Quotes of the Day:

"Even if my body is broken and my spirit crushed, I will never yield to tyranny." 

– Yu Gwan-sun, 1919

"The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract." 

– Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity." 

– Amelia Earhart

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 15, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 15, 2024

3. ISW Fact Sheet: US Assistance to Ukraine

4. Western Weapons Are Ukraine’s Only Hope

5. Iran’s Rise as Global Arms Supplier Vexes U.S. and Its Allies

6. How Russia Recruits Soldiers From Cuba to Fight in Ukraine

7. ‘No prescription needed’: Inside a White House clinic’s ‘systemic problems’

8. US and allies disrupt Russian cyber espionage operation against US and Europe, FBI chief says

9. In America, Headlights are blinding but not in other countries, this tech is why

10. The $2.8 Billion Hole in U.S. Sanctions on Iran

11. Beating the Ossification Trap: Why Reform, Not Spending, Will Salvage American Power

12. U.S. conducted cyberattack on suspected Iranian spy ship

13. Frank Kitson, 97, Dies; Helped Shape the Conflict in Northern Ireland

14. Can Ukraine Still Win?

15. How to end China’s chokehold on the Pentagon’s supply chains

16. Hamas Is Returning to Northern Gaza Because Israel Has No Plan for the “Day After”

17. Is Israel Losing Sight of Its Long Game?

18. The Taiwan Catastrophe

19. NEWSFLASH: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dead in government custody

20. Meta takes down Chinese Facebook accounts posing as US military families

21. Opinion: The Plan Biden Needs to Present to Congress

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 15, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-15-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces are conducting a tactical turning movement through Avdiika likely to create conditions that would force Ukrainian troops to withdraw from their positions in the settlement. Ukrainian forces have yet to fully withdraw from the settlement and continue to prevent Russian forces from making gains that are more significant than the current incremental Russian advances.
• The Russian offensive effort to capture Avdiivka underscores the Russian military’s inability to conduct a successful operational envelopment or encirclement in Ukraine.
• The potential Russian capture of Avdiivka would not be operationally significant and would likely only offer the Kremlin immediate informational and political victories.
• The Russian command reportedly reorganized the command structures of the Russian grouping of forces in southern Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted a relatively larger series of missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of February 14 to 15.
• Ukrainian security forces reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against an oil depot in Kursk Oblast.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to elaborate on an amorphous ideology for Russia to support geopolitical confrontation with the West by attempting to portray Russia as the leader of an international anti-Nazi movement.
• Putin intentionally misrepresented a statement from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an attempt to promote pseudo-history aimed at denying Ukrainian statehood.
• Russian sources claimed that the Russian military officially removed Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) Commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov and replaced him with the BSF’s Chief of Staff Vice Admiral Sergei Pinchuk.
• Select members of the US-led coalition the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (also known as the Ramstein format) formally launched an air defense coalition and agreed to form a drone coalition and demining coalition to support Ukraine following the group’s 19th meeting in Brussels on February 14.
• NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO and Ukraine will create a joint analysis, training, and education center in Poland following the meetings of NATO Defense Ministers in Brussels on February 15.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Kupyansk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Uralvagonzavod plant in Sverdlovsk Oblast, one of Russia’s largest tank producers, on February 15 to promote Russian efforts to expand Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB).
• Head of Ukraine’s nuclear operating enterprise Energoatom Petro Kotin stated that the situation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) is becoming more dangerous due to Russian activity near and at the plant.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Feb 15, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 15, 2024

Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, Angelica Evans, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 15, 2024, 8:35pm 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 2:10pm ET on February 15. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the February 16 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian forces are conducting a tactical turning movement through Avdiivka likely to create conditions that would force Ukrainian troops to withdraw from their positions in the settlement. Ukrainian forces have yet to fully withdraw from the settlement and continue to prevent Russian forces from making gains that are more significant than the current incremental Russian advances. Geolocated footage published on February 15 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced to the southern outskirts of the Avdiivka Coke Plant in northwestern Avdiivka.[1] Additional geolocated footage published on February 15 indicates that Russian forces captured a Ukrainian fortified position south of Avdiivka that has long been a Russian sub-tactical objective, and Russian milbloggers widely claimed that Russian forces effectively encircled nearby Ukrainian positions south of Avdiivka.[2] Recently geolocated Russian advances indicate that Russian forces have cut the last road in Avdiivka connecting southern and northern Avdiivka, but Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy stated that Ukrainian forces are currently using prepared secondary ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to supply Ukrainian forces in southern and eastern Avdiivka.[3] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces made further advances west of Avdiivka in an effort to cut dirt roads that Ukrainian forces are using to supply positions in Avdiivka from Lastochkyne and Sieverne (both west of Avdiivka), although ISW has not yet observed any confirmation of these claimed Russian advances.[4] Lykhoviy acknowledged that Ukrainian forces are withdrawing from unspecified positions in the Avdiivka area but stated that Ukrainian forces also continue to recapture some unspecified positions from Russian forces.[5] The spokesperson for a Ukrainian brigade previously deployed to the Bakhmut area stated on February 15 that elements of the brigade redeployed to Avdiivka and are counterattacking Russian positions within the settlement.[6] Russian forces may be able to complete the envelopment of some Ukrainian forces if the Ukrainian forces do not withdraw or conduct successful counterattacks.

The Russian offensive effort to capture Avdiivka underscores the Russian military’s inability to conduct a successful operational envelopment or encirclement in Ukraine. Russian forces initially attempted to operationally encircle Ukrainian forces in Avdiivka at the start of the localized offensive effort in October 2023, but gradually shifted towards fighting through the settlement in a turning movement after failing to conduct the rapid maneuver required for envelopment or encirclement.[7] An operational encirclement is a maneuver in which attacking forces completely surround and then destroy an enemy grouping of forces. An operational envelopment is a maneuver wherein attacking forces aim to avoid an enemy’s principal defenses to seize objectives behind those defenses that allow the attacking forces to destroy the defenders in their current positions.[8] Russian forces have achieved neither in Avdiivka and have notably repeatedly failed to conduct operations to envelop or encircle Ukrainian forces throughout the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[9] Russian forces instead have conducted a turning movement in Avdiivka, as they did with their capture of Bakhmut in spring 2023, wherein Russian forces have only sought to avoid Ukraine’s principle defensive positions to facilitate tactical gains but have not pursued the wider destruction of a Ukrainian force grouping.[10] The repeated Russian inability to conduct successful operational-level envelopments or encirclements suggests that the Russian military will likely continue to advance through gradual minor tactical advances instead of through these wider maneuvers that could lead to more rapid advances or the destruction of large groups of Ukrainian forces.

The potential Russian capture of Avdiivka would not be operationally significant and would likely only offer the Kremlin immediate informational and political victories. Russian forces have been conducting offensive operations to capture Avdiivka since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Avdiivka has been a notable Ukrainian strongpoint defensive position since the Russian invasion in 2014.[11] Russian forces began a localized offensive operation to capture Avdiivka in October 2023 and only recently began to make tactical progress through the settlement after months of costly infantry assaults and waves of mass mechanized attacks.[12] Avdiivka is a small settlement with a pre-war population of roughly 31,000 people and offers Russian forces limited avenues for future advance.[13] (Bakhmut had a pre-invasion population of 70,000 people, in comparison.) Ukrainian forces have long fortified many of the surrounding settlements, which Russian forces are also struggling to capture, and subsequent Ukrainian positions west and north of Avdiivka are likely similarly fortified.[14] The nearest relatively large settlements in the area are at least 30 kilometers west of Avdiivka, and Russian forces have not shown that they can conduct the rapid mechanized forward movement that would be required to reach these settlements in the near or even medium-term.[15] Russian forces have expended a considerable amount of manpower and materiel on their effort to capture Avdiivka and will likely need to engage in a prolonged period of consolidation, reconstitution, and rest before attempting a further concerted offensive effort in the area.[16] Russian forces would be highly unlikely to make rapid operationally significant advances from Avdiivka if they captured the settlement, and the potential Russian capture of Avdiivka at most would set conditions for further limited tactical gains.

The potential capture of Avdiivka would give the Kremlin a battlefield victory, however tactical, to promote to a domestic audience ahead of the Russian presidential election in March 2024. The Kremlin has reportedly increasingly desired any battlefield victory ahead of the presidential elections and has reportedly set objectives in Ukraine specifically to generate informational effects.[17] Russian ultranationalists, specifically those with ties to the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), have long argued that the capture of Avdiivka would push Ukrainian forces out of strike range of Donetsk City and thereby secure the regional center of occupied Donetsk Oblast.[18] Ukrainian forces would be able to continue to strike Russian targets in near rear areas in the vicinity of Donetsk City, both with indirect fire and long-range strike capabilities, regardless of the Russian capture of Avdiivka. Putin will nevertheless likely attempt to sell the potential capture of Avdiivka as a significant victory cementing control over occupied Donetsk City to the Russian ultranationalist community and the wider Russian public.

The Russian command reportedly reorganized the command structures of the Russian grouping of forces in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated on February 15 that the Russian command dissolved the “Zaporizhia” Grouping of Forces (the unnamed Russian grouping of forces that has been responsible for western Zaporizhia Oblast since at least the start of the Ukrainian summer 2023 counteroffensive) and transferred elements of the 58th Combined Arms Army (CAA) (Southern Military District) to the “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces under the command of Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) and ”Dnepr” Grouping of Forces Commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky.[19] Elements of the 58th CAA were primarily responsible for manning Russian defensive lines in western Zaporizhia Oblast during the Ukrainian counteroffensive alongside elements of the Russian 7th and 76th VDV Divisions and has since conducted limited counterattacks in the area.[20] ISW has observed indications that the Russian command may view western Zaporizhia Oblast and Kherson Oblast as a single operational axis, and subordinating the 58th CAA to the “Dnepr” Grouping of Forces may be an effort to bring the existing battlefield command structures in line with this vision.[21] Mashovets reported that the Russian command also transferred elements of the 5th, 35th, and 36th CAAs (Eastern Military District), which have generally been responsible for Russian operations in Zaporizhia Oblast and the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area alongside Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) units and various other Russian units, from the “Zaporizhia“ Grouping of Forces to the Eastern Grouping of Forces.[22]

Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy stated on February 14 that Russian forces are amassing a large grouping of forces in the Orikhiv direction, possibly in preparation for renewed offensive efforts in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[23] Lykhoviy stated that the Russian grouping in the Orikhiv direction is comparable in size to the Russian grouping around Avdiivka, which Lykhoviy recently estimated is comprised of roughly 50,000 personnel.[24] ISW has not observed recent indicators that Russian forces intend to imminently renew offensive efforts in western Zaporizhia Oblast, although the Russian command is likely interested in efforts to retake territory that Ukrainian forces captured during the summer 2023 counteroffensive.

Russian forces conducted a relatively larger series of missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of February 14 to 15. The Ukrainian Air Force reported on February 15 that Russian forces launched 12 Kh-101/555/55 cruise missiles from aircraft based at Engels air base; six Iskander-M ballistic missiles from Voronezh Oblast; two Kalibr cruise missiles from Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai; four Kh-59 guided missiles from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast and Kursk Oblast; and two S-300 guided missiles from Belgorod Oblast at targets in Ukraine.[25] Ukrainian air defenses destroyed a total of 13 missiles, including 8 Kh-101/555/55 missiles, one Iskander-M missile, two Kaliber missiles, and two Kh-59 missiles.[26] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuri Ihnat noted that Russian forces have recently not been using many Kalibr missiles, possibly due to issues transporting Kalibrs or unspecified technical issues with the missiles.[27] Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces launched over 10 missiles at Lviv Oblast, striking an infrastructure facility in Lviv City, and conducted another missile strike on Selydove, Donetsk Oblast.[28] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian missiles also damaged civilian infrastructure and residential buildings in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Khmelnytskyi, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhia oblasts and struck a warehouse in Myrnohrad, Poltava Oblast.[29]

Ukrainian security forces reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against an oil depot in Kursk Oblast. Ukrainian outlet Suspilne reported on February 14 that the Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) conducted a successful drone strike on the Polyova Oil Depot, and Kursk Oblast Governor Roman Starovoit stated that a Ukrainian drone strike caused a fire at the oil depot.[30] Russian sources published footage of explosions at the oil depot and reported that the strike caused at least two oil tanks filled with diesel fuel to catch fire.[31] This is the fifth successful Ukrainian drone strike against Russian oil infrastructure in the past month.[32]

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to elaborate on an amorphous ideology for Russia to support geopolitical confrontation with the West by attempting to portray Russia as the leader of an international anti-Nazi movement. Putin told Kremlin journalist Pavel Zarubin in an interview on February 14 that “many countries” are supporting an ideology of “the exclusivity of some nations (народ) over others” and that such an ideology is the root of Nazism.[33] Putin claimed that Russia should begin promoting ”anti-fascist and anti-Nazi" work and propaganda at a global level and that such work would not be effective at the state level.[34] ISW previously assessed that the Kremlin may be intensifying portrayals of an alleged Nazi and fascist West in an attempt to posture for international audiences, particularly those not aligned with the West.[35] Putin continues to fail to clearly define what comprises this ”anti-fascist and anti-Nazi" ideology and instead solely frames his anti-Western position as the basis for his envisioned ideological confrontation with the West. Putin’s stated goals of “uniting” and maintaining control over the Russian World (Russkiy Mir) – purposefully vaguely defined as ethnic Russians, Russian language-speakers, and any territory and people formerly colonized by the Soviet Union and Russian Empire – is part of Russia’s larger imperialist ambitions and unrelated to alleged interests in combatting fabricated modern Nazism. Putin is attempting to further both the Russian World framework to justify the war in Ukraine and Russia’s larger imperialistic objectives and the portrayal of Russia as a leader in the international fight against alleged Western Nazism simultaneously but not congruently.

Putin intentionally misrepresented a statement from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an attempt to promote pseudo-history aimed at denying Ukrainian statehood. Putin purposefully misrepresented Blinken’s statement about his Jewish great-grandfather fleeing the Russian Empire due to pogroms.[36] Putin claimed that Blinken’s great-grandfather was from Poltava Oblast and lived in and left Kyiv City, thus demonstrating, according to Putin, Blinken’s recognition that these areas of Ukraine are “primordially Russian territory.” Putin and other senior Russian officials have routinely misrepresented Western officials’ statements to further Russian information operations.[37]

Russian sources claimed that the Russian military officially removed Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) Commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov and replaced him with the BSF’s Chief of Staff Vice Admiral Sergei Pinchuk.[38] A Ukrainian strike on the Russian BSF headquarters in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea in September 2023 likely killed Sokolov.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that Sokolov, who had been BSF commander since September 2022, prohibited the BSF from installing non-standard devices on vessels for detecting maritime drones and other technologically advanced equipment and claimed that the BSF lost about 20 precent of its strength under Sokolov’s command.[40] Ukrainian Navy Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk reported that the BSF had almost 80 pieces of naval combat equipment at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 of which 30 to 35 were “heavily armed.”[41] Pletenchuk stated that Ukrainian forces have “destroyed” 26 naval combat pieces as of February 15, 2023, and “seriously damaged” another 15. Pletenchuk also stated that the Russian coast guard (subordinate to the Russian Federal Security Service [FSB]) has up to 20 various vessels.

Select members of the US-led coalition the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (also known as the Ramstein format) formally launched an air defense coalition and agreed to form a drone coalition and demining coalition to support Ukraine following the group’s 19th meeting in Brussels on February 14. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and his French counterpart Sebastien Lecornu signed an agreement to create the Air and Missile Coalition to support Ukraine’s air defense capabilities, and Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov added that Germany, France, and the United States will lead the coalition of 15 states.[42] Latvia and eight countries, including Ukraine, signed a letter of intent to join the Drone Coalition that aims to deliver one million first person view (FPV) drones to Ukraine.[43] The Latvian MoD announced that Latvia plans to spend at least 10 million euro (about $10.8 million) over the next year to bring the coalition to the next level, and UK Defense Secretary Grant Shapps announced that Ukraine will receive “thousands” of drones from the UK.[44] Shapps also announced that the UK will co-lead the coalition with Latvia. The Lithuanian MoD also announced that it signed a protocol of intent to create a Demining Coalition with 20 other countries, and Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas announced that Lithuania will lead the Demining Coalition with Iceland and will transfer armored personnel carriers to the Ukrainian military and allocate 1.2 million euros (nearly $1.3 million) to NATO’s demining support program for Ukraine.[45] Anusauskas also announced that Lithuania joined the French-led Artillery Coalition, which was launched in Paris on January 18 and will make its first contribution to the coalition by providing 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine on an unspecified date.

European officials also announced additional aid to Ukraine during the Ramstein format. Pistorius announced that Germany recently pledged to transfer 100 million euros worth of military equipment to Ukraine, including small drone bombs, 77 MULTI 1A1 trucks, medical equipment, spare parts for various weapons systems, and equipment repairs.[46] Anusauskas announced that Lithuania will also provide Ukraine with unspecified drones and anti-drone systems as part of its participation in the Drone Coalition and will also deliver another batch of winter equipment to Ukraine. Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles announced that Spain is preparing to transfer another batch of an unspecified number of M113 armored personnel carriers, personnel transport vehicles, other vehicles, anti-aircraft defense systems, and other materiel to Ukraine.[47] Ukrainian military officials stated that Ukraine’s partners discussed the need to provide Ukraine with long-range weapons and logistics for the transfer of the F-16 fighter aircraft.[48]

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO and Ukraine will create a joint analysis, training, and education center in Poland following the meetings of NATO Defense Ministers in Brussels on February 15.[49] Stoltenberg stated that NATO will open the center in Bydgoszcz, Poland, which will allow Ukrainian forces to share their combat experience with NATO and train alongside their allied counterparts. Stoltenberg also stated that NATO had negotiated contracts with ammunition manufacturers worth $10 billion and that NATO needs to come out of peace time ammunition production to replenish NATO stocks and support Ukraine.[50] Stoltenberg added that European NATO members for the first time will collectively invest a total of $380 billion on defense in 2024, which constitutes two percent of all NATO members’ collective GDP.[51]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces are conducting a tactical turning movement through Avdiika likely to create conditions that would force Ukrainian troops to withdraw from their positions in the settlement. Ukrainian forces have yet to fully withdraw from the settlement and continue to prevent Russian forces from making gains that are more significant than the current incremental Russian advances.
• The Russian offensive effort to capture Avdiivka underscores the Russian military’s inability to conduct a successful operational envelopment or encirclement in Ukraine.
• The potential Russian capture of Avdiivka would not be operationally significant and would likely only offer the Kremlin immediate informational and political victories.
• The Russian command reportedly reorganized the command structures of the Russian grouping of forces in southern Ukraine.
• Russian forces conducted a relatively larger series of missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of February 14 to 15.
• Ukrainian security forces reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against an oil depot in Kursk Oblast.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to elaborate on an amorphous ideology for Russia to support geopolitical confrontation with the West by attempting to portray Russia as the leader of an international anti-Nazi movement.
• Putin intentionally misrepresented a statement from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an attempt to promote pseudo-history aimed at denying Ukrainian statehood.
• Russian sources claimed that the Russian military officially removed Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) Commander Admiral Viktor Sokolov and replaced him with the BSF’s Chief of Staff Vice Admiral Sergei Pinchuk.
• Select members of the US-led coalition the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (also known as the Ramstein format) formally launched an air defense coalition and agreed to form a drone coalition and demining coalition to support Ukraine following the group’s 19th meeting in Brussels on February 14.
• NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO and Ukraine will create a joint analysis, training, and education center in Poland following the meetings of NATO Defense Ministers in Brussels on February 15.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Kupyansk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Uralvagonzavod plant in Sverdlovsk Oblast, one of Russia’s largest tank producers, on February 15 to promote Russian efforts to expand Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB).
• Head of Ukraine’s nuclear operating enterprise Energoatom Petro Kotin stated that the situation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) is becoming more dangerous due to Russian activity near and at the plant.

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)

Geolocated footage published on February 15 shows that Russian forces recently advanced northeast of Synkivka and southeast of Vilshana – both areas located northeast of Kupyansk.[52] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced near Synkivka from the northwest and the northeast and seized an area of 1.5 square kilometers in Synkivka’s vicinity.[53] The milblogger also claimed that Russian forces made unconfirmed advances near Ivanivka (southeast of Kupyansk), while a Ukrainian officer stated that Russian forces recently lost positions in the Ivanivka direction following Ukrainian counterattacks in the area.[54] The officer added that Russian forces operating in the Kupyansk direction are well-trained and are well-supplied but are using barrier detachments (specialized units that shoot at their own personnel who retreat or those who do not attack) in the area.[55] The officer observed that Russian claims about Russian personnel soon having one first person view (FPV) drone per fighter are plausible and noted that Ukrainian forces need additional electronic warfare (EW) systems as Russian forces are intensifying their drone usage in the Kupyansk direction. Positional battles continued northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka; and southeast of Kupyansk near Ivanivka, Pishchane, Berestove, Kotlyarivka, and Kyslivka.[56]

Russian sources claimed on February 15 that Russian forces have seized nearly 90 percent of the industrial zone near Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna), despite previously claiming full Russian control over the area on February 8 and February 9.[57] Russian state outlet RT amplified milblogger claims that the ”Aida” group of ”Akhmat” Spetsnaz forces captured another building on the territory of the chalk plant near Bilohorivka.[58] Another milblogger claimed that elements of the 7th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People's Republic’s [LNR] Army Corps [AC]) are continuing to operate near Bilohorivka.[59] Positional engagements continued northwest of Kreminna in the area south of Nevske; west of Kreminna near Terny, Yampolivka, and Torske; southwest of Kreminna near Dibrova; and south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka.[60]

Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets assessed that the Russian military command is completing the regrouping of military personnel in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions.[61] Mashovets noted that assault detachments of the 752nd and 252nd motorized rifle regiments (3rd Motorized Rifle Division, 20th Guards Combined Arms Army [CAA], Western Military District [WMD]) transferred to Zhytlivka (immediately northwest of Kreminna), likely to support assaults in the Terny direction. Mashovets noted that it is likely that the Russian military command will operationally subordinate assault detachments (each detachment having up to a battalion’s worth of combat power) of the 2nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division (1st Guards Tank Army) operating in the Kupyansk direction under the commander of the 144th Motorized Rifle Division (20th CAA) operating on the Svatove-Kreminna line. Mashovets added that the Russian command committed two ”fresh” assault companies from the 31st Motorized Rifle Regiment (67th Motorized Rifle Division, 25th CAA) in the Yampolivka direction and are transferring elements of the 47th Tank Division (WMD) from the Kupyansk direction to the Lyman direction – possibly to relieve elements of the 90th Guards Tank Division (41st CAA, Central Military District [CMD]) and fully commit the 90th Tank Division to the Avdiivka direction where other elements of the 90th Tank Division are already fighting. Mashovets concluded that the Russian command’s desire to continue simultaneous offensives in both Lyman and Kupyansk directions will require Russia to commit additional reserves as the remainder of the 90th Guards Tank Division deploys to Avdiivka.

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 recently marginally advanced near Bakhmut on February 15. Geolocated footage published on February 14 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced west of Bakhmut.[62] Russian sources claimed on February 15 that elements of the Russian 11th Guards Air Assault (VDV) Brigade advanced to the outskirts of Ivanivske (just west of Bakhmut).[63] Positional engagements continued northeast of Bakhmut near Vesele; west of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka, Khromove, and Ivanivske; and southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka, Andriivka, Kurdyumivka, and Pivdenne.[64] Ukrainian Khortytsia Group of Forces Spokesperson Ilya Yevlash stated that the Russian command is transferring units to the Bakhmut direction from other unspecified sectors of the front and that Russian forces are attacking from Bohdanivka in the direction of Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut).[65]

See the topline text for ISW’s daily update on the situation in Avdiivka.

Positional fighting continued west and southwest of Donetsk City on February 15. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced towards Heorhiivka (west of Donetsk City) and along Timiryazyevska Street on the southeastern outskirts of Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City)[66] Positional engagements continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda and Novomykhailivka[67] Elements of the Russian 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps) are reportedly operating in the Krasnohorivka direction and elements of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet, Eastern Military District) are reportedly operating near Novomykhailivka[68][69]

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

Russian forces recently advanced in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border. Geolocated footage published on February 14 indicates that Russian forces recently made a marginal advance west of Novodonetske (southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[70] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian attack near Staromayorske (south of Velyka Novosilka) and south of Zolota Nyva and Prechystivka (both southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[71]

Russian forces reportedly advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast but there were no confirmed changes to this area of the frontline. Russian milbloggers claimed on February 14 that elements of the Russian 247th Airborne (VDV) Regiment (7th VDV Division) captured several positions near Verbove, although ISW has not observed visual evidence confirming this claim.[72] Positional engagements continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne).[73] Elements of the Russian 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) and 71st Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade (35th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) reportedly continue to operate in the Zaporizhia direction.[74]

Positional engagements continued in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast near Krynky on February 15.[75] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that elements of the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet) recently returned to Krynky and are conducting assaults on Ukrainian positions near Krynky.[76] Mashovets stated that Russian forces are preparing to resume offensive operations in the Dnipro River islands and will likely employ elements of the 61st Naval Infantry Brigade (Northern Fleet) in these operations.

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

See topline text for recent Russian strikes update.

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Uralvagonzavod plant in Sverdlovsk Oblast, one of Russia’s largest tank producers, on February 15 to promote Russian efforts to expand Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB).[77] Putin claimed that the Russian DIB has significantly increased the production of various equipment, including tanks, by a factor of five and other armored vehicles by a factor of three and a half.[78] Putin specifically thanked Uralvagonzavod for providing modernized T-72 and T-90 tanks to the Russian military.[79] The General Designer for Russian drone manufacturer Special Technology Center, Roman Ivanov, similarly promoted Russian efforts to expand Russia’s DIB by claiming that Russia can now produce 1,000 Orlan-10 reconnaissance drones per year.[80] Russia has been gradually mobilizing its DIB in an effort to fulfill operational requirements in Ukraine without causing disruptions to Russia’s already weakened economy.[81] The expansion of Russia’s DIB is well below the wider economic mobilization that the Kremlin has increasingly evoked rhetorically, and ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin is unlikely to start a full-scale mobilization of Russia’s DIB.[82]

Russian officials continue efforts to use benefits to incentivize Russians to sign military contracts. Russian opposition outlet SOTA reported on February 15 that Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov and Russian State Duma deputies Vasily Piskarev and Sergei Neverov introduced a bill to write off debts of Russian personnel who are receiving certain categories of disability benefits.[83] Rostov Oblast Governor Vasily Golubev stated on February 15 that Russian officials will increase the one-time signing bonus for Russian contract soldiers from 200,000 rubles ($2,168) to 500,000 rubles ($5,420) in Rostov Oblast.[84]

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)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on February 14 that nearly half of Ukraine’s electronic warfare (EW) and air defense systems are produced by Ukrainian companies.[85] Zelensky stated that Ukraine is developing additional EW and surface-to-air (SAM) systems and that several of Ukraine’s joint production partnerships with its allies have begun.[86]

The Australian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated on February 15 that Australia will provide a grant of $32.4 million (50 million Australian Dollars) to purchase priority military equipment for Ukraine through the United Kingdom (UK) MoD’s International Fund for Ukraine.[87]

The Ukrainian MoD reported on February 15 that the Ukrainian MoD created an intergovernmental working group to coordinate weapons procurement and purchases.[88]

Swedish outlet Dagens Nyheter reported on February 13 that Norwegian-Finnish ammunition manufacturer Nammo is switching to a round-the-clock schedule at a plant in Sweden to increase the production of 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine.[89] Nammo representatives acknowledged that the facility will likely struggle to significantly help cover Ukrainian artillery demands while replenishing depleted European artillery stocks, however.[90]

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)

Head of Ukraine’s nuclear operating enterprise Energoatom Petro Kotin stated that the situation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) is becoming more dangerous due to Russian activity near and at the plant. Kotin noted that Russian forces are continuing to mine the perimeter of the plant, and are keeping heavy equipment with ammunition in the turbine halls and weapons on the roofs of power units.[91] Kotin noted that ZNPP is facing another threat as it approaches the expiration of the six-year period allowed by the manufacturer for the storage of the nuclear fuel in reactors. Kotin noted that no one in the world had previously missed the six-year deadline set by the manufacturers and that no one knows what will happen to the fuel after the deadline expires. Kotin stated that Russian occupation officials removed the remaining competent Energoatom staff from the ZNPP and that there are no remaining specialists qualified to make complex decisions about nuclear safety.

Russian occupation authorities reportedly uncovered on February 14 an explosive planted on a car belonging to a Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official.[92] Russian opposition outlet Astra, citing unnamed sources, reported that unknown individuals planted an explosive on a car belonging to Mykhailivka occupation deputy Andrey Mochalov in Mykhailivka.[93]

Russia continues to use patronage programs to further social and economic control over occupied Ukrainian territories. Kherson Oblast occupation minister of industry Semyon Mashkautsan discussed with Chechen Republic’s Minister of Industry and Energy Adam Khakimov the possibilities of the industrial and trade cooperation between Chechnya and occupied Kherson Oblast.[94] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on February 15 that Russian occupation officials brought a delegation from the Sakha Republic’s Artic State Institute of Culture to occupied Donkuchaievsk, Donetsk Oblast to organize a joint concert with Ukrainian youth.[95]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian officials continue to conduct information operations against Moldova in an effort to set information conditions to justify Russian efforts to destabilize Moldova and prevent its integration into the West. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin claimed in a February 15 interview with Russian outlet Izvestia that Moldovan President Maia Sandu’s government is pursuing an “openly Russophobic political line” despite alleged widespread support for Russia among the Moldovan population.[96] Galuzin accused Moldova of pursuing a path of “Ukrainization” and “taking hostile steps” against Russia by joining Western sanctions against Russia. ISW continues to assess that Russian information operations against Moldova are similar to those that the Kremlin used before its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 and may be setting conditions to conduct a hybrid operation against Moldova.[97]

The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on February 15 that unspecified Russian actors have started the active phase of the “Perun” information operation aimed at promoting pro-Kremlin positions in foreign media.[98] The GUR reported that Russia plans promote pro-Russian positions on the war in Ukraine through foreign journalists, media personalities, and bloggers.

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)

The Belarusian Air Force and Belarusian Air Forces and Air Defense Forces Commander Major General Andrei Lukyanovich hosted Russian personnel during a training conference on aviation safety in Minsk, Belarus, on February 15.[99]

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 15, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-february-15-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: Russian Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov paid an official visit to Iran, likely to discuss Russo-Iranian defense industrial and military cooperation.
• Iraq: Some Sunni and Shia Iraqi political factions appear divided on expelling US forces from Iraq.
• Northern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces reported that it concluded a two-week long, division-sized raid in western Gaza City.
• Southern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces continued to conduct clearing operations in several sectors of Khan Younis.
• West Bank: Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters at least six times. Hamas called for three days of demonstrations in the West Bank and abroad.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Iranian-backed militias, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted eleven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Yemen: The Houthis claimed that they conducted a missile attack targeting a Barbados-flagged, Greek-owned vessel in the Gulf of Aden.

IRAN UPDATE, FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Feb 15, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, February 15, 2024

Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, Annika Ganzeveld, Amin Soltani, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET 

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.

Russian Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov paid an official visit to Iran, likely to discuss Russo-Iranian defense industrial and military cooperation. Minnikhanov visited unspecified “large industries and industrial towns” in Esfahan Province and met with the provincial governor on February 14.[1] Several prominent defense industrial and military sites, including some operated by the IRGC and Defense Ministry for aerospace work, are in Esfahan Province. These sites include the Kashan airfield, for instance, which Russian delegations visited in June and July 2022 to examine Iranian Shahed drones.[2] The Iranian Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company, which builds Ababil and Shahed drones, is also located in Esfahan Province.[3] Minnikhanov’s visit is particularly noteworthy given that Iran is helping to construct a military drone manufacturing facility in Yelabuga, which is in the Republic of Tatarstan.[4] This factory is expected to produce at least 6,000 drones in the “coming years.”[5]

Minnikhanov is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and has extensive ties to Russia’s defense industry. He has served as the head of the Republic of Tatarstan since 2010 and also heads the Russian oil and gas company Tatneft.[6] Minnikhanov has separately chaired the board of directors for the Tupolev Public Joint Stock Company since September 2021.[7] Tupolev produces strategic bombers, such as the Backfire and Blackjack bombers, for the Russian armed forces.[8] The United States sanctioned Minnikhanov in January 2023 for his involvement in the “defense and related materiel and aerospace sectors of the Russian Federation economy.”[9] Canada sanctioned Minnikhanov in April 2023 for supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[10]

Minnikhanov separately met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to discuss “economic cooperation” in Tehran on February 13.[11] Raisi called for increasing economic, industrial, scientific, and tourism cooperation with the Republic of Tatarstan and other Russian federal subjects. Russian media reported that Raisi will travel to Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, in October 2024 to attend a BRICS summit.[12]

Some Sunni and Shia Iraqi political factions appear divided on expelling US forces from Iraq.[13] Khaled al Dabouni, a member of the Sunni Mutahidun Alliance, stated that Sunni political parties will not support the Iranian-backed effort to remove US forces. Dabouni argued that Iraq needs US forces to confront ISIS because Iraq is currently incapable of doing so by itself. This assertion is consistent with CTP-ISW's assessment that an Iraqi decision to expel US forces would very likely create space for ISIS to resurge in Syria within 12 to 24 months and then threaten Iraq.

The Shia Coordination Framework—a loose coalition of Iranian-aligned Iraqi Shia political parties—and other Iranian-backed Iraqi actors regularly argue that Iraq no longer needs US-led coalition forces because the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) can independently protect Iraq from threats, such as ISIS.[14] These statements ignore the deficiencies that the ISF continues to face in terms of intelligence, fire support, and logistics. Iranian-backed Iraqi parliamentarians accused Sunni and Kurdish factions of “boycotting” the February 10 parliamentary session to discuss the removal of US-led International Coalition forces from Iraq, as CTP-ISW previously reported.[15]

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: Russian Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov paid an official visit to Iran, likely to discuss Russo-Iranian defense industrial and military cooperation.
• Iraq: Some Sunni and Shia Iraqi political factions appear divided on expelling US forces from Iraq.
• Northern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces reported that it concluded a two-week long, division-sized raid in western Gaza City.
• Southern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces continued to conduct clearing operations in several sectors of Khan Younis.
• West Bank: Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters at least six times. Hamas called for three days of demonstrations in the West Bank and abroad.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Iranian-backed militias, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted eleven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Yemen: The Houthis claimed that they conducted a missile attack targeting a Barbados-flagged, Greek-owned vessel in the Gulf of Aden.

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.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported on February 15 that it concluded a two-week long, division-sized raid in western Gaza City.[16] Several Israeli regular units and special operations forces (SOF) advanced into Gaza City over a few hours—a short period relative to the week that it took Israeli forces to maneuver into Gaza City during the initial phase of clearing operations in November 2023.[17] Israeli forces cleared military infrastructure, located intelligence materials and weapons, and killed around 120 Palestinian fighters during the raid.[18] The IDF previously announced that Israeli forces had “dismantled” all of Hamas’ battalions in the northern Gaza Strip on January 6. Hamas exploited Israeli withdrawals in late December 2023 to infiltrate areas where Israeli forces previously cleared and reconstitute some of its militia units.[19]

The IDF continued targeting Hamas commanders and fighters in the northern Gaza Strip. Israeli forces killed the al Shati Battalion commander in Hamas’ Gaza Brigade on February 14.[20] The IDF 215th Artillery Brigade killed at least 15 Hamas fighters, including a security official, in Gaza City and other parts of the northern Gaza Strip on February 15.[21] The IDF is continuing to search for the Hamas Gaza Brigade commander, who is responsible for some of Hamas’ reconstitution efforts.[22] Hamas will almost certainly continue to replace commanders killed and/or detained by Israel and learn from its mistakes to better protect its leadership from future Israeli operations.

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters in the northern and central Gaza Strip on February 15. The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which is the self-proclaimed military wing of Fatah, targeted an Israeli military vehicle with an unspecified explosive device in the northern Gaza Strip.[23] Palestinian militias fired mortars and rockets targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip, although CTP-ISW cannot confirm the point of origin.[24] The IDF Nahal Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) clashed with Palestinian fighters and directed an airstrike to kill a Hamas commander in the central Gaza Strip.[25]

Israeli SOF operated in Nasser Hospital in western Khan Younis on February 15 to locate Palestinian fighters and Hamas-held hostages.[26] Israeli forces received “credible intelligence” that Hamas-held hostages were in the hospital and that their bodies may remain on the complex grounds.[27] Hamas rejected such claims and denied that it was operating in the hospital.[28] The IDF confirmed that its forces detained several suspects inside Nasser Hospital, including three Hamas fighters who participated in the October 7, 2023, attack.[29]

Nasser Hospital is the largest functioning hospital in the Gaza Strip. The IDF briefed its forces on the importance of preventing harm to patients, medical teams, and medical equipment prior to entering the hospital complex.[30] Doctors Without Borders staff in the hospital reported on February 15 that the situation is ”chaotic” and called on Israel to stop its operations.[31] Israel assesses that Hamas has used over 85 percent of major medical facilities in the Gaza Strip for military operations.[32]

The IDF continued to conduct clearing operations in several sectors of Khan Younis on February 15. The 89th Commando Brigade (assigned to the 98th Division) raided the homes of senior Hamas officials’ family members.[33] Hamas used these homes for military purposes, according to the IDF. Israeli forces detained Palestinian fighters, who participated in the October 7, 2023, attack, including those from Hamas’ elite Nukhba unit.[34] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed on February 15 that its fighters clashed with Israeli forces in the vicinity of Nasser Hospital for the second consecutive day.[35] Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters launched mortars and rockets targeting an Israeli supply line east and northeast of Khan Younis.[36]

Egypt is constructing a walled “enclosure” in the Sinai Desert to address concerns that an Israeli operation into Rafah will cause a surge of Palestinian refugees into Egypt, according to Egyptian officials.[37] The enclosure is meant to accommodate over 100,000 people, but an Egyptian official said that Egypt would limit the number of refugees to below the enclosure’s capacity. Egypt has repeatedly expressed concern in recent weeks that an Israeli operation into Rafah could create a flow of Palestinian refugees into the Sinai Peninsula.[38] Egypt has added other fortifications to the border and deployed approximately 40 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to the Rafah border crossing over the past several weeks.[39] Israel has not publicly outlined a plan for how it would evacuate civilians from Rafah in the event of a military operation there.

The US Central Intelligence Agency director met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on February 15 to discuss the recent hostage negotiations, according to Israeli media and two sources familiar with the meeting.[40] Netanyahu declined to send an Israeli delegation to Cairo on February 14 after the Israeli, US, and Egyptian intelligence chiefs met with the Qatari prime minister to broker a deal for hostages’ releases and an extended pause in fighting in the Gaza Strip.[41]

PIJ fighters fired rockets from the Gaza Strip targeting Ashkelon in southern Israel and the periphery of the Gaza Strip on February 14.[42] These attacks occurred after CTP-ISW's data cutoff from the previous update.

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 at least six times across the West Bank. The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades conducted three attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern West Bank with small arms fire and explosive devices on February 14.[43] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades conducted a separate small arms attack targeting the Shaked settlement south of Jenin.[44] Unidentified Palestinian fighters targeted Israeli forces with small arms fire and threw Molotov cocktails in Arroub refugee camp and Beitunia.[45]

Hamas called for three days of demonstrations in the West Bank and abroad from February 16 to 18. Hamas in Ramallah and al Bireh called on local Palestinians to hold demonstrations on February 16 after Friday prayers in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.[46] Hamas also called for demonstrations in Arab countries on February 17 and globally on February 18.[47]

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 eleven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel on February 15.[48]

Israel conducted an airstrike on February 15 that killed a Hezbollah Radwan Unit commander and his deputy in Nabatiya, Lebanon.[49] One source “familiar with Hezbollah thinking” told Reuters that the Israeli airstrike was an “escalation” but “within [the] unwritten rules of engagement]” between Hezbollah and Israel.”[50] The IRGC Quds Force established the Radwan Unit, which is Hezbollah’s special operations forces unit focused on infiltrating Israeli territory.[51]

Israel held a military exercise to increase the national readiness to handle several scenarios in case of a “multi-arena war.”[52] The exercises included scenarios involving damage to Israel's electricity sector and threats to civilians, such as mass shootings. The IDF, Ministry of Defense, and National Emergency Authority organized the exercise, which follows an Israeli assessment of the northern Israel border with Lebanon.

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 Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed on February 15 that it conducted a drone attack targeting an unspecified “military target” in the Golan Heights.[53] CTP-ISW cannot verify this claim.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other unspecified Arab countries are restricting US military operations out of US bases in their countries, according to a Politico report citing US and other Western officials “familiar with the issue.”[54] An unidentified US official said that Arab countries, especially those “attempting a detente with Iran,” are “increasingly restricting” US self-defense strikes. Another Western official specified that the UAE is attempting to portray itself as a neutral actor between the United States and Iran to pacify domestic popular opinion. Another official added that some countries are restricting airspace and facilities for assets used in strikes targeting Iranian-backed actors in the region. An unidentified US Department of Defense official cited in the report rejected reports of tensions between the United States and UAE over these issues. Pentagon spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder separately said in a statement to Politico that the United States and US Central Command (CENTCOM) maintain “the capability. . . to defend our forces and conduct self-defense strikes at the times and places of our choosing.”

The Houthis claimed that they conducted a missile attack targeting a Barbados-flagged, Greek-owned vessel in the Gulf of Aden on February 15.[55] Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree stated that the Houthis will continue conducting such attacks in the Red Sea until Israel and Hamas reach a ceasefire agreement.[56] The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency separately posted that a vessel reported an explosion approximately 85 nautical miles east of Aden.[57]

The United States conducted preemptive strikes targeting Houthi missile sites and naval attack drones in Houti-controlled areas of Yemen on February 14.[58] US forces conducted four strikes against seven mobile anti-ship cruise missiles, three drones, and one explosive mobile unmanned surface vehicle that the Houthis were ”prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea.”

CENTCOM reported on February 15 that a US Coast Guard cutter intercepted a shipment of Iranian weapons bound for Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen.[59] CENTCOM said that the US Coast Guard seized medium-range ballistic missile components, explosives, one-way surface and sub-surface naval attack drone components, military-grade communication and network equipment, anti-tank guided missile launcher components, and other unspecified military equipment.[60] US and allied naval forces routinely interdict Iranian shipments to the Houthis in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.[61]

Three unspecified US officials told NBC News on February 15 that the United States recently conducted a cyberattack on the Iranian Behshad intelligence-gathering ship.[62] The US officials said that the cyberattack was part of the US response to the January 28 Iranian-backed attack that killed three US servicemembers in Jordan. The cyberattack was reportedly meant to hinder the Behshad’s ability to share targeting intelligence with the Houthis.[63]  The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023 that the Behshad, which is stationed in the Red Sea, provides the Houthi movement with real-time intelligence, enabling them to target ships that have gone silent.[64] Western media and officials said in December 2023 that the IRGC is helping Houthi forces plan and execute the Houthi drone and missile attacks on ships.[65]

Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian criticized recent Israeli operations in Rafah during separate phone calls with Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Secretary General Hissein Brahim Taha and Algerian Foreign Affairs Minister Ahmad Attaf on February 15.[66]

3. ISW Fact Sheet: US Assistance to Ukraine

4. Western Weapons Are Ukraine’s Only Hope

Western Weapons Are Ukraine’s Only Hope

Ukraine is outmanned. It needs U.S. assistance to make sure that it isn’t outgunned as well.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/western-weapons-are-ukraines-only-hope-military-aid-congress-casualties-death-2449a74d?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Jillian Kay Melchior

Feb. 15, 2024 4:02 pm ET

A soldier speaks with a recruit at a Ukrainian battalion’s recruiting center in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 10. PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Kyiv, Ukraine

My interview with Petro Poroshenko this week began with a discussion of the importance of U.S. military support. It ended with the former Ukrainian president wiping away tears as he named friends who have died in the war.

“It’s all the time like your personal tragedy,” Mr. Poroshenko says. Among those who broke his heart: Oleg Barna, 56, a lawmaker, teacher, “a great father and husband” and an “enormously wise person. . . . I knew him for ages.” He insisted on participating in an assault operation and was “killed saving a friend.” Serhii Ikonnikov, “killed on his birthday, 25.” Glib Babich, 53, a musician and “one of the greatest poets I ever met,” dead. His list goes on.

Such losses take on a strategic significance as Western support for Ukraine wanes. Since Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion two years ago, Kyiv and its Western supporters have divided defensive responsibilities: Ukraine provides the people; the West supplies the weaponry.

Western weapons are a force equalizer that enable Ukraine, a nation of 39.7 million in 2022, to stand toe-to-toe with Russia, population 144.7 million. Western weapons free up Ukrainian manpower that would otherwise be devoted to defense production. This support “is a factor that can reduce Russia’s quantitative advantage,” says Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky. “We were in fact doing that as long as we had enough resources. Today, we are facing a certain shortage.”

The arms shortage is dire. “Without U.S. support, the situation is desperate,” says Rostyslav Pavlenko, a lawmaker from Ukraine’s European Solidarity party. “The Europeans are doing what they can, we are doing what we can, but given the mismatch in numbers . . .” He trails off. Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Kyiv-based National Institute for Strategic Studies, says, “You either fight with modern weapons or you fight with men. That’s it.”

Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a Ukrainian lawmaker from the European Solidarity party, says that “if we will fight Russia through a normal, symmetrical approach, they mobilize more, we mobilize more, they win. We can win only through an asymmetrical approach.” Anastasia Radina, a lawmaker from the ruling Servant of the People party, is even blunter: “We cannot compete with lives. We will run out. It’s really disturbing.”

Ukraine is looking for ways to increase its fighting force. In December the military suggested mobilizing as many as 500,000 more to fight. Lawmakers are considering legislation that would create a more comprehensive list of those eligible for military service and impose new consequences on those who fail to register, among other provisions. But tough choices accompany efforts to expand the military, and any political mistake could undermine national unity. Some soldiers have been fighting since day one. They’ve gained valuable experience but need rest.

Superior training is another force equalizer, but preparing new soldiers for battle requires money. If too many prime-age workers are away at war, the Ukrainian economy will struggle to produce tax revenue. “We need to remember that every service member costs the state significant amounts of money,” Mr. Podolyak says. Last year military, defense and security salaries, which aren’t covered by international donors, accounted for some 51% of Ukraine’s total defense-and-security budget of $48.3 billion.

Drafting an additional 400,000 to 500,000 soldiers would cost more than $8.4 billion, estimates Roksolana Pidlasa, a Servant of the People lawmaker who is head of the parliament’s budget committee. Russia is mobilizing about 1,000 new recruits a day, according to Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a Kyiv think tank. Moscow is also ramping up its domestic military manufacturing with support from its friends. Iran has been supplying Russia with Shahed drones, and North Korea is providing ammunition and ballistic missiles that Ukraine can shoot down only with dwindling Patriot or SAMP-T air-defense resources.

Without U.S. weapons, Ukraine is becoming outgunned and outmanned. “We can choose to allow this to happen, but this is only a problem because of our own self-limitation,” says Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. “The industrial capacity of the collective West dwarfs that of Iran plus North Korea plus Russia.”

Ukrainians are frantically trying to explain their dilemma to the U.S. They warn that Mr. Putin’s ambitions don’t stop in Ukraine, and that the risks to Americans range from economic havoc to an attack on a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally. China is watching as it eyes Taiwan, and small countries are paying attention as they assess whether the U.S. can be trusted as an ally. Russia is “totally an existential threat for us,” Ms. Klympush-Tsintsadze says, “but how come [Americans] don’t see it as a challenge or a real threat to them? . . . That is something that is puzzling to many Ukrainians.”

Several sources say they feel Ukraine has become a hostage to America’s internal politics. Maryan Zablotskyi, a Servant of the People lawmaker, returned Monday from Washington. “Once they meet you, they promise you the world,” he says of U.S. lawmakers. “Unfortunately I think the word ‘Ukraine’ has become too politicized.” Ukraine’s biggest problem, he adds, is “relying on the promises of U.S. politicians and not doing the work with the American public.”

Mr. Poroshenko says he remains optimistic Washington will come through. But as Ukraine waits for weapons, “the price for every single day, or the price for every single hour, is rising dramatically. . . . Those who will read your article cannot imagine what does it mean, every single week, to be at the funeral of your friends.”

Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal editorial board.

5. Iran’s Rise as Global Arms Supplier Vexes U.S. and Its Allies

I am surprised there is no mention of Iran's relationship with north Korea since there is so much illicit trade between them.

Iran’s Rise as Global Arms Supplier Vexes U.S. and Its Allies

Tehran supports Mideast militias with booming weapons industry boosted by Russia’s purchase of drones

https://www.wsj.com/world/irans-rise-as-global-arms-supplier-vexes-u-s-and-its-allies-6f205083?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Benoit Faucon

Follow

Updated Feb. 16, 2024 12:07 am ET

Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles on display in Tehran in January. PHOTO: IRANIAN ARMY OFFICE/ZUMA PRESS

Iran’s arms industry is growing rapidly, turning the country into a large-scale exporter of low-cost, high-tech weapons whose clients are vexing the U.S. and its partners in the Middle East, Ukraine and beyond.

The transformation of the industry, accelerated by Russia’s 2022 purchase of thousands of drones that altered the battlefield in Ukraine, has helped Tehran scale up its support of militia allies in Middle East conflicts that have intensified alongside Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza.

One of Iran’s top arms exports, a Shahed suicide drone, designed to carry explosives and crash into its target, was used to kill three American servicemembers in Jordan in an attack by an Iraqi militia group on Jan. 28, U.S. officials said.

The same day, the U.S. Coast Guard confiscated over 200 packages of weapons originating from Iran and bound for Yemen, the U.S. said Thursday. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said the shipment was headed for territory controlled by Iran’s Houthi allies, a group whose attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes have disrupted global commerce and drawn airstrikes by the U.S. and U.K., including on a drone-control station in Yemen.

Russia has used Iranian drones in Ukraine against military targets and civilian infrastructure. PHOTO: MAXYM MARUSENKO/ZUMA PRESS

The shipment included components for missiles and underwater and surface drones, Centcom said. It was the month’s second reported seizure following a Jan. 11 operation that yielded Iranian missile parts but resulted in the loss at sea of two U.S. Navy Seals. Iran denies it is arming the Houthis.

Models from the same family of drones that killed the U.S. servicemen in Jordan have been used on many fronts, including by the Houthis, by Iraqi militias targeting Israel and by Russia in its war in Ukraine, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency found in an investigation released this month. 

Battlefields in Europe and the Middle East have provided a showcase for Tehran’s emergence as a global arms supplier. In Ukraine, Russia has been using Iranian drones to great effect against military targets and civilian infrastructure, while Mideast militias have employed Iranian-supplied weapons to target the U.S. military, Israel and global shipping interests.

“By exporting these technologies and proving their efficacy in battle, Iran has likely changed the nature of asymmetric warfare forever, potentially giving substantial leverage to previously disadvantaged nonstate actors,” said Adam Rousselle, a researcher at the Militant Wire, a network of experts that examines weapons used by nonstate actors. “The consequences…could be disastrous for major powers around the world.”

The U.S. Coast Guard said it confiscated weapons originating from Iran and bound for Yemen in January. PHOTO: U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Iran sold about $1 billion in weapons from March 2022 to March 2023, three times as much as the previous year, Deputy Defense Minister Mahdi Farahi said in November. In a tally that omits smuggled weapons, Iran became the world’s 16th-biggest arms seller in 2022 with $123 million in exports, a jump from $20 million in 2017, when Iran was the 33rd-biggest exporter, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The U.S. is the world’s top weapons supplier: U.S. exports under the Foreign Military Sales system climbed to a record $80.9 billion in the 2023 fiscal year.

Iran’s sales include a range of weapons. Russia is planning to buy short-range ballistic missiles from Iran, according to U.S. officials, and Tehran has also supplied ammunition to Russia, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, which controls the country’s defense industry, also supplies weapons free to allies in the Middle East as a way of supporting their activities. Beneficiaries of Iranian support include Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, under what Tehran calls its “Axis of Resistance.” The U.S. designates both groups as terrorist organizations.

“We provide assistance to the Palestinians on how to attain military empowerment, enabling them to stand independently under siege,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations told the Journal on Monday.

“Iran faces no restrictions or prohibitions on the purchase and sale of weapons” under international law and United Nations Security Council resolutions, the Iranian mission said. Restrictions on Iran’s weapons trade, while lifted by the U.N. last year, have been maintained by the U.S. and the European Union.

Battlefields in Europe and the Middle East have provided a showcase for Tehran as a global arms supplier. PHOTO: AMR NABIL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Iran’s defense industry was born out of necessity in the 1980s after the U.S. imposed an arms embargo on the newly born Islamic Republic. For years, Iranian arms production was focused on supplying Iran’s armed forces. Iran used drones chiefly for reconnaissance, developing them in the 1980s during the war with Iraq, according to Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency.

Iran’s suicide drones gained international prominence in 2019 when Saudi Arabia said Iran or one of its militia allies was behind a complex missile-and-drone attack on Saudi oil facilities, accusations that Iran denied. By 2021, defense officials in the U.S., Europe and Israel were warning that Tehran’s rapidly developing ability to build and deploy drones was changing the security equation in the Middle East. 

But Iran’s suicide drones at the time were often made with widely available components used in the commercial drone market and by hobbyists. In 2021, the Houthis were firing 30 Iranian drones a month on average, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Production scaled up after Iran sold over 2,000 Shahed drones to Russia in 2022, according to security consultants to a European government. At around $20,000 each, the deliveries generated at least $40 million for Tehran, they said.

Iran said it sold about $1 billion in weapons from March 2022 to March 2023. PHOTO: MORTEZA NIKOUBAZL/ZUMA PRESS

Iranian drones that have turned up in Ukraine showed a leap in engineering, becoming more accurate through improvements in radio communications, onboard computers and measurement tools, according to Conflict Armament Research, a U.K.-based investigative organization.

Iran’s sale of drone technology to Russia has “brought exponential resources and profitability to the Islamic Republic’s high-tech defense industry,” said Lou Osborn, an analyst at All Eyes on Wagner, an open-source research nonprofit.

In a sign of the evolution of Iran’s drone expertise, Moscow enlisted Tehran last year to help build a Russian factory that could produce at least 6,000 drones a year, part of a $1 billion deal between the two countries, the Journal reported. The plant was expected to be operational early this year, the U.S. said in June, releasing a satellite image that it said showed the construction site. It couldn’t be determined how far those plans have progressed. The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In the Middle East, the influence of Iranian weapons technology isn’t limited to drone production. Hamas used Iranian-made explosives and antitank warheads when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, according to Israeli Lt. Col. Idan Sharon-Kettler, a weapons expert.

Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis: Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance,’ Explained

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Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis: Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance,’ Explained

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Iran-backed groups form a land bridge across the Middle East and connect in an alliance that Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance.” Here’s what to know about the alliance that includes Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Photo Illustration: Eve Hartley

The explosives and engineering know-how used in the attack to blow open the Israeli security fence on the Gaza border, in addition to other equipment used by Hamas in the war, reflected “military intelligence that could only have come from a state actor like Iran,” Sharon-Kettler said.

In recent weeks, Iran has been sending increasingly sophisticated equipment to its Houthi allies in Yemen, including drone jammers and parts for long-range rockets and missiles, according to Western officials and advisers, the Journal has reported. A surface-to-air missile used in recent months by the Houthis against U.S. drones in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman is almost identical to a model first exhibited by Iran in September 2023, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said.

Days after the Jan. 28 drone attack on Americans in Jordan, President Biden said he held Iran responsible because it supplied the drone. Iran has denied any connection to the incident.

Days later, the U.S. Treasury imposed new sanctions on companies supplying components to Iran’s drone and missile programs, and on Feb. 7 the U.S. military killed a commander in the Iraqi militia that the U.S. blamed for the Jordan attack. The U.S. warned that it would continue to carry out strikes as needed to deter attacks on its forces.

The blossoming of Iran’s weapons-export industry has been a source of revenue in a country isolated by sanctions that impede its ability to sell oil and carry out most banking transactions. The IRGC is “hooked on the cash generated by military sales,” said Saeid Golkar, an authority on Tehran’s security services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“Iran is leaving its fingerprints all over the place,” he said.

Gordon Lubold contributed to this article.

Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com

6. How Russia Recruits Soldiers From Cuba to Fight in Ukraine

Quote an indictment of Cuba: "I would rather leave the warm climate of Cuba to go fight and die in the winter of Ukraine."

How Russia Recruits Soldiers From Cuba to Fight in Ukraine

Eager to escape Communist island’s poverty, Cubans are joining Russian army

https://www.wsj.com/world/how-russia-recruits-soldiers-from-cubato-fight-inukraine-709b5ac3?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By José de CórdobaFollow

Updated Feb. 16, 2024 12:06 am ET

On a blazing hot day in November, Raibel Palacio and three neighborhood friends boarded a flight at Cuba’s Varadero beach resort, taking selfies and chattering in excitement. They had a job offer that promised a way out of the island’s misery.

A few weeks later, Palacio was killed by a drone as he tried to tie a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding from a leg wound on the freezing front lines of Ukraine, said Danelia Herrera, his mother.

“Cubans are cannon fodder and they will kill them all,” she said, weeping in her home, a wooden shack on the outskirts of Havana.

The four young men are part of a wave of Cubans who enlisted in the Russian army, lured by salaries in the region of $2,000, far higher than they would be able to earn at home, where the average monthly wage is less than $20. Ambassador Ruslan Spirin, Ukraine’s special representative to Latin America and the Caribbean, said the government believes that about 400 Cubans are fighting in the country. “We take it seriously,” he said.

Others think the numbers go higher. Maryan Zablotskyi, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who has studied the issue, estimates that between 1,500 and 3,000 Cubans have enlisted as the island’s state-controlled economy crumbles.

Raibel Palacio, who was killed while serving in the Russian army in Ukraine, in an undated photo provided by his mother. PHOTO: HERRERA FAMILY

Russia has also recruited fighters from the Central African Republic, Serbia, Nepal and Syria, according to Ukrainian authorities, to prop up its war effort. On the opposing side, the number of volunteers, initially numbering thousands, including U.S. military veterans, has dropped off as the war drags toward a third year.

The Cubans are one of the largest contingents, motivated by the implosion of Cuba’s economy, which is ossifying under a die-hard Communist government reluctant to open up to private and foreign investment after decades of mismanagement, and the impact of U.S. economic sanctions.

For military recruiters working for Russia, Cuba’s worsening poverty makes for easy pickings as Moscow attempts to fill the holes in its front lines, security experts say.

Deteriorating living conditions and an increasing sense of hopelessness among working-age Cubans have sparked an unprecedented wave of emigration. More than 500,000 Cubans, or about 5% of the country’s population, have left for the U.S. in the last two years, according to U.S. government data, while back home on the island, shortages of fuel, food and medicine are spreading. Power outages are frequent amid scorching heat.

Palacio was the first Cuban recruit whose death in combat last month was confirmed by his family. It was initially reported by the Spanish-language Univision network in Miami.

“After five months, they were going to give him a Russian passport and citizenship for me, his mother and our two daughters,” said Melisa Flores, Palacio’s wife. She hoped to escape poverty to a new life far from the shack she shared with her husband, which floods when it rains. Sometimes the family had to rely on neighbors for food.

In Russia, she thought things would be different, she said.

A damaged migrant boat in Marathon, Fla. More than 500,000 Cubans have left for the U.S. in the last two years. PHOTO: REBECCA BLACKWELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

As word spread on WhatsApp chats across the Caribbean island, “everybody in the neighborhood was talking about going to Russia to work,” said Mario Velázquez. His teenage son, Andorf, an unemployed mason who lived in Havana, left for Moscow in July. Two recruiters, a Russian woman named Elena and a Cuban named Dayana, promised Andorf a bright future in Russia, Velázquez said.

The Cuban government said in September that it dismantled a recruitment ring luring Cubans to fight in Ukraine. The island’s Communist regime, historically wary of invasion by the U.S., bans mercenary recruitment. Prosecutors said they detained 17 people who could face prison sentences of up to 30 years or even the death penalty.

Ukrainian officials are skeptical about the impact of the Russian recruitment drive in Cuba.

“A few hundred Cubans won’t make a difference on the battlefield,” said one senior Ukrainian security official, though he noted that Russia’s aim in recruiting them was likely to draw Cuba deeper into the war on the Russian side.

Russia’s Embassy in Havana didn’t reply to requests for comment. Neither did Cuban officials in Washington and Havana.

Mario Velázquez shows a photo of him and his son Andorf. PHOTO: LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

As Russia expands its recruitment across a belt of impoverished countries, from the Caribbean and across Africa to parts of Asia, it helps Russian President Vladimir Putin push back what would be a deeply unpopular order to call up more Russians to fight until after a presidential election next month. Though he is expected to win another six-year term, the margin of his victory is important to the Kremlin as it tries to demonstrate continuing support for the war.

In a bid to increase the number of soldiers in its military, Putin signed a decree in January allowing foreigners who serve in Russia’s military for a year to obtain Russian citizenship for themselves, their spouses, children and parents.

Russia has waived debt payments to its former Cold War ally and supplied fuel oil to help keep the island’s sputtering power grid going. It has also donated tons of wheat and cooking oil, which are scarce on the island.

Havana has long been one of Moscow’s closest partners. At the height of the Cold War in 1962, the Soviet Union and the U.S. came to the brink of nuclear war after the U.S. discovered Soviet nuclear missiles on the island. From 1975 to 1991, Cuba deployed more than 50,000 soldiers to Angola and Ethiopia in support of Soviet policies.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel meeting his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in 2019. PHOTO: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 transformed the Cuban military, once among the largest and best-armed in Latin America. The military was slashed to some 40,000 soldiers, and is now more focused on managing tourist hotels and growing beans than fighting in foreign wars.

Now the security relationship is picking up again as Russia looks for more troops.

Ukraine has been closely following a parade of high-ranking officials traveling between Moscow and Havana since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, including Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his defense minister, Alvaro López Miera, who met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to discuss military cooperation.

“After the visits, we started seeing Cuban mercenaries on the battlefield,” said Spirin, the special envoy.

“They weren’t soldiers or former soldiers,” he said. “They are poor people who don’t have the money to buy airline tickets.”

Knowing the effectiveness of Cuba’s intelligence services, Spirin said, he found it difficult to believe that the government wasn’t aware of the recruitment. “We have informed the Cuban government of our concerns,” he added.

Jose Cohen, a former Cuban intelligence agent who defected in 1994 and now lives in the U.S., said it is impossible that the government doesn’t know of the flow of Cubans going to fight in Ukraine. “Cuba will always say it had nothing to do with it,” he said.

The U.S. has also raised “serious concerns” about the reports of Cubans recruited by Russia, a State Department spokeswoman said. The U.S. has asked Cuba for information on its investigation of the recruitment ring. Cuba hasn’t provided any or made any public comments since the initial announcement in September, the spokeswoman said.

“We have repeatedly warned Cuba not to let its citizens fight in Russia’s war,” the spokeswoman said.

Mario Velázquez now lives in León, Mexico, after leaving Cuba. PHOTO: LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the industrial city of León in central Mexico, where he now works as a security guard and married a Mexican woman, Velázquez looks at photos on his phone showing his son Andorf, a skinny young man swallowed up in a green camouflage uniform three sizes too big for him over the white-and-blue striped shirt Russian soldiers wear.

Andorf signed up for what he thought was a work contract to dig trenches and fix destroyed buildings in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, but not to fight, said Velázquez.

“It’s a dream that turned into a nightmare,” he said, his voice breaking. He hasn’t been able to talk to his son since September and fears for his life.

In a video recording of Andorf and his friend Alex Vega, the two slightly built young men said they ended up on the front lines in Ukraine after signing contracts in Russian that they couldn’t understand. They warn other Cubans not to follow them.

“There are a lot of Cubans who have disappeared,” Vega said in the recording. “If you are thinking about coming to Russia, don’t.”

Aerial view of León, Mexico. PHOTO: LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

James Marson and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.

Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com

7. ‘No prescription needed’: Inside a White House clinic’s ‘systemic problems’

It is not hard to see how the confluence of conditions, attitudes and mindsets, personalities, missions, pressure, and lack of oversight could lead to this situation.

‘No prescription needed’: Inside a White House clinic’s ‘systemic problems’

Many issues trace to Ronny Jackson, Trump’s personal physician and now a Republican congressman, according to reports and former staffers

By Dan Diamond and Michael Kranish

February 16, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Dan Diamond · February 16, 2024

When Omarosa Manigault Newman wrenched her ankle while rushing to join a motorcade in January 2017, the Trump aide and former reality TV star sought help from the White House Medical Unit — a military-run clinic that promised free, on-demand care to senior officials.

But Manigault Newman quickly realized the clinic went beyond standard procedures.

“They would give out anything, right from the bottle, no prescription needed,” Manigault Newman recounted in her memoir “Unhinged.”

Now, the Pentagon has confirmed many aspects of what Manigault Newman said was an open secret among senior officials.

A long-awaited inspector general’s report released last month faulted previous White House medical teams for widely dispensing sedatives and stimulants, failing to maintain records on potent drugs including fentanyl, providing care to potentially hundreds of ineligible White House staff and contractors, and flouting other federal regulations.

“We concluded that all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems,” the report concluded, adding that the challenges threatened the unit’s primary mission — to keep the president and vice president healthy and safe.

The inspector general’s report sparked significant public alarm. But a Washington Post review found problems with the unit’s conduct were even more pronounced than the Pentagon’s latest findings, according to administration documents and interviews with former White House staffers and medical unit members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal procedures.

Four former members of the White House Medical Unit confirmed that in both the Trump and Obama White Houses, the team passed out sedatives such as Ambien and stimulants such as Provigil without proper prescriptions, provided complimentary medical equipment and imaging to ineligible staffers, and used aliases in electronic health records to disguise the patients’ identities and deliver free care in cases where the recipients wouldn’t be eligible.

Former staffers said those practices were shaped by Ronny Jackson, an emergency medicine physician who led the team under President Barack Obama, continued to exert control over it as President Donald Trump’s personal doctor, and ultimately spent nearly 14 years in the White House. Now a Republican congressman, Jackson used his proximity to both presidents to build influence by dispensing medical care and drugs without proper procedures, the staffers said — conduct that earned him nicknames such as “Candyman” or “Dr. Feelgood,” according to a whistleblower complaint to Congress in 2018.

According to Jackson’s own portrayal, he worked as a personal doctor to dozens of officials, providing whatever they needed and whenever they needed it.

“It was full-blown, over-the-top, concierge executive medicine, and we did it better than anybody else on the planet. As a result, everyone treated me and my team very well,” Jackson wrote in his 2022 memoir, where he described how his practices helped him win favor with both Obama and Trump. “The entire medical unit had a special place in the hierarchy of the White House. … I had a lot more to offer than any doctor they had ever had before, and they needed me close by.”

The congressman and his allies have dismissed criticism about his work in the White House as politically motivated, anti-Trump attacks — a message his office echoed recently, alleging in an email that the inspector general is helping conduct a “hit job directed at the healthiest President of all time.” Jackson’s office also argued that he should not be blamed for events that took place after December 2014, when he stepped down as the medical unit’s director while remaining in the influential role of physician to the president, and said that White House lawyers and senior Defense Department officials were aware of the unit’s practices, contrary to the inspector general’s findings.

In an interview on Capitol Hill last month, Jackson said White House lawyers signed off on his medical decisions. “People were getting the care that was authorized,” Jackson told a reporter, adding that the medical team played a particularly important role on trips abroad.

He added that his team prescribed narcotics “less than five times” across his tenure, such as cases where someone broke a bone. The unit staffers who spoke to The Post also said that fentanyl, while improperly tracked in the clinic’s records — a finding of the Pentagon report that has drawn particular attention since its publication — was never actually prescribed to their knowledge. Instead, it was kept on hand for extreme emergencies — such as a White House fence jumper impaling themselves on a spike.

“The accusations that … we prescribed fentanyl and morphine to patients is absolutely absurd,” Jackson said. “No one has ever prescribed fentanyl to a patient. And yes, we ordered fentanyl.”

Jackson told reporters in 2018 that he had prescribed Ambien to Trump while traveling, and two former staffers said that Obama also received sleep aids on trips. But there’s no evidence in the reports, or from staffers who spoke to The Post, that either president abused Jackson’s ready access to the medication.

President Biden brought on Kevin O’Connor as his personal physician in 2021 — reprising the role he played for Biden during the Obama administration. O’Connor, whom Jackson has publicly demeaned and portrayed as a rival, left the White House during the Trump administration. The White House did not make O’Connor available for an interview and referred questions about the medical unit to the Pentagon, which oversees the team’s operations. The Obama Foundation did not respond to questions about the medical unit’s operations in his administration.

The Pentagon said in a statement that “new personnel and reforms were put in place” in the medical unit under Biden’s presidency, citing new leadership but declining to specify other changes. The Defense Department also has committed to developing safeguards around prescriptions, patient eligibility and other problems identified by the inspector general.

But Jackson’s former colleagues say they remain concerned about his conduct and proximity to power. The longtime military doctor is arguably the most prominent voice who has vouched for the health and mental acuity of Trump as he seeks to return to the White House. The new Pentagon report also arrives amid widespread questions about the 81-year-old Biden’s own fitness to serve, placing new scrutiny on the White House medical team trusted with his health.

“This isn’t a partisan issue — it’s a Ronny Jackson issue,” said a former colleague in the White House unit, lamenting that Jackson disregarded medical norms to satisfy powerful people. “It was bad under Obama, and it got worse under Trump. … If Trump empowers him again, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

Winning fans in the White House

Jackson’s path to the White House began in West Texas, where he was the son of a homemaker and an electrician who lived paycheck to paycheck.

In his memoir, he describes his decision to attend junior college and later Texas A&M University at Galveston over the objections of his father, who urged Jackson to work in an oil field instead.

Scrounging for money for medical school, Jackson won a scholarship from the Navy that paid his tuition in exchange for four years of service, where he fell in love with military life, he has said. While serving in Iraq — supporting a shock trauma team working to save patients hit by IEDs — a mentor nominated him for an opening as a White House doctor.

Jackson arrived at the White House in 2006, stepping into arguably the most prestigious post in military medicine. By 2010, he was running the entire unit, which had more than two dozen health workers stationed across several clinics in the White House, the neighboring Eisenhower Executive Office Building and other locations.

Under Pentagon rules, the medical unit’s primary mission was to treat the president and vice president, their families and military personnel. The unit also could provide emergency care if something happened on the White House grounds. While some other senior officials could use the unit’s clinics, they needed to reimburse the military health system for those services.

After taking charge of the unit, Jackson dramatically broadened its mission with a unique theory: “care-by-proxy,” arguing that providing regular, complimentary treatment to officials close to the president was necessary for the president to do his job. Jackson also oversaw an expansion of the unit, which reached more than 60 staffers by 2019 — triple its size when he arrived.

“I was eventually taking care of the entire West Wing, East Wing, and everyone who supported them,” Jackson wrote in his memoir. “The First Family, most of the cabinet secretaries, all the assistants to the president, the chief of staff, the national security advisor, the press secretary, the Secret Service, the White House staff, Air Force One, Camp David, the presidential helicopter squadron, the White House Communications Agency, the White House Mess, the military aides, and anyone else who worked in the White House were all my patients.”

The decision to treat hundreds of people also had another benefit for the ambitious Jackson: endearing him to officials across multiple administrations. Some of those officials have said they were wowed by Jackson’s commitment to caring for people beyond the White House, including their relatives and friends.

“During his off-time, Dr. Jackson went to the hospital … [to ensure] that our friend’s father was getting the care that he needed,” former Obama communications official Dan Pfeiffer said on a 2018 episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast. “That is so far beyond the duties of the White House doctor.”

Jackson also grew close to Obama, who picked him as his personal physician aboard a 2013 Air Force One flight, promoted him to rear admiral in 2016 and included him in an intimate gathering at his residence on his final night in the White House in January 2017. Obama also expected the doctor — who had told the president and colleagues that he was resigning — to leave the White House with him the following day.

But Jackson, according to his memoir, was a lifelong conservative who kept his views to himself during the Obama administration, was privately thrilled by Trump’s election and was persuaded by the incoming team to stay on, a decision he says he conveyed to Obama on the morning of Inauguration Day 2017, shocking the outgoing president.

White House Medical Unit staff have described the thrill of working in the building — and the difficulty of saying goodbye.

“The proximity to power can be as intoxicating as power itself,” Eleanor “Connie” Mariano, a former White House physician to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in her memoir.

In his memoir, Jackson describes becoming the daily companion of Trump, working out of an office directly below the president’s bedroom and ensuring that he was often the first person that Trump saw in the morning. The nation’s new leader came to rely on his physician for private policy advice, often on their walks together to the West Wing. For instance, Jackson in his memoir writes that he urged Trump to ban transgender people from serving in the military — a decision that he said Trump announced the next day, befuddling Pentagon officials who could not identify the military experts that Trump claimed to have consulted.

Former medical unit staff told The Post that Jackson’s behavior worsened under Trump, saying that the longtime military official was quicker to berate staff and insist that senior Trump officials get access to whatever care they wanted.

Manigault Newman said she stands by her assessment of the unit in her memoir, which describes easy access to prescription drugs and other care granted to her and other senior officials.

“I was taken aback by how very freely they were dispersing some of the most powerful and addictive pain medication in the program,” she said in a text to The Post.

Jackson also become the most important public champion of the president’s competence, planning a comprehensive series of medical and cognitive tests in January 2018 that he believed would address unfair doubts about Trump’s physical and mental health.

“His health is excellent right now,” Jackson told reporters after the tests. “The President is mentally very, very sharp. … I think he will remain fit for duty for the remainder of this term and even for the remainder of another term, if he’s elected.”

Some physicians and reporters raised questions about whether Jackson’s assessment was correct or credible — keying on Jackson’s praise for Trump’s “incredibly good genes” and his joke that the president could “live to be 200 years old” if he only ate healthier. But at the time, they were rebuked by former Obama officials who vouched for Jackson as an apolitical operator.

“In my experience, he was very good guy and straight shooter,” David Axelrod, one of Obama’s top advisers, wrote on social media after Jackson’s 2018 briefing.

I knew Dr. Ronny Jackson in the White House. In my experience, he was very good guy and straight shooter.

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) January 16, 2018

‘You cannot confirm this guy’

Two months after Jackson’s glowing endorsement, Trump tapped his physician to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s $90 billion health system that cares for millions of military veterans and their families.

The decision would change the arc of Jackson’s career and bring new scrutiny to his team.

As a key Senate hearing on his nomination approached in April, the panel’s top Democrat said he received an urgent call. A uniformed officer who had worked with Jackson wanted to warn Congress that he was unfit for the job, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) later recounted.

“‘You cannot confirm this guy,’” the officer said, according to Tester’s memoir “Grounded.” The officer warned that while the president’s physician had charmed Trump, he had been a vindictive leader, reckless with prescriptions, and alleged that he had consumed alcohol on the job.

Tester’s office later spoke with 22 other current and former colleagues of Jackson who offered similar testimonies. On April 25, Tester circulated a two-page memo summarizing their claims, including an eye-popping allegation that “Jackson got drunk and wrecked a government vehicle”; Jackson withdrew his nomination the following day.

“He would’ve done a great job,” Trump lamented in an interview on “Fox & Friends” that morning. “These are all false accusations. These are false. They’re trying to destroy a man.”

The failed VA nomination did not end Jackson’s political career, though it did push him closer to Trump. The president named Jackson his chief medical adviser in 2019, supported his long-shot candidacy for Congress in 2020 and even dispatched several of his top political advisers to help Jackson when it appeared his campaign was flailing.

Admiral Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJackson4TX) is a very successful doctor and Navy Veteran running for Congress in #TX13. Strong on Crime, the Border and Agriculture — and he loves our Vets! Ronny has my Complete and Total Endorsement! Vote for Ronny! https://t.co/u4z8ZxbeNh

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 22, 2020

Jackson also embraced Trump on the campaign trail. Once Obama’s physician and friend, he now railed against his policies and mocked Biden’s cognitive health — prompting a swift, private rebuke from his most famous former patient.

“I expect better, and I hope upon reflection that you will expect more of yourself in the future,” Obama wrote in an email to Jackson.

Jackson sailed to victory in November 2020, winning his congressional seat by a 60-point margin. Days into his new role as a congressman in January 2021, the Pentagon released its inspector general report into the whistleblower claims first surfaced by Tester three years earlier. Investigators could not verify allegations that Jackson “got drunk and wrecked a government vehicle,” and some staff praised his high standards for performance.

But the Pentagon watchdog did conclude that Jackson had mistreated his colleagues and subordinates; of the 60 witnesses who had worked closely with Jackson, 56 said they were aware that Jackson’s behavior toward staff involved “yelling, screeching, rage, tantrums, and meltdowns.” The report also cited episodes where Jackson discussed a female staff member’s anatomy, drank on the job and took Ambien while he was supposed to be on call to the president.

The report concluded that Jackson continued to play a major role in the unit after he stepped down as director in 2014, when he was replaced by his former deputy Keith Bass; for instance, Jackson continued to sign employee evaluations until 2017, the Pentagon said, and staff told the inspector general he continued to bully them. Bass, who led the unit through 2019 and now serves as medical center director for West Texas VA Health Care System, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Navy secretary should “take appropriate action regarding [rear admiral] Jackson,” the watchdog recommended. The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it had penalized Jackson, who retired from the Navy in December 2019, ahead of his congressional campaign.

In his memoir, Jackson says he turned down an opportunity to comment for the report. He also claimed that the probe would have gone away if he hadn’t entered politics and aligned himself with Trump.

“This was happening because I am a perceived threat to the Biden administration and because a few political appointees in the Department of Defense want to make a name for themselves,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon watchdog announced that it had opened a second probe into the practices of the whole medical unit. Investigators interviewed more than 120 officials, including staffers who worked in the unit across a decade, and reviewed hundreds of documents before sending a draft of its findings to the White House military office — which oversees the medical team — in May 2020.

Different standards for care

More than three years after it was delivered to the White House, the report was released last month. It’s unclear what caused the delay, although Trump in April 2020 fired the Pentagon inspector general who was overseeing the report and other investigations.

The Pentagon didn’t respond to questions about the delay. The White House referred questions to the Pentagon.

Unlike the Pentagon’s earlier examination of Jackson’s behavior, the agency’s new report does not mention any individuals by name, occasionally referring to the “physician to the president” — Jackson’s title at the time — or decisions made by the unit’s broader leadership. But the 80-page report paints a portrait of a medical team that often disregarded rules intended to protect patients.

For instance, the watchdog concludes that the White House medical team repeatedly flouted pharmacy safety standards, including by handing out controlled substances such as Ambien or Provigil without verifying a patient’s identity as Drug Enforcement Administration rules require. Former team members told The Post that Jackson helped institute a culture where such behavior was normalized.

The Pentagon further blamed the team for writing incomplete prescriptions that were missing required information, as well as years of shoddy record-keeping.

“These records frequently contained errors in the medication counts, illegible text, or crossed out text,” the watchdog concluded, including photographs of sloppy paperwork.

The Pentagon also took a dim view of Jackson’s broadening of care, saying that senior military officials either denied knowledge of “care by proxy” or stated that it was not an approved practice. As many as 20 patients per week were ineligible for the care that they received free from the White House Medical Unit, the report concluded, and even the most senior presidential aides should have repaid the military health system and did not. The watchdog added that it could find no evidence that those patients’ costs of care had been waived.

Former medical staff also told the Pentagon that some senior presidential appointees wrongly received free specialty care and even surgery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — under aliases assigned by White House Medical Unit leaders, disguising their identities. The staffers who spoke to The Post repeated those claims. The Pentagon watchdog said it was unable to confirm those allegations because alias accounts could not be tracked or audited.

The inspector general’s report identifies multiple examples of how favoritism shaped the White House team’s choices. For instance, “medical care was prioritized by seniority rather than medical need, which increased the risk to the health and safety of non‑executive medicine patients,” the report found, a conclusion echoed by former members of the White House Medical Unit.

“It was very clear from Day 1 that people were treated differently based on how powerful they were perceived to be,” said a former member of the team.

The White House team also refused to order low-cost generic drugs because their patients preferred to use brand names such as Ambien — which was about 174 times more expensive than its generic equivalent. That decision squandered taxpayers’ dollars, the Pentagon concluded; the unit wasted about $100,000 just on buying Ambien, Provigil and sleeping drug Sonata between 2018 and 2019, rather than their cheaper generic equivalents. The decision to buy costly name brand drugs also flouted federal regulations that instruct military health officers to purchase low-cost generics when available, the report found.

The watchdog also rebuked the medical team for maintaining self‑service, open‑access containers where White House officials and visitors could retrieve common over‑the‑counter painkillers, cough drops and other medications.

While many private workplaces offer similar cabinets, “the Navy Manual of the Medical Department expressly prohibits this practice,” the Pentagon wrote.

Today, those medication cabinets have been removed, two officials told The Post — one of the most visible examples of how the new Pentagon report has resonated at the White House.

Other changes are harder to discern. Defense Department officials said that they would implement the inspector general’s most recent recommendations, such as adopting tighter controls over prescriptions and updating rules on who can access the White House Medical Unit’s services.

The Navy also took an unspecified “administrative action” against Jackson after the 2021 inspector general report substantiated allegations against him, a Defense Department official said, speak on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel matter, declining to offer specifics about that action. Meanwhile, Jackson’s Virginia medical license expired in May 2020, and his Florida medical license that allows him to practice at military facilities is set to expire next year, according to a review of licensure records.

Jackson’s medical credentials came to the forefront last year, when he attempted to treat a teenage girl who was having a seizure at a Texas rodeo, sparking a confrontation with sheriff’s deputies and emergency medical personnel who said he was belligerent and appeared intoxicated. He is not licensed in the state. Jackson’s staff at the time defended his conduct, saying that he would “not apologize for sparing no effort to help in a medical emergency.”

Jackson’s office did not respond to questions about his medical licenses.

As a two-term congressman, Jackson has taken a prominent role in backing Trump’s latest campaign — making appearances on Fox News and other conservative outlets, defending Trump in congressional hearings and attacking the sitting president on medical grounds. Jackson has repeatedly called on Biden to take a cognitive test, saying it is necessary to address the same sort of questions that dogged Trump for years.

About three-quarters of voters — including half of Democrats — have concerns about the 81-year-old president’s mental and physical health, according to an NBC News poll released in early February. In contrast, about half of voters have concerns about the 77-year-old Trump’s health, and in last month’s interview, Jackson insisted that there was nothing to fear.

“I have no concerns whatsoever. President Donald Trump is in great physical condition. He’s sharp as a tack,” Jackson said. “He proves that on a day-to-day basis.”

Aaron Schaffer, Bishop Sand and Lisa Rein contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Dan Diamond · February 16, 2024

8. US and allies disrupt Russian cyber espionage operation against US and Europe, FBI chief says

US and allies disrupt Russian cyber espionage operation against US and Europe, FBI chief says | CNN Politics

CNN · by Sean Lyngaas · February 15, 2024

FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies during a Congressional full committee hearing in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024.

Julia Nikhinson/AFP/Getty Images

CNN —

The FBI and its international allies disrupted a network of over 1,000 hacked internet routers that Russia’s military intelligence agency was using for cyber espionage operations against the United States and its European allies, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Thursday.

The law enforcement operation used a court order to cut off access to the home and small-business routers hacked by the Russian GRU military intelligence agency, kicking them out and “lock[ing] the door behind them,” Wray said at the Munich Security Conference.

The Russian hackers were using the network of hacked routers, which is known as a botnet, to target US and foreign governments, and “military, security and corporate organizations” for intelligence gathering, the Justice Department announced.

The Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wray’s allegations.

Wray also used his podium in Munich — where intelligence officials from around the world gather every year — to reiterate US warnings that Russia and China-backed hacking teams have long sought a foothold in US energy and telecommunications networks. US officials worry that Beijing could use that access to take networks offline in the event of a crisis.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, “we’ve seen Russia conducting reconnaissance on the US energy sector,” Wray said. “And that’s a particularly worrisome trend because we know that once access is established, the hacker can switch from information gathering to attack quickly and without notice.”

The disclosure of the FBI operation comes as US officials and lawmakers grapple with another more concerning Russian capability. The US has new intelligence on Russian military capabilities related to its efforts to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space, CNN reported Wednesday.

“Russia has made murder, rape and mayhem its stock and trade, so no one should question its continued willingness to launch destructive cyberattacks before and during military conflict,” the FBI chief added.

Wray delivered a stark warning to US lawmakers last month that Chinese hackers were preparing to “wreak havoc” on US critical infrastructure in the event of a crisis. In Munich on Thursday, Wray said that Beijing’s hackers had been “prepositioning” in US oil and natural gas company networks since 2011, “but these days it’s [reached] something closer to a fever pitch.”

“What we’re seeing now is China’s increasing buildout of offensive [cyber] weapons within our critical infrastructure, poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right.”

The Chinese government routinely denies those allegations and in turn accuses the US of conducting hacking operations against China.

Wray’s announcement is the latest move by the FBI to use court orders to try to stifle complex hacking operations from Russian spy agencies. Weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the FBI went public with a similar operation to neutralize another botnet allegedly controlled by a different GRU hacking team that comprised thousands of infected hardware devices.

US intelligence agencies also use hacking operations to try to thwart Russia, China and other rival governments. But unlike the FBI’s court-authorized work, details of those US cyber operations rarely, if ever, are made public.

CNN · by Sean Lyngaas · February 15, 2024

9. In America, Headlights are blinding but not in other countries, this tech is why

The Fourth Estate is doing its job – exposing government dysfunction.  It seems like congress could fix this pretty easily. Why should it take years to do so?

In America, Headlights are blinding but not in other countries, this tech is why | CNN Business

CNN · by Peter Valdes-Dapena · February 15, 2024

Cars drive along Highway 101 as rain falls on January 04, 2023 in Greenbrae, California.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

CNN —

Imagine if you could drive at night with your high beams on all the time, bathing the road ahead in bright light but without ever blinding other drivers.

In Europe and Asia, many cars offer adaptive driving beam headlights that can do this. ADB is a lighting technology that has been available for many years in other parts of the world including Europe, China and Canada, but not in the United States.

It can actually shape the light coming from headlights rather than scattering it all over the road. If there’s a car coming in the other direction, or one driving ahead in the same lane, the light stays precisely away from that vehicle. The rest of the road is still covered in bright light with just a pocket of dimmer light around the other vehicles. This way a deer, pedestrian or bicyclist by the side of the road can still be seen clearly while other drivers sharing the road can see, too.

In America, the closest we can get to that today are automatic high beams, a feature available on many new cars that automatically flicks off the high beams if another vehicle is detected ahead. But that still means driving much – or most – of the time using only low beam headlights that don’t reach very far. That can be dangerous.

US auto safety regulations enacted in 2022 were supposed to finally allow ADB headlight, something for which the auto industry and safety groups had long been asking for. But, according to automakers and safety advocates, the new rules make it difficult for automakers to add the feature. That means it will probably be years before ADB headlights are widely available in the US.

ADB-enabled headlights already are sold on some luxury cars in America. They just lack the software to perform the way they were designed to. Some American Mercedes drivers can enjoy a dazzling light display as they start up or shut off their cars at night. Moving streaks of light wash across the pavement or walls in front of the car like a glittering snowstorm. But, while driving, the lights work just like standard high beam, low beam headlights. Their adaptive capabilities aren’t enabled here because they still don’t meet US rules.

Some ADB headlights work like digital projectors, using a million or more LED pixels to project light patterns on the road. Even in the US, some Mercedes vehicles can project symbols like arrows or lines on the road to guide drivers. Less expensive systems in Europe and Asia use several thousand or even fewer light emitters, reflectors or shutter systems to create adaptive beams,

Allowed, but not yet

Until two years ago, US auto safety regulations, written for traditional headlights, simply didn’t allow for adaptive headlight technology at all. Light beams wrapping around other vehicles just wasn’t something the regulations could encompass so the technology wasn’t allowed here by default.

That changed in early 2022 when, after a decade of work on it, America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration finalized regulations for adaptive beam headlights. But because the US regulations are so different from those in other countries, with requirements so difficult to meet, automakers still can’t offer it here. It will be years before they can offer new, redesigned ADB headlights that meet the standards, auto industry sources say.

This aerial drone photo shows a car driving on a road at night with headlights shadowing a vehicle on the road.

Audi

Many industry sources didn’t want to speak on the record about these regulatory issues, instead referring CNN to technical comments sent by their automotive lighting experts to NHTSA as part of the rule-making process.

Some automakers and safety groups, including Ford, Volkswagen and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, are asking NHTSA to reconsider the regulations to make it easier and less costly to offer these headlights in the US.

“We wish the regulation and testing would be reconsidered to accept what has already been proven around the world, including Canada, and was informed and supported by [the Society of Automotive Engineers],” Audi, VW’s luxury brand, wrote in a statement provided to CNN. “Many of our cars equipped with matrix design or digital matrix design lighting on US roads today could be turned on to provide greater visibility and less glare which means safer roads for all.”

Safety regulations usually differ somewhat between different global markets. But, since adaptive beam headlights have been in use in other countries for a decade or more, automakers hoped that regulations would allow their introduction in this country without requiring major equipment changes, according to various industry sources.

“We had hoped it would have been a software change, and then it would would have been rather quick to get the technology into the market,” said Michael Larsen, Technical Fellow for Exterior Lighting at General Motors and a member of the Society of Automotive Engineer’s lighting committee. “But when everyone started really looking at this complicated regulation, you just couldn’t get there from here.”

NHTSA’s rules require the ADB headlights to respond extremely swiftly after detecting another vehicle within reach of the lights, much faster than other standards require in the EU and Canada. Also much faster than a human could switch off an ordinary high beam headlight. They also dictate extreme narrow lines between bright and dark regions.

Ultimately, the NHTSA regulations require completely new headlamp designs for the US, Larsen said. This means the ADB capabilities engineered into headlights already on Audi and Mercedes cars in the US, for instance, will probably never get switched on.

Vision versus glare

The NHTSA regulations prioritize reducing any potential to cause glare for other drivers. Glare has been a particular concern for many years since new vehicles have brighter headlights that can sometimes cause discomfort or even temporarily blind other drivers. Many in the industry say the regulations overemphasize that concern, though, holding adaptive beam headlights to even higher standards than regular headlights when it comes to glare reduction.

“We should be focused on what we can do to improve visibility,” said Matt Brumbelow, a senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “We know that low visibility causes crashes and what ADB does is maximize visibility, seeing light, while still preventing glare.”

The US regulations also limit the amount of light the headlights could put out while also not allowing them to reduce lighting as much they could in other situations, said Brumbelow.

“[We could] reduce glare compared to a high beam, and even lower than what a current low beam would be,” he said, “but we can get more light out there everywhere else.”

NHTSA declined to comment on the regulations beyond what’s written in the final regulation itself, which makes it clear that glare is a concern. NHTSA also states that other standards put forth by the industry, such as an SAE standard, don’t do enough to prevent the systems from sometimes putting too much light into the eyes of other drivers.

Eventually, ADB will come to the American roads but, assuming there’s no change to the regulations, it will take a while. One day, Americans will be able to use high-tech headlights that can do more than just make light shows.

CNN · by Peter Valdes-Dapena · February 15, 2024

10. The $2.8 Billion Hole in U.S. Sanctions on Iran

Please go to the link to view the visuals.

VISUAL INVESTIGATIONS

The $2.8 Billion Hole in U.S. Sanctions on Iran

A Times investigation reveals how lax government oversight allowed shadowy oil tankers, covered by American insurance, to fund Iran’s regime.

By Christiaan Triebert, Blacki Migliozzi, Neil Bedi and Alexander Cardia Feb. 16, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/16/world/middleeast/iran-oil-tankers-sanctions.html

For months, as Iran-backed groups attacked U.S. forces and allies in the Middle East, the Biden administration hailed its efforts to restrict Iran’s oil revenue — and the country’s ability to fund proxy militias. The Treasury secretary told Congress that her teams were “doing everything that they possibly can to crack down” on illegal shipments, and a senior White House adviser said that “extreme sanctions” had effectively stalled Iran’s energy sector.

But the sanctions failed to stop oil worth billions of dollars from leaving Iran over the past year, a New York Times investigation has found, revealing a significant gap in U.S. oversight.

The oil was transported aboard 27 tankers, using liability insurance obtained from an American company. That meant that the U.S. authorities could have disrupted the oil’s transport by advising the insurer, the New York-based American Club, to revoke the coverage, which is often a requirement for tankers to do business.

Instead, the 27 tankers were able to transport shipments across at least 59 trips since 2023, The Times found, with half the vessels carrying oil on multiple journeys.

The Treasury Department did not respond to a question about whether it was aware the ships had transported Iranian oil while insured by the American Club.

The tankers exhibited warning signs that industry experts, and the Treasury, have said collectively warrant greater scrutiny. Among other red flags, the ships are: owned by shell companies, older than average vessels and use a tactic called “spoofing” to hide their true locations.

The Times found 27 ships picking up Iranian oil on at least 59 trips since 2023

Satellite imagery, much of it freely accessible to the public, captured the tankers during their oil transports.

Gulf Knot

Jan. 6, 2023

Irises

Jan. 28, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Feb. 25, 2023

Sincere 02

Mar. 6, 2023

Galaxy Star

Mar. 10, 2023

Cathay Kirin

Mar. 12, 2023

Sincere 02

Mar. 20, 2023

Penna

Mar. 24, 2023

Gabrielle

Mar. 24, 2023

Toyomi

Mar. 28, 2023

Sincere 02

Mar. 30, 2023

Irises

Apr. 7, 2023

Sincere 02

Apr. 12, 2023

Penna

Apr. 20, 2023

Selene

Apr. 25, 2023

Gabrielle

Apr. 28, 2023

Sincere 02

Apr. 29, 2023

Sincere 02

May. 15, 2023

Galaxy Star

Jun. 2, 2023

Duplic Dynamic

Jun. 11, 2023

Narcissus

Jun. 11, 2023

Sincere 02

Jun. 11, 2023

Datura

Jun. 16, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Jun. 24, 2023

Narcissus

Jul. 4, 2023

Gabrielle

Jul. 9, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Jul. 13, 2023

Irises

Jul. 20, 2023

Datura

Jul. 22, 2023

Shalimar

Jul. 31, 2023

Shalimar

Aug. 1, 2023

Cathay Kirin

Aug. 8, 2023

Azza

Aug. 15, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Aug. 18, 2023

Datura

Aug. 20, 2023

Glory

Aug. 22, 2023

Muland

Aug. 29, 2023

Selene

Aug. 30, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Sept. 4, 2023

Serendi

Sept. 9, 2023

Irises

Sept. 14, 2023

Galaxy Star

Sept. 19, 2023

Toyomi

Sept. 24, 2023

Selene

Sept. 29, 2023

Sino Star

Sept. 29, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Oct. 4, 2023

Starry

Oct. 6, 2023

Shalimar

Oct. 9, 2023

Gulf Knot

Oct. 9, 2023

Kapok

Oct. 13, 2023

Muland

Oct. 26, 2023

Eternal Fortune

Oct. 29, 2023

Tabark

Nov. 2, 2023

Eternal Success

Nov. 23, 2023

Fortune Galaxy

Nov. 24, 2023

Venus 7

Dec. 2, 2023

Lisa

Dec. 11, 2023

Marianne

Dec. 31, 2023

Selene

Jan. 10, 2024

Sources: Copernicus Sentinel-2, Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, TankerTrackers.com, Spire Global, MarineTraffic Satellite images on display represent one of several methods that The Times relied on to locate each tanker.

It is unclear who the U.S. government considers primarily responsible for identifying suspicious tankers. The Treasury is tasked with administering sanctions by investigating and blacklisting individuals or companies participating in illicit activities. But it places some of the burden on insurers to monitor for suspicious behavior through the regular release of advisories and alerts.

To identify the shipments of Iranian oil, The Times built a database of thousands of tankers and their whereabouts using maritime data and satellite imagery. Vessels whose voyage paths showed irregularities were cross-referenced with information provided by Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, a company that monitors oil shipping.

SynMax and Pole Star, two other companies that monitor shipping, provided additional data.

In late-January, several weeks after the American Club was mentioned at a Congressional hearing titled "Restricting Rogue-State Revenue", coverage for many of the tankers identified by The Times abruptly ended. The company said that the stoppages were the result of its own internal investigations. Five of the vessels are still insured by the company, according to data listed on its website; the American Club said it is still investigating those ships.

The Times’s findings come as the Biden administration is under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers and advocacy groups for its handling of sanctions on Iran.

“It is very concerning,” said Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat of New Hampshire, who has filed a bill to strengthen the enforcement of sanctions on deceptive ships.

“The United States must use every tool at its disposal to identify, stop and sanction these bad actors,” she said. “These new revelations highlight the stakes.”

In response to Times findings, a Treasury spokesperson said in a statement: “Treasury remains focused on targeting Iran’s sources of illicit funding, including exposing evasion networks and disrupting billions of dollars in revenue.”

The spokesperson added that this month the department had taken action against what it called a Hong Kong-based front company, which U.S. officials said had funded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Kharg Island, pictured in 2017, is one of Iran’s main oil terminals where many of the American Club-insured tankers loaded oil. Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The insurance provided by companies like the American Club is a key factor in the tankers’ ability to move oil; industry insiders call it a vessel’s “ticket to trade.” Most major ports insist that ships have proof of liability coverage, among other requirements, before they can enter and do business.

The American Club is one of only 12 major insurers of its kind, and the only one based in the United States. Specifically, the company says, its policies cover third parties affected during an accident caused by a ship’s negligence.

Because of these insurers’ importance to shipping, they have been consulted by the U.S. government when developing sanctions on Russian oil sales.

Daniel Tadros, the American Club’s chief operating officer, said his company has one of the most stringent compliance programs in the industry. But he said that the company’s six-person compliance team was overwhelmed each month with hundreds of inquiries about potentially suspicious vessels, and that investigating even a single case takes time.

“It's impossible for us to know on a daily basis exactly what every ship is doing, where it's going, what it's carrying, who its owners are,” Mr. Tadros said. “I would like to think that governments have a lot more capability, manpower, resources to follow that.”

He added that the U.S. government had only recently suggested the use of satellite imagery for maritime-related businesses looking for sanctions evasion. Satellite imagery has been used as a ship-tracking tool in the industry for at least a decade.

Shipowners willing to skirt trade restrictions can make more than their normal commissions. But to maintain business connections with the West, including with insurers, they may resort to using deceptive tactics.

Since the start of 2023, the 27 vessels moved roughly 59 million barrels of oil, according to a Times analysis. The calculation is based on a tanker’s depth in the water before and after the oil was loaded, a measurement used by industry analysts.

There is no official source detailing the amount of oil that leaves Iran. According to estimates from Kpler, a company that monitors global trade, the oil carried by the tankers would amount to roughly 9 percent of Iran's oil exports over that period.

Iranian oil pickups by American Club-insured tankers since January 2023

Sources: Copernicus Sentinel-2, Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, Spire Global, MarineTraffic, TankerTrackers.com Note: Pickups include those made at Iranian ports as well as via transfer at sea from other ships to American Club-insured ships. The map does not represent all oil pickups The Times found.

Many of the tankers ultimately ended up in China, which has tripled its imports of Iranian oil over the past two years.

Some of the shipments continued into the fall, as one Iran-backed group, Hamas, led the Oct. 7 assault on Israel, and other Iran-aligned militants, like the Houthis in Yemen, launched attacks on shipping routes and U.S. forces in the region.

By then, the tankers had transported at least $2.8 billion in crude oil, based on the lowest reported prices of Iranian oil in 2023.

That dollar amount could be higher. The Times found eleven more tankers, anchored off Iranian oil ports last year, that used deceptive practices and carried American Club insurance. Although there is little other reason for the ships to hide their presence, The Times could not verify whether they loaded oil.

Where contact information was available, The Times sought comment from more than 40 entities linked to the tankers involved in moving Iranian oil. None replied.

Some experts expressed doubt that the American Club was doing everything it could to identify deceptive ships.

“Responsible, reputable insurers waste no time in confronting their clients or club members,” Mr. Madani of TankerTrackers.com said.

David Tannenbaum, a former sanctions compliance officer for the Treasury Department who now works as a consultant for a compliance advisory company, said his research showed that the American Club covers a large proportion of deceptive vessels when compared with similar insurers.

“While we’ve seen spoofers infiltrate almost all of the major protection and indemnity clubs, they are definitely a leader,” he said.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that the American Club had insured more ships suspected of violating sanctions than other comparable insurers, according to data from United Against Nuclear Iran, a privately funded group advocating stronger sanctions on Iran.

(Many of the vessels noted by the group were also identified by The Times. Mr. Tadros, the American Club executive, said his company had removed insurance for the claims it could corroborate. He said in some cases United Against Nuclear Iran presented flawed evidence, which The Times also concluded for one of the accused tankers.)

The Times was able to use satellite imagery and information available to the shipping industry, such as signals that ships transmit to report their purported locations, to identify the tankers.

The tankers’ deception mainly involved a practice known as “spoofing” in which vessels broadcast fake route information to hide their true locations. Last August, for example, the tanker Glory broadcast that it was off the coast of the United Arab Emirates when it was really loading oil in Asaluyeh, Iran.

A spoofed location near Dubai obscures an oil pickup over 200 miles away in Iran

True location

Sources: Copernicus Sentinel-2, Spire Global, MarineTraffic, TankerTrackers.com, SynMax Note: Locations relative to each other are approximate in time.

In some cases, tankers also conducted ship-to-ship transfers, exchanging goods with another vessel at sea. The practice is common, but can be used to conceal a cargo’s origin, especially when used with spoofing. Ship-to-ship transfers near Iran frequently occurred just off the coast, such as when the tanker Shalimar took on oil in October. For each transfer, The Times traced the cargo back to Iranian oil terminals.

A faked location hides a pickup from another vessel at sea

True location

Sources: Copernicus Sentinel-2, Spire Global, MarineTraffic, TankerTrackers.com Note: Locations relative to each other are approximate in time.

The Times also found some tanker crews altering the physical appearance of their ships. On one spoofing vessel, a red tarp was spread over its green deck in an apparent effort to disguise itself from satellites.

How a spoofing tanker used a tarp to change its appearance

Even though the tankers used deceptive tactics, their spoofing had identifiable patterns. Many pretended to anchor off Oman or in the Persian Gulf for days, while satellite imagery showed they were not there. Some ships even broadcasted signals showing them on land and moving at high speeds, a physical impossibility.

Several of the tankers had a history of picking up oil in other countries under U.S. sanctions. Before they moved the Iranian oil, a Times analysis found, eight of the tankers spoofed their locations while carrying Venezuelan oil that was subject to sanctions. It’s unclear if they were insured by the American Club at the time.

One of the tankers did carry American Club insurance when The Times found it likely evading Russian sanctions last year.

The American Club’s role in insuring the 27 tankers could put the company in potential violation of sanctions, industry experts said.

Mr. Tadros disagreed. He said the company includes a clause in its contracts, based on Treasury guidance, that nullifies coverage if a ship violates sanctions. He argued this protects the insurer from being complicit in potential violations.

“The American Club takes its obligations seriously and works diligently to comply with sanctions regulations,” Mr. Tadros said.

The Treasury office has publicly enforced sanctions on the American Club only once in the past 20 years. In 2013, the office announced that it found the insurer had processed dozens of claims for ships that violated sanctions on Cuba, Sudan and Iran. Treasury officials calculated the penalty for the apparent violations totaled more than $1.7 million.

Ultimately, the office said the American Club did “not appear to have been willful or reckless” and the case was settled. The company agreed to pay a reduced fine of $348,000.

Sources and Methodology

Times reporters built a database of nearly 20,000 tankers and their owners, operators, managers and insurers by combining information from Equasis; the International Maritime Organization; and Pole Star, a maritime intelligence company. Times reporters cross-referenced this information with the websites of the major insurance companies, which all maintain freely accessible databases of ships they insure.

The publicly available location data of the ships, known as their automatic identification system or AIS, was obtained through MarineTraffic and Spire Global. The platforms show live ship locations around the world and keep records of past voyages.

To detect any irregularities in the AIS paths that may be signs of deceptive practices, The Times used data on spoofing ships provided by TankersTrackers.com, as well as from SynMax, a satellite data analytics company, and Spire Global; and information collected through The Times’s own reporting. Reporters then crossed-referenced the sources with satellite imagery.

The satellite imagery used to search for the ships’ reported and actual locations came from Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies and the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite, which is publicly available. A large share of the spoofing tankers had already been spotted in Iranian waters by TankerTrackers.com.

To estimate the amount of oil carried in each shipment, The Times looked at how deep a ship’s hull dropped below the waterline after taking cargo. This number, known as draught depth, is publicly reported by each ship. The Times verified the changes in draught depth with Samir Madani at TankerTrackers.com.

The barrels’ worth was determined by taking the lowest reported price of Iranian crude oil in 2023, which stood at approximately $70 per barrel, and applying a commonly cited discount price of $10 per barrel for Chinese buyers. China was the most common destination for crude oil tracked by The Times. The Times used data obtained from Kpler, a company that monitors global trade, to estimate Iran’s total oil exports.

These are the 27 ships that The Times identified as using deceptive tactics to transport Iranian oil products. The ships are listed with their names, which can change frequently, and their International Maritime Organization numbers, which are permanent identification numbers.

I.M.O.

Ship Name9208473Azza9294240Cathay Kirin9247780Datura9337195Duplic Dynamic9230907Eternal Fortune9307633Eternal Success9257010Fortune Galaxy9247792Gabrielle9237632Galaxy Star9247077Glory9237618Gulf Knot9254082Irises9315654Kapok

I.M.O.

Ship Name9174397Lisa9245794Marianne9133082Muland9232931Narcissus9408798Penna9174220Selene9296810Serendi9295593Shalimar9226011Sincere 029263693Sino Star9252436Starry9224570Tabark9245782Toyomi9007386Venus 7

Ishaan Jhaveri, Kirsten Noyes, Muyi Xiao, Jack Begg and Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting. Additional production by Madison Dong, Jon Huang and Mira Rojanasakul.

11. Beating the Ossification Trap: Why Reform, Not Spending, Will Salvage American Power

Excerpts:

To start down such a path, the Defense Department doesn’t need new studies or recommendations. It just needs a new conviction that bold and dramatic change is necessary — as well as a strong partnership with Congress, which is itself responsible for a good portion of America’s bureaucratic nightmare and must share the leadership of any effort to escape it. The time has come for a new bipartisan consensus, built on urgent discussions between Congress and the executive branch, to inaugurate a period of radical reform designed to smash through barriers to change and burn away decades of accumulated bureaucratic underbrush.

Such a legislative-executive reform team could start with one or two issue areas as a demonstration concept. One pressing example would build on the Replicator initiative with a broader slate of reforms to innovation, procurement, and force design to both dramatically improve the process of buying legacy systems and accelerate the shift toward new technologies. Over perhaps six to nine months, the team could review all the existing studies and analysis on those issues, talk to working-level officers and civil servants, and develop a bold and comprehensive plan of attack. They could translate those ideas into legislation that could be offered like the Base Realignment Commission process, creating an over-arching presumption of action on recommendations approved by the president as a total package, absent a congressional resolution of disapproval.

The results will surely generate howls of protest and embody some risk. But with the right people involved and enough analytical rigor, there is a good chance of getting at least most of the answers right. The goal should be the sort of liberation from bureaucratic rule and routine described in broader terms by Philip K. Howard — to free people to a much greater degree to apply their common sense, case-specific judgment, and creativity. The need for such an agenda to shock the U.S. defense establishment out of its bureaucratic coma is now so obvious that taking risks with bold change is not only acceptable — it is urgently necessary.

Those who worry about U.S. defense readiness are right about two things: An increasingly complex and unstable world is emerging, and the United States will need potent, effective military power to deal with it. But the growing chorus to spend more, buy more, and field more forces along current lines gets the response all wrong. Leaders in Congress and the executive branch should be ready to act with urgency and determination. But that energy needs to be put toward a once-in-a-century campaign of reform to produce a national security establishment that is more adaptable, innovative, efficient, and rewarding for its people.

Beating the Ossification Trap: Why Reform, Not Spending, Will Salvage American Power - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Michael J Mazarr · February 15, 2024

Here’s a question: If you could add $200 billion to the defense budget — or wave a magic wand and pass every needed reform to defense procurement, personnel, business and budget processes, and other areas crying out for change — which would you do? For many defense professionals, the answer is obvious: Show me the money. With crises breaking out around the world, from Ukraine to Gaza to the South China Sea, some observers of U.S. defense strategy warn that the United States isn’t spending enough on its military. Threats are piling up, while spending — assessed against inflation — is at best holding flat. The time has come for a major defense buildup, some say, which the country can easily afford since current defense budgets remain well below post–World War II averages.

That impulse is understandable. It is also mistaken. There is a gap between the aspirations and capabilities of U.S. defense strategy — but the problem isn’t the amount of money America is spending or the size of the U.S. military. The ends-means gap emerges in part from excessive strategic ambitions and the demands they place on the U.S. military. But in terms of defense policy, the gap is a function of the deeply ingrained inefficiencies, bureaucratic and political egotism, vague conceptual foundations, self-defeating policies, and often pointless rules, regulations, and restrictions that keep the Defense Department from gaining the full value of the money it already spends. To be prepared for a more dangerous era, the United States should overhaul its defense institutions before it pours more resources into them.

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An Aging Power

The United States is showing many symptoms of having slipped into a typical pattern for aging great powers: They become overgrown with rules, bureaucracy, and established ways of doing business. Major social actors grow more concerned with following procedure, preserving institutional habits, and hoarding power and resources than generating positive outcomes. Call it the Ossification Trap — decaying into a tangle of fossilized institutions that undermine dynamism, eat away at public confidence in governance, and project an image of ineptitude.

The United States is well along this road. It has allowed overwhelming and enervating bureaucratic requirements to invade every area of economic and social life, from education to medicine to starting new businesses. The resulting bureaucratic constraints generate alienation and disempowerment. Their frequently generic and absolute rules prevent people from exercising simple common sense or creative judgment in the unique context of specific circumstances. Meantime entrenched interests work to preserve their power and preferences, often generating suboptimal choices.

Problems with bureaucratic sclerosis in defense are just one symptom of this larger disease. But the crisis in defense strategy, much like the crisis in medicine or higher education, can be traced at least in significant part to the effects of the Ossification Trap.

The background to the current disarray in defense strategy begins with the end of the Cold War. Faced with multiple regional threats from smaller powers, the United States adopted a defense strategy that could be termed expeditionary force projection — an approach based on flowing massive U.S. forces to areas of risk, gathering overwhelming power, and imposing Washington’s will on adversaries through technological dominance. The apotheosis of this approach came in the 1991 Gulf War, where U.S. forces spent months building up before launching an overwhelming shock and awe campaign against Iraqi forces.

Since that time, all of the major assumptions of that approach have been crumbling. The strategy was oriented to lesser regional powers rather than peer competitors like China. It assumed that the United States would have months to assemble these dominant force packages, and that it could do so free from attacks on its logistics chains — neither of which will be true in the future. It assumed that the United States would enjoy unquestioned air superiority, which it won’t be able to count on in campaigns against distant great powers.

With impressive foresight and intellectual energy, the U.S. defense establishment has recognized these trends and begun to respond. The last two National Defense Strategies admit ebbing U.S. predominance and point toward new approachesto warfare that will require growing investment in emerging technologies like unmanned systems. New concepts of operations — the guidebooks for how the U.S. military will fight in the future — have started to emerge. To speed adoption of new technologies, the Department of Defense and services have created a laundry list of transformation and innovation offices, task forces, and units — most prominently, the Defense Innovation Unit.

But these important ideas and initiatives — though they are generating impressive amounts of creative thinking and handfuls of usable capabilities — haven’t been matched by enough actual change. The combined effects of bureaucratic logjams, parochial interests, and budgetary politics have reached a critical mass that prevents the U.S. national security establishment from innovating at scale, recruiting and retaining enough of the best quality people, or adapting to new forms of warfare.

Broken Defense Institutions

Examples of such barriers are legion. Most infamously, the defense procurement system — the process to conceive, design, and build weapons systems — remains slow and inefficient, plagued with dozens of program requirements that impose years of delay. The latest poster child for this dysfunction is the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, a potentially $100 billion misadventure to acquire unreliable, poorly armed craft that are being rapidly decommissioned.

While the Defense Innovation Unit has made real progress, most recently releasing a “DIU 3.0” agenda to “deliver strategic impact,” it and other incubators remain tiny pieces of the defense establishment. The Navy’s drone effort, to take one example, is “the dust particle on the pocket lint of the budget,” in the words of the unit’s head. When former Defense Innovation Unit director Michael Brown left in 2022, he described the larger Department of Defense’s attitude toward the unit as “benign neglect.” The Defense Innovation Board recently published a series of in-depth studies that conclude, among other things, that a “culture of obstruction” continues to plague the procurement process.

As crippling as it is, the procurement mess is just one of many examples of calcified bureaucratic institutions. Another is the Department of Defense’s process for cultivating new ways of fighting. On one level, progress has been impressive. The services have developed the outlines of many new operational concepts: multi-domain operations, expeditionary advanced base operations, agile combat employment, distributed maritime operations, and a joint warfighting concept that in theory integrates these discrete notions. Yet the department still lacks a unified, comprehensive theory of success for large-scale contingencies. Many of these concepts are thoughtful collections of suggestive phrases and ideas rather than actionable plans. Most remain service-specific ideas not meshed into truly joint approaches.

At the same time, efforts to pursue what might be the most recent National Defense Strategy’s leading priority — tighter integration with allies and partners — continues to be hamstrung by inefficient processes for military sales and information sharing. Career and recruitment reform is another area ripe for change, in everything from hiring cyber experts to revising assignment patterns for foreign area officers to the role of professional military education in officers’ careers. U.S. security cooperation efforts are dogged by hundreds of restrictions, regulations, and procedures that impose limits on everything from the medals and awards U.S. personnel can give partner personnel to the ability to help militaries with checkered but improving human rights practices.

Bureaucratic strangulation extends all the way down to the tactical level. U.S. Army company commanders labor under a mountain of bureaucratic requirements. The Navy struggles to retain surface warfare officers in part because of their immense burden of paperwork — burdens that have been associated with a recent series of accidents.

In these and many other areas well beyond big-ticket procurement disasters, the numbing effect of crushing, risk-averse, procedure-addicted bureaucracy stifles innovation, morale, and efficiency through every nook and cranny of the U.S. defense establishment. Far too much time is spent working through byzantine processes, filling out forms, coordinating drafts, scheduling pre-meetings for pre-meetings of meetings, and checking a thousand other bureaucratic boxes, as opposed to doing the things that drive defense effectiveness. This situation isn’t new and is hard to measure in any objective way. But in recent years, it seems to have reached a critical mass.

Replicator: Right Idea, Challenging Context

All of these elements — the urgent need to do things differently, the recognition of that need by thoughtful leaders in the Department of Defense, some hopeful moves hemmed in by powerful barriers to change — are evident in the newest poster-program of defense reform, the Replicator initiative. Aimed at a truly critical priority (getting masses of low-cost unmanned systems into operational service), announced with an admirable sense of urgency, Replicator could become an exception to the rule of stagnating defense reform.

There are many reasons for skepticism. As the American Enterprise Institute’s William Greenwalt put it in a comprehensive — and disheartening — survey of barriers to innovation, “the Department’s culture and business practices stack the odds against the Replicator initiative succeeding.” It’s a long way from a handful of prototypes to a large number of deployed systems — and then integrating those systems into warfighting concepts, command and control networks, and targeting grids. (Six months have already passed in the initiative’s claimed 18- to 24-month target for mass production.) Early reports suggested that innovative smaller firms of the type Replicator needs to engage were confused by the program and intimidated by the Department of Defense’s crushing regulatory burdens. Long-term funding appears uncertain.

None of this guarantees that the program will fail. It is moving forward, with a department steering group identifying missions and technologies. Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks chose the first set of capabilities for assessment in December and describes the project as “on track.” As with so many reform initiatives, Replicator reflects great intentions and real effort. The question is whether it, or any similar ideas, can truly thrive without a broader detonation of the barriers to change.

Nimble Institutions as the Route to Strategic Success

Reformed defense institutions will boost U.S. warfighting capabilities in many ways. Improved procurement processes can help avoid dead ends like the Army’s Future Combat System and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, which together wasted hundreds of billions, and cost overruns of the sort that the Government Accountability Office has pegged at half a trillion dollars from ongoing programs alone. One internal Department of Defense report estimated that slashing bureaucracy could produce five-year savings of $125 billion. More engaged and motivated workforces could substantially improve productivity. Bold new approaches to acquisition, combined with a wider embrace of cutting-edge technologies, could bring large numbers of smaller, cheaper, autonomous, and swarming capabilities as well as new-generation sensing and targeting networks into the force far more quickly. Modernized career path and talent management approaches could attract thousands of top-flight people to the defense sector. Perhaps most importantly, fully matured, thoroughly joint operational concepts that specify clear cause-effect linkages and theories of success can help assure that U.S. capabilities are employed in the most effective way.

The defense competition between the United States and China ultimately isn’t about numbers of aircraft or ships or divisions. It is a contest to build and sustain the most dynamic, effective, and efficient defense systems. Those in turn will, over the long run, generate the best concepts and the most innovative weapons. They will nourish the most creative and sometimes iconoclastic people. They will inspire public support for defense efforts. And critically, effective defense institutions have a tremendous signaling value, indicating to observers around the world which system is the better long-term bet as the security partner of choice.

Some will reject the binary choice between reforming defense or spending more. While fully appreciating the institutional malaise in defense, they will argue that we must do both: Threats are multiplying, time is short, and changing ingrained habits is slow. Reforms might help us get some systems quicker and cheaper, but that alone might not reverse current trends in capabilities. Reform isn’t a substitute for bigger budgets; it is a complement to them.

But a major new bout of spending will not solve many key problems, and in some cases could make things worse. It will inevitably suppress urgency for especially tough reforms by suggesting the cavalry is on the way in the form of new weapons or force structure. Inefficiencies mean that a significant fraction of the new spending will not be translated into actual capability. Indeed, the maladies of the current system create a dilemma: In theory, the Department of Defense could focus added resources on high-leverage investments reflecting risk-taking on new technology and concepts — but the system is unlikely to make those choices consistently until it is reformed. More money combined with an almost desperate sense of urgency is likely to lead defense institutions to revert to what they know to make a quicker difference.

Inviting a spending race is also a losing strategy. China, which still officially spends only about 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense (the real figure is somewhat higher), could match U.S. increases. And because of purchasing power parity differences, China gets bigger bang for every additional buck than the United States, meaning that such a stepwise spending race might favor the People’s Liberation Army. In the most demanding scenario — a conflict over Taiwan — U.S. forces face challenges of distance, military access, and willpower that money alone can’t cure. Finding new trillions for defense will also collide with the need to get U.S. debt under control. Interest payments will soon exceed defense spending in the federal budget, and the historical lesson for great powers is clear: Massive debt is a one-way road to strategic decline.

More spending is the lazy way to deal with a more dangerous world. The hard way — and ultimately the only way that will keep the United States ahead of the threats and risks of a complex and uncertain future — is bringing greater adaptability and flexibility to U.S. defense institutions through reforms that everyone agrees ought to happen, but mostly never do. The only sure route to greater dynamism and competitiveness, in defense as in other areas, is to create a more dynamic, creative, and adaptive engine of national power.

Reform is also urgently needed to shore up the political foundations of U.S. defense strategy. Reports of wasted spending and inefficiencies undermine public support — not only for defense spending, but for the global commitments it underwrites. Americans’ faith in public institutions has been falling for decades, and even faith in the military has recently taken hits. Pouring more money into an unreformed defense establishment is an unsustainable approach.

In fact, given Russian and Chinese limitations, the powerful contributions of U.S. allies and partners, and the potential to trim the roster of U.S. global commitments, the United States ought to be able to meet the demands of its defense strategy with today’s level of defense spending — if we can transform our national security institutions. And without such reform, bigger budgets will achieve little in any case because they will be forced through broken machinery.

A compromise solution would be to identify a handful of areas where a temporary increment of spending could have a disproportionate effect on medium-term defense readiness — such as a time-limited fund to buy more munitions and build out associated industrial base capacity. But these investments should be small in number and highly targeted. Their purpose should explicitly be to buy time and fill critical gaps before a reenergized set of defense institutions begins to generate lasting advantage.

A Path to Reform

To start down such a path, the Defense Department doesn’t need new studies or recommendations. It just needs a new conviction that bold and dramatic change is necessary — as well as a strong partnership with Congress, which is itself responsible for a good portion of America’s bureaucratic nightmare and must share the leadership of any effort to escape it. The time has come for a new bipartisan consensus, built on urgent discussions between Congress and the executive branch, to inaugurate a period of radical reform designed to smash through barriers to change and burn away decades of accumulated bureaucratic underbrush.

Such a legislative-executive reform team could start with one or two issue areas as a demonstration concept. One pressing example would build on the Replicator initiative with a broader slate of reforms to innovation, procurement, and force design to both dramatically improve the process of buying legacy systems and accelerate the shift toward new technologies. Over perhaps six to nine months, the team could review all the existing studies and analysis on those issues, talk to working-level officers and civil servants, and develop a bold and comprehensive plan of attack. They could translate those ideas into legislation that could be offered like the Base Realignment Commission process, creating an over-arching presumption of action on recommendations approved by the president as a total package, absent a congressional resolution of disapproval.

The results will surely generate howls of protest and embody some risk. But with the right people involved and enough analytical rigor, there is a good chance of getting at least most of the answers right. The goal should be the sort of liberation from bureaucratic rule and routine described in broader terms by Philip K. Howard — to free people to a much greater degree to apply their common sense, case-specific judgment, and creativity. The need for such an agenda to shock the U.S. defense establishment out of its bureaucratic coma is now so obvious that taking risks with bold change is not only acceptable — it is urgently necessary.

Those who worry about U.S. defense readiness are right about two things: An increasingly complex and unstable world is emerging, and the United States will need potent, effective military power to deal with it. But the growing chorus to spend more, buy more, and field more forces along current lines gets the response all wrong. Leaders in Congress and the executive branch should be ready to act with urgency and determination. But that energy needs to be put toward a once-in-a-century campaign of reform to produce a national security establishment that is more adaptable, innovative, efficient, and rewarding for its people.

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Michael J. Mazarr is a senior political scientist at RAND.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Michael J Mazarr · February 15, 2024

12. U.S. conducted cyberattack on suspected Iranian spy ship

Good. But do we need to know? (The conventional wisdom is we should maintain OPSEC) Or do we need to make sure the world knows? The unconventional wisdom might be that we need the world to know what we can do and what we are willing to do. 

U.S. conducted cyberattack on suspected Iranian spy ship

The covert operation was intended to inhibit the ship’s ability to share intelligence with Houthi rebels who have been attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea.

Feb. 15, 2024, 3:00 PM EST

By Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

NBC News · by Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

WASHINGTON — The U.S. recently conducted a cyberattack against an Iranian military ship that had been collecting intelligence on cargo vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, according to three U.S. officials.

The cyberattack, which occurred more than a week ago, was part of the Biden administration’s response to the drone attack by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq that killed three U.S. service members in Jordan and wounded dozens of others late last month, the officials said.

The operation was intended to inhibit the Iranian ship’s ability to share intelligence with Houthi rebels in Yemen who have been firing missiles and drones at cargo ships in the Red Sea, the officials said. U.S. officials say Iran uses the ship to provide targeting information to the Houthis so their attacks on the ships can be more effective.

One of the U.S. officials with knowledge of the cyberattack said the operation was conducted on an Iranian ship named the MV Behshad. The other officials declined to disclose the ship’s name.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council declined to comment and referred questions to the Defense Department, which also declined to comment.

U.S. officials typically do not disclose covert operations, including cyberattacks, and have not publicly released information about the one involving the suspected Iranian spy ship.

In an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt last week, Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, said the Behshad is in the Red Sea “to combat the piracy activities” and is not providing intelligence to Houthi forces.

Since January, the Behshad has been operating near the port of Djibouti, close to a Chinese military base on shore, according to ship tracking data. Military analysts say it is possible Iran has chosen to move the ship near the Chinese base to discourage U.S. naval forces from trying to physically attack or board the suspected spy vessel.

Roughly 12% of global shipping passes through the Red Sea every day. In the wake of repeated Houthi attacks since November, shipping giants like Maersk have announced pauses in their operations in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which will add time and money to delivery of goods.

Houthi rebels, who have long been supported and armed by Iran, have vowed to continue the attacks until Israel halts its military operations in the Gaza Strip.

Houthi forces board the cargo ship Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea on Nov. 19 in a photo released by the Houthi Media Center. Houthi Media Center via AP

When President Joe Biden ordered a response to the attack that killed the U.S. soldiers in Jordan, administration officials said it would be carried out on multiple fronts and potentially over several weeks. The response began with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria on Feb. 2. NBC News previously reported that it would include both military strikes and cyber operations.

Iran issued a video warning Feb. 4 not to target the Behshad. Asked about the ship last week, the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, said he was not aware of the U.S.’ targeting the Behshad but added, “We are very well aware of the ship.”

The deaths of the three American service members in the Jan. 28 attack on the logistics support base at Tower 22 of the Jordanian Defense Network followed more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces in the region by Iranian-backed militants, according to U.S. officials.

The Pentagon said last week that the U.S. retaliatory strikes had killed or wounded more than 40 Iranian-backed militants in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. also announced it had killed a commander of the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia — the group that administration officials say was behind the attack in Jordan — in a drone strike in Baghdad.

Despite the U.S. military response to the killing of the three American soldiers, U.S. officials have told NBC News that Iran continues to provide arms and intelligence to its proxies in the region.

NBC News · by Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

13.  Frank Kitson, 97, Dies; Helped Shape the Conflict in Northern Ireland

A practitioner-scholar. For all those who follow COIN.

Excerpts:

He was first stationed in Germany, too late to see combat in World War II. But he was just at the beginning of a new era of warfare in Britain’s far-flung colonies across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Serving as an intelligence officer in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising by pro-independence guerrillas, General Kitson developed the concept of “pseudo-gangs,” which were made up of Kenyans who worked with the British in secret to disrupt the rebels’ operations.

The eight-year conflict resulted in more than 10,000 killed, more than 1,000 executed and at least 100,000 detained in concentration camps, many of whom were also tortured by the British.

General Kitson went on to serve in what is now Malaysia, where Communist rebels threatened Britain’s hold over the resource-rich colony, and later in Cyprus and Oman. He twice received the Military Cross, among Britain’s highest honors, for his service.

Over time, he built on his innovations in Kenya to develop a comprehensive counterinsurgency doctrine. He emphasized the importance of gathering information, developing informants and double agents among the insurgent ranks, conducting covert operations and using psychological warfare to root out guerrillas.

“If a fish has got to be destroyed, it can be attacked directly by rod or net,” he wrote in “Low Intensity Operations,” borrowing a metaphor from the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. “But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves, it may be necessary to do something to the water” — including, he added, “polluting the water.”

General Kitson developed the concept of pseudo operations in Kenya:

• Pseudo operations, in which government forces and guerrilla defectors portray themselves as insurgent units, have been a very successful technique used in several counterinsurgency campaigns. Pseudo teams have provided critical human intelligence and other support to these operations.
• Pseudo operation strategies used in earlier counterinsurgency campaigns can offer valuable lessons for future missions. It is likely that most guerrilla movements have become more sophisticated in their operations; as a result, pseudo teams must also develop better techniques. Still, the pseudo operations strategy could provide major benefits against insurgent groups.
• Huk Rebellion
• Malaya
• Kenya and the Mau Mau
• French in Indochina and Algeria
• Rhodesia and the Selous Scouts

Frank Kitson, 97, Dies; Helped Shape the Conflict in Northern Ireland

A British general whose specialty was counterinsurgency, he was accused of using unduly hard-edge tactics against Irish Republican forces during the era known as the Troubles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/world/europe/frank-kitson-dead.html?utm

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Gen. Frank Kitson, an expert on counterinsurgency, played a key role in the British response to the conflict in Northern Ireland.Credit...PA Images, via Alamy

By Clay Risen

Feb. 15, 2024

Gen. Frank Kitson arrived in Northern Ireland in September 1970, charged with leading a brigade of British paratroopers in Belfast. The 30-year struggle known as the Troubles, pitting loyalists, who wanted to stay part of Britain, against Republicans, who wanted to separate, was just beginning — and over the next two years, General Kitson would do much to shape the course of the conflict.

By then, General Kitson was considered one of Britain’s leading warrior-intellectuals. He had just come off a yearlong fellowship at Oxford, and he had used his time there to write a book, “Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping” (1971), which drew on his decades of experience fighting colonial wars in Africa and Asia and has since come to be regarded as a classic text in the art of counterinsurgency.

General Kitson was short and stocky, with a ramrod posture and a high, nasal voice. He detested small talk and spoke rarely, but he had a martial charisma that won him widespread admiration among his ranks.

In his 2007 autobiography, “Soldier,” Gen. Mike Jackson, who at the time was a young officer in General Kitson’s brigade, called him “the sun around which the planets revolved,” adding that he “very much set the tone for the operational style.”

General Kitson drew on his experience overseas to change Britain’s approach to the Troubles. He set up an undercover unit, the Military Reaction Force, tasked with surveillance and occasional assassinations of Republican fighters. He fed slanted information to local reporters, and he supported the British Army’s campaign of interning thousands of suspects without charge.

On the morning of Jan. 30, 1972, some 10,000 unarmed Irish Republicans were holding a march through the city of Derry to protest internment. They were walking along the edge of a “no-go” area, where British soldiers were blocked from entering and risked armed attack if they did.

Soldiers from General Kitson’s brigade were waiting for the protesters, with plans to apprehend several leaders of the Irish Republican Army, whom they expected to be at the head of the march.

As the protesters neared the soldiers, a few began throwing rocks; the soldiers responded with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons. Suddenly, shots were fired, and within minutes, 13 protesters were dead; another died in the hospital of injuries. The day became known as Bloody Sunday, one of the worst losses of life during the Troubles and a rallying cry for Republican forces.

Image

A victim of the shooting by British troops in Derry on Jan. 30, 1972, which became known as Bloody Sunday.Credit...William L. Rukeyser/Getty Images

General Kitson was on leave when the shootings occurred, but when he returned, he gave his deputy a dressing down — for not being more aggressive. Once the firing began, he said, his soldiers should have taken advantage of the confusion and pushed into the no-go area.

“There was no doubt that we could have retaken the ‘no-go’ area,” General Jackson, who was listening to the conversation, wrote in his book, “though this would almost certainly have resulted in more deaths.”

Just weeks after Bloody Sunday, General Kitson was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire. He left Northern Ireland in April 1972 and later held a number of high-ranking military positions, including aide-de-camp to Queen Elizabeth II and commander of the United Kingdom Land Forces. He was knighted in 1980.

His death on Jan. 2, at 97, was greeted with cautious praise for his career by many of the London newspapers, which detailed his innovative counterinsurgency tactics, while The Belfast Telegraph noted that his “controversial methods led to him becoming a hate figure for Republicans” in Northern Ireland.

The death was announced by the Royal Green Jackets Association, a memorial organization dedicated to his original infantry regiment. The statement did not provide a place or cause of death.

Frank Edward Kitson was born on Dec. 15, 1926, in London. He came from a 200-year line of armed forces officers. His father, Henry Kitson, was a vice admiral in the British Navy; his mother, Marjorie (de Pass) Kitson, was the daughter of a wealthy sugar and coffee importer.

He knew early on that he wanted to be an Army officer, and he joined an infantry brigade directly after graduating from Stowe School, a prestigious private academy, in 1945.

He was first stationed in Germany, too late to see combat in World War II. But he was just at the beginning of a new era of warfare in Britain’s far-flung colonies across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Serving as an intelligence officer in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising by pro-independence guerrillas, General Kitson developed the concept of “pseudo-gangs,” which were made up of Kenyans who worked with the British in secret to disrupt the rebels’ operations.

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A British police officer examines the corpse of a soldier in 1952, during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. General Kitson served as an intelligence officer during the uprising.Credit...Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images

The eight-year conflict resulted in more than 10,000 killed, more than 1,000 executed and at least 100,000 detained in concentration camps, many of whom were also tortured by the British.

General Kitson went on to serve in what is now Malaysia, where Communist rebels threatened Britain’s hold over the resource-rich colony, and later in Cyprus and Oman. He twice received the Military Cross, among Britain’s highest honors, for his service.

Over time, he built on his innovations in Kenya to develop a comprehensive counterinsurgency doctrine. He emphasized the importance of gathering information, developing informants and double agents among the insurgent ranks, conducting covert operations and using psychological warfare to root out guerrillas.

“If a fish has got to be destroyed, it can be attacked directly by rod or net,” he wrote in “Low Intensity Operations,” borrowing a metaphor from the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. “But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves, it may be necessary to do something to the water” — including, he added, “polluting the water.”

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General Kitson’s book “Low Intensity Operations,” published in 1971, has since come to be regarded as a classic text in the art of counterinsurgency.Credit...Stackpole Books

General Kitson married Elizabeth Spencer in 1962. She survives him, as do their daughters, Catherine, Rosemary and Marion, and seven grandchildren.

His reputation as a counterinsurgency expert won him senior leadership positions as well as his Oxford fellowship. After serving in Ireland, he led an armored division and an Army staff college before assuming command of the British land forces, responsible for defending the homeland and other territories.

General Kitson retired in 1985, his time in Northern Ireland seemingly far behind him. But the end of the Troubles in 1998 brought renewed interest in Bloody Sunday. Prime Minister Tony Blair launched an inquiry into the Army’s conduct during the event, and General Kitson was called as one of its key witnesses.

The inquiry concluded in 2010 with a report blaming General Kitson’s soldiers for firing the first shots on Bloody Sunday.

Investigations into General Kitson’s leadership did not end there. In 2015, he was named a co-defendant in a lawsuit by Mary Heenan, the widow of Eugene Heenan, a laborer killed by a loyalist paramilitary group in Belfast in 1973. Elements of the group, the Ulster Defence Organization, had ties to the British military — making it, according to the suit, a version of the pseudo-gangs that General Kitson had long promoted in counterinsurgency campaigns.

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Mary Heenan with her son Eugene in 2015. She sued the British Ministry of Defense and General Kitson for the murder of her husband, also named Eugene, a laborer killed by a loyalist paramilitary group in Belfast in 1973. Credit...PA Images, via Alamy

Even though he had long since left Northern Ireland by the time of the killing, the lawsuit blamed General Kitson for establishing policies and tactics that were “reckless as to whether state agents would be involved in murder.”

The suit, which also named the British Ministry of Defense as a defendant, was continuing at the time of General Kitson’s death.

Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Clay Risen

14. Can Ukraine Still Win?

Excerpts:

Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist, “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”

Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.

Military analysts are, however, a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discussing the equipment and firepower Ukraine would need. “Let’s say I want to have a breakthrough operation against Russian forces,” he said. “I need to have substantial artillery superiority at the point of the attack. I need to find a way to introduce land forces in sufficient numbers and have a way that they will not all get blown up by enemy artillery. The enemy artillery needs to be suppressed, needs to be destroyed, or needs to be blinded so that you can get enough of the land forces to punch the hole.” This needs to happen, furthermore, at multiple points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that, if a breakthrough is achieved, those troops can take advantage of it. “That all, to me, sounds remarkably expensive,” Boston said. In a situation where a roughly base level of support is having trouble making it through a divided Congress, Boston found it hard to see a way toward an even greater level.

“Ukraine needs to prepare for a long war,” Olga Oliker, a former RAND analyst and Pentagon staffer who is now the head of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group, told me. Oliker believes that a long war could be won, but it may not look like the victory some maximalists have been promising. “You have to create the space for Ukraine to claim victory under less-than-ideal conditions,” she said. “Because, if you say the only thing that is victory is the Russians go home entirely from Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine is in NATO, and Moscow somehow disappears off the face of the earth—that’s an unrealistic goal. To me, Ukrainian victory is a situation in which Russia can’t do this again or at least is going to have a very hard time doing it again.”

Can Ukraine Still Win?

As Congress continues to delay aid and Volodymyr Zelensky replaces his top commander, military experts debate the possible outcomes.

By Keith Gessen

February 15, 2024

The New Yorker · by Keith Gessen · February 15, 2024

Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations. The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts. And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post, in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.

The arguments were painful and significant. Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be? The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?

There was a third option: neither. The dominant factor was the Russian military. It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war. It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death. They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines. “People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”

Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common. The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes. “In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.

“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”

Once a war ends, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some debates remain unsettled, because the war they theorize never takes place. A famous instance is a debate many years ago, on the pages of the journal International Security, over whether NATO was adequately prepared for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The political scientists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, having calculated the relative balance of forces, said that it was; the defense intellectual Eliot Cohen, who had worked in the Pentagon’s famous Office of Net Assessment, said that it was not. The debate stretched over several months, in 1988 and 1989. A short while later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The war in Ukraine has led to more than its share of arguments. In the run-up, the U.S. spent months warning skeptical allies that an invasion was imminent. This argument was mirrored inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent the weeks before the war urging a mobilization; Zelensky remained uncertain, and resisted the advice, worried that it would panic the population and give Russia an excuse to invade. There was widespread consensus that, in the event of an invasion, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February of 2022 that the Russian military might take Kyiv in as little as seventy-two hours.

When this did not happen, in part because Zaluzhny repositioned some of his forces without authorization and moved or camouflaged the country’s military hardware, a new round of arguments broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger, or did it simply fight in the stupidest possible way? Was China also overrated? Was the tank dead (again)?

Some of the figures in the argument were familiar: Eliot Cohen was back, urging the West to take a harder line with Russia (and China); so were Mearsheimer and Posen, counselling caution. (Mearsheimer sometimes went further, blaming the West for provoking the Russian bear and for violating the tenets of his books, which posit that great-power conflict is inevitable.) Both sides invoked Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist. Cohen cited Clausewitz’s observation that intangible “moral factors,” like the will to fight, are the most important thing in war; Cohen’s opponents held up Clausewitz’s arguments that defense always has the advantage, and also that war is the realm of contingency and chance. (“Clausewitz is like the Bible,” the American University international-relations scholar Joshua Rovner told me. “You can pull out parts of it to suit basically any argument.”)

Among analysts who had studied the Russian military and thought it would do much better than it did, there was some soul-searching. Russian units turned out to be shorthanded, and neither their cyberattacks nor their Air Force were as dominant as expected. The Ukrainian military had better cyber defenses than people realized, and they fought tenaciously. Importantly, they also had the full support of U.S. intelligence, which was able to tell them when and where Russian forces would try to land, and to help them prepare for it. But the biggest surprise was Vladimir Putin’s terrible war plan, which assumed that Ukrainians would not resist, and which he kept secret from his own Army until the eve of the invasion. “No one would have done a Ukraine war game that was set with the political and strategic starting conditions of the Ukraine conflict,” Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who often “plays Russia” in the think tank’s war games, said. “You’d be kicked out of the room.”

So, was the Russian military as bad as it seemed, and would Russian lines collapse if subjected to a bit of pressure? Or was it a fundamentally competent military that had been given an impossible task? Boston said he kept thinking of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, between Somali militants and American special forces, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and eighteen Americans were killed in a misbegotten snatch-and-grab mission inside the Somali capital: “You can take the best soldiers on the planet, and, if you throw them in a bad enough situation, it’s not going to go well.” Russian soldiers were not the best on the planet, but they were probably not as bad as they looked in that first month of the war, running out of gas for their tanks and asking locals for directions to Kyiv.

The very successful Ukrainian counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 presented evidence for both sides. In the Kharkiv region, thinly defended Russian lines collapsed when confronted with mobile Ukrainian units, allowing Ukraine to take back significant amounts of territory and cut off key Russian supply lines. But along the other axis of attack, in the city of Kherson, Russian forces held out for a long time and then made a large and orderly retreat, saving much manpower and matériel. The question became which army Ukraine would face in the summer and fall of 2023: the undermanned and demoralized one they saw in Kharkiv, or the organized and capable one they saw in Kherson?

A cemetery in the Murmansk region of Russia includes the fresh graves of soldiers who were killed during the so-called special military operation in Ukraine.Photograph by Nanna Heitmann / Magnum

The answer, unfortunately, turned out to be the latter. “The Russian military adapted,” Lee said. “They often require some painful lessons, but then they do adapt.” Lee agrees with some of the criticisms lobbed by both sides in the aftermath of the offensive. Strategically, he thinks the defense of Bakhmut was carried out for too long by Ukrainian forces, for political reasons; materially, he agrees that the West should have got its act together a little sooner to provide more advanced weaponry to the front. But, for him, these are secondary matters: “Most of it came down to the Russian side.” A failure to appreciate this was a major problem in U.S. discussions of the war. Dara Massicot, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the emphasis on Russian incompetence in the first months of the war created unrealistic expectations and complacency. “The narratives that the Russian military is an incompetent clown car, incapable of learning, that they are about to collapse, and so on, are unhelpful and have done real damage,” Massicot said. “They have not collapsed. They’re still there. They have stood in the field and absorbed billions’ worth of Western weapons and aid over two years.”

In early November, the behind-the-scenes disagreements over Russian capabilities broke out into the open, in the form of an extraordinary essay by Zaluzhny and accompanying interview published in The Economist. Zaluzhny admitted that the counter-offensive had stalled and that the war was now in what he called a stalemate. He identified several factors—technological breakthroughs, achieving air superiority, improving electronic-warfare capabilities—that, he hoped, might move the war into a new phase. But Zaluzhny had lost faith in the idea that, by imposing devastating casualties on the invader, he would be able to take them out of the fight: “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” Zelensky, in turn, was frustrated that the commander-in-chief was making his views public—worsening an already tense relationship between the two.

Some analysts hope that the upcoming introduction of the American F-16 fighter to the Ukrainian side will change the course of the war. (Most predict that the F-16 will be helpful but not decisive.) Some believe that dropping a requirement that Western weaponry not be used to strike inside Russia could help. (Others, while agreeing, caution that deep strikes cannot be a substitute for conventional warfare; ultimately, Ukraine will have to take back territory in a ground offensive.) Many are concerned about the fact that Oleksandr Syrsky, Zelensky’s new choice for commander-in-chief, is the general who insisted on defending Bakhmut even after it became indefensible; they are even more concerned about the military-assistance package that is being held up in the U.S. Congress. But if, as Zaluzhny told The Economist, there will be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough,” what will happen instead?

The political-science literature on war duration (as opposed to war outcomes) is pretty clear: If a war is not over quickly, then it will last a long time. This is because incentives change. Blood and treasure have been expended. Society has been mobilized, the enemy vilified. People are angry. The war must go on.

There is a wrinkle to this story, however, when it comes to regime types. The standard work is “Democracies at War,” by Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, from 2002. Reiter and Stam argue, based on a slew of examples, that democracies have a better war-fighting record than autocracies. The reason is that they are better at fighting (the soldiers are more motivated) and that they start fewer dumb wars of choice. In a late chapter of the book, however, Reiter and Stam sound a cautionary note. For the same reason that democracies tend to start fewer wars, they tend to grow weary of them faster: “When the promised quick victory does not materialize . . . the people may reconsider their decision to consent to the war at hand and actively withdraw their support.” According to Reiter and Stam, this is the main reason that Harry Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. When wars drag on, democracies’ chances of victory diminish. In fact, Reiter and Stam write, “The longer a war continues, the more likely autocracies are to win.”

Putin has probably not read Chapter 7 of “Democracies at War,” but he has long been counting on the dynamics it describes. He has what he likes to think of as stability—he can decide on a policy and stick with it—whereas Western democracies are constantly changing their leaders and their minds. It was apparently his calculation, in the run-up to the war, that European voters would not long stand for the high energy prices that a war with Russia would entail; he believed, too, that the U.S. was preoccupied with its own difficulties and would not mount a sustained response. For nearly two years, he was wrong. Western democracies rallied to the side of Ukraine, and Russia seemed a lot less stable than Putin had supposed: a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 was unpopular, and, in the summer of 2023, one of Putin’s longtime loyal oligarchs, Yevgeny Prigozhin, gathered a column of men and started marching toward Moscow. But Prigozhin was assassinated, and, in recent months, Putin’s expectations of Western disarray have finally begun to be met. Largely owing to Hungarian recalcitrance, the European Union took months to agree on a large aid package to Ukraine; more worrisome still, a group of Republicans has been able to stall a similarly large aid package in the U.S. Congress. And inside Ukraine, too, politics have reappeared. It is widely thought that Zelensky decided to remove Zaluzhny because he worried that Zaluzhny was becoming a political rival. (Zaluzhny’s public disagreements with his boss did not help.)

Hamas’s violent incursion into Israel on October 7th of last year, followed by Israel’s hugely disproportionate response, has scrambled the international map. It has also occupied the time of senior U.S. officials and weakened Joe Biden politically. Then there is this year’s U.S. Presidential election. The fact that, back in 2019, Donald Trump appeared to attempt to extort Zelensky—conditioning military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate the Biden family—is not an encouraging sign for supporters of Ukraine. Neither is Trump’s long-standing skepticism of NATO, expressed most recently in his comment that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that did not “pay.”

Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist, “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”

Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.

Military analysts are, however, a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discussing the equipment and firepower Ukraine would need. “Let’s say I want to have a breakthrough operation against Russian forces,” he said. “I need to have substantial artillery superiority at the point of the attack. I need to find a way to introduce land forces in sufficient numbers and have a way that they will not all get blown up by enemy artillery. The enemy artillery needs to be suppressed, needs to be destroyed, or needs to be blinded so that you can get enough of the land forces to punch the hole.” This needs to happen, furthermore, at multiple points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that, if a breakthrough is achieved, those troops can take advantage of it. “That all, to me, sounds remarkably expensive,” Boston said. In a situation where a roughly base level of support is having trouble making it through a divided Congress, Boston found it hard to see a way toward an even greater level.

“Ukraine needs to prepare for a long war,” Olga Oliker, a former RAND analyst and Pentagon staffer who is now the head of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group, told me. Oliker believes that a long war could be won, but it may not look like the victory some maximalists have been promising. “You have to create the space for Ukraine to claim victory under less-than-ideal conditions,” she said. “Because, if you say the only thing that is victory is the Russians go home entirely from Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine is in NATO, and Moscow somehow disappears off the face of the earth—that’s an unrealistic goal. To me, Ukrainian victory is a situation in which Russia can’t do this again or at least is going to have a very hard time doing it again.”

One of the few remaining civilians in the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar walks past buildings that bear the scars of combat.Photograph by Tyler Hicks / NYT / Redux

This could mean that the Russian military is constrained by some agreement that it’s been forced into, but it could also mean that Ukraine’s defenses are sufficiently bolstered, and its allies sufficiently clear in their resolve, that the cost to Russia of a renewed offensive would simply be too high. There is also the hope, not entirely illusory, that Russian vulnerabilities will eventually become too much for the Putin regime to handle. “There’s a certain amount of instability that’s built into the Russian system that the Russians worry about,” Oliker said. “At some point, if they’re worried enough, they might be willing to negotiate.”

A senior Biden Administration official who has helped develop sanctions against Russia expounded on this theory. He said that, for some time, the Administration’s view has been that Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble. He pointed to the freezing of Russian assets abroad, the running down of its hard-currency reserves, and the increasingly complex supply lines that Russia needs to evade Western sanctions. “It’s like a top that’s slowing down,” the official said. “They’re going to have to start making harder and harder choices, faster and faster, as we get into 2025. That’s a far cry from whatever Putin’s aim was in this war—which was, you know, reinstating Catherine the Great’s empire or something.”

The Administration official was painting an optimistic picture—one that depends on continued Western support. When I asked whether there was a contingency plan if the aid did not come through, he said there wasn’t one: “The contingency plan, frankly, is that the Ukrainians will keep fighting with less and less.” Ukraine is already running short of artillery shells, and it could eventually run out of air-defense interceptors. “So it’s a very stark choice in terms of the security assistance,” the official said. He estimated that, with the help of Western air-defense systems, Ukrainian forces could shoot down as many as ninety per cent of Russian air-attack assets. “Without it, that number will be zero soon.”

There is a third option for how the war might develop, beyond a “mutually hurting stalemate,” as it’s known in the literature, and a measured Ukrainian victory. As Michael Kofman, a longtime analyst of the Russian military who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stressed to me, Ukraine could start to lose. That could mean a breakthrough by Russian forces, though they have so far been unable to achieve one, or just enough wearing down of Ukrainian and Western will that Ukraine is forced to negotiate concessions from a position of weakness. The question then becomes what, aside from the catastrophic humanitarian and political consequences in Ukraine, a Russian victory would mean for the world. If Putin wins, or feels like he has won, what will he do next?

Some argue that he would do nothing—that Ukraine is a special case, more central to Russia’s conception of itself as an imperial power than any other country. The counter-argument is that we don’t know. “In Moscow, they have all sorts of assessments of NATO power,” Massicot said. “I don’t think they can confront it directly. For one thing, the Russian Army is partially destroyed. The Russian Air Force has not exactly covered themselves in glory in this war. But they will downgrade their assessment of NATO as a cohesive alliance on the basis of our political will. From their point of view, they will feel that they have won a proxy war with NATO. And they’re going to be angry, they’re going to want revenge, and now they think we’re weaker than we are. That’s a dangerous situation.” Right now, the U.S. has about a hundred thousand troops in Europe; in 1989, there were three times that many. An ambiguous result in Ukraine, which leaves Russia capable of further offensive action, could mean a movement toward old troop levels. And Mearsheimer, Posen, and Cohen would have to dust off their essays on NATO preparedness.

It feels, in fact, like all the old Cold War arguments are back. Clearly, the Russian leadership is capable of brutal expansionist aggression. But just how far are they willing to go, and what exactly will they think of next? “The problem that I see is that the Russian economy has undergone a structural transition and is now on a militarized footing,” Kofman said. “So the Russian government is probably going to be focussed on regenerating military power for some time, both because it’s a matter of strategy but also because the militarized economy is going to be producing military goods and they will not have an easy way to transition it back.” This, Kofman concluded, means “that they could be in a position sooner than people think to actually contest the security and stability of Europe.”

Kofman, Lee, and Massicot recently published an article on the national-security Web site War on the Rocks in which they outlined a strategy for Ukrainian victory. “Hold, Build, and Strike,” they called it. In the essay, they urged Ukraine to hold the line of contact in the coming months, spend 2024 building up its forces, and then strike, in 2025, when they could see an advantage. These ideas were not far from what Zaluzhny had been advocating over the past several months. “You shouldn’t fight a war till your first failed offensive,” Kofman said. “That’s not how most conventional wars go. If that’s how they went, they’d all be over really fast.” He went on to give an example from the Second World War. “You know Stalin’s famous ten blows?” These were ten major offensives, several of them on Ukrainian territory, that the Soviets undertook against Germany in 1944. But there were, in fact, far more than ten offensives, Kofman said: “They just don’t include all the offensives that failed.” Last summer was a good opportunity for Ukraine to take back territory from the Russian Army, but it will not, Kofman believes, be the last such opportunity.

Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to seek ways to end conflicts, does not see how this one can end just yet. She admitted that, in the aftermath of the failed counter-offensive, in the midst of a long cold winter, and with Western support in doubt, Ukraine is facing a very difficult moment. “But it was not a good moment for Russia in spring and summer of 2022,” Oliker said. “That’s war. If it is, in fact, a long war, prepare for a few more back-and-forths.”

The New Yorker · by Keith Gessen · February 15, 2024

15. How to end China’s chokehold on the Pentagon’s supply chains

How to end China’s chokehold on the Pentagon’s supply chains

Defense News · by John G. Ferrari and Mark Rosenblatt · February 15, 2024

Around the world, threats to U.S. national security are converging. Our most potent antidote for dealing with these crises — hard power — is at risk not only because of our ailing defense-industrial base but because of China’s grip on our supply chains. It maintains a chokehold on U.S. military munitions and platforms that we have not broken, despite evidence of supply chain vulnerabilities and an ever-shrinking window to do so, threatening our ability to deter adversaries in the Indo-Pacific region.

The latest National Security Scorecard from data analytics firm Govini revealed countless China-based firms remain deeply embedded in Defense Department supply chains across 12 critical technologies. Consider as well as that the draft version of the Pentagon’s National Defense Industrial Strategy noted that “today’s [defense-industrial base] would be challenged to provide the required capabilities at the speed and scale necessary for the U.S. military and our allies and partners to engage and prevail in a major conflict.”

This is what happens when just-in-time defense manufacturing meets dependence on Chinese companies, not to mention firms in Taiwan that Beijing could blockade during a crisis on which many, if not all, precision weapons and modern platforms depend.

The recently passed fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act barely affects the timeline for eliminating the Pentagon’s dependence on selected Chinese companies and materials. The narrow scope and lengthy time frames of current government efforts to alleviate our supply chain dependencies send an unspoken message to Beijing: The DoD does not have, nor will it soon have, the supply base required to prosecute a long war against China. The message to Taiwan is that we can’t build the weapons and platforms needed to defend you in a protracted war without access to these at-risk supply chains.

Thankfully, there are solutions that the Pentagon and the administration can take to armor the Achilles’ heel of our defense supply chains.

First, they can focus on resiliency rather than independence, entailing the pursuit of multiple solutions to ensure the DoD has sufficient stocks — or access to the production — of the products, materials and services required for a long conflict. To build resiliency, the Pentagon can focus on increasing the size of its inventories, cultivating new second and near-shore sources, and redesigning munitions and platforms that are especially critical for an Indo-Pacific fight.

Resiliency requires assessing the true extent of China- and Taiwan-based dependencies, and remediating them.

Second, the Pentagon should ask Congress to invert its approach to how it defines, analyzes and addresses Pentagon supply chain vulnerabilities. To date, the government’s efforts have largely focused on inputs, as well as suppliers based in so-called covered countries like China. But if the government inverts its approach from inputs (e.g., rare earths) to outputs (e.g., an F-35 jet), it will address dependencies in a more holistic manner, forcing a review of the full supply chain.

Requiring the defense-industrial base to quickly conduct a bottom-up analysis by critical munition and platform that identifies each node in its supply chains — something it could readily by law do with commercial software — would establish a baseline for modeling different platform and munition inputs under different scenarios. These models would rapidly identify potential and growing risks as well as assist the DoD in proactively addressing them. They would also help avert a scenario where the DoD has to reactively scramble to address the collapse of a critical node far down in its supply chains.

Lastly, like the U.S. had during World War II with the War Production Board, someone or some organization should be in charge of these efforts. The Federal Acquisition Security Council may be the best organization to fill that role, as it would be well placed to roll up our supply chain dependencies, place them against requirements to create demand signals and determine how best to fill them.

These actions could be included by the Pentagon in its budget for the coming fiscal year — or given their urgency, a single, focused bill, an executive order, or a future emergency supplemental.

No one knows if or when tensions with China could spiral into armed conflict. But there’s no doubt that the world is becoming more dangerous. The U.S. must send a message to Beijing that we are prepared to prosecute a long war if needed. And the U.S. must also send a message to Taiwan that it will be able to support the island in a time of need. Without ending China’s chokehold on our defense supply chains, we will be hard-pressed to send either.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. Ferrari previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service. Mark Rosenblatt runs Rationalwave Capital Partners, which invests in public and private technology companies.

16. Hamas Is Returning to Northern Gaza Because Israel Has No Plan for the “Day After”

Excerpts:

Providing for the welfare of Gaza’s civilians is therefore a political, military, and humanitarian imperative. Israel expanded the scope of its military operations to pursue its objectives — it should now correspondingly broaden its mission parameters to provide aid and assistance to the territory’s residents. This need will become more acute as Israel expands its operations to Rafah, the one urban area in the Gaza Strip devoid of an Israeli military presence. Previously a densely populated city of 250,000 residents, Rafah’s population has swelled to incorporate as many as 1.5 million refugees who fled fighting elsewhere in Gaza. These civilians have nowhere else to go that is outside of Israeli military control. Thus, if it does enter Rafah, Israel will have no choice but to provide for Gazans’ welfare.

This could placate the Biden administration, who have repeatedly cautioned that they will not sanction any Israeli operation in Rafah without guarantees that it would protect the territory’s civilians. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers will balk at providing humanitarian aid but doing so could alleviate international pressure and thus leave Israel better placed to conduct the prolonged counter-insurgency campaign it seeks. It would also allow Netanyahu to continue his balancing act of mitigating U.S. pressure to retrench Israel’s military footprint and internal cajoling by far-right ministers to continue fighting until Hamas is defeated. Governing — rather than just pacifying — Gaza need not augur an entrenched occupation. Israel successfully provided an extensive aid and welfare program within Syria during that country’s civil war, which it was able to quickly end and leave little footprint of its years-long presence. Basic humanitarian aid and governance will not end Gazans’ suffering, but it will help alleviate the acute and burgeoning humanitarian crisis within the territory.

As the U.S.-led coalition discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, the term “post-conflict reconstruction” is a misnomer. This is because post-war strategic planning is rarely about just rebuilding whatever infrastructure a conflict has damaged. Instead, interveners and occupiers often take on the unenviable and significantly harder task of replacing what came before with a new system of governance. As such, they should create a local status quo that better guarantees stability and security than the pre-war balance of power that necessitated the intervention in the first place.

Israel’s declared war aims — destroying Hamas’ military infrastructure and rendering it incapable of governing a post-war Gaza — are a contemporary manifestation of these lofty goals. But by refusing to engage in Gaza’s civilian governance, while denying other non-hostile actors a role in post-conflict reconstruction, Israel is providing Hamas with the silver platter of legitimacy that it needs to survive the conflict.

Hamas Is Returning to Northern Gaza Because Israel Has No Plan for the “Day After” - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Rob Geist Pinfold · February 16, 2024

In a stormy cabinet debate after the Six Day War, Israel’s prime minister, Levi Eshkol, rejected hardline demands to apply direct civil rule over the newly captured West Bank, declaring: “I don’t want more land and I don’t want more Arabs.” This terse assertion pre-empted decades of Israeli policy. In its subsequent long history of occupation, Israel has almost always avoided directly practicing civilian governance over local Arab populations. This laissez faire approach surprised a visiting intellectual, Milton Friedman, who during a 1969 tour of the West Bank noted that: “Israeli civilian administrators were few and far between. Governmental functions were being carried out by the pre-war Jordanian civil servants.”

In 2024, as Israel’s war planners seek to prolong their ground invasion of Gaza, this long-established doctrine of laissez faire occupation faces a new challenge:: Hamas bureaucrats, militants, and police re-asserting their authority in areas that Israel ostensibly controls. From the sprawling ruins of Beit Hanoun on the Israel-Gaza border to the outskirts of Gaza City’s Al Shifa hospital further inside the coastal enclave, Hamas’ uniformed police are operating openly once more. Beyond restoring some semblance of public order on the streets, Hamas’ substantial and established bureaucracy has ordered its employees return to work and has re-started social welfare programs aimed at providing for Gazans’ everyday needs.

This may be an unfolding development, but it is not a surprising one.

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Instead, it represents the latest symptom of Israel’s lack of a coherent post-war plan for the territory. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly refused to articulate a “day after” vision for Gaza, arguing that it would distract from the primary goal of destroying Hamas.

But this lack of strategic clarity ensures that, far from preventing Hamas’ return, Israel’s ongoing policies within Gaza are actively facilitating this scenario. Absent any clear political vision for capitalizing on its military successes, Israel refuses to provide everyday governance to Gaza’s civilians. It has also stopped aid organizations from entering the territory. Gaza’s war-weary and poverty-stricken civilians need welfare, public order, and a sense of normalcy now more than ever. Currently, Hamas is the only party that is willing and able to provide these essential services. It is this entirely avoidable status quo that sows the seeds for the Islamist movement’s return to power in Gaza after the fighting ends. In short: The Israeli government should recognize that providing aid and basic civilian governance in Gaza are essential components of a strategy for defeating Hamas.

A Legal and Practical Necessity

During its ongoing military campaign and beyond, Israel has steadfastly rejected any responsibility for governing Gaza’s civilian population. This contravenes international occupation law, which explicitly states that it is the occupier who must guarantee the welfare and address the everyday needs of all non-combatants under a military occupation. It is no wonder that Israel has sought to sidestep this responsibility, given that it is an indubitably heavy burden that spans a broad gamut of needs, including healthcare, education, policing, and more.

Israel has also led the campaign to de-fund the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, thereby shutting out a key and established source of welfare for Gaza’s civilians. Further, Netanyahu has ruled out foreign troops or a Palestinian Authority presence in a post-war Gaza. These are not the fringe positions of a hawkish prime minister: a range of moderates — from defense minister Yoav Gallant to opposition leader Yair Lapid — have echoed Netanyahu’s stances on these key pillars of post-war planning.

But providing aid and good governance is not just Israel’s legal obligation. It is a necessity: Gaza’s civilians are poorer, hungrier and sicker than ever before. Equally, their need for peacetime services has not abated. Gaza’s children still have a right to an education, while the territory’s long-term sick need their regular medications. Someone must provide these services, but Israel refuses to do so.

When Israel launched its ground invasion in late October 2023, the operation’s relatively limited geographical scope surprised observers: Rather than occupy the entire Gaza Strip, the Israeli military concentrated its efforts in the northern part. Israel demanded that the territory’s civilians evacuate to southern Gaza. This would supposedly ensure that Israel could minimize civilian casualties and meet its duty of care to non-combatants. But as the war has dragged on, Israel expanded its operations southwards. It is, therefore, finding itself controlling increasing amounts of territory with increasingly significant civilian populations. Simultaneously, Israel’s strategy has not adapted to these new realities and remains stubbornly force-centric.

An Obvious Outcome

The end result is predictable. It is Hamas — the only group with an established civil infrastructure, a long-established formal and informal charity network, and the willingness to police, provide for, and pay Gaza’s civilians — that fills this power vacuum. It is no coincidence that Hamas administrators are now re-appearing in the parts of Gaza that Israel first captured in the early stages of its ground invasion, because this is where civil governance has been absent for the longest and Gazans’ need for some form of normalcy the most acute. While most of Gaza City’s residents fled south, thousands remain in the territory — it is these families that Hamas now seeks to co-opt to guarantee its post-war existence.

Netanyahu has repeatedly shrugged off U.S. and internal cajoling to articulate how Israel intends to turn its battlefield successes against Hamas into a long-term political vision for Gaza’s future. Facing diametrically opposed political pressure from his right-wing allies to resettle and even annex parts of Gaza on the one hand and the Biden administration’s rapidly diminishing patience for a prolonged military campaign on the other, Netanyahu’s response has been to equivocate and obscure.

The result is that no-one, including the Israel Defense Forces, know what Israel’s long-term objectives in Gaza are. Israel’s military is restricted to doing what the oft-quoted maxim claims armies do best: “Kill people and blow stuff up.” Absent any clearer military doctrine, the perceived need for vengeance following Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 has seeped into interactions between Israeli soldiers and Gazan civilians. This worrying trend is exemplified by the plethora of TikToks and other social media content that Israeli personnel operating in Gaza have themselves uploaded, which often show troops looting property and humiliating detainees with apparent impunity.

Eschewing civilian governance in areas that Israel has supposedly cleared of hostiles does not just create a post-war political challenge. It also creates significant operational issues that stymie Israel’s war effort. When Hamas’ bureaucrats re-appear, its armed wing is not far behind. This is why the Israeli military has recently redirected significant resources to retaking the Al Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, despite the fact that Israel first captured it as far back as early November.

Hamas’ re-emergence also casts doubt on Israel’s ability to eliminate the Islamist movement’s operational capabilities in the Gaza Strip. In early January 2024, Israeli military officials boasted that they had destroyed Hamas as a fighting force in northern Gaza. Barely one month later, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi admitted that same territory witnessed “terrorist activity nearly every day.” Israel then increased its military presence in northern Gaza, flying in the face of its desired strategy to dial down operations to prepare for a more limited yet lengthy counter-insurgency campaign.

The Necessity of Governance

Providing for the welfare of Gaza’s civilians is therefore a political, military, and humanitarian imperative. Israel expanded the scope of its military operations to pursue its objectives — it should now correspondingly broaden its mission parameters to provide aid and assistance to the territory’s residents. This need will become more acute as Israel expands its operations to Rafah, the one urban area in the Gaza Strip devoid of an Israeli military presence. Previously a densely populated city of 250,000 residents, Rafah’s population has swelled to incorporate as many as 1.5 million refugees who fled fighting elsewhere in Gaza. These civilians have nowhere else to go that is outside of Israeli military control. Thus, if it does enter Rafah, Israel will have no choice but to provide for Gazans’ welfare.

This could placate the Biden administration, who have repeatedly cautioned that they will not sanction any Israeli operation in Rafah without guarantees that it would protect the territory’s civilians. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers will balk at providing humanitarian aid but doing so could alleviate international pressure and thus leave Israel better placed to conduct the prolonged counter-insurgency campaign it seeks. It would also allow Netanyahu to continue his balancing act of mitigating U.S. pressure to retrench Israel’s military footprint and internal cajoling by far-right ministers to continue fighting until Hamas is defeated. Governing — rather than just pacifying — Gaza need not augur an entrenched occupation. Israel successfully provided an extensive aid and welfare program within Syria during that country’s civil war, which it was able to quickly end and leave little footprint of its years-long presence. Basic humanitarian aid and governance will not end Gazans’ suffering, but it will help alleviate the acute and burgeoning humanitarian crisis within the territory.

As the U.S.-led coalition discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, the term “post-conflict reconstruction” is a misnomer. This is because post-war strategic planning is rarely about just rebuilding whatever infrastructure a conflict has damaged. Instead, interveners and occupiers often take on the unenviable and significantly harder task of replacing what came before with a new system of governance. As such, they should create a local status quo that better guarantees stability and security than the pre-war balance of power that necessitated the intervention in the first place.

Israel’s declared war aims — destroying Hamas’ military infrastructure and rendering it incapable of governing a post-war Gaza — are a contemporary manifestation of these lofty goals. But by refusing to engage in Gaza’s civilian governance, while denying other non-hostile actors a role in post-conflict reconstruction, Israel is providing Hamas with the silver platter of legitimacy that it needs to survive the conflict.

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Rob Geist Pinfold is a lecturer in Peace and Security at Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs and a research fellow at Charles University’s Peace Research Center Prague. This article employs data from his book, Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Israeli Occupations and Exits (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Rob Geist Pinfold · February 16, 2024

17. Is Israel Losing Sight of Its Long Game?

Excerpts:

Historically, Israel’s strategic shortcomings in Gaza have been driven in large measure by the idea that Israel could deal with the military threat of Hamas without simultaneously addressing the deeper causes of Palestinian grievances. Ever since it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, perhaps even earlier, Israel has viewed the economic and political running of the strip—and the welfare of its population—as largely a Palestinian concern. Sure, Israel provided electricity, and it allowed Qatar, the United Nations, and other actors to provide humanitarian assistance. But from Israel’s perspective, the Palestinian Authority—and later Hamas—was ultimately responsible for Gazans. The rest of the world, however, has never seen Gaza that way. As long as there is no Palestinian state, Israel must realize that to outside observers, it owns the ultimate responsibility for governance.

This in part may account for the significant disconnect between the differing Israeli and Western assessments of Israel’s military campaign today. For many Israelis, the campaign in Gaza has had considerable success, given the progress made in dismantling Hamas’s infrastructure. To many Western observers, on the other hand, the war has been mostly a failure because of the extraordinary destruction it has wrought within Gaza. But the two issues—the welfare of Gazans and the destruction of Hamas—are fundamentally intertwined. If Israel wants to maintain what Netanyahu has called “overall security responsibility” of Gaza, it must also assume responsibility for Gazan wellbeing. Ultimately, if Swords of Iron is to be successful, Israel needs to solve not just its 3,000 and 30,000 problems, but its 3.5 million one, too.

Is Israel Losing Sight of Its Long Game?

Why Dismantling Hamas Requires More Aid for Gazans

By Raphael Cohen

February 16, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by From Cast Lead to Protective Edge: Lessons from Israel’s Wars in Gaza · February 16, 2024

Like many wars, Israel’s four-month-old operation in Gaza is playing out on split screens. In most major international media outlets, it is portrayed as a campaign of wanton destruction and mass misery that has killed 28,000 or more Gazans and destroyed more than 70 percent of the territory’s homes, without coming close to achieving its stated objective of “eradicating” Hamas and returning all the hostages. As a result, Western analysts have placed Israeli strategy on a spectrum ranging from “muddled,” as one Foreign Affairs article has put it, to a “strategically and morally unrecoverable” failure, as Ryan Evans, the founder of War on the Rocks, has described it.

By contrast, most Israeli media often seem to be depicting an entirely different war. On any given day, many Israeli newspapers and news broadcasts are filled with images of tunnels destroyed and weaponry captured, as well as the names of high-profile Hamas commanders killed. One recent headline in The Jerusalem Post trumpeted, “Israel Defeats Hamas in Khan Yunis, over 10,000 Gazan Terrorists Killed.” Another in The Times of Israel proclaimed, “Hamas in Route to Defeat.” This is not to say that the Israeli accounting suggests unalloyed success. After more than four months, many of the hostages remain in Hamas hands, and Israeli military casualties are mounting. Nonetheless, despite the unpopularity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and growing pressure on the government to bring the hostages home, Israelis, on the whole, largely support the war effort, and a sizable portion of Jewish Israelis remain committed to toppling Hamas.

As is often the case when two narratives diverge sharply, reality lies somewhere in between. Israel is making more tangible progress toward some of its war aims than outside observers may realize, but it is also falling short of or losing on others to an extent that has been overlooked by many in the country itself. As important, both narratives may be overlooking a more grounded understanding of the unfolding campaign in relation to the several, quite distinct challenges Israel is trying to address. For the war is about more than simply defeating Hamas, and it is crucial to understand the different ways that Israel’s progress against the group can be assessed. But Israel’s success must also be measured in relation to the war for Palestinian opinion and the long-term consequences that Israeli actions may have. If Israel hopes to win in Gaza, it will need to recognize that these various objectives are fundamentally interconnected and that winning in one area does not necessarily result in winning in another. Its strategy in Gaza, therefore, needs to work on multiple levels at the same time.

A THREE-DIMENSIONAL WAR

Israel faces three overlapping but distinct challenges in Gaza. First, it has what could be called the 3,000 problem: dealing with the direct perpetrators of October 7. According to Israeli officials, about 3,000 militants, mostly from Hamas’s military wing but also members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other militant groups, crossed into Israel that day and murdered, raped, and tortured Israeli soldiers and civilians—men, women, and children—and took 253 hostages, including at least 130 who remain captive in Gaza, several dozen of whom are believed dead. An estimated 1,000 militants were killed on October 7, but a larger number escaped back to Gaza. To effectively solve the 3,000 problem, Israel needs, at minimum, to kill or capture those who ordered or took part in the attack and to secure the release of the hostages, either by force or through negotiation.

Israel also has a 30,000 problem. Before the war, Israeli intelligence estimated that Hamas’s military capabilities included a fighting force of roughly 30,000 militants. These fighters enjoyed a vast subterranean network of tunnels and facilities in Gaza spanning more than 350 miles and an expanding and ever more sophisticated array of offensive capabilities—including thousands of rockets, as well as tens of thousands of rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, mines, and other weapons poised to strike Israel from land, sea, and air. For Israeli strategists, the October 7 attack showed that Israel can no longer rely on its earlier deterrence and containment strategy toward Hamas—enforcing a series of border restrictions on the group while keeping it in check by conducting periodic, limited strikes in Gaza. Israeli officials have concluded that they must destroy and dismantle Hamas’s organization and infrastructure to ensure Israel’s safety.

Finally, Israel has a 3.5 million problem. According to an opinion survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in November, during the weeklong cease-fire, some 57 percent of Gazan respondents and 82 percent of West Bank Palestinian respondents said they supported Hamas’s October 7 attack. All told, this is proportionally equivalent to about 3.5 million people, based on prewar population numbers for both territories. In other words, even if Israel solves its 3,000 and 30,000 problems, rescuing hostages and effectively destroying Hamas as a military entity, it will still face a large population that supports armed resistance and that will provide fertile ground for any future militant group that rises in Hamas’s place.

Israeli and Western narratives of the war diverge sharply.

Framed this way, the results so far of Operation Swords of Iron, as Israel calls its campaign in Gaza, look different from the picture that has emerged in either the Western or Israeli accounts of the war. After four months of war, Israel has in fact made strong progress on its 3,000 and 30,000 problems. Israeli forces have successfully killed or captured scores of Hamas leaders, including the ones directly responsible for the massacres at Beeri and Nir Oz, the hardest-hit kibbutzim on October 7,in which over 140 Israelis were killed. Israel also secured the release, mostly through negotiation, of 112 Israeli hostages. On the other side of the ledger, many perpetrators of the October 7 massacre, including many of Hamas’s top leaders, remain at large. Moreover, the majority of Israeli hostages are still in the custody of Hamas and other, smaller groups. Israeli attempts to free the hostages by military force have produced mixed results, with some succeeding in rescuing ones and twos, while others have ended in disaster. As of this writing, despite weeks of indirect negotiations, Israel has not achieved a deal to release many or all the remaining hostages.

Israel has made somewhat more progress on its 30,000 objective of destroying Hamas’s forces and infrastructure: the Israeli military claims to have killed at least 10,000 militants, wounded another 10,000, and defeated at least 18 of 24 battalions. According to Israel, 2 of 5 brigade commanders, 19 of 24 battalion commanders, and more than 50 platoon commanders have been eliminated. Dozens of miles of Hamas tunnels have been identified and destroyed. Israel also claims to have destroyed 700 rocket launchers, and as a consequence, rocket attacks on Israel have dramatically decreased, although Hamas continues to be able to launch rockets. Meanwhile, Israeli officials say that they have mostly established control over the northern half of the Gaza Strip and that Israeli forces are making slow but steady progress against key Hamas strongholds in the south. Even by Israeli estimates, finishing the job may require a year or more of fighting. But by these measures, Israel has inflicted far more damage to Hamas’ military capabilities than in any previous Israel-Hamas war.

Yet Israel is utterly failing at its 3.5 million problem. Indeed, as the war continues, Palestinian support for armed resistance is, if anything, growing. Hamas is more popular now than it was before October 7. The group’s approval rating among Palestinians in the West Bank soared from 12 percent in September to 44 percent in December. Support for Hamas has also grown across the Arab world and even globally, including in the United States, particularly among younger Americans and other key voting demographics. For all Israel’s military progress on the war’s other fronts, it is clearly losing the public relations war, not only with the Palestinian population but internationally as well.

Put more directly, Israel faces a dilemma. Right now, its progress on its 3,000 and 30,000 problems is coming at the direct cost of making its 3.5 million problem worse. Israel’s successful hostage rescue in mid-February captures this dynamic in a nutshell: while it safely brought two hostage home, it came at a cost of dozens of Palestinian lives that overshadowed this otherwise good news story in the international press. Destroying Hamas requires lots of military force and even more destruction, but that destruction comes at the cost of radicalizing many more Palestinians. Even more critically, as the 3.5 million problem becomes more acute, international opposition to the war will continue to build. From Israel’s perspective, the concern must be that this international pressure will eventually force it to cut short its operations before it can claim victory. In other words, the 3.5 million problem, if not addressed, will eventually undercut Israel’s chances of solving its 3,000 and 30,000 problems.

GOLDILOCKS IN GAZA

In the first week of January, Israeli leaders signaled a shift in war strategy: Israel would have fewer troops in Gaza and conduct fewer airstrikes and would instead pursue more targeted operations. The change came after months of U.S. pressure on Israel to reduce civilian casualties, and over the past month, the shift has slowly taken shape on the ground. In January, Israel withdrew five brigades and scaled back its use of airpower. For Gaza’s battered civilian population, this scaling back will likely be welcome, but it will not solve Israel’s strategic dilemma.

To date, Israel has employed enormous firepower during Swords of Iron. Israeli officials point out, likely correctly, that Hamas’s theory of victory—or at least of survival—hinges on Israel being forced to curtail its operation as a result of international pressure, so Hamas has a vested interest in inflating civilian casualties. But even excluding Hamas’s figures, the war’s other statistics speak for themselves: as of mid-December, for example, Israel had conducted some 29,000 airstrikes on various targets in Gaza and estimated that it had killed approximately 7,000 Hamas militants. According to these figures, on average fewer than one in four bombs dropped on Gaza have killed a Hamas militant. Admittedly, the ratio is a rough estimate, but it suggests that Israel can dial back its use of firepower—by more selectively choosing its targets, killing fewer people, and wreaking less devastation—without necessarily compromising the military effectiveness of its operations.

Whatever the next phase of the war looks like, it will make no one happy.

A less violent operation is certainly welcome news for Gazans, but from an Israeli perspective, the question is whether this shift will buy Israeli forces the time they need to finish dismantling Hamas and prevent the group from gaining further Palestinian support. Here, there is much more reason to be skeptical. For starters, even targeted operations can still fuel popular resentment. For example, in January, the precision drone strike that assassinated Hamas’s deputy political leader, Saleh al-Arouri, in a southern suburb of Beirut killed a total of seven people—all either members of Hamas or Jamaa Islamiya, a Lebanese terrorist group. Nonetheless, the strike still set off protests across the West Bank and anger across the Arab world. Moreover, given how destructive Israel’s campaign in Gaza has already been, the human conditions inside Gaza will likely continue to deteriorate in the absence of outside aid, even if the Israelis scale back their use of force. As a result, such a move may not buy Israel much immediate goodwill among the Palestinian population or the rest of the world. To many international observers, it will seem too little, too late. Imagery of the conflict will continue to be dominated by a largely civilian population suffering at the hands of the Israeli onslaught.

At the same time, Israel faces real limits on how far it can dial back its military operation, particularly if it remains committed to dismantling Hamas completely. Israel has only partially rooted out Hamas from its strongholds in the southern cities of Khan Younis and the refugee camps near the center of the strip. And it is only starting to fight in Rafah. Even by Israel’s own estimates, a majority of Hamas’s fighters remain at large. Against an adversary of this size, airstrikes and targeted raids may not be enough. (Indeed, the United States tried the latter approach in Afghanistan and failed terribly, as evidenced by the fact that the Taliban are again running Afghanistan today.) A scaled-back strategy would also create domestic political problems. Members of the Israeli cabinet have criticized Israeli Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi for pulling back on the use of airpower. This complaint is not driven only by blood lust: Israel has lost more than 230 soldiers in Gaza to date—on a per capita basis, more than the United States lost during the entire Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. Israel thus sees airpower as a way to minimize its forces’ casualties on the ground, and so restricting it at the potential cost of more Israeli lives is a tough political sell.

Whatever this next phase of the Gaza war looks like, one thing is clear: it will make no one happy. Simply put, the Israeli military cannot reduce its use of firepower enough to placate its critics abroad, nor can it appease its critics at home who call for a decisive defeat of Hamas while minimizing Israeli military casualties, and still accomplish its strategic objectives in Gaza.

A BETTER WELFARE STRATEGY

If Israel intends to buy itself the time it needs to resolve the 3,000 and 30,000 problems, then it must also begin to address its 3.5 million problem. To do this, Israel will need, first, to embrace the fact that it is responsible for Gaza’s more than two million civilians and ensure their welfare—if not on moral grounds, then on strategic ones. Contrary to some voices on Israel’s hard right, Gaza’s population cannot simply be pushed out. The United States, Europe, Israel’s Arab neighbors, and even some right-wing members of Israel’s governing coalition oppose the idea of transferring Palestinians out of Gaza. More important, the Palestinians do not want to leave. They will remain in Gaza for the foreseeable future. And so, the first step to solving Israel’s 3.5 million problem begins with this population.

For Israel, ensuring the welfare of Gaza’s civilians is also the best way to secure international support—particularly from the United States—for its continued mission to dismantle Hamas. In a poll of Americans conducted by Gallup in December, 49 percent of Democratic respondents said that the United States was not doing enough to help the Palestinians. By contrast, only 15 percent of Democratic respondents said that the United States was doing too little to help Israel. Especially now that the presidential campaign is starting in earnest, the Biden administration needs to show its supporters—particularly on the progressive left—that it cares about human welfare in Gaza, if only to secure their votes on election day.

What Israel needs, then, is to take a big, tangible, and public step in its war strategy to show that it indeed cares about Gaza’s civilian population. Establishing safe zones in areas already cleared of Hamas militants in northern Gaza is one place to start. Such a move, of course, is easier to talk about than to execute: it would require removing unexploded ordnance, setting up temporary housing, and providing basic sanitation, all under the continuing threat of attacks by Hamas and other groups. As important, it would need to overcome likely skepticism among war-devastated Gazans, who may conclude that such a move is not a true shift in policy but simply another Israeli military ploy. Nonetheless, these challenges are worth taking on, for in doing so, Israel could send an important, visible signal about its commitment to Gazans’ welfare.

Israel must take a big, tangible step to show that it indeed cares about Gaza’s civilian population.

Similarly, Israel needs to substantially expand humanitarian aid to Gaza. If Hamas is intercepting aid convoys, as Israel claims, then Israel should provide aid directly to the population—by having Israeli army units either protect those aid convoys or deliver the aid directly. Not only is that the morally right thing to do, but it is also the strategically prudent option. From a public relations standpoint, if nothing else, Israel would then be able to use the images of Israeli soldiers providing food to starving children or treating Gaza’s elderly to balance those of Israeli bombs destroying large swaths of Gaza.

Finally, Israel must offer some sort of vision for what will happen to Gaza after the war, and it should offer that vision now rather than delay the discussion until after the war. Such planning is operationally necessary, to avoid the kinds of troubles that befell the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq following the invasion of those countries and the toppling of their regimes. But it is diplomatically necessary, too. Friendly Arab states have predicated reconstruction assistance on such a plan. But beyond these considerations, making public a postwar plan is essential to convincing both the Palestinians and the world at large that Israel does not plan to evict Gazans from the strip when the fighting stops.

Israel will likely never be able to fully win hearts and minds in Gaza. Given all the bloodshed of this war and previous ones, decades of indoctrination in Gaza’s schools, the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the stalled peace process, and the fraught history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the animosity will persist for quite some time. But Israel can limit its ongoing losses and, crucially, in the process, buy itself more time.

3.5 MILLION HEARTS AND MINDS

Historically, Israel’s strategic shortcomings in Gaza have been driven in large measure by the idea that Israel could deal with the military threat of Hamas without simultaneously addressing the deeper causes of Palestinian grievances. Ever since it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, perhaps even earlier, Israel has viewed the economic and political running of the strip—and the welfare of its population—as largely a Palestinian concern. Sure, Israel provided electricity, and it allowed Qatar, the United Nations, and other actors to provide humanitarian assistance. But from Israel’s perspective, the Palestinian Authority—and later Hamas—was ultimately responsible for Gazans. The rest of the world, however, has never seen Gaza that way. As long as there is no Palestinian state, Israel must realize that to outside observers, it owns the ultimate responsibility for governance.

This in part may account for the significant disconnect between the differing Israeli and Western assessments of Israel’s military campaign today. For many Israelis, the campaign in Gaza has had considerable success, given the progress made in dismantling Hamas’s infrastructure. To many Western observers, on the other hand, the war has been mostly a failure because of the extraordinary destruction it has wrought within Gaza. But the two issues—the welfare of Gazans and the destruction of Hamas—are fundamentally intertwined. If Israel wants to maintain what Netanyahu has called “overall security responsibility” of Gaza, it must also assume responsibility for Gazan wellbeing. Ultimately, if Swords of Iron is to be successful, Israel needs to solve not just its 3,000 and 30,000 problems, but its 3.5 million one, too.

• RAPHAEL S. COHEN is Director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program of RAND’s Project Air Force and a co-author of From Cast Lead to Protective Edge: Lessons from Israel’s Wars in Gaza.

Foreign Affairs · by From Cast Lead to Protective Edge: Lessons from Israel’s Wars in Gaza · February 16, 2024

18. The Taiwan Catastrophe

Excerpts:

In his memoirs, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower envisioned a dangerous chain reaction that Taiwan’s fall would trigger: “The future security of Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and even Okinawa would be placed in jeopardy and the United States’ vital interests would suffer severely.” Consequences that already looked dangerous when Ike was in the White House 65 years ago would be far more dire today. Taiwan’s annexation in the face of U.S. inaction or ineffective action would present U.S. allies in Asia and Europe with a nightmare they have never faced before: Washington proving unable to protect a polity that is an ally in all but name.

Autocracy would surge ahead in the global contest of systems. An illiberal, China-centric world order could supplant the liberal, U.S.-led system that for 80 years has underpinned remarkable improvement in the human condition. This shift would curtail trade, limit India’s development, and crimp middle powers, including important U.S. allies. Moreover, China’s quest for domination abroad would cement autocracy at home, shrinking the prospects for its own population. The stage for future warfare would be set.

Taiwan is in a sense the West Berlin of the new cold war unfolding between Beijing and the free world. It is an outpost of liberty, prosperity, and democracy living in the shadow of an authoritarian superpower. Just as Stalin tested the free world 76 years ago by blockading Berlin, Xi is now testing it with rising pressure on Taiwan. Back then, U.S. leadership and major investment galvanized a four-decade multinational commitment to keep West Berlin and West Germany free. The stakes are equally stark today with Taiwan—and there is no time left to waste.

The Taiwan Catastrophe

Foreign Affairs · by Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel B. Collins, and Matt Pottinger · February 16, 2024

Washington and its allies face many potential geopolitical catastrophes over the next decade, but nearly all pale in comparison to what would ensue if China annexed or invaded Taiwan. Such an outcome, one U.S. official put it, “would be a disaster of utmost importance to the United States, and I am convinced that time is of the essence.” That was General Douglas MacArthur in June 1950, then overseeing occupied Japan and worrying in a top-secret memo to Washington about the prospect that the Communists in China might seek to vanquish their Nationalist enemies once and for all. More than 70 years later, MacArthur’s words ring truer than ever.

Then, as now, Taiwan’s geography matters. A self-governing Taiwan anchors Japan’s defense and denies China a springboard from which it could threaten U.S. allies in the western Pacific. But unlike in the 1950s, when Taiwan was under the authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-Shek, today the island is a full-blown liberal democracy—whose subjugation to Beijing’s totalitarianism would hinder democratic aspirations across the region, including in China itself. And unlike in MacArthur’s time, Taiwan today is economically crucial to the rest of the world, by virtue of its role as the primary producer of advanced microchips. A war over the island could easily cause a global depression. Yet another key difference between MacArthur’s time and today is the flourishing of a wide network of U.S. allies across the Indo-Pacific, countries that rely on U.S. support for their security. A Chinese seizure of Taiwan could trigger a race among nations to develop their own nuclear arsenals as U.S. security guarantees lost credibility.

In recent years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has shown an impatient determination to resolve Taiwan’s status in a way his predecessors never did. He has ordered a meteoric military buildup, instructing Chinese forces to give him by 2027 a full range of options for unifying Taiwan. These signals are triggering debate in Washington and elsewhere about whether Taiwan is strategically and economically important enough to merit protection through the most challenging of contingencies. But make no mistake: whether one cares about the future of democracy in Asia or prefers to ponder only the cold math of realpolitik, Taiwan’s fate matters.

DEFENDING DEMOCRACY

When MacArthur wrote his memo in June 1950, Communist insurgencies were convulsing Southeast Asia, and the Korean Peninsula was teetering on the brink of war. The military utility of Taiwan—then called Formosa in the West—beckoned. “Formosa in the hands of the Communists,” he wrote, “can be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender [a ship that supplies submarines] ideally located to accomplish Soviet offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate counteroffensive operations by United States Forces based on Okinawa and the Philippines.” MacArthur explained how Imperial Japan, which ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, had used the island as “a springboard for military aggression” beyond East Asia and warned that Communist forces could do the same.

But MacArthur was thinking about far more than basing, emphasizing that Taiwan’s people should be offered “an opportunity to develop their own political future in an atmosphere unfettered by the dictates of a Communist police state.” He even highlighted Taiwan’s importance as a net exporter of food in postwar Asia and as a future “prosperous economic unit.”

The dynamics MacArthur highlighted remain relevant today, some more than ever. Eventually, Taiwan’s citizens did indeed seize the opportunity “to develop their own political future” by building a full-fledged democracy off China’s coast. If that system were extinguished, Beijing would have erased the world’s first liberal democracy whose founders include many people of Chinese heritage—and, with it, living proof that there is a workable, appealing alternative to Beijing’s totalitarianism. In 1996, the Taiwanese voted for the first time to directly elect their president, whose maximum tenure was newly shortened from two six-year terms to two four-year terms. Four years later, they elected an opposition-party president, ending the political monopoly of the Kuomintang party, which had ruled the island since 1945. Over the past two-plus decades, democracy has only deepened its roots in Taiwan, which enjoys an orderly transition of political power every four to eight years.

Taiwan is ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit as the world’s eighth-most “fully democratic” polity, ahead of every country in Asia and even the much older democracies of the United Kingdom and the United States. Its people enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of association. Taiwan also has one of the most economically equitable societies anywhere, with a relatively low disparity in income distribution despite having among the highest median incomes. Its per capita GDP overtook Japan’s in 2023.

Over the past two-plus decades, democracy has deepened its roots in Taiwan.

Taiwan ranks sixth in the world for gender equality, according to a UN Development Program index. Women hold more than 40 percent of seats in Taiwan’s national legislature, the highest percentage in Asia and well ahead of the United States, where just 28 percent of members of Congress are women. Taiwanese have twice elected a female president, several of its leading cities are led by female mayors, and the incoming vice president is female. Taiwan’s respect for the rights of indigenous peoples (with designated legislative seats) and minority groups stands out, too. In 2019, Taiwan became the first society in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.

Taiwan is a democratic standout in another important respect: its faith in democracy is growing at a time when many democracies are doubting their system of government. A Taiwan Foundation for Democracy poll in 2023 found that three-quarters of Taiwanese believe that although there are problems with democracy, it remains the best system. And in a refreshing contrast with the United States, younger people were especially likely to hold that view.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of Taiwan’s strong democracy, given the political realities just across the Taiwan Strait, where more than 1.4 billion people sharing many linguistic and cultural traditions are subject to totalitarian rule. Numerous Chinese citizens draw inspiration from Taiwan’s political transition from martial law to democracy, which offers a model for what China could become. Fearing precisely such a result, officials in Beijing have long tried to caricature Taiwan as slavishly imitating Western forms of governance. But it is actually the Chinese Communist Party that is doing so by clinging to its Marxist-Leninist system, a discredited political model imported from Europe. A Chinese street protestor caught on video in late 2022 highlighted the absurdity of the accusation that he was manipulated by foreign forces. “What ‘foreign forces’ are you referring to?” he asked. “Is it Marx and Engels? Is it Stalin? Is it Lenin?”

The loss of Taiwan as a democratic alternative would end the experiment with popular, multiparty self-governance by a society with significant Chinese heritage, with bad tidings for the possibility of democracy in China and far beyond.

CHIP WARS

A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would devastate semiconductor manufacturing—the backbone of almost every strategically important industry today and the lifeblood of our big data world. The planet now produces approximately $600 billion worth of chips each year. Those chips end up in products—from smartphones to cars to supercomputers—that are collectively worth multiple trillions of dollars, and the services delivered by these devices amount to tens of trillions annually. The very latest generation chips (those with circuits five nanometers or smaller) are produced in only two places: Taiwan (by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC) and, to a much lesser extent, South Korea (by Samsung). Taiwan now accounts for roughly half of the global production capacity for all semiconductors and a much higher proportion—perhaps 90 percent—for the most advanced chips. Put differently, Taiwan’s market share for advanced semiconductors is roughly twice the share of oil produced by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Much as cheap Russian energy fueled German industry for decades, so, too, have abundant Taiwanese semiconductors propelled global technological progress, the artificial intelligence boom, and the rise of trillion-dollar U.S. tech titans such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Thanks largely to Taiwanese manufacturers’ efficiency gains, the unit costs of computing power have fallen exponentially in recent decades. The cutting-edge chips that are (or will be) used in Apple’s latest generation smartphones, for instance, now cost less than $100 apiece. Combining high-powered computing capabilities with low unit costs generates a virtuous cycle of discovery and productivity. As Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and chair of Google, put it in Foreign Affairs last year, “Faster airplanes did not build faster airplanes, but faster computers will help build faster computers.”

The loss of Taiwanese chips would shatter that cycle. Unlike with oil and gas, commodities whose source can be switched with relative ease, no such fungibility exists for high-end semiconductors. It would take years to build and activate high-end chip production facilities to replace Taiwanese foundries. Each month of delay in resuming chip supplies at pre-crisis levels would cause compounding global economic losses and stall progress in critical fields, from medicine to materials science. In a best-case scenario, inferior, far less energy-efficient substitutes would require massively increased electricity use merely to keep society functioning. In the more likely scenario, global computing power would effectively be capped for a prolonged period, wreaking profound economic and political damage.

Losing access to Taiwanese semiconductors would shave five to ten percent off U.S. GDP.

Even if China captured Taiwanese foundries intact, they would probably struggle mightily to reach prewar production levels. Disruptions to electricity, software updates, and the supply of foreign equipment, maintenance, and engineering—not to mention the likely flight overseas by many of Taiwan’s most knowledgeable semiconductor experts—would throttle Taiwan’s chip factories. For months or even years, occupied production facilities would face grave difficulties, especially given the postwar economic sanctions that the world’s democracies would impose.

The global economic convulsion that would follow an interruption of Taiwanese chips could well exceed those caused by the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has estimated that losing access to Taiwanese semiconductors would shave five to ten percent off U.S. GDP. “It’s an immediate Great Depression,” he assessed in 2022.

If Taiwan’s chip factories somehow remained intact and operational, Beijing would control virtually the entire world’s supply of the most advanced semiconductors. If, on the other hand, they struggled to resume operations, as is more likely, the world would have to settle for much inferior older-generation chips—of which China is on track to become the largest producer.

Certainly, China’s economy would suffer major setbacks if Taiwan’s high-end chips disappeared from global markets. But so would the economies of the rest of the industrialized world. Beijing’s Marxist-Leninist rulers, who regard power as zero-sum, may consider this a price worth paying—especially if China ultimately emerged as the world’s leading chip producer. Indeed, Xi and his advisers might plausibly conclude that China could weather, and ultimately leverage, such a Taiwanese production halt better than any other country.

FROM ORDER TO DISORDER

Whether through outright war or intense coercion, Chinese annexation of Taiwan against the will of its 24 million people would disrupt the global order in ways unseen since World War II. For starters, Beijing might not stop after annexing Taiwan. As Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated in Ukraine, the leaders of revanchist powers are not known for appetite suppression. China is grabbing land in Bhutan and engages in border skirmishes with India. It pursues disputes with all its maritime neighbors. It is actively challenging Japan’s claims over the islands that Tokyo administers and calls the Senkaku (and which China calls the Diaoyu), as well as the territorial claims of five other governments in the South China Sea. Ominously, official maps, propaganda, and statements question the legitimacy of Japanese sovereignty over the Ryukyu island chain—including Okinawa—and of Russia’s control over parts of its far east.

Japan would be in a far weaker position to defend its territory were Taiwan under Beijing’s control. Japan’s defensive strategy relies on the ability to threaten People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces that approach, penetrate, or venture beyond the “first island chain,” the long string of Pacific archipelagoes that includes Japan and Taiwan. To ensure Japan’s security, the entire chain must remain in friendly hands. If Taiwan hosted PLA bases—the “unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender” MacArthur warned of—Japan would become acutely insecure. PLA doctrine stresses precisely this point. As one air force textbook emphasizes, “As soon as Taiwan is reunified with mainland China, Japan’s maritime lines of communication will fall completely within the striking ranges of China’s fighters and bombers.” China made its capabilities clear during extensive PLA exercises in August 2022, when one of several ballistic missiles it fired landed in the water near Japan’s Yonaguni Island, only 68 miles from Taiwan.

The fall of Taiwan would be even worse for the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. Beijing would have the power to complicate U.S. access to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean—the littoral of the most populous, economically active part of the world. The United States could begin to resemble, as the diplomat Henry Kissinger once put it to one of us (Pottinger), “an island off the coast of the world.”

Worse, by establishing an indisputably dominant position in East Asia, Xi could pursue preeminence globally. The military resources, planning, and training that have long been concentrated on taking Taiwan could, following a successful annexation, be used for projecting power throughout continental Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. China could even attempt to make inroads in the Atlantic Ocean, where the PLA already operates tracking, telemetry, and command stations in Namibia and Argentina. Equatorial Guinea, Angola, and Gabon are among the 19-odd countries with which Beijing has been pursuing military facilities beyond the ones it already has in Djibouti and Cambodia. America’s own history shows how achieving regional preeminence facilitates global power projection. Only by dominating the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth century was the United States able to become a global superpower in the twentieth.

Members of Taiwan’s navy participating in a drill, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, January 2024

Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters

It is impossible to predict precisely how China might act as a global power, but decades of data suggest it would take a far less benign approach than the United States. At an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Vietnam in 2010, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, foreshadowed future bullying when he announced, “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.” Beijing followed suit with the de facto annexation and outright construction of territory throughout the South China Sea and a massive military buildup. China has declared its goal to become a “world-class” military and to use its armed forces to defend its interests wherever it defines them around the world. And those interests are set to expand, with Beijing having unveiled a “global security initiative,” a “global development initiative,” and a “global civilization initiative.” These sprawling programs promote Chinese-led alternatives to Western alliances and Western economic and political models. As a 2023 State Council document explains, they “showcase the global vision of the Communist Party of China.”

Herein lies a danger similar to the one U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt warned of in 1939: “So soon as one nation dominates Europe, that nation will be able to turn to the world sphere.” Today, Asia has replaced Europe as the world’s center of economic and technological gravity. The region’s domination by a hostile power today would be equally dangerous to U.S. interests. Asian countries would not eagerly accept Beijing’s diktats, but absent Washington’s intervention, their options would be limited. China alone commands an economy meaningfully larger than that of all its Asian neighbors combined, India included. China’s navy, meanwhile, boasts firepower second only to that of the U.S. Navy. And it is relatively concentrated: imagine if the entire U.S. naval fleet primarily operated in an arc from New York to New Orleans.

With a U.S. counterbalancer committed to freedom of navigation and economic access, all Asian countries can prosper—including China, as decades of economic growth demonstrate. But were China to annex Taiwan and proceed to push the United States out of Asia, even the most powerful countries would see their economic sovereignty and long-term national autonomy compromised.

THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM

At that point, another problem would arise: having lost faith in the United States’ security commitments, U.S. allies would face great incentives to develop their own nuclear weapons. Ever since China’s first nuclear test, in 1964, Washington has been able to dissuade most East and Southeast Asian countries from going nuclear. But an Asia reeling from the annexation of Taiwan would present very different circumstances and might send leaders scrambling to acquire nuclear armaments to protect themselves.

Japan has the shortest path to developing nuclear weapons, boasting both its own facilities for processing nuclear fuel and what is likely the world’s largest plutonium stockpile. In February 2022, months before he was assassinated, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe raised the idea of Japan engaging in “nuclear sharing,” proposing something similar to the arrangements Washington has with a number of NATO allies, whereby nuclear weapons are stored on bases in the host country but under U.S. control. But Japan could go further and develop its own independent capability. In the words of Vipin Narang, a political scientist now serving as an official in the Pentagon, Japan has “a very real, and potentially swift, pathway to a nuclear weapons arsenal in the event of a rapid deterioration of Japan’s security environment.”

South Korea, for its part, has a world-class civilian nuclear program, with 26 reactors in service. Although the country currently lacks the domestic enrichment or reprocessing facilities required to build nuclear weapons, its politicians openly debate the question of whether to develop a nuclear arsenal. And given South Korea’s world-class scientific expertise and industrial base, Seoul could doubtless fashion deployable fission devices within a handful of years if it so chose.

China’s annexation of Taiwan might send leaders in Asia scrambling to acquire nuclear armaments.

Were Japan or South Korea to go nuclear, the effects might not stop there. Leaders in Beijing might conclude that they needed considerably more than the 1,500 warheads China is expected to have by 2035. Should China decide to expand its arsenal, both the United States and Russia would likely seek to expand their arsenals, too. India would probably follow suit; indeed, there are already signs that it is considering doing so. In December 2022, India tested an updated version of its Agni-5 ballistic missile, whose range exceeds 4,000 miles—sufficient to reach all of China. If India expanded its nuclear stockpile, historical patterns suggest its archrival, Pakistan, would likely seek parity.

Asian nuclear proliferation could even spill over into the Middle East, where Iran continues to edge closer to breakout capability. If two of the United States’ closest Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, became nuclear weapons states, it would be functionally impossible for Washington to secure a multinational coalition to punish Iran for building a bomb—something Iran might be more tempted to try in the chaos that would follow a takeover of Taiwan. If Iran went nuclear, Saudi Arabia would almost certainly do so, too, perhaps first through a stopgap sharing agreement with Pakistan and subsequently by developing a domestic production capability.

A nuclear cascade following a Chinese annexation of Taiwan could add hundreds of nuclear warheads or more to stockpiles globally. Decades of counterproliferation progress would be lost. Far better that this Pandora’s box were never opened in the first place.

ECONOMIC EXCLUSION

If China annexed Taiwan, the United States could well lose access to valuable trade and investment opportunities in Asia, severely damaging the U.S. economy. History shows that regional hegemons regularly restrict rivals’ economic prospects. In a 2018 Foreign Affairs article about “life in China’s Asia,” the political scientist Jennifer Lind noted that in their quest for regional dominance, such countries “develop and wield tremendous economic power.” They also “build massive militaries, expel external rivals, and use regional institutions and cultural programs to entrench their influence.”

In case this sort of behavior sounds alien, consider the United States’ own efforts in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century to enforce the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and extirpate European influence from the Western Hemisphere. Motivated by a fear of European entry (or re-entry in some cases), Washington engaged in all manner of aggressive behavior: buying out debts owed to European banks, deploying warships in the Caribbean, toppling governments, and intervening militarily. Unlike a fledgling United States, a China buoyed by possession of Taiwan would have the economic and military means to immediately enforce its own Monroe Doctrine. And unlike today’s United States, China under Xi does not accept the postwar rules and norms that safeguard the sovereignty of a superpower’s neighbor, no matter its size.

Chinese attempts to hive off Asia, the world’s largest, most dynamic economic region, would deal a devastating blow to U.S. economic interests. East Asia and the Pacific account for one-third of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms, a share roughly twice that of the United States. The region’s vibrant, open trading networks would likely degenerate into more of a hub-and-spoke system, with China as the hub and subjugated countries at the end of the spokes. In the worst-case scenario, the United States could lose access to trade volumes with its nine largest Asian trade partners other than China. This group’s two-way goods trade with the United States was nearly $940 billion in 2023—about 60 percent larger than the U.S. goods trade with China itself. U.S. investors might also lose out. In Asian countries besides China, particularly in Southeast Asia, the United States is one of the largest sources of invested capital. Americans have plowed untold sums into factories, data centers, and real estate properties throughout the region. Because these and other brick-and-mortar infrastructure are physically immovable, they would be vulnerable to forced changes of ownership under Chinese coercion.

A China that had annexed Taiwan might also accelerate efforts to have other Asian countries reduce their reliance on the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. Most governments in the region would prefer not to be forced to choose between the dollar and yuan, just as many of them have tried to avoid taking sides on the broader competition between the United States and China. But a less constrained Beijing could plausibly seek to abolish such a middle course, pushing its trading partners to more widely use yuan in their economies and kicking off a regionwide de-dollarization.

THE NEW WEST BERLIN

In his memoirs, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower envisioned a dangerous chain reaction that Taiwan’s fall would trigger: “The future security of Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and even Okinawa would be placed in jeopardy and the United States’ vital interests would suffer severely.” Consequences that already looked dangerous when Ike was in the White House 65 years ago would be far more dire today. Taiwan’s annexation in the face of U.S. inaction or ineffective action would present U.S. allies in Asia and Europe with a nightmare they have never faced before: Washington proving unable to protect a polity that is an ally in all but name.

Autocracy would surge ahead in the global contest of systems. An illiberal, China-centric world order could supplant the liberal, U.S.-led system that for 80 years has underpinned remarkable improvement in the human condition. This shift would curtail trade, limit India’s development, and crimp middle powers, including important U.S. allies. Moreover, China’s quest for domination abroad would cement autocracy at home, shrinking the prospects for its own population. The stage for future warfare would be set.

Taiwan is in a sense the West Berlin of the new cold war unfolding between Beijing and the free world. It is an outpost of liberty, prosperity, and democracy living in the shadow of an authoritarian superpower. Just as Stalin tested the free world 76 years ago by blockading Berlin, Xi is now testing it with rising pressure on Taiwan. Back then, U.S. leadership and major investment galvanized a four-decade multinational commitment to keep West Berlin and West Germany free. The stakes are equally stark today with Taiwan—and there is no time left to waste.

• ANDREW S. ERICKSON is Professor of Strategy in the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute and a Visiting Scholar in Harvard University’s Government Department.
• GABRIEL B. COLLINS is a Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Center for Energy Studies, and heads the center’s Program on Energy & Geopolitics in Eurasia.
• MATT POTTINGER served as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser from 2019 to 2021 and is editor of the forthcoming book The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel B. Collins, and Matt Pottinger · February 16, 2024

19. NEWSFLASH: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dead in government custody

NEWSFLASH: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dead in government custody

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/newsflash-russian-opposition-leader?utm

Ross breaks down the implications for Ukraine, and what many Ukrainians think of him.

ROSS PELEKH

FEB 16, 2024

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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and other demonstrators march in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in downtown Moscow on February 29, 2020. (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died at the age of 47. 

The Russian prison service said that he had fallen unconscious after taking a walk, and could not be revived. He had been held, many times in isolation, in a penal facility 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle. 

The death comes approximately one month before Russia is scheduled to have presidential elections, which are not expected to be free and fair. 

The President of Latvia calls Navalny’s death a brutal murder.

At the moment of writing the piece, I already see that Russian Wikipedia is updated with Navalny's death date. 

After being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent, falling into a coma, and seeking medical treatment in Germany, Navalny decided to return to Russia. 

He arrived in Moscow in January 2021 and was immediately detained. Returning to Russia and facing an absolutely fabricated case… he knew how the Russian system deals with its enemies.

But he returned anyway. And it didn’t work. 

The rest of the world responded with some warnings, and imposed some sanctions on people who were involved in Navalny’s poisoning. Russians opposed to Putin did a couple of protests and, after being humbled by security forces, and the demonstrations flamed out. 

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears on a screen set up at a courtroom of the Moscow City Court via a video link from his prison colony on May 17, 2022. (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)

And the world slowly started to forget.

Only small bits of news about Navalny appeared in the Ukrainian or Russian media space, and only from time to time. He popped up when he was moved to another facility or Navalny himself released some rare thoughts through his lawyer. 

The news about Navalny’s death without a doubt shook the Ukrainian and Russian media space. But it is not news that will have some effect on the frontline neither for us, nor Russians.

Aleksiy Navalny was a big name in the Russian opposition, and to see how one such figure so blatantly dies in prison weeks before elections in Russia is itself indicative of the Putin regime’s arrogance.

Putin’s spokesperson Dmitriy Peskov said, in short comments, that it is the job of official authorities to investigate, confirm and speak about the case, and that the Kremlin does not possess any information about circumstances of his death. 

Ukrainians reaction to this news is rather indifferent. 

At this stage of the war for most of Ukrainians, it’s just another dead Russian. We stopped to differentiate between them a long time ago.

Alexei paid for his moral choice with two years of cold walls and torture, all for the sake of the Russian people.

Navalny had many words that would never make him a friend of Ukraine, no matter how valiantly he would stand in opposition to Putin. 

And we can have different opinions on his personality, but it is without a doubt that his decision was not an easy one, and one that requires character. 

And decisions like that rarely go without consequences. 

20. Meta takes down Chinese Facebook accounts posing as US military families

Meta takes down Chinese Facebook accounts posing as US military families

The accounts posted about aircraft carriers and Taiwan.

Karissa Bell·Senior Editor

Wed, 14 February 2024 at 11:00 am GMT-5·2-min read

au.finance.yahoo.com

Meta has taken down a network of fake accounts that posed as US military families and anti-war activists. The fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram originated in China and targeted US audiences, according to the company’s security researchers.

Meta detailed the takedowns in its latest report on coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB). The cluster of fake accounts was relatively small — 33 Facebook accounts, four Instagram profiles, six pages and six groups on Facebook. The accounts posted about US aircraft carriers and other “military themes,” as well as “criticism of US foreign policy towards Taiwan and Israel and its support of Ukraine,” Meta wrote in its report.

The group also ran accounts on YouTube and Medium and shared an online petition “claiming to have been written by Americans to criticize US support for Taiwan.” The company’s researchers said the fake accounts originated in China, but didn’t attribute the effort to a specific entity or group. During a call with reporters, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead Ben Nimmo said that there has been a rise in China-based influence operations over the last year.

“The greatest change in the threat landscape,” Nimmo said, “has been this emergence of Chinese influence operations.” Nimmo said. He noted that Meta has taken down 10 CIB networks originating in China since 2017, but that six of those takedowns came in the last year. Last summer, Meta discovered and removed an especially large network of thousands of fake accounts that attempted to spread pro-China propaganda messages on the platform.

In both cases, the fake accounts were apparently unsuccessful at spreading their message. The latest network only managed to reach about 3,000 Facebook accounts, according to Meta, and the two Instagram pages had no followers at the time they were discovered.

Still, Meta’s researchers note that attempts like this will likely continue ahead of the 2024 election and that people with large audiences should be wary of resharing unverified information. “Our threat research shows that, historically, the main way that CIB networks get through to authentic communities is when they manage to co-opt real people — politicians, journalists or influencers — and tap into their audiences,” the report says. “Reputable opinion-makers represent an attractive target and should exercise caution before amplifying information from unverified sources, particularly ahead of major elections.”

au.finance.yahoo.com

21. Opinion: The Plan Biden Needs to Present to Congress

Opinion: The Plan Biden Needs to Present to Congress

With the US Congress preventing the Biden administration from mustering the support Ukraine needs to fight Russia, it’s time for a concerted effort from the “leader of the free world.”

By Jonathan Sweet

By Mark Toth

February 16, 2024, 10:56 am

kyivpost.com · by Jonathan Sweet, Mark Toth · February 16, 2024

As the saying goes, “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem” – and Washington, we have a problem.

The White House, Senate, House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats – instead of airing their Festivus-like grievances towards one another in the media, should be huddled in the Oval Office coming up with a solution. Country must prevail over party. Lives and democracies are at risk.

In a little over one-week, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine will enter its third year.

In February 2022, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley gave Ukraine 72 hours before capitulating. The United States offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his family to safety. His response would immortalize him and fuel Ukraine to resist the Russian invader: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

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And that is exactly what the US and NATO did. They came to the defense of a democracy in peril, providing weapons, ammunition, training, intelligence, humanitarian assistance and assurances that they would “stand by Ukraine.”

America was united. During his first State of the Union speech President Biden called upon members of Congress – Democrats and Republicans – to stand in the House chamber in a show of support for Ukraine. He stated: “Let each of us here tonight in this Chamber… send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world… We, the United States of America, stand with the Ukrainian people.” He added: “This is a real test. And it’s going to take time. So let us continue to draw inspiration from the iron will of the Ukrainian people. To our fellow Ukrainian-Americans who forged a deep bond that connects our two nations, we stand with you.”

Other Topics of Interest

FBI Informant on Trial for Lying About Biden’s Ukraine Links

The case against Biden, now being used by Republicans to impeach him, hinges on Alexander Smirnov’s claims that the President and his son received money from a Ukrainian company.

But that was two years ago – standing has a time limit in Washington; Presidential elections complicate things.

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Our government is stuck on stupid.

The House voted against funding Ukraine, Israel and securing the border along party lines. House Democrats voted no on a $17.6 billion stand-alone Israel aid bill. The Senate just passed a $95 billion national security supplemental package that provides funding to “Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific,” with 22 Republicans voting yes, and Democratic Senators Peter Welch and Jeff Merkley, along with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, voting no. The supplemental package does not include any border security provisions and is not likely to survive in the House. Our government is stuck on stupid.

Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), are wary of another “forever war.” Their position is further complicated by an unsecured southern border and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, not to mention Houthi threats to commercial shipping and US Navy ships in the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden, and Iranian proxies throughout the region attacking US bases – 170 since October 18.

Bundling this “trifecta of inaction” has become an impossible task. Washington must focus on the “wolf closest to the sled” – Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine poses the most significant threat to the US. A Russian victory threatens eastern Europe – Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland. All NATO countries who are not likely to stand idly by as Russia resets.

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Despite Putin’s assurances to Tucker Carlson last week that he “had no interest in attacking countries on NATO’s eastern flank,” he said that once about Ukraine too. Putin’s word is worthless – wanting to believe him again is foolhardy.

As Biden stated in Warsaw, Poland in March 2022: “We have a sacred obligation under Article 5 to defend each and every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.” The U.S. would likely be drawn into a war with Russia should Ukraine fall. Supporting a Ukrainian victory today ultimately saves American lives later.

The White House must acknowledge that “defend Ukraine” and “weaken Russia” have run their course. American support to Ukraine has not transitioned with the situation on the ground.

The White House must articulate a winning strategy for Ukraine. The killing stops when Russia is defeated. The President, our nation’s Commander-in-Chief, needs to become part of the solution. That begins with a plan, and a message – to the American people, Ukraine, NATO and Russia – America supports a Ukrainian victory.

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Defensive weapons are not going to win this war. They will, however, extend it. As Gen. George S. Patton said, “Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

Ukrainians have demonstrated their ability to kill Russians and destroy their equipment – having eliminated 395,990 Russian soldiers since Feb. 24, 2022. They simply lack the offensive capability right now to decisively expel Russian forces from their country.

The President needs to throw the weight of the US behind Zelensky and his new Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky. Where America leads, others (NATO) will follow, and still others (Iran, China, North Korea) will take notice.

It begins with a plan – US Support to Victory in Ukraine – and would be delivered in four phases.

The President needs a plan – the free world is looking towards America for leadership. It is time to deliver.

Phase I is the messaging and begins with the President declaring his intent to support a Ukrainian victory in a speech from the Oval Office. This gives the President a platform to sell the way ahead directly to the American people – and puts Congress and Russia on notice.

The President must make three additional points. The first, his intent to activate the defense industrial complex to begin maximum production of critical ammunition and weapon systems to replenish wartime stocks and immediate shipment to Ukraine. He would also announce his intent to pull salvageable M1 Abrams tanks and Bradly infantry fighting vehicles from existing stockpiles in boneyards such as the Anniston Army Depot and the Sierra Army Depot. These refurbished weapons are fully capable of taking on Russian T-55/62 tanks, along with the BMP-1/2 infantry fighting vehicles currently deployed in Ukraine.

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The second would be the creation of a Presidential Advisory Council for the War in Ukraine, consisting of retired Flag Officers who spent their careers preparing to fight the Russian Army. Army Generals the likes of McCaffrey, Keane, Petraeus, Hodges, Hurtling, and Kellogg. Air Force Gen. Breedlove, Navy Adm. Stavridis, and Marine Corps Generals Kelly and Mathis.

The third would be his support for Ukraine’s rapid accession into the NATO alliance after Russian forces have been defeated and removed from the country.

Phase II is the immediate delivery of critical weapons systems and ammunition needed now to defend Ukraine: 155mm artillery, HIMARS munitions, Patriot missiles, Stinger missiles, small arms, Javelin missiles, drones, cluster munitions, etc., required to hold off the relentless “meat assaults” in Avdiivka.

Phase III is the buildup of combat power, training, and logistical support necessary to re-launch their offensive. It would include ATACMS, fighter jets, ground launched small diameter bombs, cluster munitions, engineering equipment, etc. This provides precision deep strike capability to shape the battlefield, interdict Russian supply lines, defeat Russian missile/drone attacks at the point of origin, make the Crimean Peninsula untenable, and affords no sanctuary for Russian troops, their equipment, or their commanders in Russia.

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Phase IV is support to the Ukrainian offensive. This begins in Phase I and runs throughout the plan. It involves joint planning with Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky’s staff, intelligence sharing, logistical sustainment, and battlefield assessments.

The President needs a timeline and a cost estimate. He needs to identify the specific weapons that will be provided to win the war and provide a clear end state. He needs a plan – the free world is looking towards America for leadership. It is time to deliver.

Copyright 2023. Jonathan E. Sweet and Mark C. Toth. All rights reserved.

Jonathan Sweet, a retired Army colonel, served 30 years as a military intelligence officer. His background includes tours of duty with the 101st Airborne Division and the Intelligence and Security Command. He led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012-14, working with NATO partners in the Black Sea and Baltics. Follow him on Twitter @JESweet2022.

Mark Toth is a retired economist and entrepreneur who has worked in banking, insurance, publishing, and global commerce. He is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis, and has lived in U.S. diplomatic and military communities around the world, including London, Tel Aviv, Augsburg, and Nagoya. Follow him on Twitter @MCTothSTL.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

kyivpost.com · by Jonathan Sweet, Mark Toth · February 16, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com