Quotes of the Day:

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.”

–​ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same." 

–​ Carlos Castaneda

"There is nothing in the world really beneficial that does not lie within the reach of an informed understanding and a well-protected pursuit." 

–​ Edmund Burke

​1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 13, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 13, 2024

3. Lighten the load: The Army’s plan to save time by shedding excess gear

4. Most casualties from recent attacks in Middle East are brain injuries

5. Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley to Join the Princeton SPIA Faculty

6. Air Force Has 'Strong Desire' to Fly Osprey Again Following Deadly Crash, But Questions Remain

7. US Navy Projects Massive Power With Dual Carrier Ops in Pacific

8. Russia vs the West: Is Putin winning?

9. Why John Bolton Is Certain Trump Really Wants to Blow Up NATO

10. Why the Navy says its Red Sea and Gulf of Aden battles are historic

11. The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits

12.  It’s Not Time for Our Troops to Leave the Middle East By Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.

13.  Navigating the Political Economy of Cold War 2.0

14. Biden’s Grand Bargain to Remake the Middle East

15. War in WESTPAC? Really? You & What PGM Inventory?

16. General Mark A. Milley (retired) To Join Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence

17. Green Berets leverage immersive simulator for training

18. Why America Can’t Have It All

19. Russia’s Dangerous New Friends

20. From Korea to Vietnam, This West Pointer Was An Inspiration To All Who Knew Him

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 13, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-13-2024

Key Takeaways:

• The US Senate passed a supplemental appropriations bill that would provide roughly $60 billion of security assistance to Ukraine, the vast majority of which would go to US companies and personnel.
• Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported that Russian forces are attempting to restore maneuver to the battlefield through Soviet deep battle theory but are struggling with implementing Soviet deep battle so far due to current Ukrainian capabilities.
• The current Ukrainian battlefield capabilities that are denying Russian forces the ability to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms largely depend on the provision of Western military assistance in key systems, many of which only the US can provide at scale.
• Ukrainian forces will not be able to retain these advantages and deny Russian forces the ability to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms without further assistance from the United States and its partner countries in the near and medium term.
• Russian sources are purposefully exaggerating Ukrainian casualties in a Russian strike near Selydove, Donetsk Oblast on February 13.
• The Kremlin appears to be asserting the right to enforce Russian Federation law on officials of governments in NATO member states over actions taken in the performance of their official duties within the territories of their own countries.
• US sanctions are reportedly constraining Russian efforts to skirt the G7 oil cap amid continued indications that India may be rethinking its growing position as a customer of Russian oil.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Kreminna and in western Zaporizhia Oblast amid continued positional engagements along the entire frontline.
• The British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank stated on February 12 that Russia is likely able to sustain its current rate of vehicle losses for at least two to three years by producing new vehicles and reactivating vehicles from storage.
• The Kremlin continues efforts to solidify control of occupied Ukraine through institutionalizing social benefits and services.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Feb 13, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 13, 2024

Grace Mappes, Christina Harward, Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 13, 2024, 7:10pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:00pm ET on February 13. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the February 14 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

The US Senate passed a supplemental appropriations bill that would provide roughly $60 billion of security assistance to Ukraine, the vast majority of which would go to US companies and personnel. The Senate passed a $95.3 billion aid package for assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, $60.6 billion of which is for Ukraine, by a 70-29 vote on February 13.[1] Roughly 16 percent of the Ukraine-related appropriations in the bill would go directly to support the Ukrainian government and economy whereas the remaining 84 percent of the appropriations are specifically marked for US manufacturers and US or allied government entities supporting Ukraine.[2]

Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported that Russian forces are attempting to restore maneuver to the battlefield through Soviet deep battle theory but are struggling with implementing Soviet deep battle so far due to current Ukrainian capabilities. Mashovets stated that Russian forces are attempting to implement Soviet deep battle theory for operational planning to rapidly break through Ukrainian defenses but are failing to achieve the effects of Soviet deep battle operations.[3] Deep battle theory is a product of Soviet operational art developed in the 1920s and 1930s that was designed to restore maneuver to battlefield after World War I by engaging the enemy on multiple fronts and in depth at the tactical and operational levels by attacking enemy assets at all echelons with artillery, airstrikes, and attacks against the enemy’s rear in concert with frontal attacks to penetrate the enemy’s defensive lines.[4] Deep battle theory also posits that successful operational design includes sequenced plans for successive operations to prevent the defender from re-establishing coherent defensive positions following a penetration and its exploitation.[5] Deep battle theory’s key operational tenets are still valid in modern war, and the Russian military could restore maneuver to the battlefield and overcome Ukrainian defenses if it could successfully plan and execute operationally sound campaigns using deep battle theory. Ukrainian forces could also use deep battle theory to restore maneuver to the battlefield to their advantage if their Western supporters properly resourced them.

Mashovets, however, noted that Russian forces’ current limited capabilities, specifically in conducting effective counterbattery fire, striking targets at operational depth, concealing force concentrations from the enemy, and combating Ukrainian technological parity, are preventing Russian forces from achieving the operational level surprise necessary to break through Ukrainian lines and conduct deep battle operations.[6] Mashovets stated that the Russian military command is failing to implement certain technological innovations into operational planning, including remote mine laying; large scale drone operations; command-and-control; and communications using modern technology.[7]

The current Ukrainian battlefield capabilities that are denying Russian forces the ability to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms largely depend on the provision of Western military assistance in key systems, many of which only the US can provide at scale. Ukrainian forces currently have advantages in counterbattery technology and medium-to-long-range strike capabilities due to Western-provided military assistance.[8] Western states have provided NATO 155mm artillery systems and ammunition capable of striking targets at longer ranges than Soviet equipment, and superior counterbattery radar systems that have provided Ukrainian forces with targeting advantages.[9] Western-provided medium- and long-range systems including HIMARS, ATACMS, and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles have enabled Ukrainian forces to achieve the significant impacts of liberating west bank Kherson Oblast and severely degrading the Russian Black Sea Fleet, among others.[10] Western provided air defense systems have denied Russian forces the air superiority necessary to safely operate aircraft to support Russian offensive operations, including hypothetical deep battle operations.[11]

Ukrainian forces will not be able to retain these advantages and deny Russian forces the ability to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms without further assistance from the United States and its partner countries in the near and medium term. Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials have previously touted their hopes of outlasting Western security assistance to Ukraine on the battlefield, and Russian forces are attempting to develop technology to adapt to current Ukrainian capabilities.[12] Mashovets noted that the Russian military command is learning and currently demonstrating greater operational flexibility than earlier in the war, including by establishing new artillery batteries to increase fire capabilities, bolstering intelligence capabilities, using disinformation to feed false intelligence on Russian force movements, and fragmenting the movements of its larger formations.[13] Mashovets stated that Russian forces are also actively developing their own technology to counter Ukrainian capabilities and develop their own capabilities, including electronic warfare (EW) systems, sea drones, combat control systems.[14] Ukraine will lose its current battlefield advantages if Western states, particularly the United States, prematurely cease security assistance to Ukraine before Ukraine’s ongoing defense industrial base (DIB) revitalization efforts render its DIB largely self-sufficient.[15] If the US cuts off military aid now Russian forces may regain battlefield capabilities necessary to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms and would place Russia in a much better position militarily in the medium to long term.

Russian sources are purposefully exaggerating Ukrainian casualties in a Russian strike near Selydove, Donetsk Oblast on February 13.[16] Other Russian sources claimed that the strike caused far fewer casualties and published footage purportedly of a Russian strike against Tsukuryne (just south of Selydove) that is not consistent with the high number of casualties that other Russian sources claimed.[17] Ukrainian military officials reported on February 13 that Russian sources began purposefully spreading disinformation about Ukrainian losses after the Russian strike near Selydove and stated that Russian forces conducted a multiple rocket launch system (MLRS) strike against Tsukuryne, Donetsk Oblast on February 13 that damaged civilian infrastructure but did not cause any casualties.[18] Kremlin newswire TASS amplified a claim from an alleged unofficial Telegram channel of a Ukrainian brigade confirming Ukrainian personnel losses in the strike.[19] This unofficial Telegram channel later denied its initial claim.[20] The official Ukrainian brigade’s Facebook page has not published anything regarding the purported strike at the time of this publication.[21] The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation reported in December 2023 that Russian actors planned to promote information operations aimed at degrading Ukrainian morale through a network of fake Telegram channels disguised as official accounts of Ukrainian regional officials and military brigades.[22]

The Kremlin appears to be asserting the right to enforce Russian Federation law on officials of governments in NATO member states over actions taken in the performance of their official duties within the territories of their own countries. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) has put dozens of government officials from NATO countries on Russia’s wanted list because of alleged violations of Russian federal law committed outside the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation. Russian opposition outlet Mediazona stated on February 13 that it gained access to the MVD’s wanted list and that the Russian MVD put Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, Estonian Secretary of State Taimar Peterkop, Latvian Justice Minister Inese Libina-Egnere, Latvian Finance Minister Arvils Aseradens, Latvian Agricultural Minister Armands Krauze, and former Latvian Interior Minister Marija Golubeva on the wanted list for allegedly destroying Soviet monuments in Estonia and Latvia — which Kremlin newswire TASS confirmed.[23] Mediazona stated that 59 Lithuanian Seimas deputies, 15 Riga municipal deputies, Lithuanian Mayor of Klaipeda Arvydas Vaitkus, Vaitkus’s deputy, 13 members of the Klaipeda city council, six deputies of the Vilnius city council, Polish Mayor of Walbrzych Roman Szelemey, and Polish Deputy Minister of State Assets Karol Rabenda also appear on the Russian MVD’s wanted list in connection with the destruction of Soviet monuments in the Baltic states and Poland.[24] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitri Peskov stated the Baltic officials are wanted for “hostile actions against historical memory and Russia.”[25] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed that Kallas is “actively pursuing a policy of demolishing monuments and mocking the memory of Soviet soldiers” and that she must be held accountable for “blasphemy.”[26] Zakharova called on Russian law enforcement agencies to conduct investigations “within the framework of their powers and responsibilities in accordance with the legislation of Russia.” Zakharova claimed that the officials must “answer for their crimes” and that “this is just the beginning.”[27]

Article 243 of the Russian Criminal Code states that the destruction or damage of cultural heritage sites and monuments is punishable by up to six years in prison.[28] Russia, however, does not have the legal authority to prosecute foreign citizens for allegedly violating Russian laws in foreign states. Russia has notably used the issue of Soviet monuments to justify hybrid warfare tactics against NATO countries in the past when Russia launched large-scale cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007 after Estonia moved a Soviet World War II war memorial and the remains of Soviet soldiers from central Tallinn to the Tallinn Defense Cemetery.[29] Although it is unclear if the Russian government had planned to publicize its inclusion of the European officials on the list before Mediazona disclosed this information, this may be part of ongoing Russian effort to set informational conditions justifying possible Russian escalations against NATO states in the future, as ISW has extensively reported.[30] The Kremlin has also invoked narratives related to the historical memory of World War II to justify and sustain its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[31]

US sanctions are reportedly constraining Russian efforts to skirt the G7 oil cap amid continued indications that India may be rethinking its growing position as a customer of Russian oil. Bloomberg reported on February 13 that at least 21 of the 50 oil tankers that the US has sanctioned since October 2023 for carrying Russian crude oil priced above the G7’s $60 price cap have stopped transporting Russian oil and petroleum products.[32] Bloomberg also reported that in the past two months roughly half of 14 idling oil tankers carrying Russian oil to India have since turned around from their destination without unloading.[33] Indian government sources have recently reportedly stated that India wants to distance itself from Russia due to the war in Ukraine, limiting Russia’s ability to provide India with munitions.[34] Increased energy exports to Indo-pacific states, primarily India and China, and widespread Russian efforts to skirt the G7 price cap through a fleet of oil tankers with obscure ownership and insurance allowed Russia to significantly increase oil revenues in 2023.[35] Russia relied on oil revenues to buoy federal budgets amid increased spending on its war in Ukraine in 2023, and effective US sanctions and Indian reconsiderations of its trade relationship with Russia may complicate this effort in 2024.[36]

Key Takeaways:

• The US Senate passed a supplemental appropriations bill that would provide roughly $60 billion of security assistance to Ukraine, the vast majority of which would go to US companies and personnel.
• Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported that Russian forces are attempting to restore maneuver to the battlefield through Soviet deep battle theory but are struggling with implementing Soviet deep battle so far due to current Ukrainian capabilities.
• The current Ukrainian battlefield capabilities that are denying Russian forces the ability to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms largely depend on the provision of Western military assistance in key systems, many of which only the US can provide at scale.
• Ukrainian forces will not be able to retain these advantages and deny Russian forces the ability to restore maneuver to the battlefield on Russian terms without further assistance from the United States and its partner countries in the near and medium term.
• Russian sources are purposefully exaggerating Ukrainian casualties in a Russian strike near Selydove, Donetsk Oblast on February 13.
• The Kremlin appears to be asserting the right to enforce Russian Federation law on officials of governments in NATO member states over actions taken in the performance of their official duties within the territories of their own countries.
• US sanctions are reportedly constraining Russian efforts to skirt the G7 oil cap amid continued indications that India may be rethinking its growing position as a customer of Russian oil.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Kreminna and in western Zaporizhia Oblast amid continued positional engagements along the entire frontline.
• The British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank stated on February 12 that Russia is likely able to sustain its current rate of vehicle losses for at least two to three years by producing new vehicles and reactivating vehicles from storage.
• The Kremlin continues efforts to solidify control of occupied Ukraine through institutionalizing social benefits and services.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports. 

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces recently advanced west of Kreminna amid continued positional fighting on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on February 13. Geolocated footage published on February 12 shows that Russian forces recently advanced in a field east of Torske (west of Kreminna).[37] A Russian milblogger claimed on February 12 that Russian forces advanced 300 meters further into eastern Bilohorivka (south of Kreminna) and seized a segment of the Shypylivka-Bilohorivka road, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[38] Positional fighting continued on February 13 northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka and Lake Lyman; southeast of Kupyansk near Tymkivka and Tabaivka; northwest of Kreminna near Nevske; west of Kreminna near Terny and Yampolivka; and near Bilohorivka.[39]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces reportedly advanced west of Bakhmut amid continued positional fighting in the area on February 13. The spokesperson for a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Bakhmut area stated that Russian forces are partially advancing near Bohdanivka (northwest of Bakhmut) and are capturing whole windbreaks or forest areas near the settlement.[40] The Ukrainian spokesperson stated that Russian milbloggers are falsely claiming that Russian forces have advanced within two kilometers of Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut).[41] Russian milbloggers claimed on February 12 and 13 that elements of the 98th Airborne (VDV) Division, including elements of its 331st VDV Regiment, advanced towards Bohdanivka, west of the O0506 (Khromove-Chasiv Yar) highway, and towards Ivanivske (west of Bakhmut).[42] Positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut near Bilohorivka and Vesele, northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka, west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske, southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Andriivka, and south of Bakhmut near Shumy and Pivdenne.[43] Elements of the Russian 83rd VDV Brigade and the 106th VDV Division are reportedly operating in the Bakhmut direction.[44]

Russian forces reportedly continued to advance within Avdiivka amid continued positional fighting in the area on February 13. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in northern and central Avdiivka and on the southeastern and southern outskirts of the settlement, although ISW has not yet observed confirmation of further Russian gains within Avdiivka.[45] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced west of Avdiivka near Lastochkyne and southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske, but ISW has not observed confirmation of these claims either.[46] Positional fighting continued within and near Avdiivka, west of Avdiivka near Tonenke, and southwest of Avdiivka near Nevelske and Pervomaiske.[47] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Commander Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi stated that Russian forces are intensifying assaults in the Tavriisk direction (Avdiivka through western Zaporizhia Oblast) and conducted their highest number of air and artillery strikes in the area since the start of 2024.[48] Russian milbloggers claimed on February 13 that Russian forces conducted up to 60 glide bomb strikes on Ukrainian positions in Avdiivka over the past day.[49] Elements of the Russian 1st “Slavic” Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk Peoples Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) are reportedly operating in the Avdiivka direction.[50]

Positional engagements continued west and southwest of Donetsk City on February 13. Russian and Ukrainian sources stated that positional fighting continued west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda and Novomykhailivka.[51] Elements of the Russian 238th Artillery Brigade (8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) and the 5th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) are reportedly operating near Heorhiivka and elements of the 14th Spetsnaz Brigade (Russian General Staff’s Main Directorate [GRU]) and the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet) are reportedly operating near Novomykhailivka.[52]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Positional engagements continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on February 13 but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Russian and Ukrainian sources stated that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked south of Prechystivka (southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and north of Pryyutne (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[53] Elements of the Russian 29th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) reportedly continue to operate in the Vuhledar direction (east of Velyka Novosilka).[54]

Russian forces recently advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast amid continued positional engagements on February 13. Geolocated footage published on February 12 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced west of Robotyne.[55] Russian and Ukrainian sources stated that positional engagements continued near Robotyne, northeast of Robotyne near Mala Tokmachka and Novoprokovka, east of Robotyne near Verbove, and south of Robotyne near Novoprokopivka.[56] Elements of the Russian 71st Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) reportedly continue to operate near Robotyne.[57]

Positional engagements continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky.[58] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian Storm-Z, Naval Infantry, Airborne (VDV), and mobilized units conduct two-to-three assaults in left bank Kherson Oblast per day.[59] Humenyuk also reported that Russian forces are increasingly using first-person view (FPV) drones in assaults in left bank Kherson Oblast and that Russian assault units lose up to 70 percent of their personnel in such attacks.

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of February 12 to 13. The Ukrainian Air Force reported on February 13 that Russian forces launched 23 Shahed-136/131 drones from Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Krasnodar Krai, and occupied Cape Chauda, Crimea, and that Ukrainian forces destroyed 16 Shaheds in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.[60] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian Kh-59 missile near Odesa City and that Russian forces struck Kirovohrad Oblast with a likely Iskander-K missile.[61] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat stated that Ukrainian forces are using a large number of foreign air defense systems in parallel with Soviet-era S-300 and Buk-M1 air defense systems.[62] Ihnat stated that foreign air defense systems, such as NASAMS, IRIS-T, and Patriot systems, should become the basis of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella.[63]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

The British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank stated on February 12 that Russia is likely able to sustain its current rate of vehicle losses for at least two to three years by producing new vehicles and reactivating vehicles from storage.[64] IISS estimated that Russia has lost over 3,000 armored fighting vehicles in 2023 and close to 8,000 armored fighting vehicles since February 2022. IISS stated that Russia likely reactivated at least 1,180 main battle tanks and about 2,470 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers pulled from storage in 2023. IISS stated that Russia has 10 Central Tank Reserve Bases, at least 37 mixed equipment and armaments storage bases, and at least 12 artillery storage bases. Ukrainian military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko stated on February 11 that Russia’s reported tank production numbers in recent years largely reflect restored and modernized tanks drawn from storage rather than new production.[65]

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian government to address issues related to Russian military personnel, likely as part of Putin’s continued efforts to portray himself as an involved, caring, wartime leader before the March 2024 presidential election. Putin ordered the Russian government to change the process of examining injured miliary personnel who fought in Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) militias and military formations since May 2014 and to analyze existing frameworks for providing benefits and payment to Russian military personnel.[66]

Russia is trying to nationalize certain defense industrial base (DIB) enterprises. Russian news outlet Kommersant reported on February 13 that the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office filed a lawsuit with the Sverdlovsk Oblast Arbitration Court to seize the shares of three industrial enterprises of the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant, claiming that the privatization of these enterprises from 1993 to 1999 was illegal and required the Russian government’s permission.[67] The Prosecutor General’s Office claimed that residents of unspecified “unfriendly” states control the enterprises and that the enterprises export products at a reduced cost to the US, France, and the United Kingdom (UK). Kommersant reported that the Prosecutor General’s Office stated that the enterprises are Russia’s largest producers of ferroalloys specifically for high-quality steel for military equipment, heat-resistant aircraft engines, weapon barrels, and armor-piercing projectiles.

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)

Nothing significant to report.

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

Ukraine continues efforts to domestically produce drones. Ukrainian Prime Minster Denys Shmyhal stated on February 13 that Ukraine has about 200 private drone production companies.[68] Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated on February 12 that Ukraine allocated about $2.5 million in grants to military tech startups in 2023 and that Ukraine is set to increase this amount by tenfold in 2024.[69]

Ukraine reportedly created a nationwide electronic warfare (EW) system that can disrupt Russian drones’ satellite navigation.[70] The “Pokrova” system reportedly jams navigation systems, like the Russian GLONASS, with “spoofing,” causing the drones to relay an incorrect location. Ukrainian forces have reportedly used spoofing to down Russian drones at a short range, but Pokrova works on a larger scale. Forbes stated that Ukrainian forces may already be using Pokrova to down Russian Shahed drones.[71]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian citizens into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

The Kremlin continues efforts to solidify control of occupied Ukraine through institutionalizing social benefits and services. Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a list of instructions on February 12 instructing the Russian government to ensure the extension of preferential mortgage lending programs in occupied Ukraine, to develop health infrastructure in occupied territories through offering medical workers from Russia money, and to guarantee insurance payments to volunteers operating in occupied Ukraine.[72] These instructions notably aim to attract Russian citizens, businesses, and volunteers to occupied Ukraine, likely to permanently change Ukraine’s demographics. These measures support longstanding Russian efforts to establish economic and social control over occupied territories while also likely supporting Russian repopulation efforts that seek to bring ethnic Russians to occupied Ukraine as part of the Kremlin’s ethnic cleansing campaign.[73]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

US-sanctioned pro-Kremlin Moldovan politician Ilan Shor reiterated boilerplate claims that the US intends to directly interfere in Moldovan politics by finding a “replacement” for current Moldovan President Maia Sandu.[74] Shor is likely attempting to further a common Russian information operation aimed at portraying any perceived pro-Western political sentiment in post-Soviet countries as Western-manufactured and not endogenously generated.

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Nothing significant to report.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 13, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-february-13-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Southern Gaza Strip: Israel presented a proposal to move displaced Gazans in Rafah to Egyptian-built tent cities in the southwestern Gaza Strip, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• Negotiations: Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan claimed on February 12 that Egyptian and Qatar mediators believe that the Hamas ceasefire proposal that Qatar delivered to Israel “opened a way to reach an agreement.”
• Hamdan reiterated Hamas’ longstanding requirements for a ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, which include the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the end of Israeli military operations, humanitarian aid and reconstruction, and a hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal.
• Lebanon: France outlined a three-step plan to deescalate the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border and force Lebanese Hezbollah to withdraw six miles from the Israeli border.
• Iran: Former Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister and Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Director General Ali Akbar Salehi said during an interview on February 11 that Iran is able to develop nuclear weapons.

IRAN UPDATE, FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Feb 13, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, February 13, 2024

Andie Parry, Amin Soltani, Kathryn Tyson, Alexandra Braverman, Peter Mills, Kathryn Tyson, Kitaneh Fitzpatrick, and Brian Carter

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm EST

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. For more on developments in Iran and the region, see our interactive map of Iran and the Middle East.

Note: CTP and ISW have refocused the update to cover the Israel-Hamas war. The new sections address developments in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as noteworthy activity from Iran’s Axis of Resistance. We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report. Click here to subscribe to the Iran Update.

Key Takeaways:

• Southern Gaza Strip: Israel presented a proposal to move displaced Gazans in Rafah to Egyptian-built tent cities in the southwestern Gaza Strip, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• Negotiations: Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan claimed on February 12 that Egyptian and Qatar mediators believe that the Hamas ceasefire proposal that Qatar delivered to Israel “opened a way to reach an agreement.”
• Hamdan reiterated Hamas’ longstanding requirements for a ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, which include the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the end of Israeli military operations, humanitarian aid and reconstruction, and a hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal.
• Lebanon: France outlined a three-step plan to deescalate the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border and force Lebanese Hezbollah to withdraw six miles from the Israeli border.
• Iran: Former Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister and Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Director General Ali Akbar Salehi said during an interview on February 11 that Iran is able to develop nuclear weapons.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to launch and sustain a major ground operation into the Gaza Strip
• Degrade IDF material and morale around the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian militias did not claim any attacks targeting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the northern Gaza Strip on February 13. IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said that the IDF would continue to operate in the northern Gaza Strip.[1] He added that the northern Gaza Strip remains “isolated” from the remainder of the Strip because the IDF does not want civilians to reenter areas where Palestinian militia fighters are continuing to operate.[2] The al Quds Brigades posted footage of the group’s previous targeting of Israeli forces in western Gaza City but did not claim new attacks.[3]

The Nahal Brigade (operating under the 162nd Division) killed at least 10 Palestinian fighters in the central Gaza Strip, including a Palestinian anti-tank cell.[4]

Israeli forces continued operations in several areas of Khan Younis Governorate. Israeli forces concentrated on clearing western Khan Younis between January 22 and February 10.[5] Palestinian militias have resumed attacking Israeli forces in eastern, southern, and northern Khan Younis governorate after February 8. The militias focused most of their attacks in western Khan Younis between January 25 and February 8.[6]

Palestinian militias attacked Israeli forces north of Khan Younis on February 13. Hamas conducted at least four attacks on Israeli personnel and armor in the al Qarara area, north of Khan Younis on February 13, including a house-borne improvised explosive device attack targeting Israeli forces as they entered a home there.[7] Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters also targeted Israeli forces with small arms in northern Khan Younis.[8]

Israeli forces continued clearing operations in western Khan Younis and clashed with Palestinian fighters there. The IDF 7th Brigade (assigned to the 36th Division) raided militia infrastructure, conducted patrols, and killed over thirty Palestinian fighters in western Khan Younis.[9] The 35th Paratrooper Brigade (assigned to the 98th Division) killed two Palestinian fighters in western Khan Younis who were hiding among civilians to disguise their movement.[10] Local Palestinian sources reported that Israeli forces advanced to the gates of the Nasser Hospital in western Khan Younis on February 13 and ordered the occupants to evacuate the grounds.[11]  

The 646th Brigade (assigned to the 99th Division) engaged Palestinian fighters and captured Hamas weapons caches during clearing operations in Abasan al Saghira, east of Khan Younis, during the last week.[12] The 646th Brigade evacuated thousands of civilians from a humanitarian shelter that Hamas fighters were using for refuge. The 646th Brigade detained and killed dozens of Palestinian fighters as the fighters attempted to evacuate alongside the civilians in the shelter.[13]

Palestinian fighters attempted to defend against the 646th Brigade’s operations in Abasan al Saghira. Palestinian fighters detonated a house-borne improvised explosive device that killed three Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander, during the brigade’s operations in the town on February 13.[14] Hamas fighters also fired small arms targeting seven 646th Brigade soldiers in Abasan al Saghira on the same day.[15]

Israel presented a proposal to move displaced Gazans in Rafah to Egyptian-built tent cities in the southwestern Gaza Strip, according to the Wall Street Journal.[16]  Unspecified Egyptian officials said the Israeli proposal plan would obligate Egypt to 15 camps in the Gaza Strip containing 375,000 tents with funding from the United States and unspecified Arab partners. The camps would contain medical clinics, and Israel would coordinate with Egypt to permit the evacuation of wounded Gazans. The Israeli and Egyptian governments did not comment on the alleged proposal. The IDF Chief of Staff stated on February 13 that Rafah contains an estimated 10,000 Hamas fighters and over a million displaced Palestinian civilians, which requires the IDF to evacuate Rafah before beginning major clearing operations in the city.[17]

Israel is also considering other plans to evacuate the population from Rafah. Israel’s public broadcaster reported that Israel is considering other plans to enable operations in Rafah by evacuating the population from Rafah to Khan Younis or by allowing some civilians to return to designated zones in the northern Gaza Strip.[18] The IDF Chief of Staff said that the IDF would not allow northern Gaza residents to return as long as militant activity persists in the northern Gaza Strip, however.[19]

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan claimed on February 12 that Egyptian and Qatar mediators believe that the Hamas ceasefire proposal that Qatar delivered to Israel “opened a way to reach an agreement.”[20] Hamdan reiterated Hamas’ longstanding requirements for a ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, which include the withdrawal of Israeli forces, the end of Israeli military operations, humanitarian aid and reconstruction, and a hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal.[21] An unspecified Hamas source told CNN on February 13 that the next 24 hours are critical to the ceasefire negotiations.[22] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas’ previous three-stage ceasefire and hostage exchange proposal on February 7.[23] Hamas’ February 7 proposal is the last publicly acknowledged proposal. The United States, Egypt, and Qatar are continuing to mediate negotiations between Israel and Hamas.[24] 

Palestinian militias launched at least two rocket salvoes from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel on February 13. The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement fired a rocket salvo from the Gaza Strip into a town in southern Israeli adjacent to Beit Lahia.[25] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) fired an unspecified number of rocket salvoes at unspecified Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip.[26]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Draw IDF assets and resources toward the West Bank and fix them there

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters four times across the West Bank on February 13.[27] Israeli security forces shot and captured one attacker who attempted to run over civilians with his vehicle near Gush Etzion.[28] The IDF detained 18 wanted individuals across the West Bank on February 13.[29] The IDF separately reported that Israeli security forces detained a Hamas fighter in Jenin. The IDF described the fighter as the head of ”Hamas’ military infrastructure in Jenin”.[30]

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Draw IDF assets and resources toward northern Israel and fix them there
• Set conditions for successive campaigns into northern Israel

Iranian-backed militias, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted six attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel on February 13.[31] Hezbollah fired anti-tank guided missiles targeting Kiryat Shmona. The Hezbollah attack targeting Kiryat Shmona injured two Israeli civilians.[32]

France outlined a three-step plan to deescalate the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border and force Lebanese Hezbollah to withdraw six miles from the Israeli border.[33] An unspecified French diplomat told Reuters that France delivered the proposal to Israel, the Lebanese government, and Hezbollah.[34] The proposal calls on Israel and Hezbollah to end military operations—including airstrikes and cross-border attacks—along the Israel-Lebanon border. Hezbollah would then withdraw at least six miles north of the border. The Lebanese Armed Forces would backfill Hezbollah to serve as a buffer between the border and Hezbollah forces. Israel and Lebanon would resume negotiations to demarcate the border between the two countries in the plan’s third stage. A Hezbollah official said in response that the group would not negotiate until Israel stopped military operations in the Gaza Strip.[35]

Lebanese Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech on the state of the Israel-Hamas war on February 13. Nasrallah said that Hezbollah will not escalate against Israel unless Israel escalates against Hezbollah.[36] He added that Hezbollah will continue its attacks into northern Israel until Israel ends its operations in the Gaza Strip.[37] Nasrallah demanded that the Lebanese government set ”new conditions” on UN Security Council 1701. Nasrallah said the government should not ”implement” 1701, which says that Hezbollah cannot deploy military forces south of the Litani River.[38]

Israeli media reported on February 13 that Lebanese Hezbollah has incorporated hundreds of Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters in Syria into Hezbollah’s Radwan Force.[39] The Radwan Force is an elite Hezbollah unit. Hezbollah has enabled Palestinian militias to conduct attacks targeting Israel from southern Lebanon since the war began.[40]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Demonstrate the capability and willingness of Iran and the Axis of Resistance to escalate against the United States and Israel on multiple fronts
• Set conditions to fight a regional war on multiple fronts

The Russian Ambassador to Iraq offered condolences to the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Commission Chairman Faleh al Fayyadh for the deaths of Popular Mobilization Forces members in the February 2 US airstrikes.[41] The February 2 airstrikes targeted two Iranian-backed Iraqi militias in Anbar and Babil provinces.[42]

Iranian militias transported weapons from Iraq through the unofficial and Iranian-backed militia-controlled al Sikka crossing into Syria on February 13.[43] The Iranian-backed Iraqi militia group Liwa al Tafuf facilitates the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)’s movement between Iraq and Syria and weapons shipments into Albu Kamal, Syria from Iraq.[44] The United States targeted Liwa al Tafuf and the al Sikka crossing on February 2 in response to the January 28 Iranian-backed attack in Jordan that killed three US servicemembers.[45]

Israel likely conducted a drone strike targeting an IRGC missile storage facility in al Mayadin, Deir ez Zor Province, Syria on February 13.[46] Israel has conducted a series of airstrikes during the Israel-Hamas War targeting IRGC and IRGC-affiliated military facilities, weapons warehouses, and personnel in Syria. These strikes are Israel’s response to Iranian attempts to accelerate weapons shipments to Lebanese Hezbollah through Syria.[47]

Local Syrian media reported that unspecified Iran-backed militias targeted US forces stationed at the al Omar oil field in eastern Syria on February 13.[48] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—has regularly conducted drone and rocket attacks targeting US forces in Iraq and Syria since October 18, 2023, but it did not claim this attack.[49]

The IRGC fired short and medium-range ballistic missiles from a forward base ship in the Gulf of Oman toward central Iran during a military exercise on February 12.[50] The IRGC Navy and Aerospace Force launched the missiles from the Shahid Mahdavi forward base ship using a launcher disguised as a shipping container.[51] The ability to launch ballistic missiles from a containerized launcher means that Iran has the capability to hide the launcher on otherwise unassuming, civilian container ships. Iran could use these container ships as commerce raiders to attack merchant shipping and disrupt maritime traffic without a requirement for land-based launchers.[52] Iranian officials and media used this event to signal the IRGC’s ability to directly target Iran’s adversaries, including Israel.[53]

Former Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister and Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Director General Ali Akbar Salehi said during an interview on February 11 that Iran is able to develop nuclear weapons.[54] Salehi claimed that Iran has the components it requires to make nuclear weapons and noted that these parts have non-weapons related purposes. Salehi was responding to a state television presenter’s question about Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi called for transparency from the Iranian nuclear program and expressed concern over Salehi’s remarks during the World Government Summit in Dubai on February 13.[55]

An unspecified Iranian official and “two others briefed on the matter” told Western media on February 13 that the IRGC recalled its senior commanders from Syria ahead of US strikes on February 2.[56] The unspecified Iranian official told the Financial Times that Iran sought to avoid direct confrontation with the United States by recalling its commanders. The New York Times similarly reported on February 2 that Iran recalled its senior commanders from Iraq and Syria ahead of the US strikes.[57] The United States struck over 85 IRGC Quds Force and Iranian-backed militia targets in Iraq and Syria on February 2 in response to the January 28 Iranian-backed attack in Jordan that killed three US servicemembers.[58]

Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian implied that Israel will not achieve its war time goals in a meeting with Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh. Abdollahian implied the Israel will not achieve its goals, citing Hamas’ participation in “political negotiations” with Israel, the United States, Qatar, and Egypt.[59] Abdollahian claimed that the United States and Israel recognize Hamas as a “party to political negotiations“ in the war and the group‘s “irreplaceable role and position. He also ”praised” the Axis of Resistance for its “brave support” of the Palestinian people.

Abdollahian is using his ongoing regional tour to coordinate politically with Axis of Resistance leaders, including Haniyeh. Abdollahian met with Lebanese Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut on February 10.[60] He separately met with senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine officials in Beirut on the same date.

Abdollahian separately met with the Qatari prime minister and foreign affairs minister and the Qatari emir in separate meetings in Doha on February 13.[61] Abdollahian and the Qatari leaders discussed a political solution to the Israel-Hamas war in both meetings. The Qatari prime minister and foreign affairs minister stressed the necessity contain the scope of the war.[62] This marks Abdollahian’s fifth trip to Doha since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.[63]

Barron’s reported that Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)-affiliated hackers said that they conducted a cyberattack targeting the Iranian parliament’s website and the Iranian parliament-affiliated news agency.[64] The United States listed the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization between 1997 and 2012.[65] MEK claimed that it penetrated 600 Parliament-affiliated servers. The group published hundreds of pages of material that it acquired during the cyberattack on its Telegram channel.

3. Lighten the load: The Army’s plan to save time by shedding excess gear

We should all re-read the "Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation," by S.L.A. Marshall. A PDF copy is at this link: https://mcoecbamcoepwprd01.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/library/ebooks/Soldier's%20Load_dated%201980.pdf

From Marshall: 

"Of the two score military books and manuals which I have written, this essay which first appeared in 1949 has had by far the most instructive history and consequence."

...

The basic theme is elementary and should be beyond argument: No logistical system is sound unless its first principle is enlightened conservation of the power of the individual fighter. 

The secondary theme, in 1949 a radically new idea, as yet unsupported by incontrovertible scientific proof, is that sustained fear in the male individual is as degenerative as prolonged fatigue and exhausts body energy no less." 

Or we should listen to the troops. "A hundred pounds of lightweight sh*t (stuff) is still a hundred pounds." The Alice ruck abhors a vacuum and Joe/Josephine will fill every space with all equipment and ammunition they believe they might need. The more lightweight it is the more of it they will try to carry. And if they cannot fit it inside they will tie it on. If a little is good. A lot is better.

Lighten the load: The Army’s plan to save time by shedding excess gear

armytimes.com · by Todd South · February 13, 2024

The days of stuffing Conex boxes full of any and all gear on hand and shipping them to a combat zone are over.

The Army wants sleeker formations. The service is modernizing everything from night vision and rifles to tanks and artillery. There’s no more room in the supply section for unused gear that’s piled up over the recent wars.

And that gear is more than an eyesore: it’s a time suck.

As the service prepares for the possibility of a conventional war, the one thing soldiers can’t spare is time.

Every set of outdated optics, old M4s or obsolete radios add up to days each month that soldiers have to drag out, inventory and maintain gear they don’t use. And those days rob soldiers of training time on basic skills and new equipment needed to fight the next war.

It appears that top Army leaders feel their pain. A recent pilot program now making its way across the force aims to clear out the junk cluttering a unit’s space and free up time for soldiering.

Commanders a generation ago might have kept a “property book” with five to 10 pages of equipment. Today, their counterparts at operational units such as the 82nd Airborne Division, 3rd Infantry Division and 2nd Cavalry Regiment now tote books with 50, 70, or more than 100 pages.

“A company commander in the 82nd Airborne can carry a property book of 50 pages or more,” Capt. Stephen Glynn, headquarters company, 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division told Army Times. “That book alone accounts for 3,200 pieces of equipment that he or she must inventory, clean, and maintain throughout the year.”

That could mean more than 200 rifles and optics, 45 handguns, 35 vehicles and thousands of other pieces of gear, ranging from communications equipment to chemical protection kits and other mission essential tools and supplies for a single company.

But not all of that is essential any longer.

The 82nd Special Troops Battalion along with the 82nd Airborne Division Sustainment Brigade prep equipment for the Rapid Removal of Excess Pilot Program (R2E), Fort Liberty, N.C., Oct 30, 2023. (Sgt. Vincent Levelev/Army)

Much of the growing property list for these combat units are holdovers from decades of Global War on Terrorism deployments, commanders said. And a complicated process for ditching unnecessary or unserviceable equipment has, for years, stymied unit leaders’ efforts to trim their books.

When Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George took office in September, he laid out clear priorities — warfighting, continuous transformation, strengthening the profession and delivering ready combat formations.

George has commanded at all levels, from tactical to strategic. He’s had his soldiers roll out warehouses full of gear, unpackage it, handle inventory and account for thousands of items.

“Laying out, counting it, you only have to do it once or twice to know how painful it is,” George told Army Times.

At the time he took over, he also announced a pilot program, later called Rapid Removal of Excess, from which he expected quick results.

The chief’s directive was far-reaching. He told his staff to identify two divisions, one light and one heavy, in the same corps. Larger Army formations such as Army Materiel Command, Forces Command and Army headquarters would support those divisions over a 90-day period while they cut excess from their inventory.

The move — clearing out old gear — may seem administrative, but there’s a bigger plan at play, George said.

“I think it’s going to improve our readiness,” he said. “Obviously if you’re out on today’s battlefield you need to be able to move, you need to be able to conceal yourself, you’re dragging all of this stuff around. If you’re significantly leaner, you’re significantly less targetable.”

By cutting down on how much time and energy officers, and by extension, rank-and-file soldiers, spend sorting through warehouses full of gear nobody uses, they’ll be freed up to focus on the many other demands already on their plates.

Soldiers inventory tents and camoflauge netting at Storck Barracks in Illesheim, Germany, Sept. 24, 2020. (Staff Sgt. Garrett L. Dipuma/Army)

Reducing the burden on soldiers

For generations, the Army has dictated what equipment various kinds of units must keep in their inventory. At the same time, each unit may be tasked with a new mission or duty that then adds more to that load.

Typically, a unit commander inventories about 10% of their gear each month throughout the year.

Equipment that they had to track but didn’t use, sometimes for years, could stack up. The sheer volume of gear created storage problems, and spilled over into areas originally meant for training. It also meant time spent maintaining that gear, which had to be kept intact, clean and in working order, just in case.

For a long time, getting rid of anything was an uphill battle.

Maj. Brian Campbell, executive officer of 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne, told Army Times that getting permission to remove the equipment required approval all the way up the unit chain of command, from company to division or even corps. Simply getting the green light could take months.

A major hurdle every commander faced was the requirement that equipment couldn’t be turned in until it was in operational condition. That meant spending time cleaning, fixing and ordering any missing or broken parts, which ate up time, money and led to a backlog that stalled the process.

The equipment removal pilot reversed those requirements. Soldiers from Army Materiel Command, Forces Command and the 3rd Expeditionary Support Corps, the unit responsible for coordinating sustainment operations for XVIII Airborne Corps, the parent unit of 3rd Infantry Division and 82nd Airborne, the two divisions chosen for the program’s first iteration, set up mobile sites at Fort Liberty, North Carolina and Fort Stewart, Georgia.

They also waived the maintenance requirement so soldiers could bring in gear “as is.”

“So, drive it, tow it, drag it down, we will take it and they are immediately relieved of that excess equipment,” said Eric Cowan, a longtime logistician with Army Materiel Command.

The move quantifiably streamlined the process.

In one example, a typical Humvee turn in, which would include a detailed inspection, could take two to three hours on average. Through the pilot process it took about 15 minutes, said Col. David Alvarez, 3rd Expeditionary Support Corps assistant chief of staff for support operations.

And with 800 “rolling stock” items — Humvees, trailers, mobile generators — turned in by the two divisions, that time adds up.

Glynn had a Humvee that his unit had been trying to get rid of for five years, long before he took command. But the maintenance and permissions just never aligned. Three weeks into the pilot, the Humvee was gone.

Both the support corps commander, Brig. Gen. John Hinson, and 82nd Airborne Deputy Commanding Officer Col. Jason Williams told Army Times that the key to coordinating so many units to turn in so much equipment in about 35 working days involved treating it like an operation. Units even conducted rehearsals before the pilot kicked off, noting which units would bring their gear in when and how much they expected to offload.

In the past, Williams said, getting rid of gear was seen as something the executive officers, unit logistics sections and supply sergeants would take care of while everyone else was out training.

For this pilot, instead of dragging out the inventory on a continuous basis, soldiers at Fort Liberty and Fort Stewart spent several days clearing out old and unused gear in one fell swoop. Despite the arduous — and monotonous — task, this means that future gear checks will be shorter and more seamless.

Spc. Kyle Doyle, a truck driver with 110th Composite Truck Company, lays out his gear for an inventory inspection in preparation for a rapid deployment to the areas affected by Hurricane Florence in 2018. (Sgt. Liane Hatch/Army)

Those moves buy back time for all the other things soldiers have to do.

“First and foremost, we’re gonna train more,” Glynn said. “Now that I’m not wasting time every month, that time can be reinvested on training and maintaining mission essential equipment.”

Soldiers dragged out piles and rows of everything from generators, computer systems, automation equipment, tents, blue force trackers, satellites, drones, nuclear, biological, and chemical protection equipment, night vision goggles, sniper rifles, aged M4 carbines, small terrain utility vehicles, trailers, Humvees, light medium tactical vehicles, route clearance vehicles and unserviceable tanks.

Many of the changes could be likened to clearing out a cluttered garage.

“If you haven’t done spring cleaning for years in your garage, it’s almost impossible to get anything done,” Campbell said. “It’s just so jam-packed with stuff you’re unable to use it.”

What the pilot program did, Campbell said, was give units a chance to clean out their space, organize it and figure out how to use what they had in their facilities to work better.

Before the pilot began, the 82nd Airborne Division was tasked with cutting 2,700 items. They got rid of 16,400.

Among those items, an estimated 3,000 pieces would have required maintenance to bring them up to the operational standard that units have had to meet before turning items over. Handing off that equipment “as is” saved more than 120,000-man hours of maintenance, Williams said.

That’s less time cleaning old weapons, scanning NBC gear for cracks, counting radio cables and servicing vehicles that nobody drives anymore because they’ve been replaced.

That time saved has a ripple effect, Williams explained. Every item in the inventory has its share of scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Scheduled items include oil changes for vehicles or function checks for weapons and other gear as they’re used for training or checked periodically.

Unscheduled maintenance often means that something broke.

Maintainers only have so much time, so when something breaks down, that takes priority, Williams said. That means that sometimes the scheduled maintenance gets pushed, creating backlogs. Enough broken equipment and those scheduled maintenance backlogs could bring down the readiness of both the equipment and the unit.

In February, the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, will begin the next equipment removal, Hinson said. Following that, I Corps, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, then III Corps at Fort Cavazos, Texas are on the schedule.

George said there’s interest across the active Army and Guard. Units in Europe and the Pacific have asked to undergo the gear-shedding process.

A soldier turns in excess equipment to the Modernization Displacement and Repair Site at Fort Liberty, N.C., Nov. 2, 2023. (Lindsay Grant/Army)

Other efforts to save soldiers’ time

The pilot program is one of multiple efforts that George has highlighted in his first few months as chief, all aimed at moving both the physical and bureaucratic workload up the chain of command.

A simultaneous effort that hasn’t gotten as much publicity is the Modified Table of Organization and Equipment Reduction Pilot.

The table is the Army-assigned list of equipment and personnel a unit must have on hand, in good working order, to perform their primary mission. That can vary widely depending on the unit, but it is the linchpin for a unit’s capabilities.

The team reviewed 10,699 pieces of equipment on the various lists at the 3rd Infantry Division and 82nd Airborne and identified 159 pieces they recommended for removal. That’s in addition to the excess equipment not on the equipment table.

Some examples included computer and data systems, avionics testing equipment, a grader in the combat engineer company and secure telephones, Ashley Patoka, a Forces Command spokesperson, told Army Times.

George also noted early on in his tenure that he wanted to drastically reduce the footprint of units’ command posts. He sees a not-too-distant future where a commander uses no more than a tablet from the back of a vehicle to share an operating picture with their staff.

He also told Army Times that he met with senior chief warrant officers from across the force to examine how often mechanics were doing unnecessary vehicle maintenance simply because it was part of the regulation or schedule.

“If you could save 50 hours inside your formation and spend 25 of that on the range or doing some training, shoot, I don’t care if you use the other 25 to spend time with your family because we’re so busy,” George said.

Staff Sgt. Camilla Brock and Cpt. Amanda Smith of the 210th Mobile Affairs Detachment verifies the serial number of a pair Night Vision Goggles as part of an arms inventory on Jan. 13, 2019. (Sgt. Charity Boedeker/Army)

How the Army’s inventory overhaul is going

When the pilot began on Oct. 23, program overseers estimated they’d see 21,464 pieces of equipment leave the inventories of 3rd Infantry Division, 82nd Airborne and about a dozen other smaller units at both Fort Stewart and Fort Liberty.

By the pilot’s end on Dec. 15, the units had turned in more than 37,000 pieces of equipment. More than 16,000 pieces came out of Fort Liberty units and another 11,000 pieces from the Fort Stewart units.

An estimated 19,000 pieces were transferred to other units or depots for maintenance. The rest went to the Defense Logistics Agency for other dispositions such as foreign military sales, donations to veterans organizations — think of the tanks in front of the Veterans of Foreign Wars halls across the country — or to be sold for scrap.

But to drill down to the effects on soldiers tasked with tracking all this gear, Glynn, the headquarters company commander with 82nd, shaved 20 pages out of his property book. The captain estimates that simply tracking the excess equipment took at least two workdays a month.

Soldiers receive and inventory equipment issued to the 41st Field Artillery Brigade at Grafenwoehr, Germany, Sept. 26, 2019. (Matthias Fruth/Army)

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Joshua Conde, property book officer for 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, shrank his property book by 10 pages, cutting 4,200 pieces of equipment out of a 28,000-item property book, or about 15% of what he had to track.

“I have never in my 25 years of active duty, seen this happen before,” said Williams, the 82nd Airborne’s deputy commanding officer.

When asked how long cutting so much gear from their lists would have taken under the old system where the burden was on the smaller unit and everything had to be in top maintenance condition, soldiers from the rank of general down to captain estimated between one and three years.

Beyond time, Glynn pointed to visible differences at his company headquarters.

Half of his storage space was filled with excess equipment.

He now has a Chemical, Biological, Radiological Nuclear training cage with 600 suits and training aids ready to use.

“I have a workshop for my (communications) section where they can innovate and train on new communications equipment and my company’s supply cage is now in order and streamlined for distribution,” Glynn said.

The captain also pointed to an intangible aspect of the lighter load — credibility. Too many times soldiers were hauling out gear they couldn’t identify and didn’t use, degrading trust that what they were doing mattered.

“We’re not asking a soldier to dig out something that is 20-25 years obsolete,” Glynn said. “They’re focusing on equipment that matters and they know that everything they touch is a piece of equipment that they need to be prepared to go to war with.”

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

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armytimes.com · by Todd South · February 13, 2024

4. Most casualties from recent attacks in Middle East are brain injuries

Troops have always suffered from blast injuries. We only now seem to be detecting and describing them as brain injuries. It makes me wonder about the tremendous suffering that troops throughout history have undergone from undiagnosed brain injuries or have been branded as malingerers suffering from "battle fatigue."

This is also why we need baseline brain testing of all troops.

Most casualties from recent attacks in Middle East are brain injuries

militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · February 13, 2024

Roughly 186 troops have been injured or killed in attacks on U.S. personnel in the Middle East since mid-October. Of those, 130 have been traumatic brain injuries, the Pentagon confirmed on Monday.

That means TBIs resulting from the blast impacts of missiles, mortars and drones make up 70% of the total number of casualties, which include three soldiers who were killed in the Jan. 28 attack on Tower 22 in Jordan.

“We do expect that number to continue to fluctuate as our service members ... with TBI report symptoms later on,” Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters during a Jan. 29 briefing. “So, that number could continue to grow.”

The number of troops injured in Iran-backed militia attacks more than doubled following the Tower 22 incident, according to numbers provided by the Defense Department.

The most recent injury data follows a Pentagon report on Feb. 5 that there were roughly 80 injured personnel overall. Of those, 40 stemmed from the Jordan attack, with eight requiring transportation out of the country for medical treatment.

As of Tuesday, there have been 170 attacks on U.S. troops since mid-October, Air Force Lt. Col. Bryon Garry, a Pentagon spokesman, confirmed to Military Times.

That number has held steady since Feb. 4, Singh confirmed Tuesday, representing one of the longest pauses in attacks since the barrage began in the fall.

RELATED

After Jordan attack, Pentagon weighs options to bolster base security

U.S. troops will likely be staying put at Tower 22 and other remote outposts in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, according to the Pentagon.

The lull coincides with a series of retaliatory U.S. strikes in Iraq and Syria, targeting militia facilities and leadership. The Pentagon announced Thursday that roughly 40 militants had been killed in the strikes.

The most recent attack targeted a vehicle carrying a high-ranking member of Kataib Hezbollah, the group responsible for the Tower 22 attack and dozens of other strikes.

That group told its members via Telegram message on Jan. 30 to cease targeting U.S. troops.

About Meghann Myers

Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.

5. Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley to Join the Princeton SPIA Faculty

Good work if you can get it.

Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley to Join the Princeton SPIA Faculty | Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

spia.princeton.edu

Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley to Join the Princeton SPIA Faculty

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Feb 13 2024

By Tom Durso

Source Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

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General Mark A. Milley, the retired 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is joining the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs as a Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor and Visiting Lecturer.

The appointment, which begins this month and runs through June 2025, is a homecoming for Milley, who earned his bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton.

At SPIA, Milley will serve as a guest lecturer, meet with students, engage with alumni and faculty, and provide input on the School’s Security Studies Ph.D. program. He will also participate in select events at the SPIA in D.C. venue in Washington.

“We are thrilled to welcome Mark back to Princeton, and to SPIA specifically,” said Amaney Jamal, the School’s dean. “His many years of outstanding, dedicated service to his country will be of enormous value to our students, and his experience in the national’s capital as well as abroad in conflict zones will benefit the School as a whole.”

Milley was appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs and confirmed by the Senate in 2019. He continued to serve through the presidential transition until stepping down in September 2023.

Prior to his tenure as Joint Chiefs Chair, Milley served as chief of staff of the Army. He had held command and staff positions in six Army divisions and a Special Forces Group after earning his commission in 1980 through Princeton's Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps program.

Milley, who played ice hockey for four years at Princeton, has returned to the University several times, including last May to meet with and speak to 14 members of the Class of 2023 who became commissioned officers in the U.S. armed forces. In 2016, he received the Woodrow Wilson Award, the University’s highest honor for undergraduate alumni. Additionally, he was the 2023 recipient of the Princeton Varsity Club Citizen Athlete Award.

In addition to his Princeton degree, Milley holds master’s degrees from Columbia University and the Naval War College, and he attended the MIT Center for International Studies Seminar XXI National Security Studies Program.

Princeton School of Public and International Affairs ⋅ Princeton University ⋅ Robertson Hall ⋅ Princeton University, NJ 08544-1013© 2024 The Trustees of Princeton UniversityPrivacy PolicyAccessibility

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6. Air Force Has 'Strong Desire' to Fly Osprey Again Following Deadly Crash, But Questions Remain

Do the troops have a strong desire to fly IN the CV-22?

Air Force Has 'Strong Desire' to Fly Osprey Again Following Deadly Crash, But Questions Remain

military.com · by Thomas Novelly · February 13, 2024

AURORA, Colorado -- Air Force Special Operations Command officials want to get their fleet of Ospreys back in the air for missions but are treading carefully following a CV-22 crash that left eight airmen dead in November.

The service is eager to fly the Osprey again but wants more information first, Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, head of Air Force Special Operations Command, said during a roundtable with reporters Tuesday at the Air and Space Forces Association's Warfare Symposium conference at Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center.

"There is a strong desire to return to fly because that is a capability we want to have, but we want to be able to return to fly with as much knowledge as we possibly can so that we can ensure that we are safely taking care of our crews as it goes forward," Bauernfeind told reporters.

The Air Force special operations Osprey that went down Nov. 29, call sign Gundam 22, was on a training mission off Japan's Yakushima Island. The deadly crash triggered a grounding of all Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy V-22s. That stand-down and multiple investigations into the mishap are still ongoing.

An initial assessment after debris was pulled from the ocean indicated a mechanical failure, raising new questions about the aircraft's safety. The Osprey fleet had already been under scrutiny following other deadly mishaps and a mysterious mechanical issue, called a hard clutch engagement, that has been seen in the V-22 for more than a decade.

Military.com learned last week that Pentagon safety officials are talking with the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy about the potential risks involved with flying the Osprey again. The status of the current Defense Department probe, what prompted officials to start talking with the services, and a possible timeline for putting the V-22 back in the air is still unknown.

Bauernfeind told reporters Tuesday that there are "conversations going on at multiple levels," but added that there are no new findings or timelines to report.

At the Air and Space Forces Association's conference in Washington, D.C., in September, Bauernfeind told Military.com that the service remained confident in the aircraft a month after three Marines were killed in an MV-22 Osprey crash during training in Australia.

"We're very confident in the mitigation steps that we've done," Bauernfeind said at that time. "With respect to the CV-22 at large, it is answering a long-held requirement … that no other capability can answer in the special operations community as we go forward."

Military.com asked Bauernfeind on Tuesday whether he stands by those comments, just months after the Nov. 29 incident marked the deadliest CV-22 crash in the Air Force's history.

The AFSOC commander seemed more critical of the CV-22, pointing out that it is "1980s technology" and noted that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has a program looking into an experimental vertical takeoff and landing plane.

But he did reiterate that the CV-22 will not go back into flying status until he is fully confident in its safety.

"I can tell you right now, nothing is more important to me than the safety of our air commandos," Bauernfeind said. "And when the time is right, when we make that decision to return to fly, it will be with me having the full confidence not only in our training, but our crews, as well as the platform and the new mitigation measures that we have in place."

In addition to the Air Force crash in November and the Marine crash in August, five Marines died in 2022 when their Osprey suffered a catastrophic clutch failure during training in California.

The causes of the Nov. 29 crash and the August crash in Australia have not yet been revealed.

Bauernfeind said Air Force Special Operations Command has convened a safety investigation board and an accident investigation board; it is also conducting a comprehensive review of the Air Force CV-22 force.

That final review is analyzing whether "the CV-22 force is appropriately organized, trained and equipped for safe, effective and efficient, special operations," he said.

Search efforts in the Nov. 29 crash involved more than 1,000 personnel, 46 aircraft, 23 maritime vessels, and 21 unmanned air and watercraft looking for wreckage and remains, covering more than 60,000 square kilometers of the ocean surface and 39 square kilometers of the ocean floor, according to the Air Force.

The U.S. military last month concluded its search efforts after 43 days of recovery and salvage efforts. Remains of seven airmen who died in the Nov. 29 mishap were located, recovered and identified during the search off the southern tip of mainland Japan, but AFSOC said in a statement that the body of Maj. Eric Spendlove could not be found.

Last month, Military.com reported that the Government Accountability Office agreed to look into the Osprey incidents following a request by Reps. John Garamendi, D-Calif., and Mike Waltz, R-Fla. The lawmakers asked the agency "to conduct a review on the cause of the accidents that have resulted in several deaths involving the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft (V-22) during military operations and training exercises."

military.com · by Thomas Novelly · February 13, 2024

7. US Navy Projects Massive Power With Dual Carrier Ops in Pacific

US Navy Projects Massive Power With Dual Carrier Ops in Pacific

Two massive US Navy aircraft carriers are now projecting power in the Philippine Sea in close proximity to one another

• KRIS OSBORN, WARRIOR MAVEN - CENTER FOR MILITARY MODERNIZATION21 HOURS AGO

https://warriormaven.com/sea/us-navy-projects-massive-power-with-dual-carrier-ops-in-pacific?mc_cid=9968019008&mc_eid=70bf478f36

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

Two massive US Navy aircraft carriers are now projecting power in the Philippine Sea in close proximity to one another in what appears to be a deliberate effort to prepare for any ability to potentially project an extremely powerful, large and sustained air attack campaign in the Pacific. The USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group is now performing routine war preparation exercises right alongside the USS Vinson within striking distance of Taiwan’s airspace.

“Dual carrier operations are an example of the US Navy exercising to operate at scale in major conflict. The carrier battle group, as a rule, is all-domain. Dual carrier ops and other integrated exercises at scale are essential for great power conflict. They provide a deterrent effect that tells would-be adversaries we have enough firepower to be where we need to be,” said Ret. Maj. Gen. David Coffman, former Director, US Navy Expeditionary Warfare, senior Warrior Naval warfare expert.

The scale and scope of these kinds of operations, which essentially deliver two combined massive floating airports, widens the operational envelope and greatly increase attack volume, dwell time and mission endurance, as aircraft can quickly replace or supplement one another over a given target area. This can also decrease any need for aerial refueling, something which can be quite dangerous over hostile areas as most large tankers are non-stealthy and vulnerable to enemy air defenses. With extra sorties and attack aircraft volume, dwell time over targets can be greatly extended as newly arriving aircraft replace ones operating over a target area.

A major challenge, as well as a major advantage of these kinds of scaled operations resides in the realm of Command and Control, Coffman explained.

“A Carrier task force built to be an autonomous self-contained thing, a composite warfare structure. Dual-carrier ops merge these structures’ command and control,” Coffman said.

There are many command and control advantages to these kinds of operations, provided transport layer connectivity is both assured and secured. Carriers likely have radio connectivity between them, something which enables operational synergy and coordination. Fighter jet sorties can be properly staggered, scaled and integrated to ensure any air attack campaign achieves its intended impact.

Secondly, each carrier operates with an impactful number of F-35C aircraft, 5th-generation stealth planes with a common Mulit-functional Advanced Data LInk (MADL) enabling all F-35s to seamlessly and immediately share data, voice, video and other targeting and operational specifics in flight. This means F-35s in high-threat areas can quickly alert other F-35Cs and Marine Corps F-35Bs of high threat areas, enemy activity or locations of air defenses. MADL operates with a significant range, so in the event that one group or formation of F-35s encounters a heavy concentration of enemy fighters and targets, reinforcements can be called quickly.

This ability is fortified by a growing ability for 5th-generation aircraft to exchange information with 4th-generation aircraft in flight, enabling 5th-gen fighters to use stealthy and long-range sensing to identify and destroy enemy air defenses. This kind of operation would be designed to create a safer “air corridor” for 4th-generation aircraft to enter with less risk of being destroyed by ground-fired air defenses or ship-based anti-aircraft guns.

Why 2-Carries are Critical in Pacific

The largest advantage with any kind of “scaled” 5th-generation attack may be in the area of air superiority and an ability to potentially track and destroy a Chinese amphibious assault. The People’s Liberation Army - Air Force, for example, does not as of yet operate an ocean launched 5th-generation aircraft and currently has only a few prototypes of its emerging carrier-launched J-31 5th-gen stealth aircraft. While the PLA-AF has the J-20, it is land launched and may be less effective in a maritime scenario. The island of Taiwan is only 100 miles from mainland China, placing the air space within reach of land-launched J-20s, however it is by no means clear that the J-20 can rival US 5th-generation aircraft. Available specs on the J-20 seem to indicate it is larger and potentially less maneuverable than rival US 5th-generation aircraft, but the aircraft is apparently capable of operating in a “bomb-truck” mode carrying up to 24,000 pounds of ordnance. This factor, while likely impactful in any kind of land engagement enabled by air superiority, is not likely to bring much value to any effort to establish air superiority above Taiwan and areas in the Pacific. As an aircraft restricted to land-take, the J-20 would also operate with much less “dwell-time” in the skies above the Pacific, making it difficult for the PLA Air Force to sustain any kind of protracted air-attack campaign.

Added to this equation, there are estimated to be only a little more than 100 operational Chinese J-20, so PLA 5th-generation aircraft would likely be outnumbered and challenged to operate hundreds of miles off shore. Any Pacific conflict is likely to not only be focused on the areas around Taiwan but also extend hundreds of miles across the Pacific, areas where the US and its allies are quite likely to operate with air superiority. All of these factors suggest that any PLA - Navy amphibious assault on Taiwan is likely to operate without air superiority, a factor which naturally makes their surface forces extremely vulnerable from the air. US, Japanese, South Korean and perhaps even Singaporean F-35s in the future would be positioned to not only protect forward operating US Navy carriers within range of Taiwan but also conduct air-to-surface attacks.

All of these variables would seem to contribute to the many reasons why the US Navy seems regularly inclined to conduct dual-carrier operations in the Pacific theater.

Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven - Center for Military Modernization and Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

8. Russia vs the West: Is Putin winning?

How can we attack his strategy?

(Sun Tzu said it is of supreme importance to attack the enemy's strategy.)

Russia vs the West: Is Putin winning? - New Vision Official

newvision.co.ug

Russia vs the West: Is Putin winning?

Feb 12, 2024

"It's true to say that President Putin is confident that he can outlast the West and so it's incumbent on us to show the resolve to prove him wrong," said a senior official from a Western country, asking not to be named.

In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia's President Vladimir Putin addresses the audience during the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow on February 8, 2024. (Photo by AFP)

AFP .

@New Vision

_______________________

Former US President George W. Bush believed he had a "sense of his soul". British ex-premier Tony Blair thought he deserved a place at the "top table". And French President Emmanuel Macron invited him for hours of talks at his official holiday residence.

For much of President Vladimir Putin's two-and-a-half decades in power, Western leaders believed they understood the strategy of the Kremlin leader and argued that Russia merited a place as an international partner.

But that approach was blown apart two years ago on February 24, 2022, when Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, consigning to a distance past images such as that of the smiling Russian leader bounding up the steps of Macron's Mediterranean Fort de Bregancon residence in August 2019 bearing flowers for the French leader's wife Brigitte.

While Putin failed in his initial aim of taking key Ukrainian cities in a lightning offensive that first winter, he now appears increasingly content, seeing off Ukraine's much-anticipated summer 2023 counter-offensive and controlling key territories in the south and east of the country.

"It's true to say that President Putin is confident that he can outlast the West and so it's incumbent on us to show the resolve to prove him wrong," said a senior official from a Western country, asking not to be named.

Russia gains advantage

Putin had made increasingly bullish statements, declaring in December that Ukraine "does not have a future" and -- in an interview broadcast on Thursday with controversial right-wing US talk show host Tucker Carlson -- that a strategic defeat of Russia is "impossible by definition".

Western leaders have responded by insisting that defeating Russia in its war on Ukraine is the only option, with Macron declaring last month that Europe's priority must be to "not let Russia win".

Analysts say only drastically ramped up Western support for Ukraine as it runs out of munitions can change the momentum.

But even this is far from certain, as US legislators hesitate over a new aid package, Putin awaits a possible Donald Trump victory in this year's US presidential election and cracks emerge in Europe.

"It is a race by both sides to rebuild their offensive capacity," said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior fellow at Washington-based Center for New American Security (CNAS).

"If the Western funding does not come through, if Russia gains some sort of advantage, then they have the possibility of making some more gains," she said.

"The momentum has shifted."

Kendall-Taylor added that if Ukraine can hold its lines in 2024, it could pressure Russia more in 2025 if new resources come through.

"From Putin's perspective, 2024 is quite critical," she said.

Ukraine is deeply unsettled by the prospect of a return to the White House for Trump, who famously declared in 2023 that he would "have that war settled in one day, 24 hours" if elected again.

Far-right parties, which commentators fear would advocate a softer line against Russia, are on the rise in France and Germany.

Cause for concern

Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the R. Politik consultancy, said Putin saw 2024 as a "window of opportunity" to turn the course of the war in Russia's favour, partly due to the weaknesses in the West.

"He anticipates a temporary gap in Western military support, with ammunition production expected to ramp up only by early 2025," she wrote on her Telegram channel.

"The US election cycle might lead to a less decisive American geopolitical strategy towards supporting Kyiv, and the European Union, facing its internal disagreements, is unlikely to compensate for this support on its own," she added.

But one reason for some optimism in the West may come from Russia's domestic weaknesses.

Its economy is firmly on a war footing, there are signs of public fatigue with the duration of the conflict and it has suffered astronomical losses. So far, Western sources say 350,000 soldiers have been killed or wounded on the Russian side.

The Western official said there were things that "really ought to be a cause for concern" for Putin, with government spending on defence and security "storing up some real long-term problems in the Russian economy".

"Balancing the domestic stability picture absorbs a large percentage of Putin's bandwidth," said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noting "overconfidence" in the current tone of Russian officials.

But without significant Western support "I don't know what kind of negotiating position the Ukrainians would be in. It would be a terrible one," she said.

newvision.co.ug

9. Why John Bolton Is Certain Trump Really Wants to Blow Up NATO

We need this question asked of all the issues. And we need good answers to it.

Except:

Why should voters care about this?

Well, if they want to secure a country, having alliances that help reinforce our power around the world is critical. You know, the world doesn’t have a natural order. And what order there is, is basically supplied by the United States and its alliances. We’re not doing that out of charity. We’re doing it because it’s in our national interest, to have trade and investment and everything that goes with the world that’s not threatened by hostile, belligerent, aggressive nations. It’s true that probably most allies are free-riding to an extent on U.S. power — and they should pay more. But the answer when they don’t is not to cut off your nose to spite your face.

Why John Bolton Is Certain Trump Really Wants to Blow Up NATO

The hawkish former national security adviser on Trump’s real plans.

Politico

By KELLY GARRITY

02/13/2024 11:12 AM EST

Kelly Garrity is a breaking news reporter at POLITICO.

Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton on Trump’s real plans.

John Bolton, one of the loudest critics to emerge from the Trump White House, has long expressed dismay at former President Donald Trump’s tenure. | Chip Semodevilla/Getty Images

02/13/2024 11:12 AM EST

Kelly Garrity is a breaking news reporter at POLITICO.

John Bolton doesn’t really buy Donald Trump’s story about telling an unnamed head of state he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to countries that didn’t meet NATO’s defense spending standards.

But he does think the former president’s threats — and his desire to abandon the alliance — are chillingly real.

“Look, I was there when he almost withdrew, and he’s not negotiating,” said Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser. “His goal here is not to strengthen NATO, it’s to lay the groundwork to get out.”

Bolton, one of the loudest critics to emerge from the Trump White House, has long expressed dismay at Trump’s tenure. In his post-mortem book, “The Room Where it Happened,” he portrayed Trump as unfamiliar with basic facts and driven, above all, by a desire to win another term. In Bolton’s telling, it’s no different with Trump’s recent comments about NATO. That doesn’t change the reality that Trump wants out of the alliance that has helped ground the U.S.-led global order for decades. And Bolton wants Trump’s defenders to recognize that.

“I think there are some Republicans who support Trump out there saying, ‘Oh, it’s, you know, it’s not a big deal. He’s not going to do it, so on and so forth.’ I’m telling you, I was there in Brussels when he damn near did it,” Bolton said.

And if Trump does destroy NATO, he warned, the consequences would be dire.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your first impression when you heard Trump’s comments about NATO?

At the NATO summit in 2018, he came very close to withdrawing from NATO right there at the summit. So each of these comments, as he makes them now over six years, to me simply reinforces that the notion of withdrawing from NATO is very serious with him. People say, “Well, he’s not really serious. He’s negotiating with NATO.” Look, I was there when he almost withdrew, and he’s not negotiating — because his goal here is not to strengthen NATO, it’s to lay the groundwork to get out.

We have been telling NATO allies for decades that they had to increase their defense spending. And those of us who have been doing this for a long time have done it to strengthen NATO so that the U.S. can be more flexible around the world. When Trump complains that NATO allies are not spending enough on defense, he’s not complaining to get them to strengthen NATO. He’s using it to bolster his excuse to get out.

So you don’t think Trump would stop threatening allies if they just met the NATO goal of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense?

For many of these allies — take Germany in particular — it’s not just saying, “OK, well, we’ll start spending more on defense.” The commitment that all this turns on — at the NATO summit at Cardiff, Wales, in 2014 — was that over a 10-year period, all NATO members would end up spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product or more on defense, and that hasn’t happened. Spending has increased in recent years. And a good part of the reason for that is Trump.

But again, looking at Germany, the second-biggest economy in NATO — it is still clobbering along at 1.2, 1.3 percent, somewhere in there. What Trump says is, Look, number one, Europeans pay billions of dollars to Russia each year for natural gas. Number two, he says, the Europeans screw us in trade negotiations. And then number three, they don’t spend enough to meet their NATO commitments. So even if people started increasing on that, I don’t think that would change his mind.

Congress has enacted new restrictions that could limit a president’s ability to leave NATO. Would that tie Trump’s hands?

Well, it’s never been definitively adjudicated, whether a president can unilaterally withdraw from the treaty, but it has happened repeatedly throughout American history. I myself have participated in several examples: George W. Bush withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Trump withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and from the Open Skies treaty with Russia. Congress doesn’t like it, but I think the constitutional logic is, it’s entirely in the president’s hands. So this statute won’t restrain him.

I think if it were tested in court, it would be declared unconstitutional. But even if I’m totally wrong, and Trump announces that he’s withdrawing from NATO, somebody sues under that statute, and you litigate it for two or three years — imagine the damage that’s done to NATO, while Trump is openly attacking it.

What are the implications that would come with Trump pulling the U.S. out of NATO? What would that mean for the country and the world?

It would mean the end of NATO. We are the leader of NATO, and what would survive would be remnants of some European Union kind of structure, but it would have implications beyond Europe and North America. I think it would be catastrophic for U.S. credibility around the world. If we’re willing to throw NATO over the side, there is no American alliance that is secure. A lot of people, for instance, say Trump would be so much better for Israel than Biden has been. Well, if Trump is willing to knife NATO, what makes anybody think he wouldn’t knife Israel if it suited his purposes?

What would that mean for U.S. security, if the U.S. were unable to form alliances that other countries could trust?

It would be devastating, and part of this desire to get out of NATO is that Trump has no idea about what alliance structures do and how beneficial they can be. He spent four years as president, he didn’t know anything about it when he entered the Oval Office, and he didn’t know anything about it when he left. So he has no idea the damage that withdrawing from NATO would do. He may be the only figure in American politics who thinks that — there are some nutcases around who don’t care, frankly, what the effect would be, but they’re a very distinct minority.

Is there any incentive for these countries to actually start increasing the amounts they’re spending on defense?

It will never be enough. For some of these countries, it’s close to doubling their defense spending. And you just can’t snap your fingers or turn on a light switch and make that happen. So in two years, a number of them still would not be at 2 percent, and all of the pressure — with the threat of Russia in Europe, with the turmoil in the Middle East, with the threat being posed by China — all of the pressure is increasing defense spending.

For example, the Japanese only spend about 1 percent of GDP, and when Prime Minister [Fumio] Kishida was here in Washington a couple of months ago, he pledged that Japan would double its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP over a five-year period, which is a pretty rapid buildup. And if you consider that if you expect Japan’s economy to grow in the next five years, it’s obviously more than a doubling in real terms. So that’s a pretty dramatic step for Japan to take, and that would still only bring them up to 2 percent if they can fulfill that pledge.

Why should voters care about this?

Well, if they want to secure a country, having alliances that help reinforce our power around the world is critical. You know, the world doesn’t have a natural order. And what order there is, is basically supplied by the United States and its alliances. We’re not doing that out of charity. We’re doing it because it’s in our national interest, to have trade and investment and everything that goes with the world that’s not threatened by hostile, belligerent, aggressive nations. It’s true that probably most allies are free-riding to an extent on U.S. power — and they should pay more. But the answer when they don’t is not to cut off your nose to spite your face.

How can Trump’s opponents make voters pay attention to this?

I think political leaders in both parties have not done a good job for 30 years-plus, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the victory in the Cold War, to explain to people that what happens internationally can threaten our economy and our way of life over here. People talked after the Soviet Union collapsed about the “end of history.” And everybody said “it’s the economy, stupid,” as if international affairs didn’t mean anything.

Well, I think people are waking up, and that’s important and that needs to be encouraged. But political leaders have to explain to voters and justify to them why these threats require an American response. My response is Ronald Reagan’s approach of peace through strength, and that requires spending money to have a bigger defense. But if political leaders don’t explain it to the American voter, it’s no surprise that they wonder why they’re being asked to do it.

Does the conversation he recounted sound real to you?

I never heard him saying anything like that, and the way the way the conversation goes doesn’t sound real. You know, he makes up a lot of conversations where people are always calling him “Sir.” You know, maybe his subordinates are calling him sir, because that’s the right thing to do. But foreign leaders don’t call him sir. They either call him Mr. President or Donald, number one. But number two, the fact that it’s an imaginary conversation that makes Trump look very good — as all of Trump’s imagined conversations do — doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe what he’s saying.

POLITICO

Politico

10. Why the Navy says its Red Sea and Gulf of Aden battles are historic

Why the Navy says its Red Sea and Gulf of Aden battles are historic

militarytimes.com · by Geoff Ziezulewicz · February 13, 2024

SAN DIEGO — The Navy’s ongoing battles with Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden have resulted in destroyers shooting down 14 anti-ship ballistic missiles “for the first time in history,” the Navy’s top officer said Tuesday at the annual West 2024 conference here.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, the warships Carney, Gravely, Laboon, Mason and Thomas Hudner have destroyed more than 70 drones and seven Houthi cruise missiles, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said.

Anti-ship ballistic missiles are designed to hit vessels like Navy destroyers, and their deployment by the Houthis against military and commercial ships in the region is believed to be the first time such munitions have been used in a conflict.

In recent months, the Navy has also pounded Houthi positions in Yemen, eliminating missiles and kamikaze drones that are still on the ground but prepared to fire.

“And that’s really just the start of what our Navy is doing around the world,” Franchetti said. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

RELATED

All the Houthi-US Navy incidents in the Middle East (that we know of)

A non-exhaustive, running list of Houthi attacks in the Middle East and the U.S. strikes back at them.

She also noted the Navy is being challenged in the world’s waters to a level that hasn’t been seen since World War II.

“For the first time since World War II, we no longer operate from a maritime sanctuary against competitors who cannot threaten us today,” she said. “Sea control is neither guaranteed nor freely given.”

About Geoff Ziezulewicz

Geoff is the editor of Navy Times, but he still loves writing stories. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.

11. The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits

This is smart on two levels. Yes this is a place to influence future recruits. But we must also recognize that China is investing heavily and seeking to control the game space for influence operations purposes.  

We need to get a bunch of young PhDs doing research on the Chinese influence in the gaming industry. I have heard from risk advisers that CHina is seeking to buy companies with the ultimate intention to control content and ensure it is favorable to the China narrative.

By operating in this space to draw recruits the US military may be helping to counter Chinese influence.

The US military is embedded in the gaming world. Its target: teen recruits

Amid a recruitment struggle, branches are using huge hits like Fortnite as marketing tools. Some veterans see the practice as unethical – especially given the age of the gaming audience

The Guardian · by Rosa Schwartzburg · February 14, 2024

In a small room tucked into a US navy facility outside Memphis, Tennessee, uniformed personnel sit hunched over monitors, their eyes focused on screens as they speak into headsets with clipped efficiency. Computer towers and glowing red keyboards crowd their desks. This is top-of-the-line gear, used for executing combat missions and coordinating strategy – but not with fleets stationed across the world. These sailors are playing video games. On the other end of their headsets and screens are young gamers they hope to inspire.

“In 2019, we did a big look at where we were spending our money, looking at where the next generation is,” says Lt Aaron Jones, captain of the navy’s esports team, as we sit in his office after touring the facility. A naval press officer hovers a few feet away. “This is where they are,” Jones continues. “Whether it’s Twitch or YouTube or Facebook Gaming, this is what they love.”

His esports team – navy personnel who compete with gamers online under the name Goats & Glory – consists of twelve enlisted sailors who used to work as flight officers, sonar techs and even a chaplain’s assistant. A navy recruiting command spokesperson says the navy allocates 3%-5% of its marketing budget to esports initiatives annually. That amounted to up to $4.3m from Oct 2022 through Sept 2023, according to budget information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Esport competitors take part in a gaming tournament last year. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Since 2018, the US military has been ramping up its use of gaming to recruit more people, critical at a time when the US armed forces face the worst recruitment struggle since becoming an all-volunteer force after the Vietnam war. Targeting gamers makes sense from the military’s perspective, as it gives them access to the young, tech-savvy population they want joining up. But some veterans told me that marketing the military with video games – essentially making a game out of war – is unethical.

Of primary concern is just how young the military’s gaming audience is. Online gaming spaces are popular with minors, many of them not yet 13 years old, and the military deliberately capitalizes on games that appeal to them. If the military’s recruiting efforts are successful, these kids and teens will end up applying the skills they honed while playing games they love to warfare – piloting drones to kill from afar, for example.

One young gamer I spoke to, Katie K, age 12, spends hours a day watching livestreams of people playing warlike games on YouTube and TikTok Live. The thought of fighting for her country intrigues her. She thinks it would teach her better discipline. Also: “I would think about all the people that would thank me – like, that would be pretty cool.”

The reality is starkly different.

“I was in a country fighting a population that lives on less than $1 a day with gigantic weapons and armored vehicles,” says a former US army intelligence analyst, Jeremiah Knowles, “and if I’m patrolling in Afghanistan with my assault rifle and a kid gets too close …” He pauses. “That’s not what they put in the advertisements. That’s not what they talk about on their Twitch streams.”

The military is gaming online – and in schools

In the late 1990s, the military was struggling to meet recruitment goals, prompting the army to release its own video game aimed at younger people. “When a kid starts thinking about what he’s going to do with his life, it’s not at age 17, it’s more like age 13,” a colonel who oversaw the project told Corey Mead, author of War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. “You can’t wait until they’re 17, because by then they will have decided that they’re going to college or to a trade school.” The resulting game, America’s Army, was hugely successful. According to Mead, the relationship between the military and the games industry remains “symbiotic”, with the military loaning resources to game developers in exchange for the insertion of pro-military narratives.

In 2018, the army formed the first military esports team but was accused of unethical recruitment practices in its Twitch stream, including censoring questions about war crimes in its chat and holding a fake Xbox controller giveaway. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) proposed a ban on Twitch recruitment that did not pass. The army stopped streaming on Twitch, but gaming recruitment continued.

These days, the US military’s gaming content sprawls across Twitch, YouTube, Instagram and Discord. The army and navy esports teams host tournaments for some of the most popular games among young people, including Fortnite and Valorant. The air force and coastguard formed esports teams of their own, while US Marine Corps recruitment has partnered with gaming influencers including TheWarOwl and Melonie Mac. Young gamers who I interviewed report being targeted with recruitment ads that mirror the graphics of their favorite games. “Last year, we had over a million impressions on Twitch,” says Joshua Silva, religions program specialist with the navy esports team.

Internet users are supposed to be at least 13 to use social media sites such as Twitch and YouTube; users under 18 are supposed to have parental permission. But such age limitations are easy to bypass.

Plenty of 13-year-olds in the online gaming community are starting to form opinions of the US military. Kaitlynn Considine, a former marine linguist, gives her 13-year-old brother as an example. “He is a very young child. His brain isn’t fully developed,” she says. “What he knows about the military is his older sister went and did that, and he has pictures of me in front of equipment that he thinks is super cool.”

Considine is a member of the anti-video-game-recruitment initiative of Veterans for Peace, called Gamers for Peace. She says she would worry if her brother were to watch a military Twitch stream or military-sponsored content from a favorite influencer, or be targeted by a recruiting ad. She acknowledges that the military must advertise itself, just as military service is sometimes the best (or only) option for young adults.

“I can’t tell someone that they can’t join, especially if you’re in a precarious financial situation. But people need to be able to understand what they’re getting into,” she says. “No matter what your job is, you are supposed to help the military kill. You might not ever pull a trigger, but you’re still part of that mission.”

Most members of Gamers for Peace are anti-war veterans in their 30s and 40s and lifelong gamers. They understand both the influence that video games can have on young people and the gravity of what it’s like to serve in the armed forces. “As a person who played a lot of video games as a kid, it kind of pissed me off,” says one member, Jeff Parente, a US Marine Corps veteran with three deployments. “There are a lot of younger kids that watch Twitch to watch other people play video games, and to think [the military is] going into that space to go after these kids that don’t know any better …”

Officially, the military does not recruit anyone under age 17. In this case, “recruit” means the formal process of signing a legally binding agreement to enlist. The military does, however, advertise to and interact directly with minors for the purposes of military recruitment.

Katie, the 12-year-old, has watched gaming streams from military accounts “once or twice”, though she has not yet seen recruitment ads. She likes playing first-person shooters like Call of Duty, which let players experience combat through their characters’ eyes: “It’s, like, pretty fun to shoot things,” she says. She acknowledges that compared with real warfare, Call of Duty is probably not “100% realistic”, but she adds: “I’m pretty sure you use real guns like how they actually are, and the healing is pretty realistic.”

Choosing games that draw in young people is part of the military’s recruiting calculation. “Shooters are the No 1 genre that I find people playing,” says Silva. His navy esports team also makes a point of playing the racing/sports game Rocket League because it’s “one of the bigger games that universities and high schools play”. And when I visited the Memphis facility, Goats & Glory was hosting a championship for Fortnite, the third-person shooter that is massively popular with kids Katie’s age and young adults – so popular that it will soon be folded into the Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars universe. (As it happens, Katie’s favorite Fortnite weapon is the combat SMG, an abbreviation for “sub-machine gun”.)

US soldiers look out over hillsides at a checkpoint in Nerkh district of Wardak province in 2019. Photograph: Thomas Watkins/AFP/Getty Images

In a video posted to Instagram last fall, you can watch a navy esports team member slipping a Meta Quest VR headset on to a child’s head in an elementary school library in Utah. The boy plays with the headset, punching his fists, before images of sea vessels appear in the frame. The graphics read, “United States Navy: where gamers thrive” and “Press start to protect!”

Military recruiters are allowed to talk to children in schools – a practice that boomed in the 2000s when the No Child Left Behind Act ensured military access to campuses. In 2008, the ACLU reported to the United Nations that the US military was violating international children’s rights conventions by “heavily recruiting” students under 17 on high school campuses. In response, the state department reiterated the military’s age policy and said recruiters were prohibited from using “coercive measures or deception”. Meanwhile, the UN expressed its “concern” and issued “recommendations” for improvement in recruiting practices.

Jordan, age 20, who asked to use a pseudonym in case he wishes to join the military in the future, remembers when the army came to his high school in Mineola, Texas, in March 2021, when he was a junior.

“They had just like a regular trailer, like the ones we use for band,” he says, “and on the inside, every station had a cubicle where everyone could play a game.” He recalls that the army brought a spinoff of America’s Army called Proving Grounds. “Everyone was excited to play the game – but not really to join the military.”

Sheena Young, an air force veteran with Gamers for Peace, had recruiters come to her high school, too. “But they weren’t going out and joining conversations. They had their table in the cafeteria. You had to approach them,” she says. “When a 12-year-old goes on to watch somebody play Twitch, they’re not approaching a recruiter. They’re in the same space.”

And unlike at a high school, there are no other adults around to supervise interactions in online gaming spaces, notes Knowles, also of Gamers for Peace. Knowles is now a licensed social worker at a university, where he primarily works with young adults. “They follow these streamers, and the amount of influence those personalities have on young adults is pervasive,” he says. “When it comes to the military recruiters on Twitch streams, they’re giving them an incomplete view of that world.”

By age 17, gamers see recruiting tactics

Since she was a kid, Amber Cronin has enjoyed watching professional streamers play her favorite games – like TheWarOwl, a Twitch streamer with 1.46 million followers on YouTube. Cronin, a 21-year-old computer science student, has also logged over 800 hours on Counter-Strike, a first-person shooter where players can either fight for a team of terrorists or a unit of military and police forces.

When she was 18, Cronin noticed TheWarOwl had released a series of videos in which he trained with the marines for 100 days, matching his gaming skills “against the real world battles that marines fight and win for the country”. Then, last school year, the algorithm started feeding her recruitment videos when she scrolled YouTube Shorts. “Even if they’re not directly providing a link to join the army or whatever,” Cronin tells me from her dorm room at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “they are trying to appeal to the cool factor of ‘ooh, we do mid-air refueling’ and ‘we jump out of planes and shoot guns’.”

In March, Cronin was contacted directly by a marine recruiter, who asked if she wanted to attend Officer Candidates School.

By the time gamers are old enough to join the military, at age 17, they will probably have been exposed to video game recruitment. Bodhi B, 17, says he “gets ads from the military super often on YouTube” – usually while watching his favorite gaming content. Bodhi and his twin brother, Dashiell, high school seniors from suburban Massachusetts, have played games like Rainbow Six Siege and Counter-Strike since they were 12. “I see the army’s team sponsoring Valorant tournaments or sponsoring teams,” says Dashiell.

The military says online gaming spaces provide an opportunity to have meaningful conversations with young people.

“A recruiter in high school – he’s in uniform,” says Jones, the navy esports team captain. “You see him, you know what he is. When you play against us, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re a regular person?’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, the navy is regular people. We are just like you – we have the same hobbies, the same loves.’”

The navy emphasizes that its team members are not official “recruiters”. After the army was accused of unethical practices on Twitch, the navy refined its own streaming practices to avoid similar blowback. Jones says the team talks about life in the military while streaming, but members are trained to direct anyone who expresses interest in the navy to a recruiting website, where they can connect directly with an official recruiter.

Players at the 2019 Fortnite World Cup. The army and navy esports teams host tournaments featuring Fortnite and other popular games. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

“When we started about three years ago, a lot of the negative stuff that we saw was really a bleed over from [the army’s] stream and the way they were operating,” says Jones.

Still, every navy team member does attend the recruiting orientation unit, where they learn basic public speaking skills, according to Jones. Then the team undergoes more public affairs training at the esports center itself, where members are taught team lingo and how to moderate a Twitch stream.

“You kind of have to explain [to those watching the Twitch stream] that we’re not robots, we’re people,” says Jones. “I’m not gonna, like, put you in a chokehold. They think that soldiers just kill people and all that stuff.”

He says that Goats & Glory likes to “position ourselves as the Blue Angels of esports”, referring to the navy aerobatic team that performs at air shows and sporting events. “The Blue Angels go out and fly; they don’t try to get people in the navy. People want to know more about the navy because they see the Blue Angels.”

The reality of combat

Moses Lemann, 21, a University of Pittsburgh junior, often gets recruitment ads that look like his favorite game series, Battlefield. “It really looks like they’re jacking the aesthetics of a video game,” he says, with the ads mimicking Battlefield’s loading screen, complete with a topographic map and prompts for players to “pick your class”. “It’s clearly trying to tap into that, like a specialization in the military is exactly like picking a class in Battlefield,” says Lemann.

Since the end of the cold war, military superpowers like the US have largely moved away from conventional warfare and towards “asymmetric warfare”, in which powerful states rely on sophisticated technology to defeat less equipped opponents. To maintain the technological upper hand, the US military needs to recruit from a pool of young people whose skills include being “detail-oriented”, being “problem solvers under time pressures” and showcasing “perseverance in the face of frustration”, per the navy’s recruiting guide for streamers.

Jones puts it more literally: “We look for those we consider ‘high quality’, the people who are very technically savvy, your Stem people” who can help when the navy needs “more nukes” or “IT stuff”. “Just by being a hardcore gamer, you already [have] this affinity for technology.”

Virginia-class attack submarines use Xbox controllers to operate photonic masts, and some combat vehicle controllers resemble Nintendo 64 controllers. Then there is the obvious parallel between combat drone piloting and gaming. While drone pilots often reject the comparison (primarily due to the psychological toll of operating a real machine that remotely kills people), research does show that gamers excel at this work.

Scientific research has consistently shown that video games do not make people more violent. Playing games can, however, improve perceptual and cognitive functions, says Dr C Shawn Green, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Office of Naval Research funded Green to research how certain games (mainly shooters) improve warrior performance. “These games have lots of speed in them,” he says. “There’s lots of what we call ‘transient events’ – things pop up on the screen and disappear.” He says this can improve basic visual perception as well as heighten levels of cognition (such as working memory).

But video games can’t fully convey the psychological toll of combat, the moral injury, or even the physical toll. “I remember wearing the armor,” says Knowles. “You’re adding 80lb on to your body, you have seven magazines across the front of your body, and then you’re carrying your 8lb M4. Heaven forbid you have a grenade attachment, which adds another 5lb to your rifle. And then you have to try and get in and out of an upper armored Humvee in a combat zone while you’re getting shot at. That’s not in Call of Duty.”

A scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. Photograph: Activision Blizzard

As potential conflicts with Russia, China and in the Middle East loom, personnel is considered critical for maintaining combat “readiness”. But the branches are scrambling: In December, the Department of Defense reported that the branches had collectively missed their 2023 recruiting goals by 41,000 recruits – even after they lowered their goals significantly. The military points to the fact that most young people are ineligible to serve due to their weight, drug use or criminal records. Others attribute youth reluctance to recent publicity about a culture within the military that allows for racism, white supremacy and sexual violence; gaping holes in the US’s veteran support system; the legacies of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; and ideological opposition to war itself.

But when recruiting teams go into gaming spaces where there are kids and teens, “they’re trying to get their attention and start to glamorize the military as a lifestyle – or try to minimize it”, Young of Gamers for Peace says.

The military does not release data on how impactful video game recruitment is, but the teams consider the efforts successful.

In December 2021, the air force launched an online “Aircade” of video games that require “real-life skill that airmen use”. In Command the Stack, for example, players can pilot aircraft in an augmented reality mission simulator constructed from satellite scans. “I had some folks come up to me saying, ‘Hey, I actually joined the air force because of Air Force Gaming,’” says Maj Oliver Parsons, founder of the air force/space force esports team, adding that it has “made the overall Department of Defense more relatable to folks and put us in a better light”.

Silva says: “Without the esports team in the navy? You would never talk to these kids.” He and Jones list Goats & Glory’s recent accolades: partnerships with influential streamers and esports leagues; videos of sailors playing Madden NFL with professional athletes; and their own competitions, including a 2022 tournament in Denver that was “one of the largest amateur League of Legends events in all of North America”, per Jones. The navy says it will expand its Memphis facility into a more sophisticated esports center this year. “There might be a stage with extra seating,” Jones says excitedly.

Notably, the marines have thus far refused to use esports for recruitment. Although there is a Marine Corps Gaming team, it does not officially represent the branch. “It’s a very serious decision to serve, and there’s concerns over gamifying what we do and the translation between video games and actual military service,” a US Marine Corps communications officer told Military.com in 2020.

Another way to game

Military gaming goes beyond recruitment. Video games can improve mental health and build community, issues that the military sorely needs to address, not least because mentally healthy fighters are capable of making better moral decisions. And the military’s openness to channeling resources into gaming can be a force for good – like funding immersive VR therapy for veteran trauma treatment.

Parsons created Air Force Gaming as a grassroots project with fellow airmen. He says esports help build psychological resilience across the branch. He tells me that a drone pilot who was “in a very dark place” told him: “If it wasn’t for my Overwatch team, and these airmen and guardians that I met all around the world, I wouldn’t be here today.”

As veterans like Considine and Knowles point out, kids and teens are simply not old enough comprehend the seriousness of enlistment, or the toll active service takes.

Cronin, the computer science student, recently learned about military propaganda in a college history class: “I was naive and I said, ‘What is the current form of military propaganda? Why don’t they make those posters any more?’ And the answer was: it’s the advertisements, and it’s the cool videos and social media engagement.”

She has no immediate plans to enlist. Though career and money pressures make it tempting, she’s not as open to the idea as she was as a teenager. She says she’s become much more critical of the military as she’s matured.

• Reporting of this piece was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Sources under the age of 18 are named using first name and last initial
• In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. You can also reach Crisis Text Line by texting MHA to 741741. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The Guardian · by Rosa Schwartzburg · February 14, 2024

12. It’s Not Time for Our Troops to Leave the Middle East By Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.

​Excerpt:

In the end, American troops are in Syria and Iraq to prevent ISIS from being able to attack our homeland. By leaving, we could give them the time and space to re-establish a caliphate, increasing our risk at home. We may also face the prospect of being forced to return at a very high cost. There would be negative consequences across the region as well: Our rapid withdrawal would be seen as yet another example of American weakness that adversaries would not hesitate to exploit.

Leaving is not a choice that should made lightly, but staying is not a good choice, either, unless we can end the attacks on our troops. It’s still unclear whether we will be able to do this, and a stream of U.S. casualties will make it increasingly hard to stay. If we want to remain, we must effectively deter, deflect and defeat attacks on U.S. forces by Iranian-backed groups.

We are at an inflection point. Americans have died. Our response must be based not on emotion or a desire for revenge but rather on a cleareyed determination about what is best for the United States. I believe it is best to stay the course and to defend our homeland abroad rather than at home.

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

It’s Not Time for Our Troops to Leave the Middle East

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/opinion/us-troops-syria-iraq-withdraw.html

Feb. 14, 2024, 1:00 a.m. ET

The transfer case containing the remains of Sgt. Kennedy Sanders who was killed in during a drone strike in Jordan.Credit...Kevin Dietsch/Getty Image​

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By Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.

General McKenzie was the 14th commander of U.S. Central Command.

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The United States base at Tower 22 in Jordan is in the middle of a seemingly unending desert, astride the ancient Damascus-Baghdad Highway near the border with Syria. In January it is cold, often rainy and very bleak. Last month three U.S. service members at Tower 22 were killed by a drone launched by an Iranian-backed militia. Their deaths prompted more than 80 retaliatory strikes by the United States against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and militias operating in Iraq and Syria.

The attack in Jordan was the clear, foreseeable result of our tepid responses to more than 150 attacks against U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq since October. The simple fact of the matter is this: For too long, we postponed dealing with a growing threat to our forces in the region because our troops were able to defend themselves so well. In other words, our troops’ capabilities enabled Washington to minimize the risk they faced — and to avoid making hard choices.

The Tower 22 attack ended that state of play and sparked fresh questions about the safety of thousands of U.S. military personnel stationed in Jordan, Syria and Iraq as the Middle East conflict widens. Last month, the United States and Iraq started talks that could lead to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Some members of the Biden administration may be considering pulling troops from Syria as well, according to one report.

This kind of talk can be seriously damaging to U.S. interests in the region. It gives hope to Tehran that it is succeeding in its long-term goal of ejecting the United States from the region through its proxy militias. Nothing could be less helpful — or more dangerous to our service members who are already in harm’s way.

Should U.S. troops stay in Syria and Iraq, or should they go? And if they stay, how does American leadership prevent these attacks from continuing? What’s needed now is a presidential decision that has been too long deferred: a firm commitment to keeping our troops in Syria and an additional, nuanced commitment to work with the Iraqi government to find a mutually agreeable force level in that country.

Let’s look first at Syria. It’s become commonplace in Washington to say that the presence of our 900 service members in Syria has outrun our foreign policy. The reality is much more complex than that. The United States entered Syria in 2014 with an international coalition to confront ISIS with our partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces. By mid-2019, we achieved the goal of removing the caliphate as a geographic entity, but remnants of ISIS endured.

Since then, American troops have continued to work with the Syrian Democratic Forces in northeastern Syria to train local defense forces. We have helped the group manage more than 10,000 surrendered ISIS fighters now in prison and the roughly 50,000 people displaced there.

A withdrawal would come with serious risks. Without U.S. support, the Syrian Democratic Forces could struggle to continue to secure the prisons holding ISIS fighters and camps where so many displaced Syrians lead tenuous lives. If enough ISIS fighters are freed and the group has the space to rejuvenate itself, it will lead to fresh threats to Iraq and many other nations. President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, even if buttressed by Russia and Iran, would find it difficult to suppress ISIS.

Our long-term goal in fighting ISIS in this part of the world has always been to get to a point that local security forces will be able to assume primary responsibility for preventing attacks. We have made some progress in Syria, but much remains to be done. It is not yet time to leave.

Next door in Iraq, we have about 2,500 troops, who have been helping train Iraqi security forces to confront ISIS. We’re farther along with this goal than we are in Syria, but there is still a need for us in Iraq. It is reasonable to assume that our troop presence in Iraq will decrease as negotiations continue with the government and will shift to a more normal security cooperation arrangement that will require fewer U.S. forces. But it would be a mistake to withdraw too quickly, as we did in 2011. We also need to bear in mind that a platform in Iraq is a precondition for maintaining our forces in Syria.

Image

American troops are in Syria and Iraq to prevent ISIS from being able to attack our homeland. U.S. tropps at an undisclosed location in Northeastern Syria in 2019.Credit...Darko Bandic/Associated Pres​s

As in Syria, our forces in Iraq have been subject to attacks by paramilitary groups that answer to Iran. Negotiating our continued presence there is another complex situation. Iraq’s leaders are in an uncomfortable place. They know they need allied help to train their security forces; at the same time, they face strong pressure from Iranian-sponsored Shiite groups to remove all foreign military presence in the country. The United States ratchets up that pressure by striking Iranian proxy and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps targets in Iraq, as it did this month.

In the end, American troops are in Syria and Iraq to prevent ISIS from being able to attack our homeland. By leaving, we could give them the time and space to re-establish a caliphate, increasing our risk at home. We may also face the prospect of being forced to return at a very high cost. There would be negative consequences across the region as well: Our rapid withdrawal would be seen as yet another example of American weakness that adversaries would not hesitate to exploit.

Leaving is not a choice that should made lightly, but staying is not a good choice, either, unless we can end the attacks on our troops. It’s still unclear whether we will be able to do this, and a stream of U.S. casualties will make it increasingly hard to stay. If we want to remain, we must effectively deter, deflect and defeat attacks on U.S. forces by Iranian-backed groups.

We are at an inflection point. Americans have died. Our response must be based not on emotion or a desire for revenge but rather on a cleareyed determination about what is best for the United States. I believe it is best to stay the course and to defend our homeland abroad rather than at home.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired Marine, was the 14th commander of U.S. Central Command. He is the executive director of the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. His forthcoming book is “The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century.”

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13. Navigating the Political Economy of Cold War 2.0

Excerpts:

With that in mind, all countries – notably democratic countries – must revisit and bolster their political governance in light of the populist wave and the democratic retreat that is now well recognized by many governance analysts. Weak and unstable democratic governance associated with populist politics can become a vulnerability, as entire systems of infrastructure financing, technological development (e.g. AI, social monitoring and management), and social media applications (e.g. disinformation) may be applied with weaker checks and balances and far less multilateral consensus on protecting individual rights and freedoms.

Under these conditions, more stable domestic politics can better underpin the protracted engagement necessary under a new cold war between the superpowers and the uncertainty and volatility, as well as the “slowbalization” (modest global growth) that may accompany these tensions in the years ahead.

Navigating the Political Economy of Cold War 2.0

thediplomat.com

Lessons from the first cold war could help states in the second. So could recognizing what’s changed.

By Ronald U. Mendoza

February 12, 2024

U.S. President Joe Biden, right, and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands before their meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting, Nov. 14, 2022, in Nusa Dua, in Bali, Indonesia.

Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File

In December 2017, the U.S. National Security Strategy introduced the notion of a “new era of strategic competition,” describing its once-close economic partner, China, as an “adversary,” “rival,” and “strategic competitor.” Foreign policy analysts point to a new cold war between the United States and China, possibly ushering in a period of economic disintegration and the formation of regional trade, investment, and national security blocs.

Navigating this new economic and geopolitical terrain will be critical for many countries that seek to chart stable and sustained pathways for both economic development and national security. Some lessons from the first cold war may be useful in that regard – even as this impending cold war is going to be vastly different from the previous one.

Battle of Ideas

One key aspect of the Cold War involving the United States and its Western allies and the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence referred to the “Battle of Ideas,” i.e. the competition of economic and political ideologies and policies: democratic and free markets vs. socialist/communist and centrally planned governance systems. The strength, stability, and sustainability of the economies of the U.S. and Soviet Union, respectively, were seen as critical in recruiting allies and partners on both sides of the Cold War divide.

The nuclear, military, and space races placed the respective economies of the U.S. and the Soviet Union under significant pressure, revealing what many considered to be the stronger efficiency and credibility of the democratic and free market governance systems. With the eventual fall of the “iron curtain,” the introduction of key reforms to restructure politics and economics (glasnost) as well as promote greater transparency and openness (perestroika), and the period of technological growth that ensued, soon fueled a wave of democratization and free market economics that began to reshape not just the former Soviet Union, but also many countries under a period of integration and globalization.

Nevertheless, far from the pivot to democracy that signaled the end of the first cold war, democracy today faces many threats, not simply reflected in the rise of populist politics, but also in the disruptive nature of new technology such as AI and disinformation in social media. Democratic societies seem more polarized than ever – for some countries, policies swing with the political tides.

Second, so-called free market economies have suffered from a string of financial and economic crises in the past three decades (e.g. the 1996-1997 Asian financial crisis, 2000 dot-com bubble, 2008-2010 global financial crisis, and 2020-2021 pandemic). Many countries have turned to industrial policy and protectionism again, reversing several decades of economic openness. Scholars argue that part of this is in response to growing domestic pressure for job creation and democratic stress, along with calls in many countries to promote stronger equity in the gains from globalization, and regain national sovereignty over economic and political decision-making.

Suffice it to say that globalization – and more specifically international economic integration – faces a threat of reversal because of the very same factors that fueled the emergence of this second cold war. The same period of globalization that enabled the emergence of China as a superpower, along with many middle powers, in turn, fueled myriad challenges to sovereign governance and particularly what Dani Rodrik called mass politics. The latter is clearly intertwined with the populist wave that was partly fueled by globalization, and in many ways today stifles further aggressive globalizing ambitions.

It is on this broader canvass that the new cold war must be understood. Several main ingredients appear crucial, in order to thrive in the present uncertain and polarized environment of a second cold war.

Stable Politics and Better Governance

First the confluence of political and economic pressures faced by many countries will require that each nation recalibrate economic policies in favor of rebalancing the benefits (along with the broader legitimacy) of their integration into, and engagement with, the international economic order. The strengthening of national economic institutions will also prove critically important as the world faces another wave of potentially unequalizing technological shocks brought about by the fourth industrial revolution. Just as the period of globalization witnessed rapid technological advancements, along with the increased economic volatility and inequality risks these accentuated, this new period ahead of us necessitates better preparation for the likely unequalizing and disruptive features of new technologies (e.g. AI, social media, internet of things, robotics, etc) now reshaping the world economy and even touching on democratic politics and governance.

Multipolar Alliances

Where possible, countries can and should explore the development of international economic cooperation and regional trade and investment groupings in ways that create mutual value and avoid being forced to choose between the United States and China. If such a choice may have been inevitable under the first cold war, this may not be the case today given the emergence of middle powers that create more options for different layers of economic, technological and national security partnerships, and what some call “strategic autonomy.” Some analysts have argued that far from the two-superpowers phenomenon of the first cold war, the world today can be characterized as multipolar – while the two superpowers and their alliance blocs in the 1950s accounted for 88 percent of the global economy, today these same countries account for only about 57 percent of world GDP. Economic (and to some extent military prowess) has become more dispersed across nations, and particularly a large group of middle powers that have become much more influential since.

Since 2003, the number of low income countries has declined from 66 to about 31 in 2019. There are 107 middle income countries in the world today; 60 of them are classified as upper middle income A network of diverse economic partners may be much more resilient in a multipolar setting when compared to the kind of polarization that a China-U.S. trade and tech war would imply. Arguably, a network of partners may also lessen the vulnerability of countries to pressure from either of the superpowers (notably by providing more options for economic alignment). It may also help alleviate the reduction in international economic integration benefits forecast by recent research on economic decoupling scenarios – a predicted reduction in global welfare by 2040 of about 5 percent, with some regions’ welfare losses reaching as high as 12 percent.

Democratic Resilience

Finally, analysts note how the deep challenges to democracy stem in part from the relative success of the Chinese model itself. As Tarun Chhabra put it in a 2019 analysis for the Brookings Institution:

The rise of China and the persistence of deep, internal challenges across open societies have created tremendous headwinds for democracy and liberal values globally, threatening U.S. alliances, liberal economic order, and even the political identity of the United States and its democratic partners and allies. Beijing’s ‘flexible’ authoritarianism abroad, digital tools of surveillance and control, unique brand of authoritarian capitalism, and ‘weaponization’ of interdependence may in fact render China a more formidable threat to democracy and liberal values than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

With that in mind, all countries – notably democratic countries – must revisit and bolster their political governance in light of the populist wave and the democratic retreat that is now well recognized by many governance analysts. Weak and unstable democratic governance associated with populist politics can become a vulnerability, as entire systems of infrastructure financing, technological development (e.g. AI, social monitoring and management), and social media applications (e.g. disinformation) may be applied with weaker checks and balances and far less multilateral consensus on protecting individual rights and freedoms.

Under these conditions, more stable domestic politics can better underpin the protracted engagement necessary under a new cold war between the superpowers and the uncertainty and volatility, as well as the “slowbalization” (modest global growth) that may accompany these tensions in the years ahead.

This article draws on the author’s study of the same name, which is available here.

Authors

Guest Author

Ronald U. Mendoza

Ronald U. Mendoza, Ph.D., is a senior economist with the Ateneo Policy Center and served as former Dean of the Ateneo de Manila University, School of Government.

thediplomat.com

14. Biden’s Grand Bargain to Remake the Middle East

​A more modest goal of relative stability weight be more prudent.

Biden’s Grand Bargain to Remake the Middle East

The election-year gamble is a long shot.

By Amy Mackinnon and Robbie Gramer

Foreign Policy · by Amy Mackinnon, Robbie Gramer

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Foreign & Public Diplomacy
• Middle East and North Africa
• Robbie Gramer
• Amy Mackinnon

February 13, 2024, 4:58 PM

The Biden administration is laying the groundwork for an ambitious grand bargain that would tie rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia to substantial steps toward Palestinian statehood, according to nine analysts and former U.S. government officials familiar with the plans. The long-shot diplomatic gamble could remake the Middle East and define U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign-policy legacy, but it faces staggering challenges that many fear will be insurmountable.

The plan the administration is working on builds on preexisting efforts to strike a U.S.-Saudi defense pact, a top Saudi foreign-policy priority. In exchange, Saudi Arabia, the most influential Gulf Arab state, would establish diplomatic relations with Israel, with all parties agreeing to forge irreversible steps toward Palestinian statehood.

Despite Israel’s punishing war in Gaza, which has drawn widespread condemnation across the Arab world and beyond, Saudi officials never renounced efforts toward normalization. Officials in Washington still see it as the best way to shake up the intractable status quo in a region where decades of U.S.-led peace efforts have failed to bring tensions between Israelis and Palestinians to an end or create a functional, sovereign Palestinian state.

Brett McGurk, Biden’s top White House Middle East aide, is spearheading the effort, according to those familiar with the talks, with the administration set to announce the proposed plan in the spring.

Diplomatic efforts on the issue were challenging before the war, and they have been exponentially complicated by both the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, which left Israeli society deeply traumatized, and Israel’s brutal offensive in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

“It’s like you’re trying to complete a Rubik’s Cube while running 100 miles an hour and sinking in quicksand,” Frank Lowenstein, who served as a U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama administration, said of the diplomatic push. “The degree of difficulty on that is just through the roof.”

The challenges were evident last week as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made his fifth visit to the region since the start of the war as part of a multistage diplomatic push by the United States to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages as well as broker a wider deal to diffuse tensions in the region.

The visit came as Hamas issued its response to a prospective cease-fire deal, which had been crafted by U.S., Egyptian, Israeli, and Qatari officials and presented to the group late last month. Blinken described the militant group’s demands as containing some “non-starters” while noting that there was space for further negotiations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas’s proposed terms as “delusional.” Blinken ultimately came back to Washington without having secured a deal.

A moment when the turmoil wrought by Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response has reverberated across the Middle East may seem like an unlikely time for ambitious diplomacy. And analysts and former U.S. officials underscored that no one deal is likely to bring decades of conflict to a close. But some experts say the fact that this crisis is engulfing the region is precisely why now is a good time to try.

“Everything is so chaotic. There’s an opportunity to do one grand bargain,” said Joel Braunold, the managing director of the Washington-based S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace.

A key element absent from previous peace efforts is the interest of the Gulf Arab states, which have increasingly come to see normalizing ties with Israel as being in their own economic and security interests. “That’s the new factor here,” said Dennis Ross, who spearheaded U.S. Middle East peace efforts during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have already signed normalization agreements with Israel as part of the Trump administration-facilitated Abraham Accords. Qatar has emerged in recent years as a significant diplomatic broker, maintaining ties with Hamas’s political wing as well as the United States, and has been central to negotiations over the release of Israeli hostages from Gaza.

The promise of normalization with Saudi Arabia would further reduce Israel’s isolation in the Arab world and potentially give Riyadh powerful leverage over Israel to secure concessions for the Palestinians, at least in theory.

Both Saudi Arabia and the United States are highly motivated to get a deal done quickly ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. A deal would represent a major diplomatic victory for a president whose foreign-policy record has been plagued by crisis management from Afghanistan to Ukraine to the Middle East. For its part, Saudi Arabia is keen to see a defense pact with the United States make it through the Senate while the Democrats hold the gavel, and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has promised to secure the additional votes needed to reach the two-thirds majority required for ratification of such an agreement, according to NBC News.

All the same, the path to clinching the deal is precarious. Biden’s relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is complicated. On the 2020 presidential campaign trail, then-candidate Biden described the Middle Eastern country as a “pariah” state over the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and once in office, Biden put long-standing U.S.-Saudi ties under review.

Now that the United States has done a complete about-face and seems eager for a deal, Riyadh is likely to try to exact a steep price from Washington in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel. In a statement issued this month, the Saudi Foreign Ministry said that there “will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Foreign Policy reached out to the Saudi Embassy in Washington for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Relations between the Biden administration and Netanyahu’s government have also become increasingly fraught. Washington is dealing with the farthest-right government in Israeli history, led by a prime minister who has long opposed the creation of a Palestinian state.

But “this is not just a Netanyahu issue—this is an Israeli issue,” said Michael Makovsky, the head of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “After Oct. 7, their whole sense of what they need for their own security has completely changed.” The Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, considered the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, sent shockwaves through Israeli society and caused tectonic shifts in the Israeli public’s views on Palestinian statehood: 65 percent of Israelis oppose a two-state solution, while only 25 percent support it, recent polls show—a complete reversal of where Israelis stood a decade ago.

Foreign Policy contacted the Israeli Embassy in Washington for an interview for this piece but was not granted one.

It’s also unclear what the Palestinians would get out of such a deal. The United Nations, Arab leaders, and Blinken have all called for irreversible steps toward Palestinian statehood, but U.S. officials have yet to publicly outline what that would entail—and how to make such measures irrevocable. The Biden administration is realistic that full Palestinian statehood remains a distant prospect but is looking into options that could at least help lay the groundwork for a two-state solution, such as land transfers or an agreement on East Jerusalem. Part of that reportedly involves the State Department exploring options for what a “demilitarized” Palestinian state would look like, though that could be a non-starter for the Palestinian side.

Then there’s the matter of who from the Palestinian side would negotiate any path to statehood. The primary political entities that the United States could conceivably negotiate with—the Palestinian Authority and PLO—are “ossified and have lost most of their legitimacy,” said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “The PLO barely exists, and the PA is dysfunctional, divided, weak, and deeply unpopular among Palestinians.” Meanwhile, wartime polls show Hamas has gained support among Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.

The Biden administration has spoken of plans to help revitalize the PA, but here, too, it has been light on details on what that plan actually entails. “There needs to be massive internal reforms before you could even negotiate a final outcome because you need a leadership that has the legitimacy and the mandate to negotiate these existential issues with Israel,” Elgindy said. “This is one of the main reasons why all the previous negotiations have failed.”

In the United States, Biden is facing what promises to be a bruising presidential election campaign against former President Donald Trump with the Israel-Hamas war playing an outsized role in the election cycle. Progressive Democrats have criticized Biden for being too lenient with Israel, while Republicans have rebuked him for not going far enough to support Israel and punish Iran and its regional proxy groups.

Congress, meanwhile, is hobbled with partisan infighting and has yet to pass a major national security supplemental bill that includes billions of dollars in funding for Israel. Both Saudi Arabia and Israeli-Palestinian issues have been highly politically charged in Congress in the past. Any new deal could require congressional buy-in, through either funding or a Senate approval of a new defense pact with Saudi Arabia.

Clinching any final deal, let alone one during an election year with one of the most dysfunctional Congresses in modern history, could prove to be an impossible task, especially on an expedited timeline ahead of the U.S. elections. “The idea that this whole deal would be signed, sealed, and delivered within the next three or four months, I just don’t understand how the math works on that,” Lowenstein said. A more feasible alternative, he said, would be for Biden to announce just the parameters of a grand bargain as a road map in the spring. “That, at least to me, feels relatively feasible.”

But if the risks of failure are high, the rewards from the slim chance of success are even higher, administration insiders say—and it’s a chance that Biden administration officials say they can’t let fall by the wayside.

Some of the most consequential diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East came on the backs of war, including the 1978 Camp David Accords that cemented relations between Israel and Egypt after the 1973 war and the 1993 Oslo Accords that effectively set up a vision for a two-state solution after the First Intifada from 1987 to 1993.

“We remain determined as well to pursue a diplomatic path to a just and lasting peace and security for all in the region,” Blinken said during his trip to the region, including a “concrete, time-bound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state.”

Foreign Policy · by Amy Mackinnon, Robbie Gramer

15. War in WESTPAC? Really? You & What PGM Inventory?

Excerpt:

All I know is a war is afoot in the Western Pacific and we will burn through our existing TLAM and other precision-guided weapons inventory - especially those with a standoff capability - very fast.

However, the war will need to be fought. There is no training time out - or procurement timeout - in war. As such, we will ask our military to execute the mission with whatever they have at hand … that means short-ranged, not-so-precision-weapons. That means an uglier, bloodier war for us. How many aircraft and ships can present production replace for wartime losses?

We may not be prepared to fight a long war, but a long war may be prepared to fight us.

War in WESTPAC? Really? You & What PGM Inventory?

https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/war-in-westpac-really-you-and-what?utm

...numbers matter...

CDR SALAMANDER

FEB 14, 2024

5

Share

I’m as guilty as everyone else.

When I look at the possibility of a war west of the International Date Line, I have a feel for the number of targets that will demand attention. Tied in to that, I know that we need to plan for most of our land-based assets Guam and west may not be usable for a significant period after D+1.

That means that to project power in the Western Pacific, it will need to come off carrier decks and out of VLS cells.

Untold articles exist stating we don’t have enough VLS cells nor enough platforms to carry them. It is easy to focus on that - it needs to be addressed - but it can’t be looked at in isolation.

As a former TLAM guy, I get the VLS cell challenge - especially when you need a lot of them for AAW as the People’s Republic of China will flood the air with ASCM and ASBM the minute our fleet gets in range. We don’t have the ability to swap loadouts once we leave homeport - and for WESTPAC based units, after D+0 they may have to move east of the International Date Line to change load outs or reload.

How many reloads?

We’ve talked for years about our shallow magazines; filled via the unholy coupling of peacetime accountants and pliable war planners selling the 72-hour war & Deterrence by Punishment snake-oil.

No one goes to opening day of dove season with only a half-dozen shells, and no one should plan for a Great Pacific War like we have.

Our friend Mackenzie Eaglen over at The National Interest has the numbers for you. Great credit to Mackenzie on this point, she has been telling this story for years to anyone who will listen.

While the Navy does have a large existing stockpile of Tomahawks to sustain its land-attack capability, it has recently been firing the missiles faster than it can replace them. According to the Navy, opening day strikes alone expended more than 80 Tomahawks to hit 30 targets within Yemen.

Last year’s entire Tomahawk purchase of 55 missiles accounted for 68 percent of the precision munitions fired at the Houthis in one day. This is an unsustainable rate of expenditure. However, this represents adherence to, rather than deviation from, the norm.

Prior strikes in Syria expended fifty-nine Tomahawks in 2017 and an additional sixty-six in 2018. The Navy bought just 100 Tomahawks in 2018 and then zero Tomahawks in 2019—failing to offset the expenditure rate of the Syria strikes.

Firing off more weapons than America buys causes stockpiles to decline quickly. The same weapons reserve the nation would need should Beijing seek to use force to take Taiwan while the United States is supporting wars in two other regions.

Like most of the United States high-tech precision-guided munitions, the Tomahawk suffers from a recent history of inadequate and unstable procurement. In the last ten years, $2.8 billion has been spent on TLAM procurement by the Navy to procure just 1,234 missiles.

…

In the 2024 White House budget request, the Navy would buy zero new land-attack Tomahawks and instead opt to invest in the experimental modification of fifty standard land-attack Tomahawks into the Maritime Strike Tomahawk (MST) variant, designed to hit ships at sea.

Just look at it;

If anyone has an explanation that makes sense, I’m all ears.

All I know is a war is afoot in the Western Pacific and we will burn through our existing TLAM and other precision-guided weapons inventory - especially those with a standoff capability - very fast.

However, the war will need to be fought. There is no training time out - or procurement timeout - in war. As such, we will ask our military to execute the mission with whatever they have at hand … that means short-ranged, not-so-precision-weapons. That means an uglier, bloodier war for us. How many aircraft and ships can present production replace for wartime losses?

We may not be prepared to fight a long war, but a long war may be prepared to fight us.

16. General Mark A. Milley (retired) To Join Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence

​More good work if you can get it for the former Chairman. Which is higher in rank in academia? - A distinguished fellow aor a jolly good fellow. I always get those academic ranks confused.

General Mark A. Milley (retired) To Join Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence - Georgetown University

georgetown.edu · by Jason Shevrin · February 13, 2024

(WASHINGTON – February 13, 2024) General Mark A. Milley (retired) will join Georgetown University as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Security Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service. His appointment with Georgetown begins this semester.

“We are excited to welcome General Milley to the School of Foreign Service,” said Joel Hellman, Dean of the School of Foreign Service. “His lifetime commitment to service in the interest of our nation’s security will surely inspire our students and enrich our community.”

General Milley served as the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, and the principal military advisor to the President, Secretary of Defense, and National Security Council. He retired September 29, 2023.

“I am excited about the opportunity to make a contribution at Georgetown and help shape our National Security leaders of the future,” said General Mark A. Milley. “Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service is world class and joining such an accomplished group of faculty and staff is truly humbling.”

Prior to becoming Chairman on October 1, 2019, General Milley served as the 39th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. A native of Massachusetts, General Milley graduated from Princeton University in 1980, where he received his commission from Army ROTC. He also holds a master’s degree from Columbia University.

During his active duty service, General Milley held multiple command, staff, and operational positions in Washington, D.C., Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, and other deployments.

General Milley will join the security studies community – he will mentor and engage with students, work closely with program faculty, and offer his insights in events with members of the broader Georgetown community.

###

ABOUT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Established in 1789 by Archbishop John Carroll, Georgetown is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the United States. Located in Washington DC, Doha, Qatar, and around the world, Georgetown University is a leading academic and research institution, offering a unique educational experience that prepares the next generation of global citizens to lead and make a difference in the world. For more information about Georgetown University, visit Georgetown.edu or connect with Georgetown on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

georgetown.edu · by Jason Shevrin · February 13, 2024

​17. Green Berets leverage immersive simulator for training

Green Berets leverage immersive simulator for training

army.mil

A Green Beret with 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) shoots at different targets in the VirTra simulator on Fort Carson, Colorado, Feb. 2, 2024. The Green Berets were able to experiment with different weapon systems, targets and environments before conducting a shooting scenario.

FORT CARSON, Co. — Members of the special forces community are utilizing training software that employs, to some degree, artificial intelligence. Operators with 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) completed multiple iterations of VirTra simulation training at the Human Performance Training Center on the 10th SFG (A) Complex, Feb. 2, 2024.

Applicable for both law enforcement and military, the VirTra simulator is a program featuring technology that can present different scenarios to its users which helps sharpen shooting skills. The program is fully customizable, helping individuals prepare for real-life incidents, while also providing accurate ballistics and military weapons qualification courses.

10th SFG’s (A) cognitive performance specialist, Jake Blumberg, oversaw the training iterations that were conducted in the HPTC. Blumberg described the structure of the training and designed it to be as realistic and similar to combat as possible, explaining that the Green Berets were guided through a series of exercises to spike their heart rate before executing shooting scenarios.

A Green Beret with 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) fires at a target in the VirTra simulator on Fort Carson, Colorado, Feb. 2, 2024. The VirTra simulator features technology that can present different shooting scenarios, environments and targets to better help its users sharpen their shooting skills while providing realistic training.

A cognitive performance specialist sets up an iteration of VirTra simulator training for 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Green Berets on Fort Carson, Colorado, Feb. 2, 2024. The VirTra simulator features technology that can present different scenarios to its users which helps sharpen shooting skills and is a way of receiving realistic training.

“This allows us to pair marksmanship with a variety of different training environments where they are coupled with a strength coach to simulate physical stress,” said Blumberg. “[Operators] are then able to create a variety of different ranges and targets to really hone their craft.”

Blumberg mentioned that 10th SFG(A) is the only Special Forces Group in the U.S. Army that has full-time access to this sort of technology and to think of the VirTra simulator as a more advanced version of the U.S. Army’s already well-known Engagement Skills Trainer.

“This [technology] provides what the EST can in terms of weapons qualification and flat range practice,” Blumberg remarked. “But VirTra also incorporates different types of drills, from reaction drills to threat-not-threat scenarios.”

The different scenario options that VirTra features include active threat, hostage situation, threat recognition and high-risk entry. Through these scenarios, the VirTra simulator is actively analyzing the decisions that its users make and then adjusting what happens in the program based on those decisions.

Green Berets with 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) acclimate to the VirTra simulator before starting an iteration of training on Fort Carson, Colorado, Feb. 2, 2024. The VirTra simulator features technology that can present different scenarios to its users which helps sharpen shooting skills and is a way of receiving realistic training. The Green Berets practice firing different weapon systems in the VirTra simulator before completing an actual shooting scenario.

Several Green Berets were afforded the opportunity to this unique training and one team captain commented that it gives him and his Soldiers unlimited opportunities to practice the fundamentals and increase their personal shooting skills, since using the simulator doesn’t use any live ammunition.

Since this technology is local to 10th SFG (A), this allows the operators to hone their craft at any time of the day and not spend time reserving ranges or acquiring other supplies.

“Everything comes down to increasing lethality, so the more triggers we pull in the correct manner, that’s what we want," said the team captain. “Practice makes permanent — ultimately we want to be training the fundamentals all the time and this is another venue for guys to pull their personal weapon and become better at the basics.”

army.mil

​18. Why America Can’t Have It All

Excerpts:

If Trump returns to the White House next year, he could potentially become a retrenchment president, but he would have to change much of his outlook and conduct. In his first term, U.S. alliance commitments and defense spending only expanded. For all his ally-bashing, Trump mainly aimed to wring a better deal out of existing security arrangements, not to retract them. Unless he demonstrates a stronger and more consistent preference for retrenchment and appoints appropriate personnel, a second Trump administration might well resemble the first. Trump’s pledge to restore “peace through strength”—his mantra on the campaign trail—partakes in the very fantasy that has brought U.S. foreign policy to this low point. In fact, no amount of American strength will make the rest of the world cower in fear and accept peace on Washington’s terms.

And that is just fine. The United States does not need global military dominance in order to thrive. What it must do is rescue its liberal democracy, rebuild its party politics, and restore the confidence of its people. Clinging to primacy sets back this great task. It creates a foreign policy that is perpetually out of control, and a country that is losing its sense of self-control. More than any major power, the United States, endlessly innovative, militarily peerless, shielded by two oceans and nuclear deterrents, should be master of its fate. It should look out at the world and see opportunities to seize and choices to make. Great nations set priorities.

Why America Can’t Have It All

Washington Must Choose Between Primacy and Prioritizing

By Stephen Wertheim

February 14, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy · February 14, 2024

The Biden administration took office intending to inject strategic focus into U.S. foreign policy. The president and his team promised to end the United States’ forever wars and make the country’s international engagements serve the needs of a disaffected public. In its first year, the administration terminated the two-decade-old war in Afghanistan, pledged to “right-size” the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, and even pursued a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia. By placing less emphasis on certain regions, the logic went, Washington could concentrate on what most affects U.S. interests: managing competition with China and tackling transnational threats such as climate change and pandemics.

Today that vision lies in tatters. The United States is now immersed in multiple wars in Europe and the Middle East, precisely where the administration sought to keep things quiet. Meanwhile, relations with China and Russia have deteriorated so strikingly as to raise the realistic prospect of the first major-power conflict since 1945.

One can hardly blame U.S. policymakers for the turmoil. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin who decided to invade Ukraine in 2022, and Hamas that chose to attack Israel in 2023. No one had a crystal ball to predict these shocking actions years in advance. Yet American officials bear responsibility for making a failed wager of their own. They hoped entire regions of the world would sit still because they preferred to turn their gaze elsewhere, even as the United States remained ensconced in those regions’ security arrangements. The Biden administration wanted to prioritize what in its view mattered most while declining to disentangle the United States from what mattered less.

This is a form of wishful thinking—perhaps as naïve as invading countries to liberate them—and ought to be recognized as such. The Biden administration is not the first to indulge in it. The rationale for American global dominance after the Cold War, as articulated by the Pentagon in 1992, was that by maintaining military primacy in most world regions, the United States would suppress competition among other countries, dissuade challengers from emerging, and keep the peace at a reasonable cost to Americans. But the unipolar era is over. Going forward, the United States’ options are stark: it can selectively retrench and control costs and risks, or it can stick with global primacy and lurch from crisis to crisis.

NO HARD CHOICES

From his inauguration through the autumn of 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden appeared to consider pulling U.S. forces back from the Middle East and possibly elsewhere. He initially directed the Defense Department to review the United States’ global force posture and align it with the priorities defined by the White House. Then, in August 2021, he ended the war in Afghanistan. Yet specific circumstances had largely forced Biden’s hand: along with an agreement reached by his predecessor to withdraw from the country, he inherited so few troops there that he would have had to escalate the failing and unpopular war effort if he did not pull out. By November, the Pentagon had announced that the U.S. force posture, having been duly reviewed, was basically correct.

Ever since, the Biden administration has avoided making structural reductions to any portion of U.S. global primacy—to the political objectives, defense commitments, and military positions that Washington has accumulated over eight decades. At the same time, it has continued to try to set priorities, privileging security requirements in the Indo-Pacific above those in Europe and the Middle East. In its National Security Strategy, released in October 2022, the terms “priority,” “priorities,” and “prioritize” appear 23 times, even as the United States’ globe-spanning alliances and partnerships are described as “our most important strategic asset,” tantamount to ends in themselves. In essence, the administration wished to keep certain regions off the president’s desk while remaining the paramount security actor in those same places.

There are two possible ways to make sure low-priority regions stay that way, absent any changes to U.S. objectives, commitments, or positions. First, the United States could employ deft diplomacy to accommodate the grievances of actors such as Iran and Russia that seek to revise the status quo in their favor. But U.S. diplomats could offer only modest measures if they were prohibited from paring back the United States’ core ambitions, security partnerships, or forward deployments. Alternatively, the United States could try to convince its allies and partners that they, not Washington, would have to take primary responsibility for managing any conflicts that arose in their own neighborhoods. Yet if the United States cared so much that it chose to remain the region’s premier military power, why would it care so little that it would stand back in a crisis? The message would be awfully difficult to make credible.

In its first year, the Biden administration opted for a halfhearted combination of both inadequate options. It attempted to mollify rivals through diplomacy and coax allies and partners to step up—in practice falling back on the hope that the status quo would somehow hold. In the Middle East, Biden initially aimed to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran that his predecessor had abandoned in 2018 and gave the cold shoulder to Saudi Arabia. But the administration could never decide whether it wanted to pay the political costs of reviving the accord, and negotiations fell apart as Washington pursued a “longer and stronger” agreement and Tehran sought new concessions and guarantees that the United States would not withdraw again in the future. The Saudi snub, mostly atmospheric, was easily reversed by Biden’s second year.

Biden positioned himself as the restorer of normalcy after Trump.

More fundamentally, the Middle East is so complex and unstable, comprising numerous states and armed groups able and willing to challenge the status quo, that even ambitious diplomatic efforts to ease tensions among some parties end up exacerbating tensions among others. Consider the fate of the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab countries to normalize relations. By embracing the accords and seeking last summer to expand them to include a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration was in a sense promoting integration and peace, but only among opponents of Iran and its proxies. And the move came at the price of diminishing the political prospects of Palestinians—who, under the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, were supposed to achieve statehood as a condition of Arab governments normalizing relations with Israel. The Palestinians’ vanishing political horizon was likely an impetus for Hamas’s attack in southern Israel on October 7.

The Biden administration never put as low a priority on Europe as it did on the Middle East. In its first year, however, it reached out to Moscow in the hopes of establishing a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia that could permit Washington to focus on strategic competition with China. Biden held a summit with Putin in June 2021, and the two countries launched a strategic stability dialogue with the aim of reducing the risk of nuclear war and enhancing arms control. But the White House underestimated Russia’s revisionist ambitions and refused to negotiate over NATO’s relationship with Ukraine, an issue that would have had to be addressed for there to be any chance of getting Putin to shelve his invasion plans.

Eager to embrace U.S. allies after the Trump years, the Biden administration did little to encourage European states to bear the bulk of the transatlantic defense burden. “America is back,” the president proclaimed. Rather than capitalize on the possibility that Donald Trump might return to office, Biden positioned himself as the restorer of normalcy after a Trumpian aberration. The United States remained Europe’s security provider of first resort, one crisis away from having to manage the response.

The point is not that the Biden administration could have made better diplomatic efforts, short of retrenchment, that would have prevented it from ultimately getting diverted to Europe or the Middle East. To the contrary, any such attempt was bound to fail. The accommodations necessary to satisfy U.S. rivals, and the inducements required to get allies and partners to solve problems themselves, would compel the United States to practice some measure of retrenchment. Only by pulling back—by trimming its political objectives and defense obligations, and the military posture that supports them—can Washington plausibly keep Europe and the Middle East crisis-free, at least for the United States. If this was true when Biden took office, it is only more applicable now that Russia is more isolated from and hostile toward the West and the Israel-Hamas war has triggered widespread conflict in the Middle East.

SHEDDING BURDENS

As its plans for prioritization have come undone, the Biden administration has improvised something of a fallback, indicating the direction it may travel in a second term. In lieu of retrenching, it is seeking to build “connective tissue” between U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. By knitting the two theaters together, the argument goes, Washington can be more effective in each one and stimulate what Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, claims is “the greatest amount of burden sharing in decades.”

Unfortunately, although cooperation among allies is welcome, this approach is unlikely to reduce or limit the overall costs and risks the United States bears for defense. To keep its burdens from growing, allies would have to assume responsibilities and develop capabilities that replace those of the United States and outpace the threats to regional security from China and Russia. In neither region does this seem to be happening. Boosts to European and Japanese military spending, although substantial, still translate into limited capabilities, which are meant to augment more than replace U.S. forces and fall short of offsetting China’s rising power and Russia’s more aggressive intentions. The White House, for its part, has not articulated metrics by which to gauge the success of its cross-regional strategy over time. The effort may end up providing a convenient alibi for maintaining U.S. global primacy in full and giving up on prioritizing altogether.

Burden sharing is no substitute for burden shifting. If the United States truly wants to set priorities according to its interests—in other words, to act strategically—there is no viable alternative to pulling back from the places that matter less. Washington cannot reap the benefits of caring less without actually caring less and downsizing U.S. objectives, commitments, and positions accordingly. Rather than lump overseas areas together into a grand, U.S.-led battle space, Washington should differentiate among regions and establish clear divisions of labor between itself and its security partners. This means systematically disentangling the United States from the Middle East, shifting most of the European defense burden onto European allies, and working to establish competitive coexistence with China so that the political and economic relationship between the two countries stabilizes while the United States continues to use military power to prevent a Chinese bid for regional hegemony.

Such a formula may constitute the only basis for forging a new foreign policy consensus in American politics to replace the tottering primacist paradigm. It could become broadly acceptable to the progressive left, with its antiwar and antiauthoritarian leanings; to centrists who seek great-power competition without catastrophe; and to the “America first” right, opposed to Chinese belligerence and the free-riding of allies. If, by contrast, the United States continues to chase global primacy even as that endeavor becomes untethered from politics at home, it will stake too much of the world’s security and its own prestige on the outcome of each U.S. election. Finding a durable foreign policy consensus is essential to sustaining any coherent strategy and keeping commitments credible.

Burden sharing is no substitute for burden shifting.

For the first time in the post-Cold War era, establishing the desirability of retrenchment might be the easy part. Implementing a course correction, however, will be extremely difficult, given the political interests and ideological axioms that currently support primacy. A president would need to take office determined to retrench and prepared to spend political capital to do so. He or she could not be dissuaded by setbacks, such as the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. A cadre of senior officials would have to formulate policy frameworks spanning four to eight years and ensure that the bureaucracy buys in and follows through. The administration could not let the momentary absence of crises keep it from advancing its agenda. For example, the Trump and Biden administrations should have removed U.S. ground forces from Iraq and Syria once their mission to defeat the Islamic State was complete, instead of leaving those troops in place as ready targets for pro-Iranian militias once tensions mounted. And when crises do arise, the administration should turn them into opportunities to pull the United States further out rather than drag it deeper in.

In the Middle East, even a responsible pullback could have destabilizing consequences in the short run. A retrenchment president would need to explain that the region’s volatility illustrates why the United States is moving to a largely offshore role, and that the Middle East must have a chance to find its own equilibrium, as the presence of multiple middle-weight powers allows it to do. By retaining a few air and naval bases, perhaps in Bahrain and Qatar, the United States could continue to secure the maritime commons, its vital interest in the region that is permanent rather than circularly created by its presence there. Because the United States lacks treaty allies in the region, aside from Turkey, the president could downgrade security partnerships into more neutral and transactional relationships without abrogating legal obligations.

Retrenchment from Europe presents a different challenge: the downside risk is more deleterious to U.S. interests but the odds of an ideal outcome—an orderly transition to European leadership of European defense—are higher than they are in the Middle East. The war in Ukraine has made the transition more feasible by spurring European allies to spend more on defense and, despite Biden’s efforts, by showing them the danger of depending on the whims of Washington. While Russian forces remain concentrated in Ukraine, the transatlantic alliance has a unique opportunity to shift the bulk of the defense burden onto the EU and the European members of NATO without allowing Moscow a window of opportunity for further aggression. A retrenchment president would strike a new bargain that keeps the United States within NATO but over a decade steadily replaces most U.S. forces and capabilities with European ones.

Barring a volte-face, the Biden administration will not adopt this approach if it wins a second term. But it should, and its successors still could. The revival of confidence in U.S. primacy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proved short-lived, and the generations of Americans with no memory of the Cold War are coming into power. To preserve the possibility of responsible retrenchment, however, Biden must not take on new defense obligations. A treaty binding the United States to defend Saudi Arabia, as he is now weighing, would damage U.S. interests, even in exchange for the normalization of Saudi relations with Israel and Israeli steps toward a Palestinian state. The administration should also hold firm against inviting Ukraine to join NATO and instead prepare to equip the country to defend itself over the long run.

AFTER PRIMACY

If Trump returns to the White House next year, he could potentially become a retrenchment president, but he would have to change much of his outlook and conduct. In his first term, U.S. alliance commitments and defense spending only expanded. For all his ally-bashing, Trump mainly aimed to wring a better deal out of existing security arrangements, not to retract them. Unless he demonstrates a stronger and more consistent preference for retrenchment and appoints appropriate personnel, a second Trump administration might well resemble the first. Trump’s pledge to restore “peace through strength”—his mantra on the campaign trail—partakes in the very fantasy that has brought U.S. foreign policy to this low point. In fact, no amount of American strength will make the rest of the world cower in fear and accept peace on Washington’s terms.

And that is just fine. The United States does not need global military dominance in order to thrive. What it must do is rescue its liberal democracy, rebuild its party politics, and restore the confidence of its people. Clinging to primacy sets back this great task. It creates a foreign policy that is perpetually out of control, and a country that is losing its sense of self-control. More than any major power, the United States, endlessly innovative, militarily peerless, shielded by two oceans and nuclear deterrents, should be master of its fate. It should look out at the world and see opportunities to seize and choices to make. Great nations set priorities.

• STEPHEN WERTHEIM is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Visiting Lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.

Foreign Affairs · by Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy · February 14, 2024

​19. Russia’s Dangerous New Friends

No mention of north Korea. I guess that is because it is an old friend. Or else it is just more pundits and academics who overlook the importance of north KOrea as a partner in the axis of totalitarians.

Excerpt:

To U.S. officials, pushing hard to break up the Russia-axis partnership may not seem like an urgent task. Washington, after all, is already consumed with stopping Russia’s efforts to subjugate Ukraine and containing the axis directly (as well as with competing against China in the Indo-Pacific). But the reality is that Washington cannot hope to address one problem without addressing the other. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been global in its intent and scope, reflecting Russia’s desire to undo the existing international order. Its patronage for the axis of resistance is part and parcel of that campaign. The axis aspires not just to kick the United States out of the Middle East but also to deal a body blow to a country it sees as an evil, imperialist empire. Moscow does not welcome the axis’s disruptive actions simply because they distract from Ukraine, and the axis is not pro-Russia purely because the Kremlin offers assistance. Rather, the two entities view each other as comrades-in-arms in a broader effort to weaken the West’s dominance. If Washington is serious about disrupting each one’s schemes, it must stop them from working together.

Russia’s Dangerous New Friends

How Moscow Is Partnering With the Axis of Resistance

By Hamidreza Azizi and Hanna Notte

February 14, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Hamidreza Azizi and Hanna Notte · February 14, 2024

Since invading Ukraine in 2022, Russia has forged deep ties to Iran. Moscow—which joined a sanctions regime against Tehran in the 2010s in an effort to restrict its nuclear program—has begun diplomatically shielding the Islamic Republic and boosting its investment in the Iranian economy. Tehran, in turn, has provided substantial battlefield support to the Russian military, including drones. Both developments have received substantial international attention and provoked widespread fury.

But Russia is simultaneously building another set of relationships that, although more subtle, are no less significant. Over the past two years, Moscow has intensified its ties to the “axis of resistance”: the network of Iranian partners and proxies that stretches from Lebanon to Iraq. This axis, which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis, and Iraqi and Syrian militias, believes itself to be in confrontation with Israel and, by extension, the United States. It is a natural ally for the Kremlin.

The war in the Gaza Strip has earned the axis newfound support and prompted it to take military action against U.S. troops, Israeli forces, and international shipping. In doing so, it has given Russia new chances to weaken the United States and the United States’ allies. Moscow has seized these opportunities. After October 7, Russia stepped up its diplomatic support for Hamas and the Houthis, defending their actions before the United Nations and blaming their attacks on the United States. It has provided technical and logistical aid for the axis as it strikes Israeli soldiers. And there are worrisome signs that Russia might enable Hezbollah in a potential confrontation with Israel, perhaps through sophisticated electronic warfare.

Moscow is not the puppeteer controlling the axis, and its efforts to incite the network’s members into further pressuring the United States will be measured. Russia wants to maintain ties with the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, as well as with Israel, and so it cannot afford to offer Iranian-linked groups unlimited backing. But Russia will still egg the axis on, encouraging its anti-American designs and working to make its attacks more effective. Washington will therefore have to respond with its own intensive efforts to counter this influence. The United States must, in particular, try to end the war in Gaza. It also must try harder to calm tensions throughout the Middle East. And Washington needs to push third parties, particularly its Arab allies, to undercut the partnership between Russia and the axis of resistance. Otherwise, Russia, Iran, and the two states’ friends may well curtail the United States’ power across the entire region.

ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

Russian engagement with the axis of resistance is not a new phenomenon. The two sides have had political contacts for many years. Hamas delegations, for instance, have frequented Moscow since 2006. The Russian military has been working with Iran-backed militias since Moscow began its military intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, during which Russia coordinated its operations with Hezbollah. During that year, Moscow also established contacts with the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella organization that brings together Iran-backed militias in Iraq. And at the same time, Iran, Iraq, Russia, and Syria created a quadrilateral intelligence center to coordinate the fight against the Islamic State (or ISIS), marking the beginning of intelligence sharing between Russia and the PMF (although the sharing was limited and had little effect).

Initially, Moscow shied away from providing these groups with systemic security assistance. But after invading Ukraine, Russia shed some of this caution. As Russia’s military focused its resources on Putin’s gambit in Ukraine, Moscow relinquished several key positions in central and eastern Syria to Iran-backed militias and to Hezbollah. According to reports by Reuters, Russia also ramped up intelligence sharing with Iran-backed militias and supplied Hezbollah with antiship missiles via Syria. In addition, it gave a green light for Iran to upgrade Syria’s air defenses. Such support has provided a major boost to these groups’ operational capabilities, enabling them to target U.S. interests in eastern Syria with increased frequency and precision.

For the axis, Russia’s patronage came at the perfect moment. After the 2020 assassination of the network’s founder, the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the axis began steadily decentralizing, giving its members increased autonomy to seek out international partnerships. Almost all of them looked to Moscow for intensified engagement, hoping that the Kremlin’s recognition would provide them with an advantage on their respective domestic political turfs and, eventually, yield security assistance that could complement the support they obtain from Iran. This outreach, in turn, gave Russia a broader choice of prospective regional associates. The decentralization also made the axis more useful to Moscow by making the network more resilient—and therefore dangerous for Washington.

After October 7, the battlefield collusion between Russia and the axis reached yet another level. Russia has stepped up electronic jamming from its Khmeimim base in western Syria, disrupting Israel’s commercial air traffic. Russian pilots have resumed their air patrols along the Israeli-Syrian disengagement line in the Golan Heights, after a one-year hiatus. According to Iranian news outlets, Hezbollah struck Israel’s Meron air control base with Russian-made antitank guided missiles in January, suggesting that Moscow may be funneling arms to the militant group. And U.S. officials have warned that the Wagner paramilitary company—which the Russian Ministry of Defense is in the process of dismantling and rebranding—may provide air defense systems to Hezbollah in the coming months.

For the axis of resistance, Russia’s patronage came at the perfect moment.

Russia has combined this increase in military aid with more diplomatic and rhetorical assistance. Moscow has worked to deflect international criticism of Hamas onto the United States, arguing that Washington has dangerously monopolized the peace process and is therefore responsible for the renewed outbreak of violence in the Middle East. Moscow also defended the Houthis after the group unleashed drone and missile attacks on Israel and on international shipping in the Red Sea. And Russian diplomats have blamed the United States for the Houthis’ violence, arguing that the attacks are really provoked by what they call a U.S.-backed Israeli “slaughter” in Gaza. Along with China, Russia abstained from a United Nations Security Council resolution that called on the Houthis to stop attacking merchant and commercial vessels.

Russia’s relationship with the Houthis is, to be sure, complex. Moscow’s abstention allowed the resolution to pass, and some of the Houthi strikes have unintentionally hit ships carrying Russian oil. Should Houthi attacks prompt the closure of the Suez Canal, through which Russia sends most of its oil to India, the costs of Moscow’s exports could become prohibitive. But Russia did (unsuccessfully) try to squeeze several amendments into the security council proposal that would have deflected criticism of the Houthis. For the time being, the strikes have caused limited economic damage to Russia. And Moscow likely welcomes the disruption in global commerce. Although it might prompt inflation and supply-side shortages, Russia hopes that these consequences will harm Western societies above everyone else.

As a result, Moscow has not been bashful about helping the Houthis. Russia hosted their representatives at its foreign ministry in late January. In return, a Houthi official promised safe passage for Russian and Chinese ships transiting through the Red Sea. Other axis groups have also visited Moscow. Hamas representatives have twice traveled to Russia’s capital since October 7, where they enjoyed the opportunity to mingle with Iranian officials.

Russia’s actions raise concerns about its potential role in an expanding conflict between Israel and the axis, and especially one between Israel and Hezbollah. Though Russia does not want an all-out conflagration, which would likely engulf Syria and threaten Russian interests there, it will likely support Hezbollah if war happens. It could cause headaches for Israel’s defense planners, for example, by intensifying electronic jamming, which Russia has already ramped up since October 7—or announcing that it was “closing” Syria’s airspace. Russia would almost certainly avoid shooting down Israeli jets itself, but should Damascus engage Israeli aircraft with its arsenal of Russian-provided missile defence systems, aided by precise intelligence and electronic jamming from Russia, Moscow could maintain plausible deniability regarding any resulting incidents.

PEER PRESSURE

Moscow’s cooperation with the axis’s anti-American activism will not be unbounded. Russia remains heavily invested in its ties with Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have afforded the Kremlin important economic benefits but have a hostile relationship to axis members. Russia also wants to maintain a modicum of civility with Israel, which is host to a sizable Russian-speaking population and might offer Ukraine military support in the future. Russian-axis cooperation may also be constrained by the fact that, in the short term, the two parties have different goals. The Kremlin likely wants to tie down American resources in the Middle East, while the axis wants to oust U.S. forces.

But these obstacles will not stop the relationship from deepening. The different actors benefit from mutual support; in February, for instance, Ukrainian military intelligence officials claimed that Russians operating Iranian drones were being trained by Hezbollah commanders in Syria. Russia and the axis are united by their animosity toward the United States, which both parties want to cut down to size. And the actors’ long-term goals are aligned: once its war in Ukraine reaches a lower intensity, Moscow also wants the United States to be evicted from the Middle East. Russian officials have hailed Iraq’s push for a drawdown of U.S. troops in the country, and they continue to deride the American presence in Syria. They have warned that they will not permit the United States to dictate plans for the “day after” in Gaza and the wider region, suggesting that Russia will try to throw wrenches into any coming diplomatic efforts that would smell of American success or would seek to sideline the axis.

For the United States, stopping this scheming will not be easy. Washington lacks direct leverage over both Russia and Iranian-backed resistance groups—as indicated by its recent poor track record in using military strikes to deter further attacks by the Houthis and Iraqi militias. But Washington can start by seeking an urgent end to Israel’s war in Gaza. The longer the war lasts, the more it will afford Russia multiplying paths to back, and benefit from, an increasingly strong axis.

Russia highly values Gulf countries as economic partners, and so it may well be susceptible to pressure from them.

More important, the United States can engage in serious diplomatic efforts to settle the region’s metastasizing conflicts. Washington’s current focus on weakening Iran and cutting its support for the axis will not automatically disrupt the axis’s ties with Russia. That requires containing and weakening the groups themselves, and to do so, the United States must seriously reengage with the countries where axis groups operate to strengthen their formal state structures. The axis would not be so powerful if the Iraqi, Lebanese, and internationally recognized Yemeni governments were not so weak and disorganized.

Finally, Washington should encourage third parties to use their leverage with Moscow to minimize mutual assistance between the Kremlin and the axis. Since Russia highly values Gulf countries as economic partners, it may well be susceptible to pressure from them to dial down the most malign forms of its assistance to pro-Iran groups. These states are, presently, united with the axis in their indignation over Israel’s campaign in Gaza, and so they have not made applying such pressure a priority. But once the war ends, Washington will have an easier time gaining Gulf support.

To U.S. officials, pushing hard to break up the Russia-axis partnership may not seem like an urgent task. Washington, after all, is already consumed with stopping Russia’s efforts to subjugate Ukraine and containing the axis directly (as well as with competing against China in the Indo-Pacific). But the reality is that Washington cannot hope to address one problem without addressing the other. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been global in its intent and scope, reflecting Russia’s desire to undo the existing international order. Its patronage for the axis of resistance is part and parcel of that campaign. The axis aspires not just to kick the United States out of the Middle East but also to deal a body blow to a country it sees as an evil, imperialist empire. Moscow does not welcome the axis’s disruptive actions simply because they distract from Ukraine, and the axis is not pro-Russia purely because the Kremlin offers assistance. Rather, the two entities view each other as comrades-in-arms in a broader effort to weaken the West’s dominance. If Washington is serious about disrupting each one’s schemes, it must stop them from working together.

• HAMIDREZA AZIZI is a Visiting Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and a Nonresident Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
• HANNA NOTTE is Director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and a Nonresident Senior Associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by Hamidreza Azizi and Hanna Notte · February 14, 2024

20. From Korea to Vietnam, This West Pointer Was An Inspiration To All Who Knew Him

Fascinating history.

From Korea to Vietnam, This West Pointer Was An Inspiration To All Who Knew Him

historynet.com · by Jon Bock · February 12, 2024

On March 30, 1972, the aging revolutionaries in Hanoi’s Politburo abandoned the strategy of protracted struggle and launched an all-out conventional invasion of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). By mid-April, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had committed its entire combat capability—14 divisions, 26 separate infantry regiments, and 1,200 tanks, plus all its artillery regiments and engineer battalions.

The NVA also introduced weapons heretofore not seen in Vietnam: large formations of T-54 tanks; AT-3 Sagger anti-tank missiles; and SA-7 shoulder-fired, heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles. Fighting raged in Quang Tri province near the DMZ, in An Loc 60 miles from Saigon, and in the Central Highlands, threatening Kontum City. The U.S. press named it the Easter Offensive since it began on Holy Thursday, the first day of Easter celebrations for South Vietnam’s Catholic population.

My Mentor in Vietnam

As in the early 1960s, the only Americans fighting on the ground were a handful of U.S. advisers with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). One of them was Lt. Col. Charles L. “Chuck” Butler, an adviser with the 31st ARVN Regiment, 21st ARVN Division, who I met the first week of May ’72.

I was a major, just assigned as the adviser with the 6th Airborne Battalion, Vietnamese Airborne Division. The battalion was co-located with the 31st Regiment and was reconstituting after being decimated near An Loc, Binh Long’s provincial capital, 15 miles north. Although I had served a previous tour in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, I had no advisory training. When I received my orders in January 1972 to return to Vietnam in late April, I requested attendance at an abbreviated Vietnamese language course and adviser training school at Fort Bragg. My assignment officer in Washington, D.C., denied both requests, stating I would be assigned to the MACV staff in Saigon. Little did he know!

Charles Lewis Butler. Butler was deployed to Vietnam in the fall of 1963 as an adviser to the 9th ARVN Division. He witnessed turmoil within the government of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem as well as the aftermath of the assassinations of Diem and U.S. President John F. Kennedy that November. Butler’s experiences gave him great insights into the conflict. Rather than retire, he opted to return to Vietnam in 1971. (Courtesy of the author)

Chuck Butler was a seasoned combat veteran. He had been an adviser in Vietnam from 1963-64 and an infantry platoon leader during the Korean War. He was a true font of knowledge and had a great perspective on the war. His counsel proved to be invaluable to me as I was getting my feet on the ground. Because Chuck was a modest man, I didn’t learn of his heroism in Korea until years later.

Chuck in Korea

Charles Lewis Butler was a member of the U.S. Military Academy’s class of 1950—670 men who graduated on June 6 that year. He and 197 of his classmates were commissioned in the infantry. Nineteen days later, North Korea invaded South Korea, drawing the United States into a war for which it was ill-prepared. The American defense establishment was gutted in the aftermath of World War II. Rapid demobilization, draconian budget cuts, and an inept management produced a hollow force. To stop the North Korean onslaught and fill the ranks, many members of the USMA class of 1950 were immediately sent to Korea, including Chuck Butler.

Chuck said goodbye to his new bride, Joan, and on Aug. 20, 1950, was aboard a troop transport sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge. He was assigned to F Company, 7th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. The division was needed in Korea but was woefully understrength. Due to the severe shortage of infantry lieutenants, recent West Point graduates were sent into battle without any training other than what they received at the Military Academy.

Chinese communist forces swarmed into North Korea in November 1950. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had discounted the possibility of Chinese intervention, but their appearance in large numbers prompted him to order the withdrawal of United Nations troops north of the 38th parallel. The 3rd Infantry Division was tasked to cover the evacuation of 1st Marine Division and the 7th Infantry Division as they left the Chosin Reservoir and moved to the port of Hungnam on North Korea’s east coast.

In Korea, Butler helped cover the evacuation of the 1st Marine Division and 7th Infantry Division from the Chosin Reservoir. Despite being shot twice, he provided covering fire for his task force from a tank’s mounted machine gun and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. (The Everett Collection)

On Dec. 15, Chuck’s platoon was given five tanks and the mission to assist a beleaguered U.S. unit. Then-Lt. Butler described what happened as he led his small force. “We suddenly came around an S-curve in the road and on both sides of us the hills crawled with Chinese. I was hit in the arm…then I was hit in the groin.”

Unable to walk, he ordered his wounded men placed on the tanks, while he was lifted onto the lead tank. Although gravely injured, Chuck manned a turret-mounted machine gun and provided covering fire, allowing his task force to disengage from hundreds of Chinese and return to friendly lines. Butler was evacuated to Japan and hospitalized for three months. Upon returning to duty in Korea, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross—the Army’s second highest decoration for valor.

To Vietnam

Twelve years later, in the fall of 1963, Maj. Chuck Butler was in Vietnam, assigned as an advisor with the 9th ARVN Division, operating in the Mekong Delta. The delta region was the agricultural heartland of the RVN; its provinces contained two-thirds of the nation’s population and produced the bulk of its rice crop.

1963 was a period of great turmoil. President Ngo Dinh Diem failed to stem the growing communist insurgency or increase popular support for his government. Restrictions on religious freedoms ignited a crisis, resulting in Buddhist riots and self-immolations by monks. Diem’s refusal to initiate any liberal reforms in the face of mounting opposition caused President John F. Kennedy to lose all faith in him. It was the last straw for the Kennedy Administration and word was quietly relayed to Saigon that JFK was amenable to a regime change.

The ARVN generals spent more time plotting coups and jockeying for positions than opposing the communists. The ARVN stayed in their cantonment areas while VC cadres took advantage of their apparent paralysis. Frustration mounted among advisers like Maj. Chuck Butler, who wanted to challenge the enemy. However, no amount of prodding could energize the ARVN. Meanwhile Diem’s government continued to accept U.S. economic and military aid at the rate of $1.5 million dollars per day ($14 million per day in today’s dollars).

In the aftermath of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, American politician and Vice­President Lyndon Baines Johnson takes the oath of office to become the 36th President of the United States as he is sworn in by US Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes (left) on the presidential aircraft, Air Force One, Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy stands beside him at right. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

On Nov. 1, 1963, ARVN troops commanded by Gen. Duong Van Minh attacked the presidential residence in Saigon. Diem and his brother, Nhu, escaped and hid in the Chinese quarter of the city. The brothers surrendered the following day, assuming they would be sent into a comfortable exile. Gen. Minh had other ideas and ordered their execution.

Diem’s death was followed three weeks later by President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22. It created uncertainty in Vietnam over what the new U.S. policy might be. Immediately, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, issued a directive emphatically stating that he would stay the course in Southeast Asia. LBJ saw the political fallout in 1949 when Mao gained power in China and was determined not to be the president who “lost Vietnam.” ARVN military leaders breathed a sigh of relief.

Aftermath of Assassinations

In the coup’s aftermath, Minh and his Military Revolutionary Council enjoyed widespread acclaim. The euphoria dissipated when the new rulers showed little aptitude for governing, squabbling over every issue. No progress was made against recent VC inroads or instituting needed reforms. Political instability was perpetuated when a bloodless coup on Jan. 30, 1964, ousted the Military Revolutionary Council.

Butler, shown here as a major in 1963 during his time as an adviser to the 9th ARVN Division in the Mekong Delta, was always willing to lend his experience to junior officers and gained a reputation for being a good mentor. (Courtesy of the Author)

Chuck Butler noticed the turbulence created by the revolving door in Saigon. Political loyalties and family ties trumped military professionalism, so generals who were closely allied with the new leadership received choice assignments. They, in turn, brought their loyal subordinates with them to fill jobs throughout the ranks. Butler observed two rounds of leader changes, both of which degraded military effectiveness. When his tour concluded in September 1964, the downward spiral continued, resulting in the commitment of U.S. combat troops in the spring and summer of 1965.

Opting for a second Vietnam tour rather than retirement, Lt. Col. Butler returned in September 1971. Again he was assigned as an adviser in the Mekong Delta, but this time with the 21st ARVN Division. The unit was responsible for the southernmost portion of the Delta, which contained the famous VC sanctuary, the U Minh Forest. The ARVN had been relatively successful subduing the insurgency throughout the region and pacifying the countryside. Butler was pleased to see the improvement.

Helping Junior Officers in Vietnam

The senior adviser to the 21st ARVN Division was Col. J. Ross Franklin, a legendary warrior-scholar with multiple Vietnam tours and a doctorate in international relations from American University. He also spoke fluent French. Franklin and Butler were West Point classmates and held each other in high esteem. Both had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross during the Korean War and served together at Fort Benning’s Infantry School after the conflict. Franklin assigned Chuck as his deputy with a primary focus advising the division’s two principal staff officers, the G2 (Intelligence) and the G3 (Operations).

Within the 21st ARVN Division combat assistance team, Butler gained a reputation for mentoring junior officers. Capt. Ed DeVos, on his first assignment in Vietnam as an assistant adviser with the 33rd ARVN Regiment, was a beneficiary of Butler’s insights. Arriving in December 1971, the captain sought out Chuck Butler and asked him many questions about the role of a junior officer “advising” men who had been fighting their entire adult lives. A recipient of two Silver Stars during the Easter Offensive, DeVos cited his admiration for Butler in his 2020 book, The Last 100 Yards.

One of the junior officers he shared his wisdom with in Vietnam was the author of this article, John Howard, pictured here as a major assigned as an adviser to the 6th Airborne Battalion, Vietnamese Airborne Division in Quang Tri City in July 1972. (Courtesy of the Author)

The 21st ARVN Division’s mission abruptly changed on April 7, 1972. President Nguyen Van Thieu convened a meeting of key officials to assess the military situation. The border town of Loc Ninh had just fallen to the communist juggernaut and Binh Long’s provincial seat, An Loc, was the NVA’s next objective. If An Loc fell, there were no forces to stop an enemy advance on Saigon, 60 miles away. Thieu made the unprecedented decision to move the 21st ARVN Division from the Delta to reinforce the defenders of Binh Long Province.

Even in the face of the largest North Vietnamese offensive of the war, U.S. withdrawals mandated by the Vietnamization program continued. Personnel shortages in division and regimental assistance teams were the norm. Regimental teams were authorized a lieutenant colonel, three captains, and two sergeants but it was not unusual for only one or two Americans to be with an ARVN regiment; the U.S. Army replacement system simply could not keep pace with battle casualties, medical evacuations for sickness, and end-of-tour rotations.

Rather than allow a key vacancy to remain unfilled, Butler volunteered to be the senior adviser with the 31st ARVN Regiment. Chuck Butler always went to “the sound of the guns.” Still, he remained Franklin’s “go-to” guy for most problems and was in charge of the division assistance team in the senior adviser’s absence.

By April 12, the division was assembled in Lai Khe, the former base of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, and told to open QL (National Route) 13 to An Loc. The 7th NVA Division had cut the road, further isolating An Loc, now surrounded by two NVA divisions, the 5th and 9th. The 21st ARVN had never operated in the field as a combat division. In its former area, commanders only supervised regimental and battalion operations. Battle-tested SOPs were nonexistent and staff work was shoddy, often lacking clarity. Attacks often failed due to a lack of proper coordination. Commanders at all levels became overly reliant on U.S. airpower, especially B-52 strikes, and were hesitant to move without them.

Facing Hardcore NVA Forces

Nor had the 21st ARVN previously encountered large formations of hardcore NVA forces that stood their ground and employed heavy artillery in quantities not previously seen. Indirect fire from 130mm and 152mm guns became the major killer of friendly troops. Consequently, ARVN soldiers developed a bunker mentality and literally “went to ground.” Such behavior was particularly prevalent among the leaders.

In a letter to his family, Butler said his ARVN counterpart, Lt. Col. Xuan, only left the regimental command bunker to answer the call of nature. By contrast, Butler regularly checked the troops, usually under fire. Butler’s bravery resulted in the award of the Silver Star, but his example had little effect. No amount of cajoling altered Xuan’s behavior. The commander’s abrogation of leadership responsibilities lowered morale and contributed to inaction.

While the 21st Division struggled along highway QL 13, I was experiencing a problem establishing a modicum of rapport with the 6th Airborne Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Dinh. He viewed me as useful when we were in a fight because I was the link to U.S. airpower, yet at other times, I was just excess baggage. He was vocal about not needing any tactical input from Americans. Butler attributed this attitude to the impact of Vietnamization. Many Vietnamese, including Dinh, believed they would ultimately be left high and dry by the United States. They were more perceptive than most Americans then serving in Vietnam.

The Division Fights On

Butler said the specter of our imminent departure and the reduction of our robust logistical system fostered anti-American attitudes. However, he was not overly critical of men who harbored those beliefs. If the intellectual elite in our country and students at Ivy League universities were unable to differentiate between U.S. policymakers and those responsible for implementation of those policies, we shouldn’t be surprised such viewpoints existed here. His observation gave me a new empathy for my Vietnamese counterpart.

During a moment of levity, Chuck shared his opinion on advisers’ “can-do” attitude. He said it was part of our makeup—but was a blessing and a curse. We tried hard to make improvements, and then felt guilty when our efforts fell short. He left me with the following thought: “Regardless of how hard you try, sometimes you simply can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit!”

Turning to an increasingly conventional approach in the war’s final stages, North Vietnam deployed armor en masse on the battlefield. This photo shows North Vietnamese T-54 tanks advancing during the 1972 Easter Offensive. In addition to increasing communist firepower, Butler and other U.S. advisers faced fraying relations with ARVN counterparts. (National Archives)

The 6th Airborne Battalion completed rebuilding and retraining at the end of May and was committed back into the Binh Long battle. It fought through the 7th NVA Division’s defenses and linked up with defenders manning the southern portion of An Loc’s perimeter on June 8, 1972. The 6th was the first unit to break the siege and was cited in the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff history of the Vietnam conflict. My relationship with Dinh had vastly improved, thanks to Butler’s sage counsel and my ability to put U.S. bombs on target.

On June 18, government officials declared the siege of An Loc broken and released the 1st Airborne Brigade (three ARVN airborne battalions, including the 6th) so the unit could join the fighting near the DMZ. Although the siege was officially lifted, the battle was not over. It took from June 18 to June 21 for the paratroopers to fight their way to Tan Khai, six miles south of An Loc. Tan Khai firebase was defended by the 31st ARVN Regiment and provided artillery support for An Loc. It was the furthest advance of the 21st Division and a thorn in the side of the NVA.

U.S. helicopters were ordered to lift the 1st Airborne Brigade from Tan Khai to Lai Khe so preparations could begin for its air movement north. QL 13 was the designated pickup zone, although airmobile landings near the firebase would attract more NVA incoming artillery fire.

The Last Time I Saw Chuck

During the lull preceding the arrival of helicopters, I made my way to the regimental command post to see Chuck Butler. Our short reunion was dampened by the news that Lt. Col. Burr Willey, adviser with the 32nd Regiment, had been killed by NVA fire on June 19. Chuck believed helicopters would energize NVA gunners who had forward observers seeded throughout the area.

Ever concerned about others, Chuck told me to be careful and jokingly said: “The good Lord will look out for you but you have to help Him by not wandering around in artillery fire!” Our meeting was cut short when a radio call informed me the choppers were inbound. We shook hands. I wished him luck and said I hoped to see him again.

It was a 15-minute flight from Tan Khai to Lai Khe, the 21st ARVN Division command post. When I arrived, Col. Ross Franklin met our flight. He was visibly shaken, with tears in his eyes. He told me that Chuck Butler had been killed when the bunker he was occupying took a direct hit, probably from a 130mm artillery round. I was in a state of disbelief. I told him I had just been with Lt. Col. Butler less than 30 minutes earlier. Ross Franklin said that I was the last American to see him.

The author was the last American to see Butler alive.Less than 30 minutes after having a conversation with the author, Butler was killed by NVA artillery fire at the age of 44, leaving behind a wife and three children. The author has never forgotten Butler. Here he is pictured standing beside Butler’s final resting place at West Point in late 2023. (Courtesy of the author)

Charles Lewis Butler was 44 years old when he died. He had recently completed 22 years of Army service. He left behind his wife, Joan, and three children, a son and two daughters. He was laid to rest at West Point on July 5, 1972, where his commitment to the profession of arms began years before. Chuck Butler joined the legion of USMA graduates who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. He was one of 333 West Pointers who lost their lives in the Vietnam War. Their service personified the academy’s motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.”

Although five decades have passed since Lt. Col. Butler was killed on June 21, 1972, it seems like yesterday to me. Memories of him and those times are never far from my thoughts. He was very helpful during my initial days as an adviser and I meant to tell him so when we were together, but I missed the chance. It is a lifelong regret. I continue to mourn the passing of an outstanding soldier, a genuine war hero, and a friend.

During the 1972 Easter Offensive, John Howard was an adviser with the Vietnamese Airborne Division, serving with the 6th Airborne Battalion and the 11th Airborne Battalion. He serves on the advisory board of Vietnam magazine.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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