52d Biet Dong Quan at the southeastern side of the overall hastily assembled perimeter.

Earlier, on 30 January, the battalion commander, Nguyen Hiep, had received a directive that Tet was cancelled for the Rangers, Airborne and Marine elements in III Corps. The battalion was to conduct an airlift into Baria to reinforce the province capital and to act as reinforcements with the Australians. That afternoon, the unit moved to the Xuan Loc Airfield and began a shuttle movement south.

Around 1600, awaiting another departure lift, we could hear shots from the area of the Ranger camp east of town. Then Hiep received a radio call from the rear detachment NCO, Sgt Phu, that the hill was under attack by numerous VC but that the Ranger wives and stay behinds were holding their own. Almost simultaneously, Hiep was visited by Col Giai, the 18th Div Commander, and told to stop the lift and deploy to assist in the defense of Xuan Loc. At this point, half the battalion was already in Baria with the deputy, D/U Tot and the senior NCO of the advisory team and would remain there. Hiep immediately deployed his half battalion to secure the airfield itself and the southeastern portion of town with the new hotel as the base. It was facing a large rubber plantation and clear fields of fire were possible along the stately surveyed mature tree rows that reached almost 100 feet in height. He placed mortars behind the berm protecting the airfield and next to the hotel. He placed several .50 cal machine guns we had previously scrounged on the hotel corners aiming into the rubber growth.

Almost immediate, refugees began streaming in from the southeast through the Michelin Rubber plantation. They told the Rangers that a major VC force had occupied the French plantation complex south and east of Xuan Loc and were moving toward the city. Hiep immediately deployed his 1st company and some heavy weapons to the eastern side and placed the 2d company and more heavy weapons to the south defending the main road between Xuan Loc and Blackhorse-the 11th ACR base camp. He established a CP on the second floor of the unfinished hotel and an alternate CP behind a tall berm at the airfield. It was 1800 and we had no contact with the Baria force and would not until we physically joined them several days later.

The hotel dominated the open ground but was almost flush with the rubber plantation. There were less than 50 meters of open grassland between the hotel and the rubber plantation. Using very extended spacing, the Rangers were placed inside the hotel and at the last open ground before the jungle and rubber met the hotel front. Almost immediately, sporadic fire was received from the east as refugees streamed into town.

By dark, serious probes were initiated along the road to Blackhorse, then at the corner where the rubber plantation met the main north-south road and then against the hotel front. It was a test and sensing of defenses more than an all-out assault.

Meanwhile, the heavy battery stationed next to the airfield, ran a landline to our position so we had direct contact with their FDC. This was a Heavy Battery composed of two 175mm and 2 SP 8 inch guns. Prior, we had used them often as they were usually the only artillery that could support Ranger operations as far as we operated outside the 105mm arc’s and into what the artillery called Zone 3 charges-the maximum distance the guns could carry. Though slow in responding and repeating fire, their guns made very big holes and were very welcome.

Almost immediately at sunset on the 1st, the hotel front and the southern highway junction began to take heavy fire. If either portion of the perimeter failed, the VC would have a direct shot to the airfield and the main advisory compound. Hiep had placed a small reserve at the airfield berm and established an alternate CP. This would be our Alamo position facing across the airfield and tied in with the heavy battery.

Soon an ARVN M41 tank arrived in our center and overwatched. Quickly, distinct sounds of bullets ricocheting off the armor could be heard. The turret gunner charged his .50 and the tank slowly retreated to the MACV gate less than 50 meters to our rear.

Around 2300, two Chinooks emerged from the darkness and without any ground assist, roared in and dropped sling loads of ammo between the heavy battery and ourselves. Some Rangers grabbed wooden boxes of small arms ammo while the artillery personnel gathered their bigger bullets. A gift, gratefully received from an unknown benefactor.

Soon after, a platoon of APC’s and ACAV’s roared in from US 5th Mech. They initially established a link with us but were called off to divert to the Xuan Loc market which was under heavy pressure. When they left, they ground off the wire line between the Rangers and the heavy battery-forcing us to use the crowded Command FM for adjustments.

Soon after midnight, very heavy pressure was put against the hotel front. Several machine guns were noted and a quickly superior rate of fire was achieved by the attackers. Hiep asked for all the help he could get and I got on the artillery FDC net. 11th ACR, firing 155MM artillery from Blackhorse, would put in a Time On Target (TOT) by the road intersection which was about to be overrun.

Simultaneously, the heavy battery would conduct a direct lay fire using primer bags only to fire to both sides of the hotel. Within five minutes, all four artillery pieces had laid their barrels at almost parallel to the ground across the berm and just over our head. All four guns fired simultaneously. For a moment, everything was sensory overload with a huge blinding flash and cloud of bright yellow cordite rolling over our position. I could distinctly see one wheeled machine gun and several bodies flung in the air and silhouetted against the light. For a while, the attacks ceased as we regrouped.

During this time, our 81mm mortars continuously fired both illumination and HE. We had “acquired” several trailer loads of ammo from the Aussies and SFC Ponce, our Puerto Rican E7 and mortar expert, had moved to each position and assisted the engagement. These guns had no sights and no aiming stakes. Like the VC, he taught the Rangers to simply aim the barrel with a standard infantry lensatic compass, the charge card in the ammo boxes and a basic map. There seemed to be a preternatural gene for this and the crews became extremely proficient gauging the range and using miniscule adjustments on the traverse and elevation gears. We could use the mortars Danger Close with a high degree of confidence. On this note, several of the LLDB’s (the deserters/POW’s assigned to us for labor) crewed part of the guns and performed superbly.

As the sun rose, an L19 from Xuan Loc, took off and immediately began spotting VC on the outskirts. The pilot called in on the MACV Command frequency and was shifted to my internal Ranger FM net. SFC Ponce took the handset and sat next to the airfield mortar position talking to the gun crews. They quickly began to engage with the pilot making 20 meter adjustments. With minimal lag time, following rounds were on their way exactly where the pilot ordered. He was astounded at both the rapid response and the accuracy. By mid-morning, 5th Cav sent an ACAV and two deuce and a half trucks to our positions off-loading mortar and small arms ammo. All received that night from Long Binh/Bien Hoa and intended for US elements but this was an indiscriminating war and no one asked for receipts.

I walked over to the artillery position for coffee-they always had hot strong coffee. Several of the senior gunners came up to me and asked about the night’s actions. They had never fired those guns at this close a range and could find no reference in their manuals to such an engagement. One NCO actually went out to the location I had spotted the VC machine gun explode and measured the distance, 800 meters from gun to crater-apparently a record. Several troops mentioned that they had never seen the impact of their rounds until last night. Hiep accompanied me and thanked the crews and told us all that the coming night would be worse than previous.

The battery commander, a somewhat more mature officer than his contemporaries, immediately got his Chief of Smoke (senior NCO) and talked about worst case scenarios. The gun crews began to collect all the hooked-nose loading plugs from their projectiles as well as spare powder bags of which there now were plenty. They put these in buckets and boxes next to each gun muzzle. They then took the halved 55 gal barrels used for latrines, emptied them and filled them with diesel putting them next to each gun. One of the NCO’s, a Korea vet, had seen this in a tight situation. Later, this was a very good thing.

It was impossible to sleep though we had all been awake non-stop for more than 48 hours. The sun blasted down on us and there were interminable visits and discussions at all levels as we tried to adjust our lines. Hiep was positive that the coming night would be the final and greatest surge and he was right.

We existed on endless c rat cans of coffee and Pall Mall cigarettes. Hiep had a couple of shots of Johnny Walker Black, his favored libation, to no effect. I lay on my canvas cot behind the airfield berm and stared at the sky listening to the radio chatter and smoking.

We had tried to talk to our other half battalion at Ba Ria but were unsuccessful. SFC Ponce had setup a 292 Antenna but it was about 40 air miles to Ba Ria and a PRC 25 just could not reach. We knew that SFC Robinson was by himself but had no idea what sort of action the unit was in or if there were casualties. We knew from second hand that Ba Ria had been under siege and the Aussies were fully engaged. We had a lost half battalion which weighed on both Hiep and myself.

Hiep took stock of his dwindling Ranger elements and asked for some additional infantry or at least a couple of the ACAV’s. Denied. The 48th Regiment/palace guard was holding the north and west portions of town and the 5th Cav ACAV’s were the final Xuan Loc reserve. Accordingly, Hiep made some adjustments to reinforce the hotel area which he determined the most likely point of attack.

Hiep took out my map and showed me the French housing complex inside the Michelin plantation. He was certain this was the VC headquarters and they would funnel forces from there, along the railroad track and then into Xuan Loc. Subsequent debriefs after the event proved him exactly correct. We developed a series of artillery fires along the route and gave it to both the MACV, Heavy Battery and 11th ACR elements for servicing.

Darkness fell on 2 Feb without incident-initially. About 0100, we were suddenly engaged on both our front lines. Hiep had displaced our CP to the berm by the airfield and we lay behind the fresh red laterite earth under the swaying hissing greenish yellow light of constant illumination. Almost immediately after the first engagement, we came under direct fire. A VC element had worked its way into town and was in a building between the MACV compound and the 18th Division. The position was pouring green tracers between them and directly at our rear. To the front, other VC had penetrated to the open space between our front lines in the south and the airfield and were arrayed in strength to our immediate front just on the other side of the runway-less than 200 yards distance.

Hiep ran down along the few Rangers holding the berm and returned. He said that there was a large force building just across the runway that had infiltrated through and they were probably going to direct assault us as the shortest route to the MACV and 18th ARVN HQ. The VC machine gun to our rear was continuously hammering us forcing the conversation to be held in squatting positions just below the protective dirt as a constant stream of green tracers coursed overhead.

I called the Heavy Battery and said “Get Ready. They are coming.” Immediately I could see the gun crews raise the barrels and shovel nose plugs down them, pushing them down the barrel with a rammer. The spare powder charges were dipped in the diesel and rammed into the breach. The gun crews could see the VC opposite them began to run in a half trot directly toward us firing as they went.

Without my command, all four guns fired and sent a huge ball of flame across our front completely shutting down our vision in a brilliant white flash. The noise was deafening and we could see dozens of silhouetted VC in the flame ball. The noise quickly subsided and all we could hear was some of the firing on the city outskirts. That was the end of the attack but not the war. I lit a cigarette and waited for daylight. Hiep just smiled at me.

At first light, we swept the airfield and in the southeast corner, there was a stack of 32 bodies all melted together with rifles, ammo vests and flesh into a single lumpy crispy critter pile. Xuan Loc held. I went to the MACV Doc and had him give me a sleeping shot. I passed out on his floor and woke 12 hours later. Just in time for the Op order to re-join with the other half of the battalion.

It was now the afternoon of 4 February. The remainder of the 52d Rangers were lined in four man intervals along the same runway we had so recently incinerated. Soon, a flight of ten lift birds came into view, circled the field and did a long sloping turn amidst clouds of red laterite dust and rotated while the Rangers climbed aboard.

Quickly, in a full power lift, we flew through the dust clouds and broke into clear cool air. We crossed the rubber plantation, now showing numerous craters and blasted trees and swung over Ranger Hill following the road to Ba Ria. The Ranger hootches were clearly discernible as were the many trailing scars created by the .50 calibers manned by the wounded and wives. Hiep turned to me and gave me a thumbs up with a broad smile.

I sat back and watched the jungle below and the road that snaked through it-for the first time in a week, actually relaxing. After about 20 minutes of mindless reverie, the birds began to drop power and descend toward a built-up area with multiple columns of smoke rising from many locations. The province chief’s compound came into view and we could see the Aussie APC’s surrounding it and securing our LZ. In less than a minute, we were quickly deposited on the field amidst gouts of burnt grass, dirt and papers.

The earlier-departed lead elements of the 52d had cleared the Province Chief’s compound with the support of the Australian elements. Reunited for the first time in a week, we exchanged quick stories of our events and moved to the roof of the Province Chief’s house, the CP. SFC Robinson had run out when he saw me and expressed great relief on our arrival. He had been very concerned that as the only US in the unit, if he had been wounded, he wouldn’t get into the US evac channels.

On the roof awaiting our arrival, there was a group of mixed uniforms. Several Australians including their commanding general, Brigadier Hughes, the Province Chief, the commander of the Thai Cobra’s (an APC element just deployed from Saigon), our XO Captain Tot and several staff officers from the Australian elements. Hiep and the Province Chief started a very intense but subdued conversation.

Hiep whispered to me that the Province Chief was in charge but that he had left the operations to BG Hughes. Hughes, a strong and forceful man, quickly summarized the situation-most of Ba Ria was still in VC hands-turned to Hiep and I and said- “What should we do now?” I responded that we would do whatever he wished but we needed a bit to re-organize ourselves. He then said- “I am not going to take the lead here. This is a Vietnamese issue. I will do whatever you collectively wish but we will follow your lead.” The Province Chief was clearly deferential to Hiep who then turned to Tot and had an extended conversation. Everyone sat down, took out cigarettes and an Aussie batman passed around a large pot of boiled tea. Even on a hot day, that tea was welcome.

Hiep had a conference with the Thai commander and Tot. He then took the map and suggested a plan based on simplicity. The Aussies would cover both flanks of the town and the Thais would block the rear along the main Vung Tau-Saigon highway. The Rangers, reinforced with a local force company that had been guarding the perimeter, would begin clearing Ba Ria North to South. Begin in one hour.

The Aussies said they would provide artillery and a liaison to Hiep’s CP. The liaison proved to be BG Hughes and a LTC as well as several batmen who immediately began setting up a primus stove to heat tea. I began to arrange tactical air which was acknowledged by Bien Hoa Control directly down on my frequency-highly unusual and indicative of the gravity of the situation as Saigon saw it. When the FAC announced that the first set of A1E Skyraiders were overhead, Hiep asked me to initiate the artillery and call in the close air support. It worked like a Hollywood script.

The Aussie 105’s saturated the hilly section of the town where the VC had dug in. The A1E’s came in at less than 100 feet, did a wing wave over us and loosed a ripple of napalm canisters. They ignited and even in the CP we could feel the heat wave. Without orders, the Rangers, patiently waiting in prone positions, rose up and moved forward. Silent and with occasional shots and hurried movements as they discerned enemy positions, they began to coalesce toward the higher ground. The Aussie tracks joined in with continuous .50 caliber fire to their front as if the action had been previously rehearsed. Uncommon languages in common cause.

I asked the Rangers to mark their forward position with smoke which they did. The A1E’s continued to pickle their ordnance in advance and then swept low and slow to engage with their guns. Hiep and I now moved forward and took a center position. The last several hundred yards were on a rocky hill mass. The closeness of the combat was such that the artillery and air had to be suspended as the Rangers methodically rooted out the holdouts from their rocky shelters. It was close, brutal work primarily done with grenades and point blank encounters. By 1600, the ground was clear. The Aussies and Thais formed a concentric ring around the area. Gen Hughes offered us a healthy draft of his rum ration which Hiep and I both took with a reciprocal passage of Hiep’s precious Johnny Walker supply. We had just received orders to form the unit on an LZ for a morning pickup to our next assignment-assist in the relief of Saigon by Fifth and Third Ranger Group’s.

With zero assistance through the Ranger system for the basics of life, I went to the Aussies and asked them for whatever spare ammo they had-primarily .50 caliber and mortar ammo. This was promptly supplied and the brigadier sent me a case of their ration packs as a personal gift delivered by his batman. I particularly relished the tea and sugar packets. Canned Irish stew with biscuits and jam were greedily devoured assisted by a large tea glass of 33 and ice.

A 9th Div helicopter dropped in and deposited the ADC (O), BG Roseboro, a red-haired fireplug of energy. He asked me what we needed and I said ammo and chow. Without hesitation, he told his aide to call it in. Within an hour we had two pallets of C rations as well as several pallets of mixed ammunition- especially prized were the LAW rockets and grenades as we knew we were in for close urban warfare and were glaringly unequipped for the situation.

During these events, Hiep had called back to Xuan Loc and arranged for all the unit vehicles to transit to us. The road was now cleared by the 11th ACR and they joined us by late afternoon. Hiep then ordered a major modification of the trucks.

The deuce and a half’s were double-sandbagged on the rear floor and our scrounged 81 mortars emplaced on top. One truck was double floored with sand filled ammo crates, then double sandbagged and a 4.2 mortar emplaced.

The ¾ ton trucks were outfitted with a combination of .50 calibers mounted on pintles fabricated by the local downtown BaRia motocyclo repair garage and sandbagged hoods and dashboards now employing .50’s on tripods. Once completed, he ordered the entire assemblage to move to Tan Son Nhut to meet us on arrival.

Promptly at first light, a seemingly endless string of US and ARVN Chinooks descended and loaded the Rangers on board, pulled pitch and headed for the short ride to Tan Son Nhut. It was 8 February. We had minimal to no guidance as to what to do when we landed. A representative from the Ranger group would meet us with orders.

The birds deposited us amidst constantly landing and exiting fighter aircraft near the rear gate, away from the main terminal. It was completely open with no shade and Hiep ordered us over local MP objection to the closest shaded area, troop billets and supply sheds. Shortly, we were joined by the vehicles which had been denied entrance and had to laager outside the main gate-viewed as much as potential enemies as allies.

While we were assembling, the Ranger Group commander arrived. He had a very sketchy sense of the situation and even less mission definition. We were to move out of the back gate and head toward Cholon clearing as we went. How far? How wide? How fast? Who with? Who is in front, rear, flank? No input. Just report as we progress. There were US and ARVN elements fighting in the vicinity of the Y bridge and Phu Tho racetrack. We would sort it out as we progressed.

Hiep called in the company commander’s and outlined a very simple plan. He drew flank boundaries one block wide outside the main street exiting the gate. We would form in two columns with each column moving at equal speed forward, clearing as we went. The gun trucks would intersperse with each platoon. As soon as a building was cleared, each element would put a platoon on the roofs with a .50 and cover every advance. We would work as slowly as necessary. There was no objective stated and no rush to go there.

As soon as we crossed the gate, we began to receive continuous sniper fire. It was from both sides of the street and further down to distant intersections. The fire was well-hidden and displayed a sense of positioning developed over time. This area had been occupied for more than a week without opposition and the tenants were well entrenched. By the time we swept the first block, fire became increasingly intense. It was now a methodical clearing operation with half the units on the roofs and the other half of the two columns clearing the rooms. Only the occasional soldier would expose himself on the street with usually poor results. Streets and blocks with a plethora of windows, alleys, heights, balconies and angles create a mortal geometry that mitigates against any random exposure.

Civilians were sparse and they were uniformly old people or women with small children. It was clear that the bulk of the population had fled. By late in the afternoon, we had progressed for two blocks and the resistance was clearly stiffening. We now began to receive B40 rounds fired from deep within houses through open windows. Several machine guns were rooted out at ground level where they had been emplaced inside the doorwell and setback from the sill to sweep the street.

The primary weapons now used were the 57 recoilless, the Law rockets and the M79’s-just recently acquired and scrounged. The .50’s did excellent service from the rooftops chewing up the masonry and clearing empty windows and door openings. The mounted guns on the ¾’s would take an oblique to a street corner and reach around to sweep at ground level. The truck-based 81’s were firing constantly against the roofs and streets less than 200 meters from the advancing elements. It was slow, grinding, ponderous work that extracted a continuous price from both sides.

Hiep’s fortuitous planning on configuring our vehicles with mortars and machine guns came to the fore. All my entreaties for air or artillery were consistently being denied. Even though the houses were largely devoid of citizens and harbored dug in VC, we had to clear them on a face to face basis.

Our casualties began to mount. Some dead, a lot more wounded. In some cases, superficial. In other cases, not so. The VC dead we pulled out of their holes and corners and left them stacked on the street for follow-up clearance. Hiep had a rigid system of triage where himself or the XO would gauge the severity of the wound and direct the soldier back to his position or approve vehicular evacuation back to Tan Son Nhut.

To supplement our dwindling forces. Hiep sent out screening troops to grab any military age males they could find in the rear or were trying to filter back to the airfield. In some cases, these were officers and in others enlisted. They were all in Saigon for the holiday and were now trying to avoid either combat or return to their units. Hiep allowed neither option as he would assign these impressed troops to whichever element was most needy. Not popular but effective.

By Day Four of this grinding, the gloves came off and artillery and close air was allowed in the city. By now, we had closed to within a few blocks of Cholon and I could see the Y Bridge from my rooftop CP. Abruptly, we were ordered to re-assemble and pull out. We were ordered to move to Bien Hoa and assist the Ranger Group in clearing the III Corps HQ.

Just prior to our withdrawal, the 1st Company commander grabbed Hiep and I and took us down an alleyway they had just cleared. This was a narrow opening between cramped structures and littered with expended cartridges, machine gun links and the other detritus of war. Toward the end of the lane, we saw a stack of bodies. They were women and children of all ages. They had been freshly executed just moments before the company had cleared the area.

This was an area predominately populated by government middle class civil service workers and military. The VC had rounded them up over the course of the week and held them until they had to depart and then wreaked a last moment revenge. Hiep just bit his lip, turned around and ordered a continuation of the sweeps.

Once withdrawn, we were met with ARVN deuce and half’s, supplemented by our own, and moved swiftly to Bien Hoa. Again, we received the same minimal set of orders-Get out. Sweep through here. More to follow. Maybe.

By now, the battalion was inured to the environment and set about its task. Now reinforced by additional Rangers from Xuan Loc and other battalions that were returning from the holidays, we continued the grind. This time, no quarter and full available fire support assets.

I had at my call US 8”, 155’s from an 11th Cav element and 105’s from Long Binh and elsewhere. This clearing operation was a face saving sweep by all available forces-US and Vietnamese.

I used artillery within a city block of our forces in a World War One Hueter rolling barrage. Tac air was liberally applied to the buildings just across the street and cobra gunships kept the roofs in front cleared.

I obtained VS 17 panels from the Cav and had them with the lead companies as they cleared buildings and gained the roofs. Several FAC’s overhead constantly controlled the myriad players with minimal friendly fire. Destruction was the end result as the enemy had dug in over several weeks and refused to exit when pressed even though we were careful to allow an escape route.

The ugly, brutal, room by room, building by building, street by destroyed street progressed through the week. By 18 February, Bien Hoa was cleared and we laagered with elements of the 11th Cav and 9th ID in a wooded area just west of the prison compound

The Vietnamese Rangers enjoyed an Allied chow line with pork steak, mashed potatoes and gravy. I reveled in strong hot coffee.

There we took ample advantage of the US largesse and acquired all the ammo and grenades we could carry as well as additional M16’s and M60’s which were largely available just for the asking. We knew when we returned to full ARVN control, the pickings would be slim.

We conducted Joint sweep and clear operations to the west near the VC POW compound until 25 Feb when we were detached and moved to a bend in the Dong Ngai River to the North. A 18th Div location manned by its 48th Regiment. Tet was over but not the war. There were thousands of windows left to clear.

About the Author(s)

Keith Nightingale

COL Nightingale is a retired Army Colonel who served two tours in Vietnam with Airborne and Ranger (American and Vietnamese) units. He commanded airborne battalions in both the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 82nd Airborne Division. He later commanded both the 1/75th Rangers and the 1st Ranger Training Brigade.

7. U.S. irregular warfare experts to brief industry next month on enabling technologies for counter-terrorism

The old TTSO did a good job with its rebranding to the U.S. Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate (IWTSD) and keeping it relevant.

U.S. irregular warfare experts to brief industry next month on enabling technologies for counter-terrorism

militaryaerospace.com · by John Keller

WASHINGTON – U.S. military irregular warfare experts will brief industry next month on plans to develop enabling technologies for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives; surveillance collection; explosive ordnance disposal and other irregular warfare applications.

Officials of the Navy Engineering Logistics Office in Washington will conduct industry day briefings from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on 5 March 2024 at the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center in Alexandria, Va.

Briefings on irregular warfare enabling technology development will involve advanced analytics; chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives; explosive ordnance disposal and explosive operations; human performance and training; indirect influence and competition; protection, survivability, and recovery; surveillance, collection and operations support; and tactical offensive support.

Briefings will support the U.S. Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate (IWTSD) of the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict.

Irregular warfare is a struggle among state and non-state actors to influence populations using indirect and asymmetric approaches to erode an adversary's power, influence, and will.

Irregular warfare involves unconventional warfare such as counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, and involves information support; cyber security; cyber warfare; countering enemy networks; counter-threat finance; civil-military operations; and security cooperation.

Officials of the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate will release their annual broad agency announcement in late March 2024, and potential bidders have one opportunity to discuss requirements and ask questions in person at this industry day.

The Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate will conduct briefings will help companies work with IWTSD program staff about upcoming requirements, and clarify and refine requirements for the final broad agency announcement. Briefings will have morning and afternoon sessions.

Companies interested in attending the briefings should register online no later than 29 Feb. 2024 online at https://events.cttso.gov/2024%20Industry%20Day/Contact/Register.

More information is online at https://www.iwtsd.gov/industryday.html, and at https://sam.gov/opp/c1cec543ff3e441cb6004edbb77285ea/view.

militaryaerospace.com · by John Keller

8. Countering Disinformation Effectively: An Evidence-Based Policy Guide

The 130 page PDF can be downloaded here: https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Carnegie_Countering_Disinformation_Effectively.pdf

A useful summary below.

Countering Disinformation Effectively: An Evidence-Based Policy Guide

carnegieendowment.org · by Jon Bateman, Dean Jackson

Summary

Disinformation is widely seen as a pressing challenge for democracies worldwide. Many policymakers are grasping for quick, effective ways to dissuade people from adopting and spreading false beliefs that degrade democratic discourse and can inspire violent or dangerous actions. Yet disinformation has proven difficult to define, understand, and measure, let alone address.

Even when leaders know what they want to achieve in countering disinformation, they struggle to make an impact and often don’t realize how little is known about the effectiveness of policies commonly recommended by experts. Policymakers also sometimes fixate on a few pieces of the disinformation puzzle—including novel technologies like social media and artificial intelligence (AI)—without considering the full range of possible responses in realms such as education, journalism, and political institutions.

This report offers a high-level, evidence-informed guide to some of the major proposals for how democratic governments, platforms, and others can counter disinformation. It distills core insights from empirical research and real-world data on ten diverse kinds of policy interventions, including fact-checking, foreign sanctions, algorithmic adjustments, and counter-messaging campaigns. For each case study, we aim to give policymakers an informed sense of the prospects for success—bridging the gap between the mostly meager scientific understanding and the perceived need to act. This means answering three core questions: How much is known about an intervention? How effective does the intervention seem, given current knowledge? And how easy is it to implement at scale?

Overall Findings

There is no silver bullet or “best” policy option. None of the interventions considered in this report were simultaneously well-studied, very effective, and easy to scale. Rather, the utility of most interventions seems quite uncertain and likely depends on myriad factors that researchers have barely begun to probe. For example, the precise wording and presentation of social media labels and fact-checks can matter a lot, while counter-messaging campaigns depend on a delicate match of receptive audiences with credible speakers. Bold claims that any one policy is the singular, urgent solution to disinformation should be treated with caution.
Policymakers should set realistic expectations. Disinformation is a chronic historical phenomenon with deep roots in complex social, political, and economic structures. It can be seen as jointly driven by forces of supply and demand. On the supply side, there are powerful political and commercial incentives for some actors to engage in, encourage, or tolerate deception, while on the demand side, psychological needs often draw people into believing false narratives. Credible options exist to curb both supply and demand, but technocratic solutionism still has serious limits against disinformation. Finite resources, knowledge, political will, legal authority, and civic trust constrain what is possible, at least in the near- to medium-term.
Democracies should adopt a portfolio approach to manage uncertainty. Policymakers should act like investors, pursuing a diversified mixture of counter-disinformation efforts while learning and rebalancing over time. A healthy policy portfolio would include tactical actions that appear well-researched or effective (like fact-checking and labeling social media content). But it would also involve costlier, longer-term bets on promising structural reforms (like supporting local journalism and media literacy). Each policy should come with a concrete plan for ongoing reassessment.
Long-term, structural reforms deserve more attention. Although many different counter-disinformation policies are being implemented in democracies, outsized attention goes to the most tangible, immediate, and visible actions. For example, platforms, governments, and researchers routinely make headlines for announcing the discovery or disruption of foreign and other inauthentic online networks. Yet such actions, while helpful, usually have narrow impacts. In comparison, more ambitious but slower-moving efforts to revive local journalism and improve media literacy (among other possibilities) receive less notice despite encouraging research on their prospects.
Platforms and tech cannot be the sole focus. Research suggests that social media platforms help to fuel disinformation in various ways—for example, through recommendation algorithms that encourage and amplify misleading content. Yet digital platforms exist alongside, and interact with, many other online and offline forces. The rhetoric of political elites, programming on traditional media sources like TV, and narratives circulating among trusted community members are all highly influential in shaping people’s speech, beliefs, and behaviors. At the same time, the growing number of digital platforms dilutes the effectiveness of actions by any single company to counter disinformation. Given this interplay of many voices and amplifiers, effective policy will involve complementary actions in multiple spheres.
Countering disinformation is not always apolitical. Those working to reduce the spread and impact of disinformation often see themselves as disinterested experts and technocrats—operating above the fray of political debate, neither seeking nor exercising political power. Indeed, activities like removing inauthentic social media assets are more or less politically neutral. But other efforts, such as counter-messaging campaigns that use storytelling or emotional appeals to compete with false ideas at a narrative and psychological level, can be hard to distinguish from traditional political advocacy. Ultimately, any institutional effort to declare what is true and what is false—and to back such declarations with power, resources, or prestige—implies some claim of authority and therefore can be seen as having political meaning (and consequences). Denying this reality risks encouraging overreach, or inviting blowback, which deepens distrust.
Research gaps are pervasive. The relatively robust study of fact-checking offers clues about the possibilities and the limits of future research on other countermeasures. On the one hand, dedicated effort has enabled researchers to validate fact-checking as a generally useful tool. Policymakers can have some confidence that fact-checking is worthy of investment. On the other hand, researchers have learned that fact-checking’s efficacy can vary a lot depending on a host of highly contextual, poorly understood factors. Moreover, numerous knowledge gaps and methodological biases remain even after hundreds of published studies on fact-checking. Because fact-checking represents the high-water mark of current knowledge about counter-disinformation measures, it can be expected that other measures will likewise require sustained research over long periods—from fundamental theory to highly applied studies.
Research is a generational task with uncertain outcomes. The knowledge gaps highlighted in this report can serve as a road map for future research. Filling these gaps will take more than commissioning individual studies; major investments in foundational research infrastructure, such as human capital, data access, and technology, are needed. That said, social science progresses slowly, and it rarely yields definite answers to the most vexing current questions. Take economics, for example: a hundred years of research has helped Western policymakers curb (though not eliminate) depressions, recessions, and panics—yet economists still debate great questions of taxes and trade and are reckoning only belatedly with catastrophic climate risks. The mixed record of economics offers a sobering benchmark for the study of disinformation, which is a far less mature and robust field.
Generative AI will have complex effects but might not be a game changer. Rapid AI advances could soon make it much easier and cheaper to create realistic and/or personalized false content. Even so, the net impact on society remains unclear. Studies suggest that people’s willingness to believe false (or true) information is often not primarily driven by the content’s level of realism. Rather, other factors such as repetition, narrative appeal, perceived authority, group identification, and the viewer’s state of mind can matter more. Meanwhile, studies of microtargeted ads—already highly data-driven and automated—cast doubt on the notion that personalized messages are uniquely compelling. Generative AI can also be used to counter disinformation, not just foment it. For example, well-designed and human-supervised AI systems may help fact-checkers work more quickly. While the long-term impact of generative AI remains unknown, it’s clear that disinformation is a complex psychosocial phenomenon and is rarely reducible to any one technology.

Case Study Summaries

Supporting Local Journalism. There is strong evidence that the decline of local news outlets, particularly newspapers, has eroded civic engagement, knowledge, and trust—helping disinformation to proliferate. Bolstering local journalism could plausibly help to arrest or reverse such trends, but this has not been directly tested. Cost is a major challenge, given the expense of quality journalism and the depth of the industry’s financial decline. Philanthropy can provide targeted support, such as seed money for experimentation. But a long-term solution would probably require government intervention and/or alternate business models. This could include direct subsidies (channeled through nongovernmental intermediaries) or indirect measures, such as tax exemptions and bargaining rights.
Media Literacy Education. There is significant evidence that media literacy training can help people identify false stories and unreliable news sources. However, variation in pedagogical approaches means the effectiveness of one program does not necessarily imply the effectiveness of another. The most successful variants empower motivated individuals to take control of their media consumption and seek out high-quality information—instilling confidence and a sense of responsibility alongside skills development. While media literacy training shows promise, it suffers challenges in speed, scale, and targeting. Reaching large numbers of people, including those most susceptible to disinformation, is expensive and takes many years.
Fact-Checking. A large body of research indicates that fact-checking can be an effective way to correct false beliefs about specific claims, especially for audiences that are not heavily invested in the partisan elements of the claims. However, influencing factual beliefs does not necessarily result in attitudinal or behavioral changes, such as reduced support for a deceitful politician or a baseless policy proposal. Moreover, the efficacy of fact-checking depends a great deal on contextual factors—such as wording, presentation, and source—that are not well understood. Even so, fact-checking seems unlikely to cause a backfire effect that leads people to double down on false beliefs. Fact-checkers face a structural disadvantage in that false claims can be created more cheaply and disseminated more quickly than corrective information; conceivably, technological innovations could help shift this balance.
Labeling Social Media Content. There is a good body of evidence that labeling false or untrustworthy content with additional context can make users less likely to believe and share it. Large, assertive, and disruptive labels are the most effective, while cautious and generic labels often do not work. Reminders that nudge users to consider accuracy before resharing show promise, as do efforts to label news outlets with credibility scores. Different audiences may react differently to labels, and there are risks that remain poorly understood: labels can sometimes cause users to become either overly credulous or overly skeptical of unlabeled content, for example. Major social media platforms have embraced labels to a large degree, but further scale-up may require better information-sharing or new technologies that combine human judgment with algorithmic efficiency.
Counter-messaging Strategies. There is strong evidence that truthful communications campaigns designed to engage people on a narrative and psychological level are more effective than facts alone. By targeting the deeper feelings and ideas that make false claims appealing, counter-messaging strategies have the potential to impact harder-to-reach audiences. Yet success depends on the complex interplay of many inscrutable factors. The best campaigns use careful audience analysis to select the most resonant messengers, mediums, themes, and styles—but this is a costly process whose success is hard to measure. Promising techniques include communicating respect and empathy, appealing to prosocial values, and giving the audience a sense of agency.
Cybersecurity for Elections and Campaigns. There is good reason to think that campaign- and election-related cybersecurity can be significantly improved, which would prevent some hack-and-leak operations and fear-inducing breaches of election systems. The cybersecurity field has come to a strong consensus on certain basic practices, many of which remain unimplemented by campaigns and election administrators. Better cybersecurity would be particularly helpful in preventing hack-and-leaks, though candidates will struggle to prioritize cybersecurity given the practical imperatives of campaigning. Election systems themselves can be made substantially more secure at a reasonable cost. However, there is still no guarantee that the public would perceive such systems as secure in the face of rhetorical attacks by losing candidates.
Statecraft, Deterrence, and Disruption. Cyber operations targeting foreign influence actors can temporarily frustrate specific foreign operations during sensitive periods, such as elections, but any long-term effect is likely marginal. There is little evidence to show that cyber operations, sanctions, or indictments have achieved strategic deterrence, though some foreign individuals and contract firms may be partially deterrable. Bans on foreign platforms and state media outlets have strong first-order effects (reducing access to them); their second-order consequences include retaliation against democratic media by the targeted state. All in all, the most potent tool of statecraft may be national leaders’ preemptive efforts to educate the public. Yet in democracies around the world, domestic disinformation is far more prolific and influential than foreign influence operations.
Removing Inauthentic Asset Networks. The detection and removal from platforms of accounts or pages that misrepresent themselves has obvious merit, but its effectiveness is difficult to assess. Fragmentary data—such as unverified company statements, draft platform studies, and U.S. intelligence—suggest that continuous takedowns might be capable of reducing the influence of inauthentic networks and imposing some costs on perpetrators. However, few platforms even claim to have achieved this, and the investments required are considerable. Meanwhile, the threat posed by inauthentic asset networks remains unclear: a handful of empirical studies suggest that such networks, and social media influence operations more generally, may not be very effective at spreading disinformation. These early findings imply that platform takedowns may receive undue attention in public and policymaking discourse.
Reducing Data Collection and Targeted Ads. Data privacy protections can be used to reduce the impact of microtargeting, or data-driven personalized messages, as a tool of disinformation. However, nascent scholarship suggests that microtargeting—while modestly effective in political persuasion—falls far short of the manipulative powers often ascribed to it. To the extent that microtargeting works, privacy protections seem to measurably undercut its effectiveness. But this carries high economic costs—not only for tech and ad companies, but also for small and medium businesses that rely on digital advertising. Additionally, efforts to blunt microtargeting can raise the costs of political activity in general, especially for activists and minority groups who lack access to other communication channels.
Changing Recommendation Algorithms. Although platforms are neither the sole sources of disinformation nor the main causes of political polarization, there is strong evidence that social media algorithms intensify and entrench these off-platform dynamics. Algorithmic changes therefore have the potential to ameliorate the problem; however, this has not been directly studied by independent researchers, and the market viability of such changes is uncertain. Major platforms’ optimizing for something other than engagement would undercut the core business model that enabled them to reach their current size. Users could opt in to healthier algorithms via middleware or civically minded alternative platforms, but most people probably would not. Additionally, algorithms are blunt and opaque tools: using them to curb disinformation would also suppress some legitimate content.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank William Adler, Dan Baer, Albin Birger, Kelly Born, Jessica Brandt, David Broniatowski, Monica Bulger, Ciaran Cartmell, Mike Caulfield, Tímea Červeňová, Rama Elluru, Steven Feldstein, Beth Goldberg, Stephanie Hankey, Justin Hendrix, Vishnu Kannan, Jennifer Kavanagh, Rachel Kleinfeld, Samantha Lai, Laura Livingston, Peter Mattis, Tamar Mitts, Brendan Nyhan, George Perkovich, Martin Riedl, Ronald Robertson, Emily Roseman, Jen Rosiere Reynolds, Zeve Sanderson, Bret Schafer, Leah Selig Chauhan, Laura Smillie, Rory Smith, Victoria Smith, Kate Starbird, Josh Stearns, Gerald Torres, Meaghan Waff, Alicia Wanless, Laura Waters, Gavin Wilde, Kamya Yadav, and others for their valuable feedback and insights. Additional thanks to Joshua Sullivan for research assistance and to Alie Brase, Lindsay Maizland, Anjuli Das, Jocelyn Soly, Amy Mellon, and Jessica Katz for publications support. The final report reflects the views of the authors only. This research was supported by a grant from the Special Competitive Studies Project.

About the Authors

Jon Bateman is a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research areas include disinformation, cyber operations, artificial intelligence, and techno-nationalism. Bateman previously was special assistant to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., serving as a speechwriter and the lead strategic analyst in the chairman’s internal think tank. He has also helped craft policy for military cyber operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and was a senior intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he led teams responsible for assessing Iran’s internal stability, senior-level decisionmaking, and cyber activities. Bateman is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Johns Hopkins University.

Dean Jackson is principal of Public Circle Research & Consulting and a specialist in democracy, media, and technology. In 2023, he was named an inaugural Tech Policy Press reporting fellow and an affiliate fellow with the Propaganda Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously, he was an investigative analyst with the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and project manager of the Influence Operations Researchers’ Guild at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2013 to 2021, Jackson managed research and program coordination activities related to media and technology at the National Endowment for Democracy. He holds an MA in international relations from the University of Chicago and a BA in political science from Wright State University in Dayton, OH.

Notes

1 The cells of this table are color coded: green suggests the most positive assessment for each factor, while red is the least positive and yellow is in between. These overall ratings are a combination of various subfactors, which may be in tension: for example, an intervention can be highly effective but only for a short time or with high risk of second-order consequences.

A green cell means an intervention is well studied, likely to be effective, or easy to implement. For the first column, this means there is a large body of literature on the topic. While it may not conclusively answer every relevant question, it provides strong indicators of effectiveness, cost, and related factors. For the second column, a green cell suggests that an intervention can be highly effective at addressing the problem in a lasting way at a relatively low level of risk. For the third column, a green cell means that the intervention can quickly make a large impact at relatively low cost and without major obstacles to successful implementation.

A yellow cell indicates an intervention is less well studied (there is relevant literature but major questions about efficacy are unanswered or significantly underexplored), less efficacious (its impact is noteworthy but limited in size or duration, or it carries some risk of blowback), or faces nonnegligible hurdles to implementation, such as cost, technical barriers, or political opposition.

A red cell indicates that an intervention is poorly understood, with little literature offering guidance on key questions; that it is low impact, has only narrow use cases, or has significant second-order consequences; or that it requires an especially high investment of resources or political capital to implement or scale.

carnegieendowment.org · by Jon Bateman, Dean Jackson

9. The Human Cost of Failed Deterrence

We can have all the great recruiting commercials and slogans and ebenefits but if they are contradicted by our actual actions or non-actions we will not be able to positively influence prospective recruits.

The Human Cost of Failed Deterrence

Fewer Americans may enlist in the military if the Commander in Chief won’t stop assaults on their bases and ships.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-biden-deterrence-iran-pentagon-three-americans-killed-breonna-moffett-william-rivers-kennedy-sanders-cd4a0357?utm

By The Editorial Board

Jan. 30, 2024 6:36 pm ET

President Joe Biden PHOTO: JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The White House released a photo of President Biden in the Situation Room on Monday, portraying him as large and in charge of a response to the murders of three Americans on Sunday. That’s a nice PR image, but does Mr. Biden realize what a corrosive effect his deterrence failures are having on U.S. public and military morale?

The Pentagon on Monday identified the Americans killed in the Sunday drone attack on a U.S base in Jordan: Sgt. William Rivers, Spc. Kennedy Sanders, and Spc. Breonna Moffett. All hailed from Georgia and ranged in age from 23 to 46. They were killed when a drone eluded the base defenses and hit the container unit that serves as base housing.

Iranian proxy forces have attacked U.S. forces 165 times in the Middle East since Oct. 17. At least 80 Americans have been wounded. If this keeps up, more of the public will wonder why any Americans should be based overseas if the Commander in Chief won’t protect them.

Some 66% of voters in a Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute poll late last year said they support maintaining “military bases around the world to deter attacks and respond quickly if something happens.” But Mr. Biden is neither deterring attacks nor responding quickly.

His failure so far to protect U.S. troops may inflame public suspicion that Americans are dying for little discernible reason in the Middle East. It’s a gift to Donald Trump and a growing left-right isolationism that wonders why Americans should be deterring rogue states. This is dangerous as global threats grow worse—from Europe to the Middle East to the Korean peninsula.

Don’t be surprised if these American casualties also compound America’s worst crisis in military recruiting since the Vietnam War. The Army is some 10,000 enlistees short of its recruitment target. The Navy will accept some recruits who lack even a high school diploma. But who wants to sign up—or encourage a daughter or boyfriend—to be Houthi target practice on a U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea? Or spend months on the receiving end of Iranian drones because Washington won’t deter the enemy?

Mr. Biden on Sunday honored the fallen soldiers as “unwavering in their bravery,” and every modern Commander in Chief has carried the heavy burden of U.S. casualties abroad. But as retired Marine Gen. John Kelly put it in a 2015 speech, what every Gold Star family quietly asks is: Was it worth it?

America has for 50 years relied on volunteers who answered that question, who decided that the dangers were worth the cause of defending their country. America will be in dire straits if it runs out of these men and women, and that is one under-appreciated risk of Mr. Biden’s failure to deter our enemies.

WSJ Opinion: Choosing a President in a World of Enemies

U.S. Support for Ukraine Lacks Intellectual Rigor

By James Van de Velde

February 01, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/01/us_support_for_ukraine_lacks_intellectual_rigor_1008870.html?mc_cid=b61a7f805c&mc_eid=70bf478f36

War Aims Remain Unclear

Sleepwalking into modern conflict is never a good strategy. The Biden Administration remains rather vague as to what end state specifically the Ukrainians are fighting for. At the moment, the United States claims the war goal is the ejection of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory taken since February 2022. There might be good reasons for the Administration to avoid proscribing any other end-state goals for the war in Ukraine or to identify acceptable bargains, such as preserving the flexibility of securing an interim ceasefire to allow a subsequent peaceful return of Ukrainian territory with a post-Putin Russia. The problem is that Ukraine may run out of weapons or men by then.

Since neither Kyiv nor Moscow is likely to be overrun, the conflict (or at least the fighting) is likely to end with both governments in power. Therefore, expecting either side to be vanquished and their government deposed by a foreign military is unlikely. The current situation begs the question, ‘Does the Biden Administration want Ukraine to win, or just for Putin to lose? And what does either mean? What, in short, is the wartime end state goal beyond Russia out of territory acquired since February 2022?’ The President is at risk of ‘losing’ the war if he cannot define what winning is.

To date, the U.S. and NATO’s Ukraine war strategy has achieved some good things: revealed the corruption of the Russian polity; proved once again that authoritarian regimes are incompatible with Western liberal democracies; demonstrated NATO defense technology and superiority of joint warfare; exposed China as hostile to Western liberal democratic values and amenable to violence to achieve political ends; revealed Iran (and North Korea) as an implacable enemy; created (a few) divisions within the Russian populace; and weakened the Russian military.

However, since the United States is a party to this conflict, it makes sense to apply the fundamentals of conflict to perceive of and move toward a coherent end. That is where most analysis simply evaporates. And that is where the Administration seems stymied or indifferent (or purposefully quiet).

Here are the fundamentals of conflict:

Conceive a desired political end (war termination).
Have a clear military objective and a sense of superior diplomatic/informational legitimacy.
Coordinate diplomatic and military moves.
Confine military moves to clear demonstrations of resolve and clear objectives.
Identify acceptable bargains and pursue them.

How many of these fundamentals have been answered by the Administration? What is the war goal for the Biden Administration, for instance? U.S. policy is, ostensibly, ‘victory,’ interpreted as ‘Russian forces must withdraw from all of Ukraine.’ But then what? Reparations? Return of all Ukrainian citizens the Russians have taken hostage into Russian territory? Ukraine joins NATO? War crime tribunals for Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, as well as individual killings? Putin indicted by the International Criminal Court? Putin travels internationally again as before (or is arrested in a third country)? And what about Russian forces on the border, poised to return to fighting?

The Biden Administration seems to have had originally an unstated war aim of getting the Putin regime to fall to a nominally more liberal democratic regime. But it has never stated this explicitly. And if so, this unstated goal seems to have evaporated.

Most private analysts make only surface-level observations about the war and offer no vision:

Defeating the Russians will be hard
Escalating the conflict is dangerous
A frozen, prolonged conflict is likely
The West may not have much of a choice but to work with Putin and his regime again

The Biden Administration wants to win through slow attrition – as long as Putin is not threatened with a humiliating defeat. There is an obvious contradiction here. This has encouraged a strategy of providing weapons to shoot attacking and occupying Russian forces but nothing beyond that seems clear. The strategy of the United States seems to be to supply weapons to the Ukrainians to shoot occupying Russian forces to attrit so many Russian soldiers that Russia withdraws from Ukraine out of exhaustion. (But then what? What about reparations? Ukrainian children held hostage by Russia? What to do about war crimes?) The Russian strategy seems to be to attrit enough Ukrainian soldiers that the country’s defenses will weaken and surrender parts of Ukraine to Russian occupation out of exhaustion.

Both sides are pursuing the same strategy, which may be (also) the overarching U.S. strategy. That is what happened in Afghanistan – the U.S.-backed government held the cities, and the Taliban held the countryside. The two sides then waited each other out. The U.S. eventually gave in (and gave up!) to that mutual strategy of attrition. (In such cases, historically, liberal democracies tend to give up first; autocracies can demand more sacrifice and tolerate more loss and ambiguity from their people.)

The danger here is that the United States and Ukraine will eventually lose or give up – principally because they cannot envision or seize ‘victory’ and the American people will become impatient with an Administration that cannot achieve or conceive of victory or a ceasefire. That would be a disaster: spend billions of dollars and achieve no coherent goal. In short, current strategy lacks a coherent, explicit ‘theory of victory.’

The U.S. Administration seemed to expect internal dissidence inside Russia to produce some sort of coup or political change or war compromise. Yet modern authoritarianism is extremely tenacious, using the surveillance state (cyberspace) to monitor and quash any hint of political opposition before it has any chance of organization. Putin has been able to appeal to traditional Russian fears of invasion to defend his aggression and control the information narrative inside Russia. His popularity has risen in Russia.

Political change is likely to happen in Russia only when Russians feel the military sacrifice and economic sanctions touch them directly and Russians conclude that Putin is not strengthening Russia. More specifically for authoritarian Russia, internal regime change (by Russians) will occur only when Putin is viewed as having severely weakened Russia and thereby threatened the internal security service of its wealth, privilege, and status.

Yet the Biden Administration has not seemed to have developed an information operations campaign to frame the war correctly (e.g., ‘the Ukraine invasion has weakened Russia and made Russians more vulnerable’). Nor is it framing Chinese Chairman Xi’s support for naked aggression as evidence of his opportunistic hostility toward the rule of law. Further, at present, Putin seems more emotionally committed to victory than does President Biden. That is also a problem since victors are usually those more committed.

The Russian military and Russian people must conclude that Putin threatens them and their survival because of his adventurism and aggression. Autocrats own victory but also own defeat. They succeed by allegedly bringing success to the state but if they bring destruction or weakness, they lose legitimacy. Unlike elected officials in free democracies, autocrats are not representing their people; they are commanding them. The Russian people must conclude that Putin led them into foolish, ruinous destruction, a middle-class brain drain, isolation, criminality, and a weaker, more vulnerable state.

It was a mistake of the Clinton and Bush administrations to allow Putin to rise unimpeded. The United States likely knew Putin and the KGB successor organization were behind the Moscow apartment bombings; the U.S. Government likely knew that Putin and his cronies killed Russian citizens to create a crisis to propel an obscure KGB officer into national prominence to take over the state. Both U.S. Presidents saw Russia’s deep state – the siloviki (former members of the security and military services) -- return and dominate the Russian government, turning the state into a mafia state, much like the CCP has in China. Both U.S. Presidents should have retreated from cooperating with Putin as his authoritarianism grew.

Putin likely believed the nonsense his intelligence yes-men analysts told him about Ukrainian political weakness. His goal in Ukraine was likely not to occupy the entire state, but to intimidate the Ukrainian military; eject the Zelenskyy government (have it flee to Poland); and install the pro-Moscow Ukrainian President again (who was sitting in Belarus, waiting to return to Kyiv). His goal was another 2008 Russo-Georgian-like war: brief, regime-targeted, and low-cost.

Putin also likely has a poor understanding of joint military doctrine. His military advisors were likely afraid of him and likely assumed his approval numbers were legitimate. They overestimated their capabilities and are likely not part of his political deliberations. Putin, therefore, thought ejecting the Kyiv Government would be as militarily easy as ejecting the Ukrainian Government from Crimea. Putin likely assessed the United States and NATO would stay out and that the Ukrainian military would defect or become largely frozen, much like Ukrainian forces did in and around Crimea in 2014.

Before the war, Biden told Putin that U.S. forces would not become involved in Ukraine – just what Putin wanted (and expected) to hear. Biden fashioned an economic sanctions package that he threatened would be implemented if Putin were to invade. Biden resisted sending weapons before the conflict began. All these signals paint a certain, manageable picture of the United States, which Putin counts on.

Biden fears sending weapons he considers ‘escalatory,’ demonstrating the very restraint Putin counts on consistently from democrats, who think ‘escalation’ is dangerous and therefore must always be avoided. Escalation is dangerous. But such restraint likely emboldened Putin, which led to his original miscalculation and overextension in Ukraine. Our ‘defense-only’ strategy guarantees that the Ukrainians will fight hard on Ukrainian land … but then will eventually run out of ammo. President Biden sends many advanced weapons – but not the very advanced ones that might win the war by escalating the conflict or imposing unacceptable cost and exposing Russian weakness.

So what are President Biden’s wartime goals today? The longer the war continues, the less coherent such goals seem.

If Americans wake up tomorrow and learn that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy were killed in an airstrike, we would be appalled but not surprised. The Russians no doubt want him dead. But is the United States helping Ukrainians threaten Putin (or at least his reputation inside Russia) or Russians in return? If not, how can we expect this war to end favorably to anyone but Putin? At present, Putin can conduct an endless war, fearing no threat to himself, as long as he can divert public focus elsewhere and control information internally.

The Biden Administration and NATO seem intimidated by Putin and his military threats. Yet Russian forces attack civilian targets almost daily. Why isn’t Putin threatened by U.S. and NATO capability?

Putin perceives Biden as weak – not likely to act unpredictably or risk conflict with Russian forces; convinced that consistency is more likely to accrue advantage than guile. He likely sees Biden as not his equal – too inured by decades of Foreign Affairs Committee sophistry; too intimidated to escalate the war; and certainly not willing to confront Putin directly or threaten him. Putin has called Biden a career politician – a slur in his mind, someone predictable and risk-averse.

Democrats and the isolationist wing of the Republican party consistently fear ‘regime change,’ noting (correctly) that regime change invites ‘instability’ (meaning to them ‘danger’). Democrats and the isolationist wing of the Republican party also consistently fear ‘escalation’ and thus pull back from prosecuting a war to its coherent end. They are constantly reacting to Russian operations with weapon systems designed only to defeat Russian operations (meaning Ukrainian forces are forever going to be ‘defeating’ Russian operations.) But one cannot win anything if nothing is risked.

Putin’s war exposes President Xi of China as another dictator, curious and privately supportive of a revanchist Russia attempting to extend its empire through force. Xi issues nonsense public statements, ignoring Russian war crimes, and attempts to legitimize an outrageous and illegitimate war, which has caused the deaths of thousands of civilians. The war exposes Xi as another autocrat, likely willing to conduct violence to further communist Chinese goals.

The United States cannot help Ukraine win this war if it fears escalating it. And it certainly cannot win the war if it cannot conceive of a favorable war end.

Since it is hard for the Biden Administration to discern and explain to the American people what an acceptable end to the war is, perhaps we can discern what ends would not be acceptable:

Putin returning to the G20; business as before
Putin forever prohibiting Ukraine’s progress toward joining the EU and NATO
Putin and his military escaping war crime charges
Russian businesses returning to business with the West as before
European states buying Russian oil and gas as before
Russia rejoining Western institutions as before
Russia emerging stronger than before the war

The Putin (autocracy) strategy of keeping border states weak, unstable, and subservient to Moscow must end forever. Authoritarianism is cheap governance and incompatible with modernity. Russians must come to terms with their history and reject authoritarianism forever. Any ‘frozen conflict’ or any degree of status quo ante rewards authoritarianism and emboldens both Putin and President Xi of China, who thinks that China’s ‘near abroad’ must also remain weak and subservient.

But no ‘frozen conflict’ solution can ever allow Putin to return to the G20, sell oil again to any liberal democratic state, or be free from Western sanctions. Regardless of where the violence in eastern Ukraine ends, Putinism is fundamentally incompatible with the Western liberal democratic states – forever. As soon as U.S. and NATO leadership state this, the better.

Putin likely invaded because a democratic, economically successful Ukraine would suggest to the Russian population that it can someday be both economically successful and politically free – something Putin cannot allow. But since Ukraine has been deeply hurt, Putin could argue to himself and his constituencies that he has succeeded: Ukraine today poses no threat of emerging as an economically and politically free state on Russia’s border anytime soon. Putin can claim that he has set back Ukraine a decade, destroyed its military to a significant degree, and kept the United States and NATO away from the Russian border.

Let Putin claim this. Over time, Russian weakness from Putinism will become more and more evident. Both military sacrifice and economic sanctions will come closer to the Russian people if the conflict were to be frozen today. In other words, as long as Putin does not return to status quo ante, he has lost much.

James Van de Velde, Ph.D., is a Professor at the National Defense University and an Adjunct Faculty Member at Johns Hopkins University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U. S. Government.

11. Why Help Ukraine: An Open Letter to My Congressional Colleagues

Excerpts:

So, as a U.S. House Representative, I know fully that there are many pulls on my community, Commonwealth, and country that deserve our attention. But I also know it is my responsibility to take hard and unpopular stands when I know it’s the right thing to do — in this case, to passionately advocate and vote for continued support for Ukraine. Such actions and support show our allies we are good for our word and here to stay. Actions such as these keep our young men and women in uniform out of harm’s way. And this is an effective use of our resources because it helps decimate Russia’s military and capabilities without depleting our own.

I genuinely believe that my colleagues — both Republicans and Democrats — fully know this, too. We must not put ourselves in a position to regret not supporting Ukraine when the war has come to us. The loss will become more severe, and I fear the price will be much more expensive in many ways. So, I ask my colleagues once again: remember our history, remember who we serve, and be brave.

Why Help Ukraine: An Open Letter to My Congressional Colleagues

By Chrissy Houlahan

February 01, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/01/why_help_ukraine_an_open_letter_to_my_congressional_colleagues_1008872.html?mc_cid=b61a7f805c&mc_eid=70bf478f36

In a departure from a largely do-nothing Congress, we may have real votes and many difficult choices to make in the coming weeks. During this time, with respect to Ukraine, I ask my colleagues to remember our collective history, remember who we serve, and be brave.

There is a buzz in the nation and Washington D.C. that we should no longer continue to support the Ukrainians in their battle against Putin’s unlawful invasion. Many of my colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, say that they hear from their communities and constituents that we should send our resources elsewhere: the southwestern border, Israel, to support childcare or end homelessness, to name a few. The list of our nation’s needs is indeed long and worthy.

I would argue two things, however: 1) it is the responsibility of the elected Members of Congress not simply to hear and reflect in Washington what our constituents might be feeling and saying but also to bring home from Washington and the world what our role as a nation should be, and 2) sometimes it also is a Representative’s fiduciary, rather than elective, job to vote based on the needs of the nation as a whole and over the long term, and it is our job to help our community understand why we voted the way we did.

Last week, I traveled to Lithuania as a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. I was also there because my home state of Pennsylvania’s Army National Guard partners with Lithuania for their State Partnership Program. The Pennsylvania Guard has worked with Lithuania for over 30 years; we specifically help them with cyber security. In addition, many of our nation’s active duty troops from all over the United States are based in Lithuania as part of our collective forward line of defense of the NATO alliance.

Lithuania borders Russia and Belarus. Belarus has proven itself to be nothing more than a puppet state of Russia throughout the war in Ukraine; recently, one might recall it housed and harbored the Russian merciless mercenary Wagner Group.

While in Lithuania, I had the chance to meet with the Assistant Minister of Defense. While speaking with him, he implored me to bring an urgent message back home: we must continue to help Ukraine defend itself. He reminded me that Lithuania and many, many more nations have spent upwards of 2.75% of their GDP on their defense and the defense of Ukraine, materially surpassing our commitment here in the U.S. Recall at one point that former President Trump maligned the members of NATO for their supposed lack of commitment.

This, indeed, is no longer the case.

Over the past couple of years, the Biden Administration has led a large international coalition to support Ukraine robustly, and the participation of dozens of nations has been historic in scale and scope. In fact, the United States is not even ranked in the top ten in terms of our overall contribution by GDP to defense and Ukraine support. NATO and many non-NATO nations are doing their part, and we must continue to do ours.

I also had the chance to meet with many of our troops in Lithuania. They are stationed very close to the border of Belarus — thousands of miles from home — in cold and challenging conditions. It is not lost on them that they are on the frontline. I was struck by their youth, their eagerness and patriotism, and their commitment to the people of Lithuania and NATO. I was also struck by their exposure and the fact that they were in literal harm’s way should the war in Ukraine go sideways.

Without our continued support to Ukraine, we are dangerously close to this, ultimately evolving into a war that requires our troops to be pulled in. If we allow Ukraine to fall to Russia, it is Putin’s expressed and stated purpose to continue onward to places like Lithuania. We have a commitment through Article 5 that if Lithuania or any other NATO nation is attacked, it is an attack on us all. And we will be required to respond.

Chrissy Houlahan represents the 6th Congressional District of Pennsylvania in Congress, which includes all of Chester County and the southern part of Berks County. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford with an ROTC scholarship that launched her service in the U.S. Air Force. After graduating from Stanford, Chrissy spent three years on Air Force active duty at Hanscom Air Force Base working on air and space defense technologies. She left active duty in 1991 and served in the Air Force Reserves before separating from the service in 2004 as a captain. Houlahan serves on the Armed Services and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

12. CIA doubles spending to meet China threat

And more from Bill Gertz' Inside the Ring.

CIA doubles spending to meet China threat

Pentagon hosts book talk on right-wing terrorism

Chinese hackers in U.S. infrastructure

CIA doubles spending to meet China threat

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing to examine worldwide threats on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 8, 2023. President Joe Biden has elevated Burns to his Cabinet. It’s a symbolic move that … Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. … more >

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, January 31, 2024

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

CIA Director William J. Burns has revealed in a major new journal article that his agency has retooled its analysis and operations and doubled its budget to focus on the rising threat from China.

Mr. Burns, writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, described China as a bigger long-term threat than Russia, and the CIA under his direction in the past two years has reorganized and redirected funds to China as a top priority.

“Accordingly, the CIA has committed substantially more resources toward China-related intelligence collection, operations and analysis around the world — more than doubling the percentage of our overall budget focused on China over just the last two years,” Mr. Burns said. “We’re hiring and training more Mandarin speakers while stepping up efforts across the world to compete with China, from Latin America to Africa to the Indo-Pacific.”

The CIA’s budget is secret, but outside analysts estimate its annual budget to be more than $15 billion.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, after accumulating more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is engaged in increasingly threatening actions, the CIA chief said.

“Xi’s growing repression at home and his aggressiveness abroad, from his ‘no limits’ partnership with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to his threats to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, are impossible to ignore,” Mr. Burns said.

American economic and trade ties with China have created “critical vulnerabilities and serious risks” for U.S. national security and prosperity, Mr. Burns said.

“The COVID-19 pandemic made clear to every government the danger of being dependent on any one country for life-saving medical supplies, just as Russia’s war in Ukraine has made clear to Europe the risks of being dependent on one country for energy,” he wrote.

The best solution is to “de-risk” and diversify supply chains and protect technology while investing in industrial capacity, Mr. Burns said.

Pentagon hosts book talk on right-wing terrorism

The Pentagon this week held a book talk for officials on the threat of right-wing terrorism — despite a recent Defense Department study that concluded the presence of right-wing extremists in the military appears to be a phantom threat.

On Monday, the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy sent out a reminder that a “virtual brown-bag book talk” by authors Bruce Hoffman and Jacob War would be held the next day.

“Their new book, ‘God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America’ was released earlier this month,” the notice said. “This is the first of what we hope will be a series of brown-bag events featuring internal and external speakers.”

The book talk drew criticism from some Pentagon officials who worry that the program, hosted by the Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, furthers the narrative that the military is allegedly riddled with right-wing extremists.

Lisa Lawrence, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the book talk was part of a series that seeks to “contribute to the professional development of [the Pentagon’s] workforce.”

“The engagement was not about extremism in the military,” she said, adding that future talks will cover a range of views and topics on national security.

“Participation in the speaker series is voluntary, and colleagues from all different viewpoints are encouraged to share them during these conversations,” she said in an email to Inside the Ring.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a study in 2021 after news reports said some service members took part in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Austin said he was seeking “greater fidelity” on the scope of the problem of extremism in the military.

Last month, the Institute for Defense Analyses released its report based on information obtained from June 2021 to June 2022. The report found that the military is not full of violent extremists, as most who have served in uniform know.

The institute’s study “found no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole.”

Pentagon data also showed “fewer than 100 substantiated cases per year of extremist activity by members of the military in recent years.” Extremist and gang-related activity in the military resulted in less than 20 court-martial cases since 2012, the report said.

The report also debunked the idea that military service members took part in the Jan. 6 riot in large number. Of the 700 federal cases related to the riot, fewer than 10 involved active-duty military personnel.

The study also noted that military personnel are confused about terminology defining “extremist” activity and that the push by Pentagon officials under the Biden administration to promote the claims could lead to polarization.

“In the absence of a clear and consistent message, there is a risk that misinterpretations could lead to a significant division in the force along political and ideological lines, with some members of the military believing that they are being targeted for their views,” the report said.

“IDA found reason to believe that the risk to the military from widespread polarization and division in the ranks may be a greater risk than the radicalization of a few service members.”

The study followed a report by the administration’s Countering Extremist Activity Working Group that revealed the cases of prohibited extremist activity among service members were rare. In a force of more than 2.1 million active-duty and reserve troops, there were only 100 cases.

Critics say the effort to find right-wing extremists in the military reflects ongoing efforts by left-wing ideologues in the Biden administration who have argue that White supremacy is a serious threat to American society.

President Biden said last year in a speech that White supremacy is the “most dangerous terrorist threat” to the nation. In a campaign speech Jan. 9 courting Black voters, he called White supremacy “a poison that has for too long haunted this nation.”

A report produced by the staff of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas opposing what the Republican lawmakers called “woke” policies in the military argued that fights over political ideology are weakening the U.S. military.

“Our military’s singular purpose is to ‘provide for the common defense’ of our nation,” Mr. Marco and Mr. Roy said in a statement. “It cannot be turned into a left-wing social experiment. It cannot be used as a cudgel against America itself. And it cannot be paralyzed by fear of offending the sensibilities of Ivy League faculty lounges or progressive pundits.”

Chinese hackers in U.S. infrastructure

A group of senior U.S. intelligence and security officials revealed to Congress on Wednesday that Chinese military hackers have penetrated critical infrastructure control networks in the country as preparation for sabotage.

Harry Coker, the White House national cyber director, said in testimony to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party that Chinese spies are continuing to carry out “significant” cyberattacks to steal secrets from government and private sector networks. But the Chinese cyberthreat, the topic of the committee hearing, is more significant, Mr. Coker said in testimony submitted to the panel.

The main threat is posed by a People’s Liberation Army hacker group dubbed Volt Typhoon, which is “pre-positioning itself on U.S. critical infrastructure systems to potentially conduct disruptive and potentially destructive attacks in the event of a conflict,” Mr. Coker said.

Volt Typhoon is not focused on financial gain, espionage or stealing state secrets. Instead, the group is working to achieve “deep access into critical infrastructure networks to put them at risk,” he said.

The Chinese military hackers are suspected in the penetration of critical communications networks on the Pacific island of Guam, a key U.S. military hub that would take part in any future U.S. defense of Taiwan. Last year, cyber sleuths in the government and Microsoft uncovered computer code in telecommunications networks on Guam that were later traced to Volt Typhoon.

The Chinese hackers have been observed by U.S. intelligence agencies targeting multiple critical infrastructure networks for future attacks that would potentially jeopardize the lives of Americans, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said. One Chinese hacking group penetrated the networks of a major U.S. transportation hub, the bureau chief said, without elaborating.

National Security Agency head Gen. Paul Nakasone, who is also commander of the military’s Cyber Command, said the Chinese hackers’ work “is not acceptable,” adding that defending against the infrastructure penetrations is “our top priority.”

Along with increased Chinese cyberthreats, both NSA and Cyber Command have become more capable at countering the Chinese actions.

“U.S. Cybercom and NSA are using our capabilities and partnerships to deny the PRC opportunities, frustrate their strategic efforts and systematically eradicate intrusions,” Gen. Nakasone said, using the acronym for People’s Republic of China.

Jen Easterly, director of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the extensive Chinese cyber intrusions are targeting infrastructure networks mostly owned by private sector companies and utilities.

“Based on our insights from working with victims of these intrusions and industry partners with unique visibility into these threats, PRC cyber actors are almost certainly capable of launching cyberattacks that could disrupt critical infrastructure services within the United States, including against oil and gas pipelines and rail systems,” she stated.

CISA is working with U.S. critical infrastructure owners to hunt down Chinese hackers and cut off intrusions, she said.

• Contact Bill Gertz on X @BillGertz.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.

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13. The Pentagon has been learning the wrong lessons for three decades

Excerpts:

The lessons our senior officials learned from the conflict encapsulated this narrative: spend more to get less, wars can be short with limited casualties, and policymakers can use technology to control from afar. These lessons made their way into military parlance, neatly tied up into concepts like revolution in military affairs, shock and awe, and effects-based operations.

Recent wars have provided, to borrow a phrase from former Vice President Gore, an “inconvenient truth”: the United States military establishment may have fallen into the victor’s trap and assumed away the problems and challenges of future warfare. From Somalia in 1993, to nearly twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, to today’s wars in Ukraine and Israel, it’s becoming apparent that the United States may have built the entirely wrong war machine needed for the 21st century.

...

The single most important task assigned to the federal government in our Constitution is providing for the common defense. With policies and strategies that call for one short war at a time, divesting current procurement to invest at some future date in more technologically advanced weapons, and a shrinking military, it’s not hard to wonder why the proverbial person-on-the-street would ask what they are getting for the $850 billion-plus spent on defense each year. We must unlearn the lessons of the Gulf War and recognize that weapons must be able to be produced quickly at scale, that the size of the force matters, and that the technological revolution depends on a bottoms-up and not top-down architecture.

As the lead of the Joint Requirements Process, only the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can fix this.

The Pentagon has been learning the wrong lessons for three decades

The Gulf War sowed the seeds of future defeat. We must uproot them—and urgently.

defenseone.com · by John Ferrari

USAF aircraft of the 4th Fighter Wing fly over Kuwaiti oil fires, set by the retreating Iraqi army during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Pictures From History / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Gulf War sowed the seeds of future defeat. We must uproot them—and urgently.

January 31, 2024

By John Ferrari

Senior Nonresident Fellow, AEI

January 31, 2024

The lightning-fast victory of the U.S. military over the Iraqi Army in the early 1990s marked a generational turning point for warfare, with the predominant lesson being that exquisite and precise munitions were the key to winning future conflicts. This fit a narrative that many desperately wanted at that time: namely, that we could spend less money, have fewer forces, and turn warfare into a targeting exercise by overwhelming the enemy with precise, short-burst barrages driven by top-down decision-making, all enabled by the digital revolution.

The lessons our senior officials learned from the conflict encapsulated this narrative: spend more to get less, wars can be short with limited casualties, and policymakers can use technology to control from afar. These lessons made their way into military parlance, neatly tied up into concepts like revolution in military affairs, shock and awe, and effects-based operations.

Recent wars have provided, to borrow a phrase from former Vice President Gore, an “inconvenient truth”: the United States military establishment may have fallen into the victor’s trap and assumed away the problems and challenges of future warfare. From Somalia in 1993, to nearly twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, to today’s wars in Ukraine and Israel, it’s becoming apparent that the United States may have built the entirely wrong war machine needed for the 21st century.

With a thirty-year, all-in bet on smaller, exquisite, and expensive forces whose flaws have been concealed by rosy policy assumptions such as we would only fight one short, high-tech war, now may be the time to reevaluate three key characteristics of force design. The uniformed military leadership, led by the official who by statute has the authority to set requirements for the military—the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—should act now to embed these three key reforms into the Joint Requirements Process.

The first is that we can no longer build weapons at scale. Our magazines are routinely depleted as wars defy the assumption that they will be short or only occur in sequence. With policy pushing for ever more technologically advanced systems, we forgot that we actually have to build them. One bright point within DOD is the call for drones as part of DOD’s Replicator initiative. If the Pentagon successfully fields drones at the scale and condensed timeframes put forth by the initiative, then it could act as a path forward for future weapons design. But we shouldn’t wait to find out. Therefore, the first reform should be a requirement that weapons be “designed to be manufactured at scale.”

The second characteristic of force design is that the technological revolution that we saw in the 1990s led to a “bottom-up” revolution, but DOD instead has forced itself into believing it was a “top-down” revolution. Small groups have used technology from both the commercial and military sectors to become super-empowered, yet DOD has failed to deliver anything nearly as potent to its own troops. ISIS, for example, was using the Internet to wage war more than a decade ago. Meanwhile, DOD’s all-but-broken information-technology system is set up to drive decisions down into the formation rather than enabling innovation at the lowest levels. The rare counterexample, such as the Army’s IVAS system, only underscores how much is going undeveloped. To reverse the flow of innovation in DOD today, and make it move from bottom to top, a new requirement is again in order. Our military leaders should mandate that all information-technology solutions start with the user and then roll up—exactly the opposite of what’s in place today.

The third characteristic is that mass matters. We now have the smallest active-duty Army since World War II and the Navy and Air Force are shrinking rapidly. Operation concepts for a light Joint Force doesn’t stack up well against the realities of warfare we’re witnessing today. The Russians are holding territory because they can marshal more resources. Israel has mobilized its population to fight. Broadly speaking, we are seeing a reversion to early 20th-century warfare in the first quarter of the 21st century. We ignore these realities at our own peril, especially as trouble brews in yet another theater as China pursues a military modernization and buildup.

To put mass at the core of how the military plans and thinks about the next war, DOD should do as my colleague Mackenzie Eaglen has stated: bring back “mass and attrition as foundational force planning principles.” That will require uniformed military leaders to embed in the Joint Requirements Process a requirement that the U.S. maintain a force-sizing construct which provides the depth of mass for fighting multiple wars with the staying power for an intense multi-year war. Civilian leaders within DOD have taken it upon themselves to dictate the force-sizing construct in order to fit their agenda. They change their assumptions to meet the budget constraints they want, forcing uniformed leaders to state that they have the forces they need to meet the strategy. At this point, when it comes to the size of our military, there are simply no bright spots: the forces keep shrinking and barring action, will continue to do so.

The single most important task assigned to the federal government in our Constitution is providing for the common defense. With policies and strategies that call for one short war at a time, divesting current procurement to invest at some future date in more technologically advanced weapons, and a shrinking military, it’s not hard to wonder why the proverbial person-on-the-street would ask what they are getting for the $850 billion-plus spent on defense each year. We must unlearn the lessons of the Gulf War and recognize that weapons must be able to be produced quickly at scale, that the size of the force matters, and that the technological revolution depends on a bottoms-up and not top-down architecture.

As the lead of the Joint Requirements Process, only the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can fix this.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. Ferrari previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the Army.

14. How Should the United States Respond to Iran after the Tower 22 Attack? Lessons from Operation Praying Mantis

Excerpt:

Risks of escalation warrant serious attention. But they should be examined with an understanding of relevant historical precedent and a sober analysis of Iranian interests and vulnerabilities, because escalation is not the only risk. There are also dangers of inaction or a minimalist response to the attack in Jordan, which are only likely to increase over time. Either of these would be perceived as weakness and engender more violent and frequent attacks against US assets. Taking decisive action now will likely deter future Iranian action as well as reduce Iran’s capacity to conduct even more deadly operations. Such a response was successful during Operation Praying Mantis and is likely the best solution to the current challenge. More importantly, our friends and enemies are also watching and gauging our resolve. Failing to take a proportional response to Iran’s escalations will embolden our adversaries and weaken our allies’ confidence long after this crisis is over.

How Should the United States Respond to Iran after the Tower 22 Attack? Lessons from Operation Praying Mantis - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Frank Sobchak · February 1, 2024

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On January 28, three American soldiers were killed and dozens injured by a one-way suicide drone at a remote outpost in Jordan, marking the first time that US servicemembers were killed in action since the start of the war in Gaza. Although the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an alliance of several Shi’a militias claimed responsibility, there was little question who was actually behind the attack. As part of the “Axis of Resistance,” the group serves as an Iranian proxy with many of its affiliates benefiting from the Islamic Republic’s financing, training, and planning. Some of the group’s members, such as Kataib Hizballah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, were active combatants against the United States during the 2003–2011 war in Iraq.

Crossing the red line of killing Americans immediately spurred a debate of how best to respond. Many, including some officials within the Biden administration, are concerned that escalating could widen the conflict and that a response should be proportional. While such a stance has generally been US policy during the post-9/11 wars, some have argued that there is a longer historical precedent that “getting embroiled in a major conflict with Iran is in no one’s interests.” Such a claim, however, is not historically accurate—during the 1980s “tanker war,” the United States became embroiled in a major conflict with Iran that included Operation Praying Mantis, the US Navy’s largest surface action since World War II. That operation still offers lessons for us today on how to best respond to aggression and manage the dangers of escalation.

Operation Praying Mantis was part of a larger operation, Earnest Will, which began in 1987 when Iraqi and Iranian forces increased attacks on merchant ships in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War. Earnest Will reflagged Kuwaiti tankers under the Stars and Stripes, which enabled them to be escorted by US Navy Warships. In July 1987, after one of the tankers in the very first escorted convoy struck a mine, elements of the newly formed US Special Operations Command were called forward to assist the mission. Two months later, helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment caught an Iranian ship laying mines and disabled it. Navy SEALs then boarded the vessel, gathered intelligence and evidence, and scuttled the ship. In other skirmishes days after that incident, US helicopters sank three other Iranian boats. After two tankers were hit by missiles the next month, Navy warships shelled IRGC bases on Iranian oil platforms. Navy SEALs followed the attacks, planting demolitions charges that destroyed one platform before they boarded and searched another.

The conflict escalated greatly when a US Navy frigate struck a mine in April 1988. Ten sailors were injured, and the ship, whose keel was broken in the blast, was saved only through heroic damage control. Mines recovered from the area matched the sequence of those from the scuttled Iranian minelayer, prompting a fierce retaliation in the form of Operation Praying Mantis. In the ensuing battles, Navy and Marine elements destroyed two oil platforms used by Iranian military forces, along with an Iranian navy frigate, a missile patrol boat, and a handful of small attack craft. As the fighting continued, American forces crippled another Iranian frigate and damaged an Iranian fighter jet. Stung by its defeats, Iran decreased its attacks against merchant vessels after the US responses.

To be clear, there are differences between the context surrounding Operation Praying Mantis and the regional situation today. Iran is stronger and has numerous proxies spread across the region. Its intelligence and IRGC officers stand ready across the globe to create mayhem. Iranian-sponsored attacks are occurring not only on land in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, but also at sea against shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb straight off Yemen.

But some things remain the same. The United States maintains escalation dominance and can do far more damage to Iran than vice versa. While Iran and its proxies could hit vulnerable forces in Iraq and Syria, such an escalation would almost certainly draw an even more powerful US response. Moreover, there are other examples when, like it did during Operation Praying Mantis, Iran has backed down when its forces were struck directly. During the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, Iranian proxies actively targeted US forces, but attacks diminished when the United States resumed unilateral attacks and threatened IRGC elements. In the days after the 2020 killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s retaliatory strikes against US forces in Iraq failed to kill anyone and ended abruptly after a perfunctory response that was likely intended for its domestic audience.

There is also one other factor to weigh. Iran continues to enrich uranium, nearing the threshold of weapons-grade enrichment, while also barring international inspectors access to its nuclear program facilities. Given its longstanding objective of developing nuclear weapons, a violent and lengthy escalation would imperil that goal, creating additional scrutiny toward and hardening global resolve against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. To maintain the possibility of faster progress on its nuclear efforts, it is far better for Iran to not stir things up more than it already has.

Such considerations likely weigh heavily in the minds of US planners as they decide what to do next. Among the first steps should be to enhance security for American and allied bases across the region. Additional forces, air defenses, and protection should all be deployed where possible. Embassies should be put on high alert. Bases that are too small or vulnerable should be closed. More minesweeping and anti–submarine warfare assets should be moved to the region, ready to respond to dangers in the Persian Gulf or the Bab al-Mandeb.

These measures, aimed at enhancing the security of US assets in the region, are the easy part of the decision. The more difficult part is how, once US forces are prepared for the inevitable tit for tat, the United States should calibrate offensive military actions. Such actions could include targeting senior IRGC Quds Force leaders outside of Iran and linked to its violent proxies, especially those who helped train, advise, or assist those who carried out the attack in Jordan. But it should also take place at sea, where a modern Operation Praying Mantis would demonstrate US resolve and capability to respond appropriately and effectively to Iranian provocations, just as it did in 1988. Off Yemen, the United States should warn the crew of the Iranian spy ship providing targeting information to Houthi fighters and give them enough time to abandon ship before sinking it. In the Persian Gulf, the United States should tell Iran that submarines and craft capable of laying mines will not be allowed to leave their bases until this crisis is over or they will be destroyed.

Targets within the borders of Iran should be excluded from the first series of strikes to limit the risk of escalation and provide Iran an off-ramp. The United States should also publicly communicate that if Iran decides to escalate, it is prepared to end those initial prohibitions. In all likelihood, there will be a series of escalations like those that happened in the 1980s before Iran decides that it has had enough.

Risks of escalation warrant serious attention. But they should be examined with an understanding of relevant historical precedent and a sober analysis of Iranian interests and vulnerabilities, because escalation is not the only risk. There are also dangers of inaction or a minimalist response to the attack in Jordan, which are only likely to increase over time. Either of these would be perceived as weakness and engender more violent and frequent attacks against US assets. Taking decisive action now will likely deter future Iranian action as well as reduce Iran’s capacity to conduct even more deadly operations. Such a response was successful during Operation Praying Mantis and is likely the best solution to the current challenge. More importantly, our friends and enemies are also watching and gauging our resolve. Failing to take a proportional response to Iran’s escalations will embolden our adversaries and weaken our allies’ confidence long after this crisis is over.

Dr. Frank Sobchak is a retired US Army Special Forces colonel who served in various assignments in war and peace during a twenty-six-year military career. He is the chair of irregular warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy, a senior fellow with the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, and a fellow (contributor) for the MirYam Institute. He is a coauthor of the acclaimed two-volume The U.S. Army in the Iraq War and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, Time, the Jerusalem Post, Defense One, the Hill, War on the Rocks, and the Small Wars Journal. His X handle is @abujeshua.

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

Image credit: Cpl. John Hyp, US Marine Corps

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Frank Sobchak · February 1, 2024

15. Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks Too

Excerpts:

Some may argue that TikTok is too entrenched to be uprooted, and that its ban would be a loss too great for the users who have built communities on its platform. But let us not underestimate the resilience and ingenuity of our creative community. Hollywood has always been at the vanguard of change, pioneering new ways to tell stories and connect with audiences. In the absence of TikTok, other platforms will rise, fostering an ecosystem that will thrive under the values and freedoms we hold dearly.

Let’s seize this opportunity. Let’s safeguard the creative freedoms that have made Hollywood a beacon of storytelling around the world and, more importantly, protect the integrity of American elections and promote American technological ingenuity.

It’s time to ban TikTok. Either that, or we should just allow Beijing full control of our broadcast networks, too.

Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks Too

COMMENTARY

By Chris Fenton

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/01/31/ban_tiktok_or_let_beijing_control_our_broadcast_networks_too_150409.html

In the dynamic landscape of global entertainment, the influence of Beijing over Hollywood has long been a topic of heated discussion. While the box office power of the Chinese market has waned, giving a breath of creative freedom back to our filmmakers, there looms a new and more pervasive form of influence on Hollywood and well beyond: TikTok.

Beijing may have lost theatrical market leverage, but it has more than made up for that with an overpowering social media presence that has become an epidemic, not just in Hollywood but throughout the United States. In fact, the Chairman of Congress’s Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), accurately labels TikTok as “digital fentanyl” and has been aggressively campaigning to ban the social media app.

As a media executive and a storyteller attuned to the intricate dance between creativity, commerce, and geopolitics, I’ve watched Beijing’s sway over Hollywood’s storytelling shift shapes. TikTok, a platform that has rooted itself deep into the fabric of American youth culture, is at the forefront of this transformation. It’s not merely a social media app; it’s a potent tool of influence, information, data collection, commerce, and creativity. One that has far outpaced traditional broadcast networks in its reach and impact on young Americans. However, unfortunately for the welfare of our great nation, TikTok is under the control of a non-allied nation’s pernicious government.

Here in Hollywood, the conversation is no longer about market access and box office numbers inside the PRC. That Golden Goose is cooked. Instead, it’s about the very platforms we use to create, promote, and share content here in the United States and elsewhere. When mentioning TikTok in those discussions, China inevitably comes up. After all, TikTok is a platform owned by a Chinese company, operated under the jurisdiction and oversight of Beijing, and heavily scrutinized by Washington as a result.

The app provides Beijing an ability to understand, control, and influence Americans well beyond simply Hollywood content. In fact, the platform is much more damaging in how it shapes the opinions and perspectives of adults under 30 years of age or, in other words, the future generations of Americans. According to Pew Research, a third of those under 30 rely solely on TikTok for news, and Beijing can throttle, amplify, or completely censor exactly what the app distributes as “news.” Yes, TikTok’s multitude of lobbyists, public relations personnel, and lawyers spin and argue the opposite, but the platform has been caught contradicting one too many times. Beijing almost certainly calls the shots.

Understanding such, the nefarious activities from our rival across the Pacific now seem gravely damaging to American interests, especially in an election year. Beijing will almost certainly use TikTok to study voter data and control the flow of information and news, attempting to dictate the 2024 election results. In December, the New York Times stated, “pundits call next year the ‘TikTok election’ because of the ballooning power and influence of the video app. TikTok … has increasingly become a news source for millennials and Gen Z-ers, who will be a powerful part of the electorate.”

Worse, research by Securing Democracy found that 30% of major party candidates in Senate races used TikTok accounts as part of their campaign strategies in 2022, and the number is likely higher today.

Logic points to the obvious. TikTok should be banned. And before those opposing such a ban even try to invoke the “Freedom of Speech/First Amendment” argument, there is a simple and effective counter. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission prohibits control of American broadcast networks by hostile foreign governments and entities beholden to them. The ban is grounded in the steadfast belief that we must protect our national narrative and cultural sovereignty from nations looking to weaken or divide us. The question, then, is why should TikTok be an exception? Why allow a foreign-owned entity such profound access to the psyches of our youth, the perspectives of our voters, and the heart of our creative industries, especially since Beijing thinks the global app isn’t even worthy of access in its own nation?

Banning the app is straightforward, with precedence, and, frankly, extremely necessary. This is not a call for censorship, nor is it an indictment of the vibrant creativity that TikTok has fostered among millions of users. It is a call for consistency in our policies and for the protection of our national interests.

Prohibition may seem disruptive, but instead, it comes with minimal cost and substantial benefits. It will propel Hollywood back to American-owned and controlled platforms, ensuring that our content and the means of its distribution remain free from the shadow of foreign manipulation. It’s also a nice, long-overdue action of reciprocity in the bilateral relationship. Beijing has tilted the scales toward its own domestic players by stifling or banning foreign competitors inside the PRC. Why not do the same to allow Instagram, Twitter, or some other innovative American social media platform to pick up the market that TikTok vacates?

Some may argue that TikTok is too entrenched to be uprooted, and that its ban would be a loss too great for the users who have built communities on its platform. But let us not underestimate the resilience and ingenuity of our creative community. Hollywood has always been at the vanguard of change, pioneering new ways to tell stories and connect with audiences. In the absence of TikTok, other platforms will rise, fostering an ecosystem that will thrive under the values and freedoms we hold dearly.

Let’s seize this opportunity. Let’s safeguard the creative freedoms that have made Hollywood a beacon of storytelling around the world and, more importantly, protect the integrity of American elections and promote American technological ingenuity.

It’s time to ban TikTok. Either that, or we should just allow Beijing full control of our broadcast networks, too.

Chris Fenton is a longtime media executive, producer, and author of “Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business.” As an informal advisor to Congress’ Select Committee on China and a member of the U.S.-Asia Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, National Committee on U.S. China Relations, and Third Way Think Tank, he founded his own firm, FENTON · International Business Strategy & Communications to help the private sector and Washington navigate America’s complicated relationship with non-allied nations. Follow him on X @TheDragonFeeder.

16. Israel and Lebanon are prepping for a war neither wants, but many fear it's becoming inevitable

Israel and Lebanon are prepping for a war neither wants, but many fear it's becoming inevitable

AP · February 1, 2024

BY ABBY SEWELL AND MELANIE LIDMAN

Updated 7:14 PM GMT+9, February 1, 2024

AP · February 1, 2024

17. China Is Quietly Expanding Its Land Grabs in the Himalayas

Excerpts:

On their part, the Bhutanese say such mistrust is unwarranted. They maintain they will never sell out India’s strategic interests and emphasize the importance of resolving the border dispute with China, even if that comes with establishing diplomatic ties with Beijing, which Thimphu has thus far resisted.

New Delhi finds the prospect of a Chinese embassy in Thimphu unappetizing and fears sharing if not losing influence over Bhutan. Worse, if China entraps Bhutan into taking expensive loans in the future, it could coerce Bhutan into giving up control of Doklam. (Bhutan has remained out of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.)

Bhutan, however, may be able to balance out any future Chinese influence by also opening up ties with other main powers, notably the United States. Bhutan, often described as the last Shangri-La, has deliberately stayed away from establishing diplomatic ties with any of the main powers in its quest to stay equidistant and not irk the Chinese. It may be time to change that, said the Bhutanese source, who felt that opening up to the United States may serve Bhutan’s interests.

“It now seems to be a widespread view in Bhutan that formal relations with its northern neighbor cannot be endlessly delayed,” Barnett added. “But we can be fairly sure that if Bhutan accepts a Chinese embassy in Thimphu, it will invite the U.S. and the other main powers to formalize relations with it, too.”

China Is Quietly Expanding Its Land Grabs in the Himalayas

As the world worries about an invasion of Taiwan, Beijing is methodically continuing its seizure of territory in Bhutan.

Vohra-Anchal-foreign-policy-columnist18

Anchal Vohra

By Anchal Vohra, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Anchal Vohra

China
Anchal Vohra

February 1, 2024, 11:27 AM

As the U.S. government has spent ever more of its time in recent years preparing to respond to any potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing has been busy slicing away parts of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Over the last few years, China has built massive infrastructure with hundreds of concrete structures, military posts, and administrative centers in the region of Beyul Khenpajong, some 12,000 feet in the northern Himalayan mountains. The so-called “hidden valley” is deemed sacred by Bhutanese, with the country’s royal family tracing its ancestral heritage to the area.

China’s blatant land grab of Bhutanese territory is just its latest move to control areas of significance in Buddhist culture, exploit a far less resourceful neighbor, and challenge its regional rival India in the Himalayas.

China’s expansion in the Beyul was first reported in Foreign Policy in 2021 by Robert Barnett, an expert on Tibet and the China-Bhutan border. Barnett wrote that while China had announced the settlement of a single village called Gyalaphug in the contested valley back in 2015, tens of miles of road and several key military buildings were in place in the Beyul and the neighboring Menchuma Valley by 2021.

He spoke to Foreign Policy from Paris last week and said that over the last two years, construction in the valley “more than doubled.”

In his 2021 report, Barnett and his team of researchers spotted 66 miles of new roads, a small hydropower plant, a communications base, five military or police outposts, and a major signals tower, among other edifices, in the Beyul and the Menchuma Valley.

According to a report on an Indian news channel, those scattered buildings now lie in fully established strips of townships with hundreds of multistory structures. The cars parked outside the buildings give the impression that the areas are inhabited, even though in 1998 China agreed with Bhutan to stick to the status quo until a final border settlement could be reached.

Bhutan, however, is a nation of just 800,000 inhabitants and a humble $3 billion economy. It has neither the economic nor the military means to respond to Chinese encroachments.

A Chatham House report published last month said that despite the cultural significance of the region, the Bhutanese government has been “powerless to stop Chinese settlement.” Experts worry that Bhutan may have to cede territory to avoid a confrontation between nuclear-armed India and China.

“The new outposts in Bhutan’s remote Jakarlung Valley, part of the Beyul Khenpajong region, may become permanent Chinese territory after an announcement on a border deal between the two countries expected soon,” John Pollock and Damien Symon warned in the Chatham report.

The 25th and latest round of talks between Thimphu and Beijing were held in October, four decades after negotiations to resolve the border dispute started. China claims 495 square kilometers (191 square miles) of territory in north-central Bhutan in the Jakarlung and Pasumlung valleys (Jakarlung is part of the Beyul) and 269 square kilometers (104 square miles) in the Doklam plateau in the west on Bhutan’s border with India. In 2020, China added Sakteng in the east to its list reportedly to seek advantage in negotiations.

The fact that China’s claims in Bhutan are based on the assertion that these regions are a part of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) has left the Tibetans flabbergasted. They are offended that China is pushing forward its imperialist agenda in their name.

Lobsang Sangay, a former Tibetan leader in exile and currently a senior visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s East Asian legal studies program, said that “history is complex and details matter,” dodging Foreign Policy’s question if Tibetans claim this territory and acknowledge a border dispute with Bhutan. But he added that it was “pretty clear Chinese troops have no right to be in the area because Tibet itself was illegally invaded and continues to be under occupation.”

A Bhutanese source who is aware of the thinking in the Bhutanese government and who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter said Bhutan is desperately trying to “avoid a full-scale war” between New Delhi and Beijing.

The Chinese expanded in the Beyul to coerce Bhutan into ceding control of a more strategic area near India, the Doklam plateau, but it has since expanded in both regions and upped the ante without any repercussions or costs.

“It’s not surprising that China is claiming Khenpajong and Doklam areas,” Sangay said. “China is implementing what it said in the 1950s, that Tibet is the palm and Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Arunachal are five fingers. First occupy Tibet, then we occupy five fingers,” he added in reference to Mao Zedong’s imperialist vision for three Indian states and Nepal and Bhutan.

Back in the 1990s, Beijing had offered Thimphu a package deal under which it would give up its claim in the northern parts in exchange for Doklam. But Bhutan refused, owing to deep historic and economic ties with India. (Some 70 percent of Bhutanese imports come from India, the local currency is pegged to the Indian rupee, and India controlled Bhutanese foreign affairs under a treaty signed in 1949 that was replaced with a much lighter version only in 2007.)

Bhutan believes that refusal led to Chinese expansion in its sacred areas. “This is basically a price Bhutan is paying for not budging over the demand on the western sector and because border talks dragged on for too long,” the Bhutanese source said. “That is what China is making us pay for.”

In 2017, India and China nearly went to war as Chinese soldiers tried to extend a road from Chumbi Valley in the TAR to Doklam, all the way to the Jampheri ridge, which offers a direct view to the Siliguri corridor—India’s Achilles’s heel. It connects the rest of India to seven federal states in the northeast and is just 14 miles wide, which makes it militarily easy to sever. If China gets access to the Jampheri ridge, it can better surveil the Siliguri corridor, often dubbed the “chicken’s neck,” and have huge leverage over India.

The tense standoff finally subsided as the Chinese stepped back, but that didn’t stop China from further expanding in Doklam. China built a whole village called Pangda inside the plateau, at a distance of just a few miles from the key ridge.

“There is a stalemate with a large number of Indian troops stationed in the area,” Sangay said. “But the Chinese have built major infrastructure with a permanent helipad and army camp. They are there to stay. Bhutan is under tremendous pressure to compromise, which means to give strategic advantage to Chinese troops.”

Nobody feels more pressure than Bhutan, but a denial in 2020 by the Bhutanese ambassador to India, Vetsop Namgyel, that “there is no Chinese village inside Bhutan” rang alarm bells in New Delhi and caused suspicion that Bhutan, India’s closest ally in South Asia, may have decided to hand over Doklam, or at least parts of it, to China.

There are signs that Indian faith in its firm relations with Bhutan is wavering. Even though New Delhi never directly questioned Bhutan’s intentions, experts feel it deployed the Indian media to insinuate that Bhutan may have shut its eyes to Chinese construction in Doklam.

There are concerns in India that the urge to put an end to Chinese encroachment and to expand its economy may encourage Bhutan to open up to China. S.D. Muni, a former diplomat and professor emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said that according to his Bhutanese friends, a third of Bhutanese consumer imports already come from China via third nations.

On their part, the Bhutanese say such mistrust is unwarranted. They maintain they will never sell out India’s strategic interests and emphasize the importance of resolving the border dispute with China, even if that comes with establishing diplomatic ties with Beijing, which Thimphu has thus far resisted.

New Delhi finds the prospect of a Chinese embassy in Thimphu unappetizing and fears sharing if not losing influence over Bhutan. Worse, if China entraps Bhutan into taking expensive loans in the future, it could coerce Bhutan into giving up control of Doklam. (Bhutan has remained out of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.)

Bhutan, however, may be able to balance out any future Chinese influence by also opening up ties with other main powers, notably the United States. Bhutan, often described as the last Shangri-La, has deliberately stayed away from establishing diplomatic ties with any of the main powers in its quest to stay equidistant and not irk the Chinese. It may be time to change that, said the Bhutanese source, who felt that opening up to the United States may serve Bhutan’s interests.

“It now seems to be a widespread view in Bhutan that formal relations with its northern neighbor cannot be endlessly delayed,” Barnett added. “But we can be fairly sure that if Bhutan accepts a Chinese embassy in Thimphu, it will invite the U.S. and the other main powers to formalize relations with it, too.”

Foreign Policy · by Anchal Vohra

18.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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