Quotes of the Day:
"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."
- Coco Chanel
"For it is fixed principle with me, that whatever is done should be done well."
- George Washington
"Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to successful life."
- Theodore Roosevelt
1. Russia-Ukraine Warning Update: New Indicators of Imminent Russian Attack
2. ‘Kill Your Commanding Officer’: On the Front Lines of Putin’s Digital War With Ukraine
3. Russia’s Propaganda & Disinformation Ecosystem - 2022 Update & New Disclosures
4. Beijing Could Run Russia’s Playbook on Taiwan
5. Even an ‘Asia First’ Strategy Needs to Deter Russia in Ukraine
6. Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China
7. Applying War College Lessons To The Crisis In Ukraine: A Narrow Window?
8. US to provide more aid to AFP
9. Romania: NATO's Next Strategic Frontier?
10. Enabling Resistance: Canada's Opportunity in Great Power Competition
11. Russia Planning Post-Invasion Arrest and Assassination Campaign in Ukraine, U.S. Officials Say
12. “If Ukraine Matters, Tell Us Why”: Joe Biden Is Talking to Everyone Except the American People
13. Will Biden’s ‘Severe Costs’ on Russia Include Cyber Attacks?
14. Europe's Gordian Knot
15. Ukrainian commander: Russia will encounter 100,000 citizen resisters if it invades
16. How false flag operations work and Russia's history of using them
17. Austin Says Current Operations Give Hints of New National Defense Strategy
18. Can we please stop talking about domains?
19. Ukraine Risks Becoming a Case Study of Liberalization Lost0.
20. What makes 2 of the world's toughest special-operations courses so tough, according to troops who've endured them
1. Russia-Ukraine Warning Update: New Indicators of Imminent Russian Attack
RUSSIA-UKRAINE WARNING UPDATE: NEW INDICATORS OF IMMINENT RUSSIAN ATTACK
Russia-Ukraine Warning Update: New Indicators of Imminent Russian Attack
By Fredrick W. Kagan and Mason Clark
February 18, 2022, 2:00 pm ET
Russia may launch an attack on Ukraine on Saturday, February 19, 2022. The attack would likely begin with an air and missile campaign targeting much of Ukraine to decapitate the government and degrade the Ukrainian military as well as the ability of Ukrainian citizens to prepare to resist a subsequent Russian invasion. US and allied governments have been warning of such an attack for some days, pointing to the size of the Russian forces concentrated on Ukraine’s borders.[1] Western officials have additionally said that Russian troops have moved to jumping-off positions for an invasion over the past 24 hours. The following additional conditions and indicators point to February 19 as an optimal date for a Russian attack:
1. Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky will be in Germany at the Munich Security Conference. He is scheduled to speak at 1530 Munich time.[2]
- His absence from Ukraine will degrade his ability to coordinate a response to any Russian attack and create more propitious circumstances for a Russian-sponsored attempt at a coup d’etat.
- Russian forces could close Ukrainian airspace to prevent Zelensky from returning to Kyiv.
2. Russian President Vladimir Putin will reportedly oversee Russian nuclear drills on Saturday, February 19, as well.[3]Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko will accompany Putin.
- Those drills are being conducted out of the usual exercise cycle and are clearly intended to deter any Western response to an attack.
- Putin and Lukashenko will observe the exercises from an unspecified “situational center” in Moscow, likely the Russian Ministry of Defense’s National Defense Control Center (NDCC). That would put them in the best position to oversee conventional military operations as well.
- Launching the attack during those drills would take maximal advantage of their deterrent effect.
3. Russian proxy provocations in eastern Ukraine have increased dramatically since February 16, including an artillery barrage that damaged a kindergarten in unoccupied Ukraine and multiple other proxy attacks.[4]
- Russian proxies have increased the frequency and drama of their claims of Ukrainian attacks on them as well as their false claims that Ukraine is preparing to invade occupied Donbas.
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Russia’s proxies in Donbas began evacuating civilians to Russia ahead of a claimed Ukrainian offensive.[5]
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Russian senior officials, including Putin, have been increasingly repeating and expanding on those claims this week.[6]
4. The proxy campaign is likely intended on the one hand to draw Ukrainian forces into a response that Russia would then claim to be an attack and, on the other, to use false flag attacks and outright disinformation to fabricate justifications for a Russian attack to “defend” “Russian citizens” in occupied Donbas. This rhetorical and kinetic activity has crossed thresholds pointing to the likelihood of an actual Russian attack.
This update reflects a change to our assessments and forecasts. We have previously assessed that Putin was setting conditions to move Russian forces overtly into occupied Donbas and possibly conduct a limited invasion in unoccupied southeastern Ukraine and/or an air/missile campaign. We now assess that those Russian activities are extremely likely and imminent and that a much larger-scale Russian invasion is very possible.
2. ‘Kill Your Commanding Officer’: On the Front Lines of Putin’s Digital War With Ukraine
This may be one of the most important lessons.
Excerpts:
Whether on the front lines or not, Ukrainians live with the constant knowledge that their systems and technology and borders are under siege, that at the moment of a military action against their country, the internet will likely go dark, their connection to the world severed.
“I have a feeling, a surrealistic feeling,” Oleksandra Matviychuk, who lives in Kyiv, told me. “On one hand, you try to continue your work, but on the other hand you go to medical training in order to learn to stop bleeding and how to make the go bags and do a lot of other things” — things like how to protect personal data and information. “We try to pretend we have a normal life,” she said, “but our normal life is ruined.”
‘Kill Your Commanding Officer’: On the Front Lines of Putin’s Digital War With Ukraine
For years, the Russians have used Ukraine as a proving ground for a new type of digital warfare. Is the West ready?
10 Days Inside Putin’s Invisible War With Ukraine
Politico · by Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs
Magazine
For years, the Russians have used Ukraine as a proving ground for a new type of digital warfare. Here’s what I saw on the front lines.
Soldiers in trenches in Zolote, Luhansk region. Photos by Sergey Korovayny for Politico Magazine
By Kenneth R. Rosen
02/15/2022 04:30 AM EST
Kenneth R. Rosen is an independent journalist based in Italy and the author, most recently, of .
ZOLOTE 4, Eastern Ukraine — On Wednesday, a few days before the U.S. pulled nearly all its diplomats from Kyiv from fear of a Russian attack, a 47-year-old Ukrainian soldier named Vita pulled back from the eyepiece of a Soviet-era periscope. Standing in a trench in ankle-high mud, she hugged an old Kalashnikov to her chest and stared out ahead.
The landscape in front of her was a strip of rolling hillside filled with buried landmines, all covered with a fresh coat of white snow. The tracks of a gray fox, stamped into the white overlay, were all that traversed the deadly stretch. The minefield is effectively the front line of a war that has never been declared — but has also been underway, in some form, for almost eight years.
On the far side of the minefield is the redoubt of pro-Russian separatists, currently occupying large swaths within the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, an area of Eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas. On Vita’s side is a warren of trenches 8 feet deep, dug by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and filled with soldiers and sandbags, with window frames forming a rough canopy overhead. To the north and south, the front line stretches a total of 280 miles.
Vita wore digital camouflage, lipstick and a pair of diamond earrings. (Like most of the soldiers I spoke with, she provided only a first name.) She let her thoughts drift from her 16-year-old son, currently living with his grandmother, to the gnawing boredom of patrol, her head rolling back slightly to glimpse the sky above. She’d been on the front for at least two years, serving in the 24th Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and was resigned to the silence of war and the potential for fatal whispers soaring overhead. In the trench beside her, next to a scrappy young Shepherd-mix panting at the sky, was a white antique side table. Vita placed the periscope on the table, inside the cabinet of which sat a hand grenade.
“There are a lot of snipers now, so we try not to go out,” Vita said. “You can’t see them from here. They’re too far away.”
A sign tacked to the trunk of a tree read, in Ukrainian, “Beware of the sniper! The enemy is watching you!” Several yards down the trench, through the muck of a recent snowmelt, across slippery duckboards into a dugout concealed by an ornate rug, two Ukrainian soldiers warmed themselves by a drumfire. Andrei, 21, who had been on the front for the past year and was not yet a teenager when the Russo-Ukrainian conflict began, lit a cigarette and checked his cellphone. “I don’t follow the news. I don’t worry much,” he said. “If there is a war, then there will be a war, and if not, then no.” On a ledge sat two Soviet-era, TA-57 hard-wire field telephones, the cables for which ran into a nest of wires, then out like runners along the trench parapets, spliced at times with electrical tape, curling toward positions elsewhere.
The old-fashioned setup, the soldiers tell me, is intentional. The high-tech Russian military, which has been supporting the Donbas separatists since the start of the conflict in 2014, can interfere with modern radios and cell-phone signals. Without special encrypted messaging devices that can evade Russian interference, the Ukrainians have resorted to cumbersome wires.
The Western world has been increasingly galvanized by the possibility of a hot war in the former Soviet Union. Over the past eight weeks, Moscow stepped up efforts to bring the total number of troops garrisoned at Ukraine’s borders to some 140,000, shipping troops from as far away as Siberia. If Russia invades, which American officials warn is possible in the next few days, Putin would be orchestrating Europe’s biggest land invasion since World War II; sources in Washington estimate as many as 50,000 civilian deaths.
But the daily life along the front line and of residents in cities and towns across the country is a clear reminder that the offensive has already begun — in fact it began years ago. The Russians have for nearly a decade used Ukraine as a proving ground for a new and highly advanced type of hybrid warfare — a digital-meets-traditional kind of fighting defined by a reliance on software, digital hardware and cognitive control that is highly effective, difficult to counter and can reach far beyond the front lines deep into Ukrainian society. It is a type of high-tech conflict that many military experts predict will define the future of war. It has also turned Ukraine, especially its eastern provinces, but also the capital, into a bewildering zone of instability, disinformation and anxiety.
The Russians and their proxies have used digital technology on the battlefield not only to assist artillery in rapidly acquiring and engaging targets, but also to disrupt communications and wage psychological warfare, like sending threatening text messages to soldiers. Beyond the front lines, Russian efforts have knocked out government websites and spread damaging disinformation in towns and cities across the country. Digital warfare has threatened more of Ukrainian society since 2021 than traditional munitions.
As they readied for a full-blown invasion, Ukrainian soldiers told me that Russian forces and Russia-supported proxies are better positioned than they have ever been to marry technology with a potential siege. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which deploys some 25 cameras along the contested border region’s front line, has steadily monitored an increase of Russian electronic warfare equipment in Donbas. (OSCE drones, which take flight to monitor ceasefire agreements, have themselves faced a recent increase in signal interference, from 16 percent at the start of last year to 58 percent by that spring, according to the agency’s reports.)
At the same time, cyberattacks on Ukrainian government websites are growing every quarter, according to Ukrainian officials. The Ukrainians “need to put focus on preparing for hybrid warfare to include cyber-attacks … and the use of social networks to undermine morale and confidence of their forces,” James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told me recently. “What I worry about the most is Ukrainian reliance on trench warfare in the face of a 21st century Russian force.”
Many in the U.S. military also worry about its own ability to go head-to-head with Russia’s style of hybrid warfare. The Russian government’s digital-savvy capabilities are nothing like that which the U.S. military contended with during the long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Syria.
Standing in a trench on a frigid day in February, along with the field telephones and periscopes, I found sticks with strips of cloth tied to their end to snuff out fires, brand-new collapsible stocks on early-model Kalashnikov rifles and handcarts with wire straps for hauling firewood: anachronisms that felt odd in the face of this new kind of warfare. As the soldiers waited for a possible invasion, the forward positions were quiet and largely devoid of rifle and artillery fire. Yet a digital incursion was ongoing, the war already unfolding in silence.
At a billet set a few yards back from the trenches outside a mining town in the Luhansk province, soldiers gathered behind a building, its windows blown out and replaced by mattresses and duvets crammed into holes in the shattered glass. The group laughed and talked, sliding on sheets of ice into mud beneath a camera tower perch raised several stories into the air. One man strutted between the buildings in olive thermal underwear and flip-flops. The mercury dipped below freezing.
Another man approached in digital camouflage, his hands bundled into the kangaroo pocket of a sweatshirt. He was part of a reconnaissance team. He ordered the soldiers who had their cell phone location turned on to switch it off, immediately. “Separatists radio devices are tuned into the units and are locating phones,” he said.
Another soldier added: “There was a situation recently. A dude gets a call from his mom and dad saying they got a message that, ‘Your son is dead.’ So people get scared. It happens a lot.”
The 24th Brigade first learned about the danger of carrying cell phones on the front lines years ago. On July 11, 2014, in the town of Zelenopillya, roughly five miles from the Ukrainian border with Russia, the brigade had planned to sever the supply line of the Donbas separatists when electronic warfare caught them by surprise. Witnesses described the scene to me: First there came the humming of an unmanned aerial vehicle able to clone cellular networks to locate active cellphones, followed by cyberattacks against Ukrainian command and control systems. Their communication systems disabled, Ukrainian forces were unable to coordinate with one another. Then, short-range rocket systems from inside Russia disabled two battalions, including T-64 tanks and amphibious tracked vehicles. Three trucks carrying troops exploded. Stumbling from the transport, one soldier clutched his entrails, and shouted for his mother. The attack killed 30 Ukrainians and wounded hundreds and lasted roughly two minutes.
Andri Rymaruk, 41, who served for 18 months in 2015 and 2016 as a private in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, had a few days earlier told me about how, during his active duty, he had received text messages from the Russian-backed separatists across no-man’s land.
“Soldier go home.”
“Soldier kill your commanding officer.”
“Surrender, we will defeat you anyway, this is our land and you are Ukrainian fascists.”
That was the last message Rymaruk received in spring 2016 while standing on the outskirts of Horlivka, a coal-mining, coke-producing city in Donetsk along the front line. By then Rymaruk was anticipating the end of his service. A few days after he received the message an endless fusillade tore through the unit. It was the first time Rymaruk saw his fellow soldiers killed. “I went around collecting their body parts in a blanket, tying them up and putting them in the car trunk and taking them to the morgue,” he recalled in an interview. “The medics couldn’t get there.”
Russian-supported forces could deploy such personalized propaganda and location tracking thanks to its use of UAVs but also its control of cellphone towers and the cellular companies that provide coverage to much of Ukraine. While Ukrainian officials and soldiers said they have tightened the security of their internal communications since 2014, like with the incorporation of L3Harris secure handheld radios sent by NATO and the U.S., vulnerabilities remain.
Meanwhile, the Russian military has relocated more electronic warfare equipment to the borders with Ukraine, such as the Leer-3 RB-341V, a drone-based system that can monitor cellular and data transmission networks, suppress wireless communications, locate electromagnetic emission sources and even send text messages to front-line soldiers.
The Ukrainian military has little equipment that can replicate or fight back against these attacks. Troops have for much of the conflict relied on generous volunteer donations and the efforts of non-government organizations for everything from tactical body armor to drones and anti-drone weapons and advanced reconnaissance camera systems. Without major government investment in equipment, Ukrainian service members and Western analysts doubt the military, and Ukraine more broadly, will be able to withstand sustained digital attacks that come with a Russian invasion.
“You can’t separate the military from the economy from the technology. That’s why they call it hybrid warfare. Russia, they own or operate Ukrainian cellular companies, banks, electricity,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told me. “They don’t need to hack anything. It’s a secret war conducted by agents of influence.”
Not needing to hack anything may be part of Russia’s military strategy, but hackers are also hard at work. Moscow has grown sophisticated in the seamlessness with which it incorporates cyberattacks into its military and social disruption tactics, stirring panic while occasionally causing serious damage that leads to infrastructure and financial losses. In 2014, as Russia illegally annexed Crimea, cyberattacks targeted communication and control elements of the Ukrainian military; on a larger scale, Ukraine’s voting system was hacked and hard drives fried. In 2017, a series of attacks orchestrated through a virus known as NotPetya inflicted $10 billion in damages. It first started as an attack against Ukrainian businesses before going global.
While large-scale attacks make headlines, smaller attacks contribute to a sustained disruption of municipal and government services and infrastructure. Ukraine was the victim of roughly 288,000 cyberattacks in the first 10 months of 2021, according to Ukrainian government official estimates. (As a comparison, traditional munitions were exchanged an average of 67 times each day in the Donbas region last year, according to the OSCE.) It’s unclear whether the attacks originate from the Kremlin, or Russian-backed hacker syndicates, or elsewhere, though many attacks have been attributed to Russia. Between January 13 and 14 this year, Ukrainian government websites were attacked, displaying nothing but a message from the hackers warning residents of Kyiv to “expect the worst.”
“Ukraine is on the front line of cyber aggression,” Victor Zhora, deputy chair of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, told me as he ran between meetings with parliament officials. He said the number of attacks grows by ten percent every quarter.
The government’s security service, which struggles to ward off these attacks, wants to centralize internet security in a push to shore up the country’s cyber defenses. But Ukraine’s private sector, which tends to pay more for talent and have more cyber expertise, is reluctant to collaborate on security with a government that has proven so vulnerable to incursion. It also hasn’t helped that Hungary has blocked Ukraine’s requests to join NATO’s cyber defense center. (Both countries have business interests with Russia.) Meanwhile, the country is preparing for a major cyber offensive in the event of a physical Russian invasion. In February, the White House sent its top cybersecurity official to NATO to prepare for disruptions by Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine.
It was breakfast at a house in the grey zone, the traditional space between war and peace, out of immediate danger but close enough to see shelling and rockets from time to time. A bottle of half-drunk Hankey Bannister whiskey was nestled among the condiments on the table, where a group of fighters from the Right Sector, a far-right Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary movement, gathered to eat a meal of boiled pork fat from a glass jar. Sandwiches were crushed in a panini press, then passed around. A man chopped raw onions on a countertop.
Everything in the room had been donated by volunteers: bread, boxes of cookies, microwaves and condiments. The radiator was turned off and the heater contained no fire. Above the refrigerator sat a radio with a Post-it note which read, “105.1 ALWAYS TURN ON.”
Igor Yaschenko, a former Soviet Army officer in his 50s, took me upstairs to a small closet-sized room off the main staircase that tripled as his bedroom, a dentist clinic and a rudimentary radio station. It’s here that he spends his days dispensing pro-Ukrainian messaging and anti-Russian propaganda from station 101.5.
Yaschenko smoked a cigarillo as he showed me the station equipment and broadcast No More by STINX to between 10 and 11 radios early that morning. In the Soviet Army, he had commanded a radio station for transmitting conversations, a mission once reliant on three vehicles: one to carry the station equipment, another to secure the communication channels and a third to transport the antennas and a diesel backup engine.
“Now it all fits into a cell phone,” he said as a cat purred at his feet. “My profession was unnecessary.”
When hostilities began in Ukraine in 2014, Yaschenko would hear separatist radio stations from beyond the front line on that radio above the refrigerator. “It was impossible to listen to it. There were so many Russian radio stations. It made me very sad.” Serendipitously, the Ukrainian military sent an FM radio team to send short broadcasts to troops along the front. Shortly afterward, Yaschenko set up a transmitter, a new antenna, a computer, some of it donated, some of it purchased, and soon he was broadcasting music and notes of encouragement into the Russian-held regions of Donbas.
But music was not enough. “I realized that our radio is not a toy,” Yaschenko told me as he stood by the transmitter. Snow fell from tree branches outside. Red Red Rose by FRAM played on the radio next. In 2016, Yaschenko invited Iryna Dovgan, a prisoner of war who had been held and tortured by Russian insurgents in her home in Donetsk in 2014, to speak on the radio. “She spoke simple words about her home, where a family of militants now lives and has a baby. This baby is lying in the same crib where her baby used to be.”
After that broadcast, Yaschenko says, separatists “burned” his transmitter. “This was done by electronic warfare professionals, who sent an overpowering signal to the transmitter. They did this for a week, two or three times a day, and we lost a signal. That’s when I realized our radio station was a weapon, and it was up to us how far that weapon could shoot.”
He bought an even bigger antenna and a more powerful transmitter. But Yaschenko admitted there were limitations, both material and philosophical.
“We don’t take information warfare as seriously as we should,” Yaschenko told me. “This is a big blunder from our side. We put a transmitter in Avdeevka to jam their radio station Sputnik … but two weeks later they blew our mast off with a missile.” Yaschenko said he is now focused on jamming enemy radio stations along the front line, and could not imagine why the task had been left only to him.
I left the Donbas just as the airspace around the Black Sea became a virtual no-fly zone and traveled to the western city of Kramatorsk, from where I caught a train to Kyiv, the capitol.
Even this far back from the front line, the effects of the digital war were still visible. Misinformation and disinformation have driven wedges in Ukrainian society. One woman in Kyiv told me she fled her home in the Donbas after the separatists took over, but could not find work or assistance in the capitol due to rumors that those in the Donbas had not contested the Russian takeover. People in Kyiv cast her as a “thief” and a “stranger.” Conspiracy theories run rampant in the country: On a walk through a small city near the front line, an older man told me, “Jews and Masons divided us.” Among Ukrainian soldiers, I heard rampant disinformation about the current Ukrainian president and witnessed wide divisions over the cause of the current conflict and whether or not Russia was a friend or an enemy. During one car ride, soldiers discussed “the Jewish issue.” In the same breath they then went on to blame the country’s woes on the Azerbaijani diaspora.
To spread division in Ukraine, the Kremlin relies on what some experts have called a “firehose of falsehood,” a propaganda technique that bombards the public with reams of lies and conspiracy theories, whether through pro-Russian media outlets or Twitter bots or other means. Some of Ukraine’s most trafficked websites have alleged ties to the Kremlin and regularly print pro-Russian propaganda.
“Information and non-kinetic means of warfare are really changing the conflict landscape,” said Justin Sherman, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative. “You’ve seen across the board, whether it’s the Russians or U.S. intelligence, a leaning into the fact that all these different tech mediums are a way to help achieve traditional battlefield ends.”
Combating Putin’s “firehose” is “a challenge for [the U.S.],” a career U.S. intelligence official told me, asking to remain anonymous to discuss internal deliberations and analysis on Putin’s intentions. “Because our logic is not his logic.” And while the U.S. has historically used what it called “public diplomacy,” its own flavor of propaganda, to further its foreign policy agenda abroad, many claim trying to go toe-to-toe with Putin’s information warfare is antithetical to democracy.
Still, because the Kremlin operates on a shaky ground of lies and distortions, the official told me, it is vulnerable to its own techniques and tactics.
Recently, the Biden administration has proven itself able to adapt, rapidly declassifying intelligence information to prevent Russian misinformation. U.S. intelligence and security officials, for example, quickly made public plans by Russian operatives to create a video of a staged atrocity and warned of “saboteurs” sent into the Donbas as a pretext for war. So effective was this new tactic, U.S. intelligence services have intercepted communications between senior Russian military officials frustrated by the continuing disruption.
“This administration has shown quite a remarkable degree of flexibility in getting inside Russian information loops and interfering with them in a really good way. At least when it comes to fighting hybrid wars we do seem to be catching up a bit,” Frederick W. Kagan, a former professor of military history at West Point, told me. “We haven’t seen that before. And the Russians haven’t seen that before. The Russians weren’t ready for that.” There remained little consensus among the current and former government officials and analysts I spoke with on whether a strategy of preemptive information warfare helped to reduce tensions or goad Putin further.
On Friday, the U.S. and United Kingdom told its citizens to depart Ukraine, warning that a preface to a Russian attack would be a staged event to destabilize the country and spark armed conflict. By the time I left on Saturday, on the last KLM flight out of Kyiv, I had personally been feeling the impact of the ongoing hybrid conflict for more than a week. I had switched out one of my SIM cards to a local number when the problems began. They came as minor frustrations first — a slow connection, an unplanned reboot, a dropped phone call. Then I began receiving a slew of phishing emails on a scale I have never before experienced. I received a call from a Ukrainian number (no one but the photographer I worked with had the number) and a two-minute voicemail of faint clicking sounds. Maybe I was just being paranoid. But no fewer than four individuals from Ukraine, and a handful of people I spoke with abroad, began our phone calls by greeting the Russians who, they said, were no doubt listening. One woman in Donbas, reached by phone, quickly hung up, citing her fears over Russian interception.
Whether on the front lines or not, Ukrainians live with the constant knowledge that their systems and technology and borders are under siege, that at the moment of a military action against their country, the internet will likely go dark, their connection to the world severed.
“I have a feeling, a surrealistic feeling,” Oleksandra Matviychuk, who lives in Kyiv, told me. “On one hand, you try to continue your work, but on the other hand you go to medical training in order to learn to stop bleeding and how to make the go bags and do a lot of other things” — things like how to protect personal data and information. “We try to pretend we have a normal life,” she said, “but our normal life is ruined.”
Politico · by Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs
3. Russia’s Propaganda & Disinformation Ecosystem - 2022 Update & New Disclosures
Conclusion:
Today, as Russia threatens an expanded incursion into Ukraine, we know significantly more than when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. As the light continues to shine on the shadowy people and outlets advancing Putin’s disinformation, we’ll continue to update our understanding of how the Kremlin seeks to subvert democracies worldwide. Stay tuned.
Russia’s Propaganda & Disinformation Ecosystem - 2022 Update & New Disclosures
New revelations and a structural update to our chart
Feb 15
In April 2021, our team published an overview of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem—the media networks, outlets, and websites that often toe the Kremlin line, spread Russian propaganda or disinformation, and even, in some cases, take direction from Russian intelligence services or the Russian state.
While our 2021 chart was imperfect, it attempted to outline the environment in which Russian propaganda and disinformation flourish online and target audiences around the globe. In this updated 2022 chart, we’ve added elements to better reflect several components of Russia’s sustained propaganda and disinformation campaigns. The new depiction further illustrates the breadth and depth of outlets linked to Russian intelligence services and offers a global context for the Kremlin’s information operations. We’ve also color-coded each of the outlets’ primary language in our chart.
Amid Russia’s military buildup at Ukraine’s borders and recent reports from the U.S. and allies of Moscow’s plans to use disinformation as a pretense for an expanded incursion into Ukraine, we’re providing a broader, more comprehensive view of the channels through which such disinformation flows.
What did we learn today?
According to reporting from the Associated Press, U.S. government officials revealed new information about some of the key outlets in the Russian media ecosystem and their connections to Russian intelligence services. Below is an outline of the outlets attributed as having connections to Russian intelligence services, including both Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and its Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
Odnarodyna is a Russian-language outlet publishing content highly critical of Ukraine that has infrastructure overlap with the Strategic Culture Foundation, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in April 2021 and outed as controlled by the SVR. According to these revelations, Odnarodyna is also linked to Russia’s SVR, through its owner Vladimir Maksimenko, who is director of the Strategic Culture Foundation. U.S. officials said that Maksimenko “met with SVR handlers multiple times since 2014.”
Fondsk, the Russian-language version of the SVR-linked Strategic Culture Foundation, is also under Maksimenko and Strategic Culture Foundation’s control, tying it to Russia’s SVR as well.
Both Antifashist and Politnavigator are Russian-language news sites directed by the Russian FSB. Both outlets target the Ukrainian information environment, spreading pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation designed to destabilize domestic Ukrainian politics. According to U.S. officials, direction from FSB also includes what cannot be published: “the managing editor of Antifashist allegedly was directed at least once by the FSB to delete material from the site.”
Russian Foreign Intelligence (SVR)-linked outlets are built to last
New U.S. government disclosures reveal the SVR’s interest in connecting like-minded parties around the world in a common pro-Russian worldview. Vladimir Maksimenko—alleged by the U.S. government to be managed by SVR handlers—as head of the internationally oriented English-language Strategic Culture Foundation, its Russian-language sister site Fondsk, and Russian-language anti-Ukraine outlet Odnarodyna, seeks to solidify domestic Russian audience views on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine while influencing foreign audiences to buy into the same pro-Kremlin viewpoint. These narratives are then republished by websites like popular English-language financial news site Zero Hedge. Maksimenko’s actions to achieve audience unity are not limited to the internet, as he also appears at events in the physical world as a representative for Strategic Culture.
Russia’s domestic intelligence (FSB) zeroes in on Ukraine
Recent revelations show the FSB is responsible for the bulk of Russian activity targeting domestic Ukrainian politics and cyber infrastructure—and according to these disclosures, the agency’s information operations are no different. Both Antifashist and Politnavigator primarily target the domestic political environment in Ukraine, and both focus on those residing in occupied Ukrainian territories. While the two websites are not well-known to Westerners, inside Russia they both register among the top-cited Russian news sites in January 2022.
NewsFront—despite being removed from numerous social media platforms multiple times following 2021 sanctions stemming from its connections to the FSB—continues to distribute its content across platforms including both Facebook and VKontakte (VK). These disclosures reiterated NewsFront’s ties to Russian intelligence, noting that FSB officers directed NewsFront head Konstantin Knyrik to “write stories specifically damaging to Ukraine’s image,” and that Knyrik had been “praised by senior FSB officers for his work.”
Russia’s Military Intelligence (GRU) is still active, too
Meanwhile, The Washington Post revealed last week that the GRU registered the website donbasstragedy.info, an outlet dedicated to framing the Ukrainian military for alleged war crimes, a favored recent hobby horse of the Russian media. This effort by the GRU represents more of the same: low-quality efforts to push a tired message. While the narrative of a “Ukrainian genocide” has permeated the Russian mainstream and fringe media of the West, there is no indication the effort of donbasstragedy.info had anything to do with the story’s spread.
What’s new in the Russian media landscape
In this update, we’ve added several new categories to our map of Russia’s Disinformation & Propaganda Ecosystem, which includes several elements of particular importance amid increasing tensions with Ukraine:
“Sources”: The Russian media environment, from overt state-run media to covert intelligence-backed outlets, is built on an infrastructure of influencers, anonymous Telegram channels, and content creators with nebulous ties to the wider ecosystem. Content is the lowest common denominator in the global information war, and these sources are the fuel for the system on a daily basis.
Russian Oligarchs: Russian financier Yevgeny Prigozhin has expanded his operations and collected media assets both inside of Russia and abroad, particularly in Africa. We’ve also added several media properties associated with “God’s Oligarch,” the sanctioned businessman Konstantin Malofeev, which are of particular note given Malofeev’s previous role in partially financing the 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
Kremlin Associates: These are outlets regularly amplifying pro-Russia, pro-Kremlin narratives and themes. Many of these outlets have ties to known Russian influence agents who have been exposed and documented by researchers, activists, and governments. This list is far from exhaustive but reflects a sample of the global reach of this system.
What we have yet to see is the media system in its entirety converge on a single topic or narrative that has larger staying power. Partially, this is because most of Russia’s state-linked media assets are simply unaware of what exactly will happen next. In the absence of further order, they do what is needed to sustain an audience: produce a high volume of content.
That high volume means that websites with higher reach sometimes pick up content that originated on sites with ties to Russian intelligence services. For example, according to the Associated Press, U.S. officials also noted that Zero Hedge “published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence.”
Today, as Russia threatens an expanded incursion into Ukraine, we know significantly more than when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. As the light continues to shine on the shadowy people and outlets advancing Putin’s disinformation, we’ll continue to update our understanding of how the Kremlin seeks to subvert democracies worldwide. Stay tuned.
A guest post by
Current: NBC/MSNBC, Miburo, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Alliance For Securing Democracy Twitter: @SelectedWisdom
4. Beijing Could Run Russia’s Playbook on Taiwan
Comprehensive deterrence options. Or integrated deterrence. Or nuclear conventional, and unconventional deterrence.
Excerpts:
Thinking through comprehensive deterrent options is necessary because U.S. presidents improvise as crises unfold in unexpected ways. For example, China’s People’s Liberation Army could blockade Taiwan in addition to other political and military measures, and Washington may want to resupply the Taiwanese military and provide the country with humanitarian aid. U.S. national security leaders need to practice these scenarios with their allies, including Taiwan.
These steps may sound too provocative—though not all of them would need to be undertaken publicly. Yet it is China that has broken the status quo, by abrogating its promise to the United States that it would settle its disputes with Taiwan through peaceful means. Instead, China has built up its military for an invasion of Taiwan, has refused to publicly renounce the use of force to settle the dispute, passed “anti-secession” legislation that includes threats to attack Taiwan if certain political conditions are not met, and repeatedly engages in provocative air incursions around Taiwan as well as provocative military exercises close to the island. Taking small steps to better prepare for what could be one of the most complex crises in history is worth Chinese diplomatic protests.
Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation makes it uniquely susceptible to a Russia-like campaign of intimidation and coercion. If the United States is to help Taiwan maintain its de facto independence, it needs to become a lot more creative—and energetic—about preparing diplomatic, economic, and military responses to China’s designs on the island.
Beijing Could Run Russia’s Playbook on Taiwan
An expert's point of view on a current event.
The Ukraine crisis should refocus thinking on China’s threats.
Taiwan's Ta Chiang vessel, a domestically produced Tuo Chiang-class corvette, fires off flares during a drill on the seas off the northern Taiwanese city of Keelung on Jan. 7. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images
As Russia edges toward a full-scale invasion, U.S. thinking is understandably focused on Ukraine. But spare a thought for how Chinese President Xi Jinping might emulate his Russian counterpart’s strategy. While there is much debate in Washington about a bolt-from-the-blue Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing may instead generate a political-military crisis by threatening to use force. If the United States wants to avoid being caught flat-footed, it needs to begin preparing today.
Beijing’s goal is to force Taiwan to meet its political demands—the acceptance of Chinese control over the island—while preventing the United States from standing in the way. While it could invade Taiwan to achieve this outcome, it does not necessarily need to do so. China might be satisfied with a Hong Kong-like outcome in which a more acquiescent government in Taipei takes over and makes concessions that strengthen Chinese control of the island. Indeed, the fact that China can invade and occupy Taiwan makes coercion, combined with political machinations, more likely. A scenario in which the Chinese Communist Party passes a law that spells out steps that Taiwan needs to take to unify and avoid war is not unimaginable
Beijing’s challenge is that, unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan is a functionally independent state, separated from the mainland by a body of water, and Chinese authorities are not already present in Taiwan, as they were in Hong Kong. To overcome these obstacles, China thus must engineer a crisis that would compel Taiwanese concessions through the threat of full-scale war. To help Taiwan resist such coercion, Washington would need credible diplomatic and military options during a crisis—options that aren’t yet plausible. In fact, if China pursued an intensified campaign of coercion similar to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current Ukraine strategy, Washington could be caught wholly unprepared.
As Russia edges toward a full-scale invasion, U.S. thinking is understandably focused on Ukraine. But spare a thought for how Chinese President Xi Jinping might emulate his Russian counterpart’s strategy. While there is much debate in Washington about a bolt-from-the-blue Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing may instead generate a political-military crisis by threatening to use force. If the United States wants to avoid being caught flat-footed, it needs to begin preparing today.
Beijing’s goal is to force Taiwan to meet its political demands—the acceptance of Chinese control over the island—while preventing the United States from standing in the way. While it could invade Taiwan to achieve this outcome, it does not necessarily need to do so. China might be satisfied with a Hong Kong-like outcome in which a more acquiescent government in Taipei takes over and makes concessions that strengthen Chinese control of the island. Indeed, the fact that China can invade and occupy Taiwan makes coercion, combined with political machinations, more likely. A scenario in which the Chinese Communist Party passes a law that spells out steps that Taiwan needs to take to unify and avoid war is not unimaginable
Beijing’s challenge is that, unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan is a functionally independent state, separated from the mainland by a body of water, and Chinese authorities are not already present in Taiwan, as they were in Hong Kong. To overcome these obstacles, China thus must engineer a crisis that would compel Taiwanese concessions through the threat of full-scale war. To help Taiwan resist such coercion, Washington would need credible diplomatic and military options during a crisis—options that aren’t yet plausible. In fact, if China pursued an intensified campaign of coercion similar to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current Ukraine strategy, Washington could be caught wholly unprepared.
There is no NATO in Asia. For all of NATO’s problems, a large coalition whose main purpose is to oppose aggression changes the aggressor’s risk calculus. While NATO is not militarily committed to Ukraine, Russia must still calculate what the alliance’s reaction to its aggression might be. In contrast, no single country—let alone any multilateral alliance—is similarly committed to Taiwan’s sovereignty and political independence. The United States is the closest, but, like the overwhelming majority of countries, it does not recognize Taiwan as a country and as such has very limited political engagement with its leaders. This would make it extremely difficult to coordinate policy in a crisis. Finally, the United States today has no formal commitment to defend Taiwan, and military engagement is thus severely restricted. The two militaries do not exercise together or take other steps necessary to prepare for a combined fight.
In contrast, the U.S. Defense Department and NATO have trained the Ukrainian military and know it well. U.S. diplomats are shuttling through European capitals, including Kyiv, to garner political and military support against Russia and coordinate punishing economic sanctions. Putin must take all of this into consideration. For Taiwan, however, alliance preparations for a crisis are all but nonexistent, though Japan is changing its policy. Coordinated coalition action against China is not a major concern for Xi.
Although the United States will not reinstate its former military alliance with Taiwan anytime soon, there are diplomatic and military steps that it can take now to forestall the fall of Taipei without breaking its commitment that it will not unilaterally recognize Taiwan as an independent country.
First, Washington can train a small U.S. military force that is prepared to land in Taiwan at the first sign of trouble to help protect its leadership, embed with front-line units, and secure communications between Taiwan and the outside world. The center of gravity of Chinese strategy is Taiwanese political will. The presence of U.S. military forces early in a crisis would be an enormous psychological boon to Taiwan’s people and its leaders and could dissuade Beijing from escalating a crisis. The number of troops involved need not be large or especially provocative.
The United States can start now by embedding small numbers of U.S. forces who speak Chinese with key Taiwanese units for significant periods of time. This would simply be a scaling up of existing programs. Washington can also increase the number of marine security officers stationed at its unofficial embassy. In addition, the United States can quietly begin to pre-position logistics and munitions on the island for use by both U.S. and Taiwanese forces.
The United States should also initiate strategic discussions and tabletop exercises with the political and military leadership of Japan, India, Australia, and permanent U.N. Security Council members Britain and France on responses to a Taiwan crisis. Allied leaders should familiarize themselves not only with possible military responses but also with other diplomatic, economic, and cyber-strategies to isolate, punish, and impose financial hardship on China should it choose the path of aggression. The new Washington consensus on Taiwan implies an almost automatic U.S. military response to a Chinese invasion, but history and the present crisis show that U.S. presidents always want to exercise nonkinetic means of deterrence first. They need good options, or the chances of doing nothing increase.
Thinking through comprehensive deterrent options is necessary because U.S. presidents improvise as crises unfold in unexpected ways. For example, China’s People’s Liberation Army could blockade Taiwan in addition to other political and military measures, and Washington may want to resupply the Taiwanese military and provide the country with humanitarian aid. U.S. national security leaders need to practice these scenarios with their allies, including Taiwan.
These steps may sound too provocative—though not all of them would need to be undertaken publicly. Yet it is China that has broken the status quo, by abrogating its promise to the United States that it would settle its disputes with Taiwan through peaceful means. Instead, China has built up its military for an invasion of Taiwan, has refused to publicly renounce the use of force to settle the dispute, passed “anti-secession” legislation that includes threats to attack Taiwan if certain political conditions are not met, and repeatedly engages in provocative air incursions around Taiwan as well as provocative military exercises close to the island. Taking small steps to better prepare for what could be one of the most complex crises in history is worth Chinese diplomatic protests.
Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation makes it uniquely susceptible to a Russia-like campaign of intimidation and coercion. If the United States is to help Taiwan maintain its de facto independence, it needs to become a lot more creative—and energetic—about preparing diplomatic, economic, and military responses to China’s designs on the island.
Dan Blumenthal is director of Asian studies at AEI and the author of the forthcoming book “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State” (AEI Press September, 2020).
5. Even an ‘Asia First’ Strategy Needs to Deter Russia in Ukraine
As an accused "Asia Firster," I concur with the authors and the late General Marshall - we need to keep in mind the world is round and understand that we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, especially when the revisionist and rogue powers synchronize actions either deliberately or coincidence (though I do not believe in coincidence).
Excerpts:
These are problems of means that the administration still has to fix, but they should not be excuses for dramatically shifting the ends of U.S. post-World-War-II strategy. A stable and closely aligned Europe may be less important relative to the Indo-Pacific than it once was, but it nevertheless remains absolutely indispensable to U.S. success on the other side of the globe.
Perhaps the original Asia Firster was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. In a famous 1951 cartoon by Herbert Block, MacArthur is pictured urging Defense Secretary George Marshall to prioritize Asia over NATO because of the Korean War. In front of MacArthur is a cube-shaped globe with the Pacific on the top and Europe hidden below the edges. Marshall says, “we’ve been using more of a roundish one.” Marshall’s retort was as right then as it is now.
Even an ‘Asia First’ Strategy Needs to Deter Russia in Ukraine
There is no Indo-Pacific strategy without U.S. pushback against Russia.
Foreign Policy · by Michael J. Green, Gabriel Scheinmann · February 17, 2022
An expert's point of view on a current event.
There is no Indo-Pacific strategy without U.S. pushback against Russia.
By Michael J. Green, the senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor at Georgetown University, and Gabriel Scheinmann, the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping take part in a welcoming ceremony at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on April 27, 2019. VALERY SHARIFULIN/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images
As Walter Russell Mead recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, there is a new “Asia First” movement pushing back against U.S. involvement in the crisis over Ukraine. The idea is that an overstretched and declining United States needs to pick its fights carefully and that China, Taiwan, and the Indo-Pacific loom larger in geopolitical terms than Russia, Ukraine, and the future of Europe. They are right: China, Taiwan, and the future of the Indo-Pacific are more important geopolitically. But retrenchment in the face of Russian aggression in Europe would undermine U.S. strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific, not enhance it.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi blew a big hole in the Asia First argument when he urged a firm stance against Russian President Vladimir Putin and promised resolute Japanese support. Hayashi correctly noted that China was watching and that a failure of resolve in Europe would only encourage greater coercion and belligerence by Beijing. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said her country “empathize[s] with Ukraine’s situation” and ordered the creation of a task force to study the Russia-generated crisis. Beijing will also carefully study Putin’s next moves with an eye to revising China’s own Taiwan strategy at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party this fall. The United States’ success or failure is carefully measured by friends and foes alike. It’s hard to imagine that Putin wasn’t encouraged in his adventurism by the abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as we warned would happen.
This time, however, the link between the Ukraine crisis and strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific goes beyond the sometimes amorphous question of prestige and credibility. It is more fundamentally a question of strategy.
As Walter Russell Mead recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, there is a new “Asia First” movement pushing back against U.S. involvement in the crisis over Ukraine. The idea is that an overstretched and declining United States needs to pick its fights carefully and that China, Taiwan, and the Indo-Pacific loom larger in geopolitical terms than Russia, Ukraine, and the future of Europe. They are right: China, Taiwan, and the future of the Indo-Pacific are more important geopolitically. But retrenchment in the face of Russian aggression in Europe would undermine U.S. strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific, not enhance it.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi blew a big hole in the Asia First argument when he urged a firm stance against Russian President Vladimir Putin and promised resolute Japanese support. Hayashi correctly noted that China was watching and that a failure of resolve in Europe would only encourage greater coercion and belligerence by Beijing. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said her country “empathize[s] with Ukraine’s situation” and ordered the creation of a task force to study the Russia-generated crisis. Beijing will also carefully study Putin’s next moves with an eye to revising China’s own Taiwan strategy at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party this fall. The United States’ success or failure is carefully measured by friends and foes alike. It’s hard to imagine that Putin wasn’t encouraged in his adventurism by the abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as we warned would happen.
This time, however, the link between the Ukraine crisis and strategic competition with China in the Indo-Pacific goes beyond the sometimes amorphous question of prestige and credibility. It is more fundamentally a question of strategy.
The U.S. strategy for competition with China must be a global strategy that links U.S. alliances and partnerships into a mutually reinforcing network rather than chopping them into separate unconnected spheres. The latter, as we should know by now, is precisely what Beijing is trying to achieve. China has sought for over a decade to divide Europe internally and to separate Europe from the United States. China’s 17+1 outreach program to weaker members of the European Union using Belt and Road Initiative money and leveraging their resentment of Brussels worked: Countries such as Hungary did China’s bidding by blocking a concerted EU response to China’s coercion in the South China Sea in 2016 and suppression of Hong Kong in 2021.
Successful deterrence of Putin now will reduce the requirement for shifting more significant resources away from the Indo-Pacific later.
Over the past year, however, the geopolitical trends in Europe have become more favorable for the United States and its Asian allies. Britain has joined with the United States to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines through the AUKUS agreement. While France was miffed at being stiffed in that agreement, it will stay onside as China encroaches on the French island territories and very large exclusive economic zone in the South Pacific. NATO is more forward-leaning on China in its own deliberations today, with Pacific-facing Canada a strong partner in that endeavor. Even in recalcitrant Germany, the Foreign Office under the leadership of new Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has predicated its China policy on “systemic competition” with China.
Members of Beijing’s 17+1 group have also grown alarmed at the ferocious Chinese economic embargo against Lithuania after Vilnius inaugurated a Taiwanese representative office using the name “Taiwan” instead of “Taipei.” Lithuania quit the 17+1 group, and Beijing’s fellow travelers were unable to block the EU from lodging a formal complaint against China at the World Trade Organization. EU members are even discussing so-called coalitions of the willing on issues related to China to preempt future attempts by Beijing to leverage captured members. These are important geopolitical trends that would be undermined if the United States abandoned NATO in Europe’s greatest moment of crisis in a generation.
The authors of the Asia First arguments are thinking primarily about the impact of Ukraine on finite military resources. They are right that deployment of more ground forces and strategic assets to Europe, even temporarily, would reduce access to similar resources needed in the Indo-Pacific. But it is important to think about the application of military resources temporally as well as geographically. Successful deterrence and imposition of costs on Putin now will reduce the requirement for shifting more significant resources away from the Indo-Pacific later. On the other hand, if Putin successfully pulls off an Anschluss of Ukraine and Belarus, that would not only quadruple the length of the current Russia-NATO contact line, but it would also create one even longer than the NATO-Warsaw Pact border during the Cold War. Adequate defense of this new border would be far costlier, and bind far greater resources, than preventing its creation.
The advocates of restraint in the Ukraine crisis also need to remember that strategic competition with China is a full-spectrum endeavor. Any Chinese calculation of the risk and reward associated with an attack on Taiwan would have to consider both the military order of battle and the geopolitical consequences. If Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks the United States’ European allies will not impose an economic and geopolitical punishment for aggression against Taiwan, then deterrence and dissuasion are weakened. Abandoning Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression would shrink Washington’s hand in the larger game Beijing is playing. For that reason, the administration’s successful harnessing of diplomatic support from Japan, Australia, and other allies against Putin is an important foreshadowing for Beijing of what NATO and European partners might do should it be Taiwan’s turn.
Realism would also force Washington and its partners to recognize that Putin and Xi are consolidating their own global alignment. The two leaders spent a full day before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics coordinating strategy for competing with the United States. China even formally supported Russia’s demands in Europe. Chinese and Russian military exercises and intelligence operations, including foreign interference campaigns, are increasingly aligned and carefully coordinated. U.S. and Japanese forces in the Western Pacific find themselves responding to simultaneous and well-coordinated Chinese and Russian military probes in the air and at sea. Russia is also a Pacific power—a fact too often overlooked, even though the Russian Pacific Fleet dates back nearly 300 years.
In the Biden administration’s recently released Indo-Pacific Strategy, the word “Russia” is conspicuously absent. Just as Beijing and Moscow are working to put Washington’s alliances in the Indo-Pacific on the back foot, the United States should be working with its allies globally to outmaneuver their authoritarian axis. Driving up the costs to Russia will also drive up the costs to China. A closer Sino-Russian axis opens potential opportunities to further coordinate strategy with India beyond what has already been achieved with AUKUS. The United States and its NATO allies also have more work to do coordinating their responses to Chinese efforts to build military bases in East and West Africa. Treating Russia as an isolated European power and China as an Asian one is ahistorical, myopic, unrealistic, and unstrategic.
At the same time, the real trade-offs between the competing security demands of Europe and the Indo-Pacific should be a wake-up call for Washington. The Pentagon leadership has been unable to break the bureaucratic morass—not least among its own brass—and shift resources from U.S. Africa Command, Central Command, and Southern Command to the Indo-Pacific. The defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff need to crack heads and make those choices so the Asia-Europe trade-off is less acute. The administration also needs to push Congress for the defense budgets needed to manage two significant military challenges. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is projected to be barely 3 percent in 2022, a post-World-War-II low at a time of great and increasing danger. If the administration is not willing to push Congress, a new Congress should push the administration. Finally, precisely because the United States is in full-spectrum competition with China, the administration should not get a pass on its lack of any international economic strategy. In its new Indo-Pacific Strategy, the White House promises leadership on a new economic framework for the region. But what is this framework? More importantly, where is it? Economic statecraft and strategic influence have always gone hand in hand. But as one senior official has lamented to us, U.S. foreign policy is now operating with one hand tied behind its back.
These are problems of means that the administration still has to fix, but they should not be excuses for dramatically shifting the ends of U.S. post-World-War-II strategy. A stable and closely aligned Europe may be less important relative to the Indo-Pacific than it once was, but it nevertheless remains absolutely indispensable to U.S. success on the other side of the globe.
Perhaps the original Asia Firster was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. In a famous 1951 cartoon by Herbert Block, MacArthur is pictured urging Defense Secretary George Marshall to prioritize Asia over NATO because of the Korean War. In front of MacArthur is a cube-shaped globe with the Pacific on the top and Europe hidden below the edges. Marshall says, “we’ve been using more of a roundish one.” Marshall’s retort was as right then as it is now.
Michael J. Green is the senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a professor at Georgetown University, and a former senior National Security Council official on Asia policy during the George W. Bush administration. Twitter: @JapanChair
Gabriel Scheinmann is the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society. Twitter: @GabeScheinmann
6. Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China
Excerpts:
Finally, if necessary, Washington could always take a page from its Cold War playbook and rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to offset the local, conventional advantages of its rivals. The presence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe helped deter the massive Soviet Red Army for decades. Similarly, the United States could rely on threatening nonstrategic nuclear strikes to deter and, as a last resort, thwart a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan or a Russian tank incursion into Europe.
To be sure, there are risks associated with nuclear deterrence, but nuclear weapons have played a foundational role in U.S. defense strategy for three-quarters of a century—and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.
Deterring China and Russia at the same time will not be easy, but it is better than pretending Washington can deal with one major-power rival or the other at its convenience. Thank goodness, former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt did not choose victory in only one theater during World War II. Biden should follow his example and plan to defend U.S. interests in Europe and the Indo-Pacific at the same time.
Washington Must Prepare for War With Both Russia and China
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Pivoting to Asia and forgetting about Europe isn’t an option.
By Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a group photo during the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28. Dominique Jacovides/AFP/Getty Images
As Russia threatens the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II, the most consequential strategic question of the 21st century is becoming clear: How can the United States manage two revisionist, autocratic, nuclear-armed great powers (Russia and China) simultaneously? The answer, according to many politicians and defense experts, is that Washington must moderate its response to Russia in Europe to focus on the greater threat posed by China in the Indo-Pacific.
This would be a mistake.
The United States remains the world’s leading power with global interests, and it cannot afford to choose between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Instead, Washington and its allies should develop a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating Russia and China at the same time.
As Russia threatens the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II, the most consequential strategic question of the 21st century is becoming clear: How can the United States manage two revisionist, autocratic, nuclear-armed great powers (Russia and China) simultaneously? The answer, according to many politicians and defense experts, is that Washington must moderate its response to Russia in Europe to focus on the greater threat posed by China in the Indo-Pacific.
This would be a mistake.
The United States remains the world’s leading power with global interests, and it cannot afford to choose between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Instead, Washington and its allies should develop a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating Russia and China at the same time.
In recent weeks, Biden has sent several thousand U.S. troops to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank—and for good reason. A major war in Ukraine could spill across international boundaries and threaten the seven NATO allies that border Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Moreover, if Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds in Ukraine, why would he stop there?
Putin has shown a clear interest in resurrecting the former Russian Empire, and other vulnerable Eastern European countries—Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states—might be next. A successful Russian incursion into a NATO ally’s territory could mean the end of the Western alliance and the credibility of U.S. security commitments globally.
The threat posed by China is also serious. Adm. Philip Davidson, former commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, predicted China could invade Taiwan within the next six years. This is a war the United States might lose. If China succeeds in taking Taiwan, it would be well on its way to disrupting the U.S.-led order in Asia, with an eye to doing the same globally.
Moreover, Russia and China are increasingly working together. As this month’s summit between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping shows, Moscow and Beijing are forging a closer strategic partnership, including on military matters. These dictators could coordinate dual attacks on the U.S. alliance structure or opportunistically seize on the distraction provided by the other’s aggression. In other words, there is a serious risk of simultaneous major-power wars in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
To address this problem, many have proposed answers that simply will not work. The Biden administration initially hoped to put relations with Russia on a “stable and predictable” footing to focus on China, but Putin had other ideas, as the world is now seeing in Ukraine. Unfortunately, Washington does not get to decide how its adversaries sequence their aggression.
Others have expressed hope that Washington can peel these powers apart or even align with Russia against China, but these are not realistic solutions.
The misguided view gaining the most recent acceptance, however, is that Washington should simply choose the Indo-Pacific over Europe. Politicians and experts argue that the United States lacks the resources to take on both Russia and China. They point to China’s power and Asia’s wealth and argue that Asia should be the priority. While Washington pivots to Asia, wealthy European countries, such as Germany, should step up to provide for NATO’s defense. Indeed, the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy, which has been delayed due to the Ukraine crisis, is expected to focus on China without offering a clear solution to the two-front-war problem.
A good strategy, however, starts with clear goals, and Washington’s objectives are to maintain peace and stability in both Europe and Asia. U.S. interests in Europe are too significant to let them be worked out solely between Putin and the United States’ European allies. Indeed, the European Union, not Asia, is the United States’ largest trade and investment partner, and this imbalance is much starker when China (which the United States seeks greater economic decoupling from), is removed from the equation.
Furthermore, China has conducted military exercises in Europe and the Middle East. Competing with China militarily means competing globally, not just in Asia. In addition, Xi is gauging U.S. resolve, and a weak response in Ukraine might make a Chinese move on Taiwan more likely.
Moreover, the United States is not France; it is not compelled to make gut-wrenching strategic choices about its national security due to constrained resources. In short, publishing a defense strategy that can only handle one of the United States’ great-power rivals (which is what is expected from the forthcoming national defense strategy) is planning to fail.
Instead, the United States and its allies must design a defense strategy capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating both Russia and China in overlapping time frames. The pause in releasing Biden’s defense strategy provides an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and get this right.
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To be sure, developing such a strategy will be challenging, but there are a number of ways to begin to square the circle.
First, Washington should increase defense spending. Contrary to those who claim that constrained resources will force tough choices, the United States can afford to outspend Russia and China at the same time. The United States possesses 24 percent of global GDP compared to a combined 19 percent in China and Russia. This year, the United States will spend $778 billion on defense compared to only $310 billion in Russia and China.
Moreover, the United States could go so far as to double defense spending (currently 2.8 percent of GDP) and still remain below its Cold War average (close to 7 percent of GDP). Indeed, given that this new Cold War is every bit as dangerous as the last one, a meaningful increase in defense spending, focused on the 21st century’s emerging defense technologies, is in order.
Some might argue that the days of a U.S. economic advantage are numbered due to China’s rise, but China’s internal dysfunctions are catching up with it. Dictators like Xi prioritize political control over economic performance.
Xi is undermining China’s growth model by cracking down on the private sector and rolling back liberalizing reforms, and his aggressive diplomacy is upsetting international economic relationships. As a result, Beijing’s economy is stagnating. Russia’s long-term economic outlook is even worse. In short, even if this new strategic competition becomes a two-versus-one arms race, Washington is likely to prevail.
In addition, the United States can actively lead its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to develop a free world defense strategy. The United States and its formal treaty allies possess nearly 60 percent of global GDP, and together, they can easily marshal the resources to maintain a favorable balance of military power over both China and Russia. Preexisting formal alliances like NATO in Europe and bilateral alliances in Asia can be supplemented with new arrangements, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.
Allies do need, therefore, to step up and do more for their defense, but they will not do it on their own if the United States threatens to leave Europe. Instead, Washington should actively lead, moving from a model where Washington provides defense to allies to one where Washington contributes to allies’ self-defense. This should include incorporating key allies into military planning, sharing responsibilities, and devising a rational division of labor for weapons acquisition.
European allies should invest in armor and artillery while Asian allies buy naval mines, harpoon missiles, and submarines. The U.S. Army should prioritize Europe while the U.S. Navy takes the Indo-Pacific and a larger U.S. Air Force plays a significant role in both theaters. In addition, the United States should provide strategic capabilities like its nuclear umbrella; global conventional strike capabilities, including hypersonic missiles; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
Finally, if necessary, Washington could always take a page from its Cold War playbook and rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to offset the local, conventional advantages of its rivals. The presence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe helped deter the massive Soviet Red Army for decades. Similarly, the United States could rely on threatening nonstrategic nuclear strikes to deter and, as a last resort, thwart a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan or a Russian tank incursion into Europe.
To be sure, there are risks associated with nuclear deterrence, but nuclear weapons have played a foundational role in U.S. defense strategy for three-quarters of a century—and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.
Deterring China and Russia at the same time will not be easy, but it is better than pretending Washington can deal with one major-power rival or the other at its convenience. Thank goodness, former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt did not choose victory in only one theater during World War II. Biden should follow his example and plan to defend U.S. interests in Europe and the Indo-Pacific at the same time.
Matthew Kroenig is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His latest book is The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy From the Ancient World to the U.S. and China. Twitter: @matthewkroenig
7. Applying War College Lessons To The Crisis In Ukraine: A Narrow Window?
Excerpts:
Judging from the reaction of U.S. officials, Russia has not similarly given the United States such explicit assurances. Nonetheless, by publicly insisting it is just conducting exercises while allowing inferences to the contrary, Russia reduces the likelihood and magnitude of damage to the credibility of its future threats if it chooses not to invade this time. As long as it gets something of plausibly sufficient value from NATO or just the United States, Russia can claim that its huge military exercises were not a bluff but rather an appropriately “loud” way of communicating its intense dissatisfaction with the status quo. If, however, no meaningful concessions are forthcoming, Russia is likely willing to take at least some limited forcible action both to save face and improve its security in the light of NATO intransigence.
Thus, Russia’s apparent decision to preserve a diplomatic pathway that will allow it to save face without violence presents a narrow opportunity for the United States and its allies to work with Russia to de-escalate. Although NATO is rightfully reluctant to reward bad behavior too generously, its “principled and pragmatic” approach seems to accept Russia has some legitimate concerns for its security, which NATO may be able to address at least partially. NATO should also factor into its cost-benefit calculations that coercion theory suggests that it should take less threatened carrot and stick to deter Russia from military action than it will take to compel Russia to undo any military action after the fact.
It is unclear if the United States and its allies are willing to offer enough inducements and credible punishments to prevent Russia from taking aggressive actions. It would be unlikely for Putin to engage in this costly and somewhat risky escalation if he did not have at least two satisfactory though not equally preferred outcomes in mind. He surely prefers significant concessions, however unlikely they may be. But creating facts on the ground through a coup, expanding his grab of Ukrainian territory, or at least formalizing control over the Donbas may also be an acceptable outcome, even though more costly, riskier, and less preferred. Russia is indeed testing the United States. A narrow de-escalation window exists, but both sides must be willing to use it.
Applying War College Lessons To The Crisis In Ukraine: A Narrow Window?
[O]ur lesson on NATO expansion indicates that Russia was deeply disturbed by the eastward encroachment of NATO into territory Russia once controlled as the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Like most of War Room’s readers, few of our Army War College students are experts on Russia or Ukraine, yet our course of study equips them to draw meaningful conclusions about the likely spectrum of what Russia is trying to achieve by massing troops on Ukraine’s borders and ostensibly threatening invasion. In particular, lessons on coercion and case studies regarding NATO expansion and the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits crisis, sprinkled with a little knowledge about the credibility of threats, suggest that Russia envisions more than one acceptable outcome.
First, Ukraine’s current unenviable situation illustrates why so many eastern European countries sought NATO membership after the collapse of the Soviet Union. More importantly, our lesson on NATO expansion indicates that Russia was deeply disturbed by the eastward encroachment of NATO into territory Russia once controlled as the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Russia surely would have preferred a different outcome then and Russian officials still think that additional NATO expansion threatens Russia’s vital national interests. And, as we teach, vital interests are worth fighting over. But does Russia seek to prevent further NATO expansion primarily through coercive diplomacy by rattling its saber along Ukraine’s border? Or does Russia prefer to take matters into its own hands as it did with its war with Georgia, its seizure of Crimea in 2014, and its ongoing support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine? Our lessons on coercion and the Taiwan Straits crisis suggest some form of the latter while preserving options for the former.
During the Taiwan Straits crisis, China conducted threatening military exercises close to Taiwan after the United States granted a visa to a Taiwanese presidential candidate who favored promoting Taiwanese independence. China viewed this as an unfavorable shift in the delicate status quo. Accordingly, it used the threat of force to compel the Taiwanese to quiet their agitation for independence and compel the United States to promise to issue no more visas to Taiwanese officials. China somewhat succeeded with the first objective and mostly failed in the second. As we teach and China discovered in this case, compellence is generally more difficult than deterrence.
Approximately 25 years later, Russia’s massive military “exercises” on Ukraine’s borders have created a new crisis with important similarities and differences to the Taiwan Straits crisis. Like China versus the United States regarding Taiwan, Russia has a more direct and intense security interest and cultural connection to the fate of Ukraine than does the United States and NATO. U.S. and NATO interests are more abstract and related to maintaining international norms of the current “liberal world order” and thus may seem less intense and more difficult to communicate. Another similarity is that Russia’s demands appear to attempt to compel action from the United States by threatening brute force against a third party that the United States is willing to sacrifice, albeit reluctantly, because it is not a vital interest. This interest asymmetry creates two dynamics that make a diplomatic solution harder. On the one hand, NATO will be hard-pressed to deter Russia’s intense interest in improving its security situation by force, if necessary. On the other hand, Russia’s coercive threats against a less intense interest of the United States are unlikely to work, much like China failed to compel the United States to accede to its demands during the Taiwan Straits crisis. Russia’s overt demands are unrealistically high and not matched by a threat of sufficient direct cost to the United States or NATO.
This discrepancy between demands and means might explain why the United States is so pessimistic about Russian intentions; Russia’s current approach to coercion does not seem genuinely interested in “negotiation” because they are not threatening something the United States values enough. Nonetheless, Russia will take any “free chicken” they can get from crisis diplomacy with the United States, but they are not likely to get much. Talking for at least a limited time will not cost Russia much, could improve their image slightly, and help them refine their cost-benefit calculation before committing to other actions.
The third potential similarity that seems underreported in the U.S. press is the possibility that Russia might primarily be trying to extract positive outcomes from Ukraine itself, much like the favorable election results that China’s threat to Taiwan seemed to produce. For example, implementation of the Minsk agreement of 2015 may provide Russia with enough gains to justify de-escalation. Greater insight into if this is happening would be helpful to know and could significantly shape U.S. perception of Russia’s intentions. Furthermore, the credibility of Russia’s threat to Ukraine is significantly higher than was China’s threat to Taiwan back in 1996, so it is at least plausible that Russia anticipates the mere fear of attack might produce an acceptable outcome in Ukraine.
Russia has already gained a strategic success by risking military action against Crimea.
Russia’s greater credibility in terms of capability and resolve is an important difference from the Taiwan Crisis. Although China had a clear interest in countering pro-independence momentum, its capability and resolve at that time were questioned. In contrast, Russia’s capability to overwhelm Ukrainian forces throughout the rest of Ukraine seems clear. It also appears to possess sufficient resolve to accept the risk and cost of implementing the threat. Russia has already gained a strategic success by risking military action against Crimea. Although Russia’s ability to translate force into enduring political objectives outside of Crimea is far less clear, one should not discount their willingness to gamble on this vital interest. Furthermore, Russia’s tolerance of the sanctions from its previous actions against Ukraine might make one wonder how much additional pain NATO countries are able and willing to impose indefinitely, especially when Russia yields substantial counter coercion against Germany, Hungary, and others due to its control over much of their supply of gas. This situation, too, helps explain apparent U.S. pessimism.
Can we infer any likely Russian actions by comparing these two cases? Possibly, if we consider the relatively low risks to their credibility that both China and Russia put at stake by engaging in provocative military actions. First, their control of domestic media makes internal consequences of saber-rattling low. Second, one might think that bluffing invasion might have significant adverse consequences on Russia’s future credibility in the eyes of foreign powers, but, like China, Russia has not overtly threatened invasion. China made it very clear to the United States that it did not intend to invade Taiwan. Nonetheless, China’s actions imposed cost on the United States by requiring U.S. officials to divert their attention and agendas to address the provocation, and China was rewarded with an informal presidential summit.
Judging from the reaction of U.S. officials, Russia has not similarly given the United States such explicit assurances. Nonetheless, by publicly insisting it is just conducting exercises while allowing inferences to the contrary, Russia reduces the likelihood and magnitude of damage to the credibility of its future threats if it chooses not to invade this time. As long as it gets something of plausibly sufficient value from NATO or just the United States, Russia can claim that its huge military exercises were not a bluff but rather an appropriately “loud” way of communicating its intense dissatisfaction with the status quo. If, however, no meaningful concessions are forthcoming, Russia is likely willing to take at least some limited forcible action both to save face and improve its security in the light of NATO intransigence.
Thus, Russia’s apparent decision to preserve a diplomatic pathway that will allow it to save face without violence presents a narrow opportunity for the United States and its allies to work with Russia to de-escalate. Although NATO is rightfully reluctant to reward bad behavior too generously, its “principled and pragmatic” approach seems to accept Russia has some legitimate concerns for its security, which NATO may be able to address at least partially. NATO should also factor into its cost-benefit calculations that coercion theory suggests that it should take less threatened carrot and stick to deter Russia from military action than it will take to compel Russia to undo any military action after the fact.
It is unclear if the United States and its allies are willing to offer enough inducements and credible punishments to prevent Russia from taking aggressive actions. It would be unlikely for Putin to engage in this costly and somewhat risky escalation if he did not have at least two satisfactory though not equally preferred outcomes in mind. He surely prefers significant concessions, however unlikely they may be. But creating facts on the ground through a coup, expanding his grab of Ukrainian territory, or at least formalizing control over the Donbas may also be an acceptable outcome, even though more costly, riskier, and less preferred. Russia is indeed testing the United States. A narrow de-escalation window exists, but both sides must be willing to use it.
Leon Perkowski is a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, an Assistant Professor in the Department of National Security and Strategy, and the Director of the Eisenhower Series College Program at the U.S. Army War College. He holds an MS in Environmental Pollution Control from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations from Kent State University.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: President of Russia Vladimir Putin meeting with U.S. President Joseph Biden (via videoconference).
Photo Credit: Presidential Executive Office of Russia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
8. US to provide more aid to AFP
I do not recall a JSOC commander ever traveling to the Philippines and discussing security cooperation and certainly not to WESMINCOM in Zamboanga )at leastt hat was ever publicly acknowledged).
US to provide more aid to AFP
THE United States promised to extend more assistance to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to boost its capacity to fight terrorism.
Lt. Gen. Bryan Fenton, commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command, vowed to sustain the strong cooperation between the US and Philippine military.
In his courtesy call on Western Mindanao Command (WestMinCom) Commander Lt. Gen. Alfredo Rosario Jr. on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022, Fenton said that US troops are committed to assisting the Philippines until peace reigns in Mindanao.
"Our partnership is grounded on our iron-clad commitment to shared security. We will continue to work hand-in-hand to eradicate the extremists and terrorists. We admire your strategic and operational approaches in fighting against the terror groups that threaten international security. We are here to solidify further our alliance for the common good," the US official said.
He lauded the efforts of the WestMinCom in combatting terror groups that victimized foreigners and locals in the past.
Rosario thanked Fenton for the US military's support.
"Rest assured that we will continue to strengthen our good relationship as we work together to fight against terror," the WestMinCom commander said.
9. Romania: NATO's Next Strategic Frontier?
Romania: NATO's Next Strategic Frontier? | Small Wars Journal
Romania: NATO's Next Strategic Frontier?
By JD Fuller
So far, the build-up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border has had the opposite effect President Putin had been hoping for.
His demand that NATO scale back its deployments in Eastern Europe has led to even more troops being sent to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, whilst NATO itself has been injected with a new life and purpose not seen in a generation. Far from sowing disunity, Putin’s actions have focused minds in Western capitals more than any annual NATO conference could have achieved, leading to new conversations about the future direction of the alliance.
Such conversations are already leading to action. Not only have additional NATO resources been dispatched to countries where permanent battle groups were already established like Estonia and Poland, but whole new operational theatres are to be opened up in the coming months as a result. On 11 February NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, announced plans for a permanent deployment of a French-led battle group to Romania, along with commitments in Bulgaria, Czechia and Hungary.
The announcement may come as a surprise to some. After all, Romania does not share a border with Russia nor is it a former member of the USSR meaning Putin does not view it as being inside Moscow’s direct sphere of influence, unlike Ukraine or the Baltic states. However, a quick glance at Romania’s neighbours shows why Western diplomats are so keen to establish a long-term footprint in the country. With long borders shared by Ukraine, Serbia and Moldova - three of Europe’s most unstable countries – Romania provides an important buffer against instability as well as a central piece in the jigsaw puzzle of European security.
Start with Serbia. Romania’s western neighbour has caused alarm in recent months by supporting the efforts of Republika Srpska, the Serbian component of neighbouring Bosnia, to break away from the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. In response, the European parliament recently called for sanctions against the Republika Srpska leader, Milorad Dodik, who regularly incites nationalist hatred on social media whilst labelling the long-term peace agreement null. Meanwhile, the relationship between Serbia and Russia grows ever stronger with the Kremlin providing the Balkan nation with 60 armoured vehicles last month and a promise for more military support in the future.
Then there is Moldova. Its breakaway regions of Transnistria and Gagauzia have been enclaves of pro-Russian sentiment for twenty years, allowing Moscow to place military assets throughout their territories in exchange for financial and diplomatic top cover. Transnistria in particular is a haven for criminality and arms smuggling and is the location of one of Russia’s largest intercept listening posts in Europe. Although most Moldovans favour stronger ties with Romania and the EU, Moldova itself will remain unstable so long as its breakaway regions and the criminal networks that thrive there are supported by Moscow.
Finally, with 245km of Black Sea coastline, Romania holds a large stake in what is fast becoming the most militarised littoral space in the world. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Black Sea has seen an exponential growth in naval manoeuvres, including several recent stand offs between NATO and Russian fleets. Although Romania has a relatively small navy, with its largest warship a Type 56 frigate, its enormous port at Constanta is regularly used by allied forces as a strategic hub to launch operations into the Black Sea and beyond. In addition to its coastline Romania also enjoys unrivalled access to the Danube River, the largest in Europe, and a key artery used since Roman times to transport troops and equipment. The deployment of a permanent NATO garrison to Romania may lead to increased investment in this mobility corridor encouraging more trade and access along the river.
Even if a diplomatic agreement is reached (as we all hope it will be) and Putin orders his troops to withdraw, the security architecture of Europe has been irreversibly changed by the experience. Yet with challenges come opportunities. In his attempt to bully Ukraine, Putin has inadvertently brought NATO closer together as well as speeded up the permanent deployment of troops to Romania; something that could bolster security in the region and forge even closer bonds between the western and eastern halves of Europe.
Such an outcome would be both welcome and overdue.
JD Fuller
JD Fuller is a serving NATO Officer with extensive experience working in Eastern Europe. His thoughts are his own and do not reflect official NATO policy
10. Enabling Resistance: Canada's Opportunity in Great Power Competition
Conclusion:
As the July 2020 strategic document points out, CANSOF must, among several other things, be prepared to effectively contribute if it comes to a state-on-state war. Assuming that such a war will be fought on the soil of foreign countries and that several allied and partner countries have developed resistance-based national defense strategies, CANSOF needs to update its training regime to develop some specific new skills and might need to consider some organizational changes as well. The capability to help build urban resistance networks pre-conflict and enable them during war should become a fundamental task for CANSOF.
Enabling Resistance: Canada's Opportunity in Great Power Competition
Over the last decade, Canadian Special Operations Forces (CANSOF) have become champions of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. However, with recent changes to the geostrategic landscape and the emergence of long-term strategic competition, they must adapt to some new challenges.
The Shift in Warfare
To provide direction and guidance for such adaptation, the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command published its strategic plan, Beyond the Horizon, in July 2020. The document recognizes major shifts in warfare, including an increasing number of (gray-zone) activities below the threshold of traditional armed conflict by state and non-state actors and the potential for a state-on-state conventional war. While CANSOF is already well positioned to fulfill its mission in the context of the former, it seems to have a long way to go when it comes to identifying and developing necessary capabilities for the latter. On that front, CANSOF is arguably behind in organizing, training, and equipping for a major war.
This article argues that CANSOF should develop the capability to build and enable urban resistance networks in foreign countries. This argument assumes that given Canada’s location and its proximity to its main ally, the United States, it is highly unlikely that any state-on-state conflict involving Canadian forces would happen on Canadian soil, but rather within the territory of a small allied or partner country. This assumption and the fact that small countries likely will not be able to prevent a conventional invasion of an aggressor also posits that CANSOF will mostly execute its missions far from friendly forces, deep within enemy occupied territory supporting the resistance networks of these countries.
Our Capability Solutions
As a response to these findings, small countries started to look at solutions for strengthening their defense capabilities and have come up with what they call ‘Total Defense Strategies’ in which their conventional military capabilities are augmented with civilian resilience and resistance efforts. Besides the fact that these concepts are based on civilian contribution, they also seem to capitalize on the defensive advantages of built-up areas since all of them seem to be situated in urban areas. The point of these urban resistance concepts is to create a force multiplier capability in support of other traditional defense efforts to increase the cost of an armed attack and effectively contribute to both deterring and, if necessary, defeating military aggression.
Although at least some elements of CANSOF seem to have recognized the emerging pattern of resistance-based strategies and started investigating their potential role in building and enabling these approaches, they still seem to be far from fulfilling their potential. During the pre-conflict period, CANSOF should focus on helping local resistance networks create and master the “toolkit” they will need to fight against a numerically and technologically superior enemy independently, effectively and in support of a conventional coalition.
CANSOF must develop a habitual relationship through training and exercising with the small states’ resistance networks to build trust, mutual understanding, and common standing operating procedures pre-conflict to maximize the utility of these networks when it comes to actual armed confrontation. Therefore, it is important that CANSOF (at all levels) and the resistance network members clearly understand their goals, capabilities, expectations, and limitations up front.
However, CANSOF is not yet ready to take on such a challenge without some significant adjustments in their training and changes in the way they currently operate. Let us look at some potential necessary changes for consideration.
The Changes, Within
First, CANSOF professional military education and training programs must develop new curriculum at every level to ensure that future military leaders fully understand the characteristics and principles of modern resistance. Second, CANSOF doctrinal publications must include appropriate tactics, techniques, and procedures enabling CANSOF to best fight alongside the 21st century resistance warriors. Third, CANSOF training must go back to the basics in many aspects while also inventing new basics.
Since almost all resistance-based concepts are focusing on urban resistance, CANSOF must become experts in all aspects of the urban operational environment. Skills like urban navigation, urban movement and maneuver, urban survival skills, weapons effects and limitations in built-up areas, communication opportunities and challenges in cities, operation of non-standard, civilian transportation platforms, etc., must become training priorities. Training infrastructure and exercise scenarios must be designed to enable CANSOF to practice activities in large, complex urban areas and to conduct experiments about how to synchronize the effects of conventional military capabilities with resistance-specific equipment and weapons.
Fourth, CANSOF training must focus on skills necessary to effectively operate in civilian cloth hidden in plain sight within a foreign society for an extended period of time. Operators need skills enabling them to effectively operate without their modern personal gadgets and without all the combat support and combat service support they have become accustomed to in recent decades.
Fifth, CANSOF training must include elements addressing how to extend existing resistance networks, recruit and vet new members, create and maintain urban safe havens, and conduct tactical training for new members given the opportunities and challenges of built-up areas.
Sixth, the enemy is no longer low-tech insurgents but professional military forces with peer or near-peer conventional and specialized capabilities. CANSOF members must become intimately familiar with the organization, doctrine, weapon systems, major equipment, rank system, tactics, techniques and procedures of both Russia and China. Besides knowing how to exploit the features of the urban terrain to avoid the strengths of enemy weapons and other systems, it is also crucial that CANSOF members understand and master how to destroy them and, if needed, how to operate them.
Seventh, CANSOF must learn how to teach all these skills to part-time, half-civilian resistance members during peace and then how to enable them to maximize their fighting capabilities during conflict.
Eighth, such changes in training and potentially in mindset should generate some serious debates whether CANSOF’s current organizational frameworks are appropriate for such tasks. A deep analysis of the future operational environment, these small countries’ defense concepts, their associated force structures, and the capabilities and limitations of the competitors might even require some organizational adjustments.
Finally, the defense industry supporting CANSOF’s needs must understand that modern resistance requires purpose-built equipment and weapons both for those who are executing it and those who are enabling it. A completely new subset of individual and collective equipment must be developed and fielded to enable resistance fighters and CANSOF operators to operate in the most efficient way possible.
As the July 2020 strategic document points out, CANSOF must, among several other things, be prepared to effectively contribute if it comes to a state-on-state war. Assuming that such a war will be fought on the soil of foreign countries and that several allied and partner countries have developed resistance-based national defense strategies, CANSOF needs to update its training regime to develop some specific new skills and might need to consider some organizational changes as well. The capability to help build urban resistance networks pre-conflict and enable them during war should become a fundamental task for CANSOF.
Sandor Fabian is a former Hungarian special forces officer with a total of twenty years military experience. Currently Sandor is a NATO special operations subject matter expert, curriculum developer, and advanced studies team leader at LEIDOS, supporting the NATO Special Operations School. Sandor is also a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and an adjunct faculty member at the School of Politics, Security, and International Relations at the University of Central Florida and the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
11. Russia Planning Post-Invasion Arrest and Assassination Campaign in Ukraine, U.S. Officials Say
Excerpts:
According to the report, the 9th Directorate of Russia’s FSB security service began wargaming scenarios this past December with the leadership of Russia’s Airborne Forces.
“Together they mapped which locals would be supportive and began working on lists of targets who would not. The intent was to establish the command-and-control links between intelligence assets and military units to secure critical infrastructure, government buildings, and to locate and eliminate Ukrainian leaders who would rally resistance,” the report said.
Details of Russia’s war game are not public. “They derive from our interviews. However, our interviewees explained in detail how they know about them. They have the receipts,” said report co-author Jack Watling, a research fellow with the institute, in an email.
The warning to Ukraine and other allies about Russia’s potential plan to target political opponents aligns with Washington’s new playbook of rapidly declassifying sensitive intelligence to call out Moscow’s moves before they are made. U.S. and other top NATO officials in Europe have repeatedly said the decision on whether to invade rests solely on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shoulders.
According to senior U.S. diplomats and former intelligence officials, the hope is that by calling out Putin’s moves before he makes them and taking away any element of surprise, they can help deter an invasion.
Russia Planning Post-Invasion Arrest and Assassination Campaign in Ukraine, U.S. Officials Say
Foreign Policy · by Amy Mackinnon, Robbie Gramer, Jack Detsch · February 18, 2022
Intelligence on possible targets has been shared with Ukraine and other partners in the region.
NEW FOR SUBSCRIBERS: Click + to receive email alerts for new stories written by Jack Detsch, Robbie Gramer, Amy Mackinnon
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrives to attend a military drill outside the city of Rivne, northern Ukraine, on Feb. 16. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images
The United States has obtained intelligence that Russia may target prominent political opponents, anti-corruption activists, and Belarusian and Russian dissidents living in exile should it move forward with plans to invade Ukraine, as U.S. President Joe Biden warned on Thursday that the threat of a renewed Russian invasion of the country remains “very high” and could take place within the next several days.
Four people familiar with U.S. intelligence said that Russia has drafted lists of Ukrainian political figures and other prominent individuals to be targeted for either arrest or assassination in the event of a Russian assault on Ukraine.
A fifth person, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the United States has been downgrading its intelligence classification regarding threats to specific groups within Ukraine to share this information with Ukrainian government officials and other partners in the region positioned to help.
The United States has obtained intelligence that Russia may target prominent political opponents, anti-corruption activists, and Belarusian and Russian dissidents living in exile should it move forward with plans to invade Ukraine, as U.S. President Joe Biden warned on Thursday that the threat of a renewed Russian invasion of the country remains “very high” and could take place within the next several days.
Four people familiar with U.S. intelligence said that Russia has drafted lists of Ukrainian political figures and other prominent individuals to be targeted for either arrest or assassination in the event of a Russian assault on Ukraine.
A fifth person, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the United States has been downgrading its intelligence classification regarding threats to specific groups within Ukraine to share this information with Ukrainian government officials and other partners in the region positioned to help.
A spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“As we’ve seen in the past, we expect Russia will try to force cooperation through intimidation and repression,” said a U.S. official who spoke on background on condition of anonymity.
“These acts, which in past Russian operations have included targeted killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, detentions, and the use of torture, would likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons,” the official said.
The Biden administration has also been startled by how formalized the lists are, which appear to target anyone who could challenge the Russian agenda. Five Eyes intelligence partners have also tracked Russian intelligence agencies, such as the FSB and GRU, building up target and kill lists. One congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the moves were typical of Russian doctrine, using armed forces to seize military objectives, while special operators shape the conflict and intelligence operators come into the country to get rid of opposition elements.
The first official noted that dissidents from Russia and Belarus, where a brutal crackdown on dissent following mass protests in 2020 prompted many to flee to neighboring Ukraine, faced particular challenges should they need to flee. Unlike Ukrainian citizens, they require visas to travel to other countries in Europe.
Franak Viacorka, a senior advisor to Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, said that his team had issued sets of specific recommendations to Belarusians living in Ukraine in the event of a Russian attack, but that they had not been informed of a specific threat to Belarusian dissidents.
Russia has amassed around 150,000 troops near the border of Ukraine, ostensibly for joint military drills with neighboring Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko’s military forces. Russia has steadfastly denied it has any plans to invade Ukraine and has accused the West of manufacturing the crisis.
The U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Michael Carpenter, said on Friday that the United States assessed that Russia had amassed between 169,000 to 190,000 personnel in and near Ukraine, a sharp increase from the end of January. The United States has asked Russia for clarification about its “large-scale and unusual military activities,” Carpenter said, including the precise location of the operations and the number and types of military units involved.
Even as U.S. and other NATO members raise concern of a possible invasion, Zelensky has downplayed the threat in recent weeks, insisting an invasion is unlikely and that Washington isn’t helping defuse the crisis by stoking alarm.
Speaking during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sketched out a detailed and disturbing picture of what a Russian invasion of Ukraine could look like, beginning with creating a false pretext for an invasion and the Russian government convening emergency meetings to address the manufactured crisis. Some Western officials have pointed to Russia’s new claims that Ukrainian military forces are perpetrating a “genocide” against the Russian-speaking population in Donbass as the possible false pretext—a claim they dismiss as wholly false.
“Next, the attack is planned to begin,” Blinken said. “Russian missiles and bombs will drop across Ukraine. Communications will be jammed. Cyberattacks will shut down key Ukrainian institutions.” After that, he said, Russian tanks and soldiers “will advance on key targets that have already been identified and mapped out in detailed plans. We believe these targets include … Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million people.”
In his speech, Blinken briefly alluded to U.S. intelligence indicating Russia would target political opponents with arrest or assassination: “And conventional attacks are not all that Russia plans to inflict upon the people of Ukraine. We have information that indicates Russia will target specific groups of Ukrainians.”
On Friday, Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine announced plans to evacuate civilians to Russia, accusing the Ukrainian government of plotting an assault on the region. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba categorically denied Kyiv had plans to launch an offensive operation in the region, describing the allegations as Russian disinformation.
A report published earlier this week by the British defense think tank the Royal United Services Institute, based on interviews with several senior Ukrainian intelligence officials, alleged that the Russian security services had extensive penetration of Ukrainian local government structures and had begun mapping out networks of individuals who could be relied upon to run local governments in the event of a Russian invasion.
According to the report, the 9th Directorate of Russia’s FSB security service began wargaming scenarios this past December with the leadership of Russia’s Airborne Forces.
“Together they mapped which locals would be supportive and began working on lists of targets who would not. The intent was to establish the command-and-control links between intelligence assets and military units to secure critical infrastructure, government buildings, and to locate and eliminate Ukrainian leaders who would rally resistance,” the report said.
Details of Russia’s war game are not public. “They derive from our interviews. However, our interviewees explained in detail how they know about them. They have the receipts,” said report co-author Jack Watling, a research fellow with the institute, in an email.
The warning to Ukraine and other allies about Russia’s potential plan to target political opponents aligns with Washington’s new playbook of rapidly declassifying sensitive intelligence to call out Moscow’s moves before they are made. U.S. and other top NATO officials in Europe have repeatedly said the decision on whether to invade rests solely on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shoulders.
According to senior U.S. diplomats and former intelligence officials, the hope is that by calling out Putin’s moves before he makes them and taking away any element of surprise, they can help deter an invasion.
Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @ak_mack
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RobbieGramer
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter. Twitter: @JackDetsch
12. “If Ukraine Matters, Tell Us Why”: Joe Biden Is Talking to Everyone Except the American People
An important critique. The American people must be informed. I think many people in Washington think the issue is self-evident but we must know that it is not outside the beltway.
I know there is criticism that the administration is conducting a "wag the dog" campaign to divert focus on domestic issues, inflation and COVID among others.
But what is the alternative? Should we ignore the intelligence about Russia and Ukraine? Should we leave Ukraine to fend for themselves while we focus on domestic issues? (Yes I know the response will be to leave it to the Europeans. Is that really feasible? If not then the President does need to explain t to the American people.
“If Ukraine Matters, Tell Us Why”: Joe Biden Is Talking to Everyone Except the American People
The president is carrying out a breathtaking diplomatic effort and deploying troops to Eastern Europe as he tries to avert war, with some beginning to wonder when he’ll explain his moves to a war-weary public more concerned with domestic problems than ever.
FEBRUARY 18, 2022
For Vladimir Putin, the stage was set. Atrophied during the presidency of Donald Trump, the U.S. and its alliance with Europe were weak, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan under President Joe Biden further stamped out an already diluted U.S. desire to engage in conflicts abroad, and the COVID pandemic had left the world reeling economically and socially. The Russian president began deploying troops and military hardware to Ukraine’s borders. “It’s sort of like an experiment: ‘I’ll just start appearing to be ready to go to war. And let’s see how that plays out,’” a former senior diplomat who worked in the region said.
What he likely did not expect was a U.S. administration wholly different on the foreign policy front than the ones that came before it—including Trump, and also Barack Obama, who forged the Iran nuclear deal but also fumbled in times of crisis (creating a “red line” in Syria and then failing to respond when Bashar al-Assad crossed it; responding with sanctions, after the fact, once Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine). In its effort to mitigate the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden’s administration has adopted a posture of preemptive crisis diplomacy—declassifying intelligence on Russia’s propaganda efforts and warning of “false flag” operations, regular communication and coordination with U.S. allies, and signaling to Putin by the highest levels of government what a U.S. response to an invasion of Ukraine might entail.
What it will mean for Biden on his home turf remains to be seen. “I always try to reflect on how this plays domestically. After all, a ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ is, to me, code for making foreign policy serve the ends of domestic priorities and electoral politics at home,” a former senior U.S. official said. “Over the last year, Biden has taken criticism for incompetence (Afghan withdrawal), insensitivity to allies (French submarines and AUKUS), and the general right-wing accusation that ‘Sleepy Joe’ is too old and not paying enough attention. In all three areas of potential criticism, I think the foreign policy team has done a good job in the current crisis of paying close attention—even perhaps overstating the danger of Russian incursion, but that’s better than not expecting the Taliban in Kabul, right?”
While engaging in nonstop diplomatic efforts over the past several weeks abroad, Biden has been largely quiet in selling the endeavor—which involves the deployment of U.S. troops to the region but, notably, not to Ukraine itself—to the American people. Speaking in a daytime address on Friday—his second in a week—Biden largely targeted his messaging to the Russian government, warning that “the entire free world is united” in opposing any attack on Ukraine, a decision he said Putin had made. “The West is united and resolved,” he said, before adding: “Russia can still choose diplomacy, it is not too late to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table.”\
Despite a nod to the idea of “collective security,” lacking in Biden’s remarks was an explanation to the American people as to why they should care (polls show that, as FiveThirtyEight put it, Americans’ views on the situation are “muddled.”) “It’s a threat to Europe and the rest of our NATO allies in Europe, Baltic states, and Poland in particular on the border of Ukraine,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow station chief for the CIA. If the world lets Russia change borders by force, he ventured, who is to say China won’t do it next?
He called on Biden to send that message. “That’s up to Joe Biden to get on his bully pulpit, which he hasn’t done yet,” he said. “If Ukraine matters, tell us why.”
Biden has won praise from diplomats for engaging so wholly, whether it is ultimately successful or not.
“I think they have done a tremendous job of keeping our NATO Allies and partners unified and coordinated,” a second former senior diplomat said. “Their efforts on this have been pitch-perfect and so thorough with State, [the National Security Council], and [the Department of Defense] all reaching out at a variety of levels.“
Observers are currently on alert for Russian “false flag” operations—partly because of the Biden administration’s decision to publicize that that would be a possible method of Russian attack. Some have praised Biden’s aggressive posturing in the information war, but others have criticized it.
The second former high-ranking diplomat said this strategy left them “perplexed.” The other diplomat worried about the parallels to 2003 and Iraq. “I’m not sure that that’s really a good formula for success, certainly using tactics like that can be really useful in moderation,” this person said. “However, to constantly be putting out senior officials every day to say, ‘War could happen today; it could happen in the next couple of days,’ it begins to make us look alarmist.”
“I don’t think that declassifying intelligence is going to influence Vladimir Putin’s moves at all. You can do all you want and declassify stuff that they already know about—it doesn’t matter…. That doesn’t influence his military decisions. Far from it. If we think that’s the case, we are fooling ourselves, that’s like diplomacy by declassification,” Hoffman said. “Economic measures have never really changed Putin’s calculus. Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia, not because of any military threat, but because nothing threatens Putin more than democracy. That’s what scares the crap out of him…. If they’re a prosperous, vibrant democracy, then that’s a clarion call to all of Putin’s own people whom you know the Kremlin is repressing and denying their basic civil and human rights.”
The hope is that the perception of a united front of the U.S. and its Western allies, coupled with clear ramifications—economic and otherwise—if Russia does invade Ukraine, will act as a deterrent to Putin. “There can be no doubt in Putin’s mind that his regime and the Russian economy will be hit very hard and that there are no cracks in the Western alliance,” Tom Malinowski, a former diplomat and now New Jersey congressman, said. “In 2014, there was a lot more naivete about Russia under Putin. I think we made the typical mistake of projecting our own worldview, our own pragmatism onto the Russian leadership, and imagined that they wouldn’t do anything as reckless as seizing Crimea or invading Ukraine. So there was very little effort prior to that action to mobilize deterrence, and once the Russians did move in, the sanctions were very gradually escalated in a way that I think softened their blow.”
Malinowksi added, “In this case, the entire Western alliance is ready to act [if] Putin moves. And the action will be comprehensive.”
13. Will Biden’s ‘Severe Costs’ on Russia Include Cyber Attacks?
Conclusion:
As Russia continues its physical military buildup on Ukraine’s border, Kyiv claims its networks have suffered significant cyberattacks this week. Has Ukraine, the U.S., or other NATO members responded in some way already that we don’t know about? The lack of openness about how nations are operating in the cyber domain may be limiting the world’s understanding of what activities may be going on behind the scenes, and what options are actually on the table. If Putin invades Ukraine, there will be costs. A framework for articulating how the U.S. and its allies intend to respond across all domains, including cyber, would be a valuable step forward in effectively communicating the high stakes at play for all involved.
Will Biden’s ‘Severe Costs’ on Russia Include Cyber Attacks?
We should know more about U.S. cyber operations by now.
What if the “severe costs”—the damage the United States and its allies cause to the Russian military and government should they invade Ukraine—comes not with just sanctions, but through the use of cyber operations? Will we ever know?
Despite all of the attention paid to the deployment of 3,000 U.S. troops to Poland to support NATO’s defense, satellite images of Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border, and potential sanctions if Putin opts to invade, we simply don’t know what actions may or may not be taken in cyberspace by the U.S. government or NATO. But we should know something. Congress and the Biden administration should use this moment to ensure that, whatever Americans are told, it is the best possible and most transparent understanding of how their government is protecting the nation and its allies.
So far, the White House and intelligence offices at the FBI, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security are actively warning about Russian state-sponsored malign cyber activity, but the U.S. government does not articulate how it might respond. This outdated lack of transparency about the true conduct of 21st century asymmetric war—or hostile activity below the threshold of war—clouds the domestic and geopolitical debate and hinders our ability to formulate policy options and inform decisions about military preparedness, engagements, and diplomacy.
The surveillance debate of the past 20 years, and the backlash to unauthorized disclosures of classified information, offer lessons about today’s current secrecy surrounding U.S. government cyber operations. The traditional arguments for keeping such information so highly guarded and classified are similar: how cyber activities are conducted must be protected lest the techniques become exposed and eventually useless. But important aspects of the surveillance information environment have changed in the past decade, paving the way for greater transparency. And the secrecy itself may have lowered confidence in the value of the underlying activities.
The debate is worth having. Greater transparency could enable better policymaking. It might also help nations, governments, and the global private sector better protect against malign nation-state cyber activity. In the physical world, although militaries endeavor to protect operational security, their troop deployments, movements, and combat actions are more easily visible to the public. But even when operations are kept secret, such as the U.S. military operation this month to capture the leader of ISIS in Syria, the event is generally known and acknowledged publicly after the fact. Where U.S. leaders draw the line for secrecy will always depend on each circumstance, but it’s time to rethink the rules and our assumptions.
A starting point would be the development of principles of transparency for cyber threats and operations, modeled on the Principles of Intelligence Transparency For the Intelligence Community. Those rules of the road were written seven years ago, following the unauthorized disclosures of classified information regarding U.S. government surveillance activities begun by Edward Snowden in 2013, and in light of the subsequent domestic and international reactions to those disclosures and associated privacy and civil liberties issues raised. The principles provided guidance to the intelligence community about how to approach declassifying information and engaging in public fora the authorities, policies, procedures, oversight, and compliance frameworks surrounding intelligence activities.
Today, the intelligence community and the homeland security enterprise engage in information sharing to better protect U.S. critical infrastructure and other assets that reside in the private sector. And, under the leadership of Avril Haines, a director of national intelligence who recognizes the value in transparency, the intelligence community has leaned very far forward in releasing information it has learned in order to inform diplomacy and public dialogue in advance of a potential Russian invasion.
Military planners and operators may counter that secrecy is an essential component of successful cyber operations. But there is a way in which governments can acknowledge the contours and use of cyber operations in a way that enables a more honest policy debate but does not compromise effectiveness. From time to time, congressional hearings or on-the-record interviews have revealed meaningful information about certain cyber engagements or activities, such as cyber operations as they relate to international terrorism organizations, like ISIS. Congressional, expert, and media response to the SolarWinds cyber event last year—which only came to light as a result of private sector public disclosure in December 2020—demonstrates how misinformed reactions to such events can vary wildly. In that case, they ranged from panicked allegations that war had started to calmer observations that the U.S. may be simply on the receiving end of the same type of nation-state cyber espionage activity it also may engage in. The lack of transparency about U.S. cyber operations appears to be increasingly hindering an honest policy conversation about deterrence, response, and engagement.
As Russia continues its physical military buildup on Ukraine’s border, Kyiv claims its networks have suffered significant cyberattacks this week. Has Ukraine, the U.S., or other NATO members responded in some way already that we don’t know about? The lack of openness about how nations are operating in the cyber domain may be limiting the world’s understanding of what activities may be going on behind the scenes, and what options are actually on the table. If Putin invades Ukraine, there will be costs. A framework for articulating how the U.S. and its allies intend to respond across all domains, including cyber, would be a valuable step forward in effectively communicating the high stakes at play for all involved.
Carrie Cordero is the Robert M. Gates senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. She previously served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security and senior associate general counsel at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
14. Europe's Gordian Knot
Excerpts:
If Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy is correct in framing Ukraine as the literal and figurative gates of Europe, then Putin is certainly knocking at the gate. Slowly untying the imperfect but important knot of Ukraine gives Moscow the leverage it needs to begin restructuring Europe’s security architecture and repairing the damage done to Russian preeminence after the Cold War. Whether pursued through political guile or brute force, Moscow’s ongoing gambit will, by design, have far-reaching consequences. As much as Western observers might want this crisis to be about Russia and its neighbor, it is not that simple.
Those who ponder whether Ukraine’s future is critical to U.S. interests are asking the wrong question. Instead, they should be wondering what the world would look like if Ukraine were fractured beyond repair. Quite possibly, it cracks open for the world’s autocrats not only the gates of Europe but also those of Asia by ushering in a new era in which the rules of the international order have changed, and neo-imperialism is an acceptable tool of statecraft so long as the imperialist justifies his ends sufficiently. No matter their interest in Ukraine’s affairs, leaders of free nations everywhere should be concerned with what that era might look like.
Europe's Gordian Knot
The Hill · by Michael P. Ferguson , Opinion Contributor · February 19, 2022
After months of speculation that the Russian military might sack Kyiv, Ukrainian and Russian separatist forces ramped up their exchange of artillery fire in east Ukraine last week. International media attention made this appear novel, but it is nothing new. More than 14,000 people have died in the fighting there since 2014. The recent escalation occurred within twenty-four hours of a Russian investigative committee supposedly finding mass graves of ethnic Russian civilians in the Donbas region, where the two main separatist factions are located. Western officials warned that the Kremlin could use such unverified claims as a pretext for a full or partial incursion.
More broadly, senior Russian officials believe the common lineage of Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians, who descended from the prominent European state of Ancient Rus’ (9 – 13 century AD), makes them all Russian rather than all Ukrainian where the capital resided in Kyiv.
Putin already has the favor of Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko, which makes Ukraine the one that got away. In other words, even if Putin withdraws his forces from Ukraine’s border, opting instead to continue with measures short of war, it will not alter his clearly articulated objective of “liberating” ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Should that happen, the ripple effects would not be contained to the European theater.
One lens through which this problem might be better understood is an ancient one. Alexander the Great, the fourth century BCE King of Macedon who nearly conquered Asia before his 30th birthday, “untied” the Gordian knot in 333. Little more than cornel wood gnarled around the yoke of a wagon, it was said that whoever untied the knot would rule all of Asia, and ruling Asia eventually became Alexander’s obsession. The way he went about untying the knot is still uncertain, but the two accounts are instructive.
The first tells of Alexander using his smarts to remove the yoke from the knot rather than untying the knot itself. The second and more likely story is that he hacked at it with his sword until it became undone. These two approaches personify modern schools of thought related to how autocrats might go about pursuing their goals this century: By applying political cunning or by chopping away at the world.
Putin is using Ukraine as leverage to secure not only increased access to and control over Europe’s security architecture, but also to question the international order as it is currently structured. How he might achieve those goals is a subject of intense debate, but both above options remain on the table.
Numerous polls reveal that the 2014 annexation of Crimea pushed Ukrainians away from Russia and into the arms of NATO and the European Union, even though Ukrainian membership in either remains unlikely. As I argued recently in a piece for the Modern War Institute at West Point, this trend, coupled with events of the last few months, lends credibility to the theory that Putin may need to rely on force more than political acumen to cement his role in Europe’s future. Lawmakers should be clear about what this means.
If the withdrawal from Afghanistan stressed Western credibility, the complete destabilization of Ukraine would put it through a gauntlet. Watching Putin shred the Budapest Memorandum (1994) and Russo-Ukrainian Treaty (1997) that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty would do little to bolster the credibility of international agreements. Those pacts also forced Kyiv to hand over its nuclear arsenal in exchange for Western-brokered security guarantees, which means voiding them would not bode well for non-proliferation efforts either. Despite these facts, some still see no U.S. interests in Ukraine and are racing toward the easiest off ramp, which Russia has conveniently furnished.
In response to Moscow’s demands made last December, numerous public figures and journalists urged President Biden to reassure Putin that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO. These advocates should consider more carefully what they are insisting: that NATO abolish its longstanding “open door policy” and the United States command another sovereign nation to abandon goals legally written into its Constitution because its neighbor has threatened the use of military force if it does not. But this is beside the point.
NATO has no intention of inviting Ukraine into the alliance any time soon, and Putin knows this. The belief that simply declaring so publicly could somehow represent Moscow’s criteria for de-escalation from a full-scale invasion is therefore illogical. Using the NATO membership trope as a carrot for the West is more a mechanism for exerting control over NATO’s decision cycle than it is a means of promoting defense equity between Russia and Europe.
These are not the only reasons to question the sincerity of such demands. In 1990 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave up East Germany in response to a promise from U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would move “not one inch” further if he did. While it is important to reiterate that members enter the alliance of their own free will, NATO did expand — a lot. It is therefore unlikely that Putin would place much faith in such a guarantee even if provided and would instead use it as a springboard to demand additional concessions from NATO.
If Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy is correct in framing Ukraine as the literal and figurative gates of Europe, then Putin is certainly knocking at the gate. Slowly untying the imperfect but important knot of Ukraine gives Moscow the leverage it needs to begin restructuring Europe’s security architecture and repairing the damage done to Russian preeminence after the Cold War. Whether pursued through political guile or brute force, Moscow’s ongoing gambit will, by design, have far-reaching consequences. As much as Western observers might want this crisis to be about Russia and its neighbor, it is not that simple.
Those who ponder whether Ukraine’s future is critical to U.S. interests are asking the wrong question. Instead, they should be wondering what the world would look like if Ukraine were fractured beyond repair. Quite possibly, it cracks open for the world’s autocrats not only the gates of Europe but also those of Asia by ushering in a new era in which the rules of the international order have changed, and neo-imperialism is an acceptable tool of statecraft so long as the imperialist justifies his ends sufficiently. No matter their interest in Ukraine’s affairs, leaders of free nations everywhere should be concerned with what that era might look like.
Capt. Michael P. Ferguson is a U.S. military officer, author and analyst with decades of operational experience throughout Europe, Southwest Asia and Africa. He writes for various publications and is coauthor of a forthcoming book on the military legacy of Alexander the Great.
*The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect official positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. government.
The Hill · by Michael P. Ferguson , Opinion Contributor · February 19, 2022
15. Ukrainian commander: Russia will encounter 100,000 citizen resisters if it invades
Unconventional deterrence. Resistance and resilience.
Conclusion:
“It’s not even about flats or houses,” Kateryna Pavlova, Chernobyl’s Head of the Department for International Cooperation and Public Relations, said. “It’s about something stronger. It’s in behavior. It’s our language. It’s our country. It’s our flag. It’s our culture.”
Last year, Putin published a long essay in which he trumpeted the “historical unity” of Russian and Ukrainian languages and cultures over more than a millennium. But many Ukrainians do not share his view.
“We hope for a diplomatic solution, but everything will be destroyed if Russia comes,” Pavlova said. “Russia must understand that it will fight not just against our troops and our military. Russian soldiers will meet a very strong population who will fight back.”
Ukrainian commander: Russia will encounter 100,000 citizen resisters if it invades - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Ukrainian commander: Russia will encounter 100,000 citizen resisters if it invades
Waving the Ukrainian flag. Credit: Vladimir Yaitskiy. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0
Russia has massed 190,000 troops along its border with Ukraine—enough, according to analysts, to undertake the largest military land operation in Europe since 1945. Ukraine’s generals acknowledge that their military could be overwhelmed by a Russian invasion. But some Ukrainians—including great grandmothers, teenagers, advertising executives, and others—have been quietly preparing to resist. These unlikely civilians practice with prop guns and purchase their own rifles. They have pursued combat-skill classes and hands-on training in private and government-run programs.
“Your mother would do it, too,” Valentina Constantinovska, a 79-year-old great grandmother, said while holding an AK-47 during a training exercise. Ukrainian citizens engaging in a potential David-and-Goliath-like battle with the colossal Russian military may sound like the plot of a farce. But this army of what one Ukrainian commander estimated at 100,000 resisters could give—and perhaps has already given—Russian President Vladimir Putin pause.
The Ukrainian law “On the Fundamentals of National Resistance,” which took effect on January 1 of this year, enshrines civilian resistance, known as Territorial Defense Forces, into the country’s military doctrine. Should Russia invade, Ukrainians are encouraged to fight back as part of this volunteer force. Admittedly, if Russia were to launch an air or missile strike, an insurgent army of armed Ukrainian civilians would not be poised to help. But a strong citizen resistance offers some hope of deterring a land invasion, especially if supported by Western countries, as many are prepared to do.
“[I]f it turned into a Ukrainian insurgency,” James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO said, “Putin should realize that after fighting insurgencies ourselves for two decades, we know how to arm, train and energize them.”
US Army veterans have also helped train Ukrainian civilians in resistance warfare. “This is their 1776,” US Army Ranger Adam, who withheld his last name due to security concerns, said.
Insurgent armies are not without controversy. The reporter with whom Constantinovska—the great grandmother—spoke tweeted a photo of her that garnered nearly 30,000 likes along with many negative responses. The criticism noted that the training exercise was offered by the far-right movement Azov, which has been accused of harboring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology. Residents engaged in the exercise noted that while not all embrace those views, this training in first aid, survival, evacuation, weapons safety, and shooting was all they have received since the start of the citizen-resistance movement in 2014.
“The more coffins we send back, the more the Russian people will start thinking twice,” Ihor Gribenoshko, an advertising executive at a pharmaceutical company, told the New York Times. In addition to potential economic and political sanctions imposed by Western countries, Putin’s calculus of whether to invade must factor in the potential cost in terms of human lives
Ukrainians are relative newcomers to organized citizen resistance. In 2014, the Russian army invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea without firing a shot. Then, in Ukraine’s Donbas region, civilians mounted a resistance, though they had little or no combat training. Today, Ukraine’s military is stronger, though still unlikely to be able to repel a Russian invasion. But a potential battle with citizens who are prepared to fight back could be messier than Russia would like.
“The Russians want to destroy Ukraine’s combat forces. They don’t want to be in a position where they have to occupy the ground, where they have to deal with civilians, where they have to deal with an insurgency,” James Sherr, a Russian military strategy analyst, told the AP.
“It’s not even about flats or houses,” Kateryna Pavlova, Chernobyl’s Head of the Department for International Cooperation and Public Relations, said. “It’s about something stronger. It’s in behavior. It’s our language. It’s our country. It’s our flag. It’s our culture.”
Last year, Putin published a long essay in which he trumpeted the “historical unity” of Russian and Ukrainian languages and cultures over more than a millennium. But many Ukrainians do not share his view.
“We hope for a diplomatic solution, but everything will be destroyed if Russia comes,” Pavlova said. “Russia must understand that it will fight not just against our troops and our military. Russian soldiers will meet a very strong population who will fight back.”
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16. How false flag operations work and Russia's history of using them
One good thing about all of this is that the public is being educated on concepts that are very important to know in this era of strategic competition and the gray zone. Understanding these concepts helps inoculate the public from the effects.
How false flag operations work and Russia's history of using them
With nearly 200,000 Russian troops now positioned on Ukraine’s borders for what the United States and NATO have warned may be an impending invasion, there’s been a great deal of discussion in recent weeks about the likelihood that Russia will use a false flag operation to justify their invasion plans.
But what exactly is a false flag operation, and why would Russia use this approach to disguise its intentions?
False Flag: Pinning the blame on the other guy
(WikiMedia Commons)
Boiled down to its simplest Hollywood terms, a false flag operation is a good old fashioned “frame job” as you might see depicted in crime procedurals. In effect, one nation frames another for committing an aggressive act and then uses that act as justification for further military action.
The phrase has roots that arguably reach back all the way to the 16th Century, though our current use of the word “flag” may originate with pirates. Pirates would fly friendly flags while approaching merchant vessels to lull them into a false sense of security before attacking, making their approach to “false flag” operations entirely literal.
In a modern sense, false flag is a phrase most often used in reference to national governments and the military forces they control. They’re used when a nation wants to avoid international retribution or sharp public criticism for aggressive military actions.
To put it into overly simplistic schoolyard terms, a false flag operation is the nation-state equivalent of punching someone in the face and then shouting, “he started it!” when sent to detention.
Russia has a long history with false flag operations
Russian President Vladimir Putin (WikiMedia Commons)
Russia has a long and storied history of using false flag operations, many of which were revealed when KGB records reached the public after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1939, the Soviet Army shelled one of their own villages near the Finnish border, which they then used as a pretext for invasion just four days later. In 1968, Russia used false flag attacks to justify its military intervention in Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact nation began pushing for social democratic reforms.
In more modern history, Russian President Vladimir Putin himself is widely believed to have taken power through his creative use of false flag operations. In 1999, apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk were bombed, killing hundreds of Russian civilians. The bombings were immediately blamed on Islamist Chechen rebels and used as justification for what became the second Chechen war, but perhaps more importantly, served as the impetus for Putin’s sudden rise to power over then-president Boris Yeltsin.
How do we know this bombing was likely a false flag operation? Shortly after the bombings, another undetonated bomb was found in the basement of a building in the Russian city of Ryazan. Investigators were able to track the bomb not to Chechen rebels, but rather to Russia’s own FSB—the direct successor to Russia’s infamous KGB. The FSB went on to declare the bomb a fake that they planted simply as a training exercise.
Putin, it’s worth noting, served in the KGB for 16 years, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Can false flag operations work in the digital age?
(U.S. Army)
It goes without saying that it’s much more difficult to get away with framing another nation for aggressive military actions in the era of ubiquitous smartphones, satellite intelligence, and lighting-fast media reporting… but in some ways, the digital revolution has made false flag operations more tenable, rather than less.
As recently as 2017, Russia used footage captured from a mobile video game as evidence of the United States colluding with the Islamic State. Though, not all Russian efforts are quite as ham-fisted.
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 14, 2017
Russia places a large emphasis on information operations, or on managing the perceptions of the world’s populous. In fact, Russian military officers learn and leverage an approach to “controlling the narrative” known as reflexive control.
“Reflexive control is defined as a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action.”
A modern example of a reflexive control campaign can actually be found in Russia’s military annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. Russia deployed troops into Ukraine with all of the military insignias removed from their uniforms, then postured publicly that they had absolutely no troops involved so aggressively that the Kremlin began to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.
By effectively muddying the informational waters online with a combination of troll tactics, disinformation, disreputable media, and people’s own innocent social media practices (sharing unvetted content) Russia is able to effectively obfuscate matters just enough to minimize the fallout of their aggressive acts.
Winston Churchill once said that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” but in the digital age, that lie may have already circled the globe twice before the truth realizes the race has begun. Often, it’s not a question of proof, but rather speed and volume that dictates what large portions of the public perceive to be true. Most of the world sees everything beyond the line of sight of their window through digital media—and that means “objective” truth can be lost in a sea of “subjective” truths presented by state media outlets and online operative (or “troll”) networks.
In a real way, this approach to managing narratives works just like advertising, except instead of trying to convince you to hand over your hard-earned money, information operations need only to nudge you toward what’s presented as a seemingly logical conclusion (and maybe entice you to click share).
How could Russia use a false flag operation to justify invading Ukraine?
A Ukrainian Ground Forces soldier provides security during a fast rope from a Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopter as part of Rapid Trident 2021 at Combat Training Center-Yavoriv near Yavoriv, Ukraine, Sept. 21, 2021. (Photo Credit: Spc. Preston Hammon)
Throughout Russia’s troop build-up around Ukraine’s borders, the Kremlin has claimed to have no intention of invading. According to Moscow, the massive build-up of Russian troops is nothing more than a training exercise… although they have also issued a series of demands required for them to stop their “totally not an” invasion from occurring.
The fear among many in the West is that Russia will soon stage an attack against its own troops or the Russian-speaking population inside Ukraine’s borders, which Russia will then argue is justification for a swift military reprisal using the nearly 200,000 troops they just so happened to have in the neighborhood.
“We are firmly convinced that the Russians, should they decide to move forward with an invasion, are looking hard at the creation of a pretext — a false-flag operation — something that they generate and try to blame on the Ukrainians as a trigger for military action,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told the press last week.
The United States and its NATO allies, however, have been trying to prevent a false flag operation from taking place by calling Russia’s bluff before they can carry such an attack out.
“And we are calling that out publicly because we do believe that if Russia chooses to do that, they should be held to account; the world should not believe that a false-flag operation that they conducted is a legitimate casus belli for going into Ukraine,” he continued.
In the coming days, keep a lookout for Russian claims of aggressive military acts from Ukraine (claims that have already begun surfacing in Russian state-owned media). In fact, Russian media has been claiming that Ukraine has been preparing to execute an offensive against Russian forces, presenting itself as a victim. Journalist Michael Weiss has collected a number of Russian media stories that reflect exactly that in this thread.
Don't need declassified intel to see the narrative shaping exercise leading up to events in eastern Ukraine in the past 48 hours. Here's a short sampling from Russian media/open source outlets since early February…
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) February 18, 2022
This Russian-language article published on February 1 says Ukraine’s “People’s Militia” is planning a “major war” against Russian forces with American backing, saying they intend to launch an airborne offensive into Donbass—a part of Ukraine that’s seen fierce fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine’s military. In this article published by Russia’s TASS on February 5, Dmitriy Polyanskiy, Russia’s first deputy representative to the UN accused Ukraine of shelling civilians in the same region. Two days later, Russian media claimed Polish mercenaries had joined the fighting in Donbass, making it all the more urgent that Russian intervene.
This article claims British forces are heading into Donbass to join the fighting, while this one says NATO forces are doing the same. Of course… none of that has happened, but it’s hard to know that for sure if you’re reading this anywhere other than Donbass.
Whether or not Russia will use a false flag operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine remains to be seen, but it’s important to remember that it’s a tool in Putin’s toolbox… and one he’s shown no aversion to using in the past.
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17. Austin Says Current Operations Give Hints of New National Defense Strategy
This is likely because the strategic competition we see happening in Ukraine and Europe, Taiwan and the South China Sea, Iran and the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, and north Korea and in the gray zone is likely to persist for decades to come (well, hopefully the regime in north Korea will not last that long!).
Excerpts:
"But most important, [integrated deterrence means] using the capability and capacity that's resident in our partners and allies," he said. "So, what you see today, actually playing out is exactly that. You're seeing us lead with diplomacy. You've seen us work very, very carefully with our allies and partners to share information, and to also move very, very quickly and deliberately to help reassure and reinforce wherever required."
"So, you have seen a preview of that strategy begin to play out here, as we address this most recent crisis," he continued.
Austin Says Current Operations Give Hints of New National Defense Strategy
People interested in the new National Defense Strategy can see some of it in play as the United States and its allies face Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in Warsaw today.
Poland Presser
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III answers questions during a news conference at the Ministry of Defense in Warsaw, Poland, Feb. 18, 2022.
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Austin said he is proud of the work that has been done on the document, but he is not yet ready to release it. He did give some hints about the strategy and the idea of integrated deterrence that is a driving force behind it.
He spoke during a press conference in Warsaw following meetings with Polish officials. They discussed NATO and bilateral efforts in Eastern Europe.
The National Defense Strategy "will certainly address major threats to our security," he said. "It'll also address major threats to the international rules-based order."
Integrated deterrence is a driving idea for the document. It "will be a key piece of that new strategy," Austin said. "Integrated deterrence means using all of the capabilities in all warfighting domains: Air, land, sea, space and cyber."
It also includes using every instrument of national power: diplomatic, economic, judicial and so on.
Partner Meeting
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Polish Minister of Defense Mariusz Blaszcak address U.S. and Polish troops at Powidz Air Base, Poland, Feb. 18, 2022. Austin was in Poland to meet with Polish leadership and to tour the Powidz facilities and observe the culture and conditions of our rotational presence there.
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"But most important, [integrated deterrence means] using the capability and capacity that's resident in our partners and allies," he said. "So, what you see today, actually playing out is exactly that. You're seeing us lead with diplomacy. You've seen us work very, very carefully with our allies and partners to share information, and to also move very, very quickly and deliberately to help reassure and reinforce wherever required."
"So, you have seen a preview of that strategy begin to play out here, as we address this most recent crisis," he continued.
Austin also saw integrated deterrence at work when he visited with U.S. and Polish service members at Powidz Air Base outside of Warsaw. The base is home for U.S. rotational units and has been for some years. The military units of both nations are integrated together and work and train together, Army Lt. Gen. John S. Kolasheski, the commander of U.S. V Corps, said.
Partner Meeting
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III addresses U.S. and Polish troops at Powidz Air Base, Poland, Feb. 18, 2022. Austin was in Poland to meet with Polish leadership and to tour the Powidz facilities and observe the culture and conditions of our rotational presence there.
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"It's just a wonderful opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with our allies and partners, focused on building readiness, focusing on building interoperability between our armies and to build collective defense crisis response," the general said to reporters traveling with Austin.
Austin beamed when he spoke to the assembled troops. He said he told the Polish defense minister that "whenever we place an American soldier somewhere, it demonstrates our resolve. It demonstrates our commitment to our partners. So, I would say that you are our greatest ambassadors. I could not be prouder of you. I want to thank you for your sacrifices, for your commitment and for your professionalism."
18. Can we please stop talking about domains?
Uh oh. Bring back EBO????
Excerpts:
The Department of Defense needs to recommit itself to effects-based warfare and focus on the reason for which the department exists: dead bad guys and broken things, or mitigated bad guys and incapable things at a minimum. That is our military objective.
We will fight tomorrow across a spectrum of effects, not a spectrum of domains. This is not advocacy for the end of services; rather, it’s advocacy for services to stop thinking of our military as a set of isolated domains. The time has come to create a permanent, destructive effect on domains and focus on why a weapon is used instead of the physical spaces being occupied.
Can we please stop talking about domains?
It is time for the U.S. military to end its focus on domains. We need to kill the concept entirely within military programing, planning and execution in order to achieve true integration.
Humans have learned to wage war in every space we occupy. We’ve even learned how to fight in environments we occupy only via electric current and light pulses. At some point we began labeling these specific maneuver spaces as domains, and in so doing we made multidomain operations unachievable. Instead of joint all-domain concepts, we need joint all-capability effects.
In general, domains can be categorized on the way in which warfare is conducted. Knowing how submarines move and understanding the unique consideration of weapons systems based on physics are important factors. Knowing how thrust and lift overcomes gravity and drag to create flight, and how we can manipulate that, is important. Understanding that space flight is controlled falling using gravity and altitude as factors for effectiveness is important. However, by dividing these concepts into domains, we put barriers to them.
In reality, all of our domains are the same. There is a physical space controlled by physics that needs to be understood and accounted for. This should not be the barrier to integration it has become.
Fiefdoms and stovepipe specializations inspired the Goldwater-Nichols Act. We reformed our joint military around domains — stovepipes by another name. We continue to split domains and “identify” new ones, further isolating capabilities.
U.S. military operations can be divided into six domains depending on your perspective: subsurface naval, surface naval, ground (which is just another surface), air, space and cyberspace.
As we expanded domains, conflicts arise first on the relevance, and then on the ownership of those domains. We continue not to learn. All domains are warfighting domains because all domains are simply a continuation of our world that can be contested for control of resources. Dividing capabilities based on physics for development is one thing, but dividing execution of effects into domains is entirely different.
Warfare requires the achievement of objectives, regardless of the physical space in which the target and the shooter exist. All of the services have weapons requiring coordination across a spectrum of physical spaces. Both the Army — our primary ground domain force — and the Navy — our primary sea domain force — have weapons that launch from the surface, travel through the air and impact a target on the surface. The Navy and the Air Force both have weapons that launch from below the surface, travel through air and space, and impact targets on the surface. A single agency responsible for that coordination makes perfect sense, but focusing on that physical space is a dead end.
Ending our military fixation on domains and domain integration will be necessary to push beyond stovepipe programs and concepts. Instead of talking to the physical domain of release or impact, let’s get back to talking about effects integration. We tried to fix the integration problem by forcing services to work together, but maintained the defining factors of which those services divide lines of effort: domains.
No matter how you categorize the end result (effect), the kill mechanism (the weapon) and the delivery system (the platform), the military’s objective is either to enhance our position or degrade the position of our adversary. Planning outside of the concept of domain allows for conversations without ownership of the effect. The location of the target compared to the location of the platform is irrelevant. A satellite communications jammer isn’t targeting a satellite — it’s targeting information. Who owns the information domain?
Let’s stop overcomplicating war. It is a series of effects created by weapons employed from platforms to achieve objectives. Every war in history has followed these concepts.
A target can exist in or on the subsurface, surface, air, space or information realm. That target can be struck with an effect originating from the subsurface, surface, air, space or information realm. Select an effect to achieve an objective, browse the category of capabilities and employ. Set up communication to ensure deconfliction and effectiveness.
The Department of Defense needs to recommit itself to effects-based warfare and focus on the reason for which the department exists: dead bad guys and broken things, or mitigated bad guys and incapable things at a minimum. That is our military objective.
We will fight tomorrow across a spectrum of effects, not a spectrum of domains. This is not advocacy for the end of services; rather, it’s advocacy for services to stop thinking of our military as a set of isolated domains. The time has come to create a permanent, destructive effect on domains and focus on why a weapon is used instead of the physical spaces being occupied.
U.S. Space Force Maj. Mark Crimm is a defense fellow taking part in the Air University Legislative Fellowship program. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily the views of the U.S. Defense Department or the Department of the Air Force.
19. Ukraine Risks Becoming a Case Study of Liberalization Lost
Ukraine Risks Becoming a Case Study of Liberalization Lost
By A.J. Skiera & Dmytro Lyvch
February 18, 2022
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Kremlin aggression has been all too real for Ukrainians for decades. It will remain Ukraine’s reality whether or not Russia invades the country in the coming days and weeks. We’ve encountered this reality firsthand, one of us as a documentary maker and the other as a resident of the country.
The Kremlin’s redeployment of some 130,000 Russian troops, who now surround Ukrainian territory on four sides, directly threatens the impressive achievements of Ukrainian civil society. The 2014 Revolution of Dignity communicated to the rest of the world that the people of Ukraine yearn to be free of Russian interference as they pursue democratic self-determination.
Just a few years following the revolution, economic growth surpassed 2% in 2016 and 2017, then exceeded 3% in 2018 and 2019. While the COVID-19 pandemic shrank the economy in 2020, nearly a half-decade of expansion was notable in a country that saw contractions of nearly 23% in 1994 and more than 15% in 2009.
The Ukrainian people have struggled to overcome the deadening legacy of the Soviet Union. Ukrainians are burdened by over 3,500 state-owned enterprises, or SOEs, which drag down the economy and provide convenient vehicles for corruption. The state operates in many sectors and holds significant market share in some, including banking and energy.
Nonetheless, SOEs have been privatized on a large scale. The state-owned Dnipro Hotel was auctioned for nearly $40 million in 2020—ten times higher than the opening price. In 2021, the ProZorro.Sale system—a platform for auctions facilitating small-scale privatization—hosted more than 1,200 successful auctions that accounted for nearly $180 million in transactions. In the process, Ukraine transferred loss-making government assets to those who can use them more productively.
Two years ago, Ukraine’s national parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed historic legislation that legalized the sale of farmland for the first time in over two decades. Ukraine lifted a moratorium on selling more than 32 million hectares of farmland currently owned by over 6 million farmers. Those landowners now have full control of their land and enjoy unprecedented selling and purchasing power.
The mere existence of a dynamic and democratic market economy is considered a threat by the Kremlin. It’s a threat to the dictatorship’s hold on the Russian people, who can see an attractive alternative just across the border. Accordingly, such transformational change does not come without blowback. (After Skiera filmed a documentary chronicling efforts to end the land-sale moratorium in 2019, dozens of his personal accounts and devices were compromised by what was most likely a Russian state entity.)
All of Ukraine’s reforms are now at risk, as the Kremlin tightens its grip on other countries. Hopes for sustained liberalization are overshadowed by fears of all-out war.
From national leaders and chambers of commerce to labor unions and media organizations, the West must form a united front and engage in full-scale deterrence, making it infinitely clear that Russia’s military mobilization will not go unchecked and specifying the repercussions in clear terms for Putin to understand.
Liberal democracies should be gravely concerned for Ukraine’s future. All of us in free societies have a moral responsibility to condemn the rise of authoritarian aggression in Europe and around the world. Putin and other dictators will continue to undermine liberty in their neighborhoods, if not deterred. We can look away and lose, or we can pierce the waves of lies and disinformation emanating from the Kremlin.
Bullied by Putin, it’s our job to ensure that democratic truths defeat dictatorial lies. Ukraine’s future depends on it, and so does the future of the free world.
A longtime public supporter of Ukraine’s civil society, AJ Skiera serves as Associate Director of Marketing and Communications at U.S.-based Atlas Network. Dmytro Lyvch serves as Chairman and CEO of the Ukraine-based think tank EasyBusiness. The views expressed are the authors' own.
A.J. Skiera serves as associate director of marketing and communications at Atlas Network, where he leads its storytelling and film work for the economic development project DignityUnbound.org.
20. What makes 2 of the world's toughest special-operations courses so tough, according to troops who've endured them
What makes 2 of the world's toughest special-operations courses so tough, according to troops who've endured them
A Special Forces soldier talks to members of an Iraqi SWAT team during close-quarter combat training in Iraq, July 6, 2008. US Army
- The US special-operations community boasts some of the toughest special-operations courses.
- From time to time, US commandos head overseas to test their mettle at foreign special-operations schools.
- These are two of those foreign special-operations courses known for their difficulty and realism.
As one of the world’s best commando forces, the US special-operations community boasts some of the toughest special-operations courses.
Special Forces Underwater Operations School, Ranger School, Special Forces Advanced Reconnaissance, Target Analysis, and Exploitation Techniques Course, Special Operations Combat Medic course are some of the courses and training regimes known for their difficulty and extremely high standards.
Special operators from all over the world vie for the opportunity to attend US commando courses, and every class has a few foreign students.
From time to time, US special operators also get to attend foreign schools. When they do, they experience a rather different approach to training. Some of those foreign special-operations courses are notorious for their difficulty and realism.
La Escuela Militar de Lanceros
Colombian troops during a demonstration at La Escuela de Lanceros. Colombian army
The Colombian Lancero course is one of the toughest foreign special-operations courses US commandos get to attend. Army Green Berets usually attend, but Navy SEALs and Army Rangers will occasionally go too.
“The most difficult course I am aware of is the Colombian Lancero Course. It was established in 1956 by two US Army Ranger officers on TDY [temporary duty] orders to Colombia. The Colombian wanted a course similar to our Ranger course,” Steve Balestrieri, a journalist and retired Army Special Forces warrant officer, told Insider.
Called La Escuela Militar de Lanceros in Spanish, the course is named after the Lanceros, or Lancers, who aided Simon Bolivar during Colombia’s fight for independence from Spain.
The Lancero course has been heavily influenced by the US Army. Capt. Ralph Puckett, a legendary Ranger and Medal of Honor recipient, was one of two American officers who helped establish it.
As a result, the Lancero course follows the same structure as the US Army Ranger School. To this day, there is always a US Green Beret officer who is qualified as a Lancero at the course to serve as a liaison.
The 73-day course is divided into three main phases: Adaption/Acclimatization, Irregular/Urban Warfare, and Mountain/Jungle Warfare, followed by a graduation week for candidates who make it through. Students who fail one phase must redo it.
Colombian troops during a demonstration at La Escuela de Lanceros. Colombian army
“During the Mountain/Jungle phase the Lancero students get only 2-4 hours of sleep and conduct one mission after another. They carry 70-pound (32kg) rucksacks up steep mountains and have a 36-kilometer movement that Colombian students call ‘Marca de la Muerte’ or the March of Death,” added Balestrieri, who served in the 7th Special Forces Group, which is responsible for Central and South America.
The course takes place in the Andean region of west-central Colombia, and “because of the threat of actual guerrillas in the area, the students carried live ammunition on patrols,” Balestrieri said.
The few successful commandos who graduate from the course earn the Lancero badge, the design of which was influenced by US Army’s Combat Infantry Badge.
The benefit of the Lancero experience for Green Berets and other US special-operations troops is two-fold.
It gives them “valuable experience” with the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by Colombians and with Colombian culture, Balestrieri said.
For troops who will be working in the region, mainly members of the 7th Special Forces Group, “the Lancero Badge is one of the most recognized and respected courses in all of Latin America,” Balestrieri added. “It provides instant credibility when working with our foreign allies.”
Royal Thai Army Ranger School
A Green Beret assigned to 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) rappels down a mountainside while attending the Royal Thai Army’s Ranger School in October 2020. US Army/Sgt. Anthony Bryant
The Thai Ranger School is renowned for its toughness — so tough that US special operators were banned from attending it for years because of the high risk of death.
Similar to the Lanceros course, the Royal Thai Army Ranger School lasts 73 days and is broken down into five phases: mountain, forest, swamp, maritime, and urban.
Students have to finish each phase to proceed to the next and are scrutinized for their ability to lead and be part of a team. Students are graded on their performance in every position in a patrol (platoon leader, squad leader, medic, paceman, and navigator).
A Green Beret performs a combat jump with Thai troops while attending the Royal Thai Army’s Ranger School, December 26, 2020. US Army/Sgt. Anthony Bryant
In December 2020, a Green Beret assigned to the 1st Special Forces Group was the first American service member to attend the course in more than 40 years. He not only graduated but was recognized as the distinguished graduate.
“It’s a lifetime bond here. I will always remember these guys and I will always keep in contact with them. It’s like brother-to-brother mentorship,” the Green Beret said afterward.
“As a Green Beret, we’re supposed to be masters of the basics. This course took me back to the basics. For instance, navigating off one map per platoon,” he said, contrasting that with the eight maps and GPS that Green Berets have when operating in Operational Detachment Alpha teams.
What you know and who you know
US Army 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) soldier briefs Guatemalan Special Forces before an exercise in Guatemala, March 3, 2020. US Army/Spc. Aaron Schaeper
Attending foreign conventional and special-operations courses is about a lot more than training for the individual US special operator who is attending.
Special-operations operations are all about access and relationships, both of which are required for SOF units to succeed.
When Green Berets, Marine Raiders, or Navy SEALs attend a foreign course, they are expected to graduate — if not as the honor graduate then at least at the top of their class. This sends a message to their foreign classmates about the quality of the US military and special-operations community.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
About the Author
Stavros Atlamazoglou
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
