Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use."

- Abraham Lincoln

"If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.

But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."

- George Washington

President Reagan on the 250th Anniversary of the birth of George Washginton:

"If one word could describe all this man was and all he meant, it might be, ``indispensable.'' Had he not lived, perhaps some other great leader would have appeared to liberate the Colonies and establish our Republic. We'll never know. We know only that Washington was there, that he did fulfill this destiny, and that he did it with such skill and perfection he seemed to be carrying out a divine plan for America.

Never a passive leader, never an armchair general, he was always in front of his troops and his nation. He did more than live up to the standards of the time; he set them.

Washington was gifted with the vision of the future. He dreamed America could be a great, prosperous, and peaceful nation, stretching from ocean to ocean. He hoped the deliberations at Philadelphia would end with a declaration of our independence. He even designed and presented a drawing of the new American flag to Betsy Ross -- 13 stripes and a circle of white stars on a field of blue.

When the war was going badly, his courage and leadership turned the tide of history our way. On our first Christmas as a nation in 1776, he led his band of ragged citizen-soldiers across the Delaware River through driving snow to a victory that saved the cause of American independence. Their route of march, it is said, was stained by bloody footprints, but their spirit did not fail. Their will could not be crushed. Washington kept them going, and with the help of France they finally battled their way to Yorktown and the decisive victory that ended the war.

After the Revolution, he wanted to return here to Mount Vernon to be with his family, to farm, to hunt, to engage in commerce. But he loved his country and his country needed him. The 13 former Colonies were impoverished. They were bickering. They needed a constitution so that they could become a union of sovereign States joined to a central government.

The American political experiment was new to all human experience, and the world expected us to fail. If Washington had not stepped forward again -- first at the Constitutional Convention, then as our first elected President, we might well have failed.

His feats were harvested from the seeds of exceptional character. He lacked higher education, but he pulled himself up with years of training and hard work. He was a man of deep faith who believed the pillars of society were religion, morality, and bonds of brotherhood between all citizens."

1. Statement from President Joe Biden on Travel to Kyiv, Ukraine

2. Biden in Ukraine ahead of war anniversary: 'Kyiv stands'

3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 19, 2023

4. Putin's Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

5. Pilots Advised Of Large White High-Altitude Balloon East Of Hawaii (Updated)

6. Rise in sea tensions expected with impending military drills (Balikatan -Philippines /US)

7. We Need a Peace Time Draft

8. U.S. Deterrence Failed in Ukraine

9. In a World Awash in Satellites, Why Use Spy Balloons?

10. Biden pledges new military aid for Ukraine during Kyiv visit

11. After Munich meeting, the US-China relationship is still a mess

12. Congress delegation visits Taiwan in tense US-China moment

13. Taiwan visit by Chinese delegation spurs internal political tensions

14. Is Taiwan the next Ukraine? It's more complicated.

15. EXCLUSIVE: Ukraine’s M1 Abrams tanks could come from US stockpiles, official says

16. Indispensable but Insufficient: The Role and Limits of Special Operations in Strategic Competition

17. America’s Special Operations Problem

18. These 26 words 'created the internet.' Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them

19. Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?

20. Miles Yu On Taiwan: Three misconceptions about Taiwan’s defense

21. How drones, start-ups and civilian spotters have changed conflict for ever in Ukraine War

22. How the War in Ukraine Ends

23. PLA Information Warfare and Military Diplomacy: A Primer on Modernization Trends

24. For U.S. forces in Indo-Pacific, it’s two steps forward, one step back

25. Biden Visits Kyiv, Ukraine’s Embattled Capital, as Air-Raid Siren Sounds

1. Statement from President Joe Biden on Travel to Kyiv, Ukraine

Statement from President Joe Biden on Travel to Kyiv, Ukraine - The White House

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · February 20, 2023

As the world prepares to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, I am in Kyiv today to meet with President Zelenskyy and reaffirm our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.

When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. But he was dead wrong.

Today, in Kyiv, I am meeting with President Zelenskyy and his team for an extended discussion on our support for Ukraine. I will announce another delivery of critical equipment, including artillery ammunition, anti-armor systems, and air surveillance radars to help protect the Ukrainian people from aerial bombardments. And I will share that later this week, we will announce additional sanctions against elites and companies that are trying to evade or backfill Russia’s war machine. Over the last year, the United States has built a coalition of nations from the Atlantic to the Pacific to help defend Ukraine with unprecedented military, economic, and humanitarian support – and that support will endure.

I also look forward to traveling on to Poland to meet President Duda and the leaders of our Eastern Flank Allies, as well as deliver remarks on how the United States will continue to rally the world to support the people of Ukraine and the core values of human rights and dignity in the UN Charter that unite us worldwide.

###

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · February 20, 2023

2. Biden in Ukraine ahead of war anniversary: 'Kyiv stands'

Biden in Ukraine ahead of war anniversary: 'Kyiv stands'

AP · by EVAN VUCCI, JOHN LEICESTER, AAMER MADHANI and ZEKE MILLER · February 20, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Monday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a striking gesture of solidarity that comes days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the country.

Speaking alongside Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace, Biden recalled the fears nearly a year ago that Russia’s invasion forces might quickly take the Ukrainian capital. “One year later, Kyiv stands,” Biden said, jamming his finger for emphasis on his podium decorated with the U.S. and Ukrainian flags. “And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”

The Ukraine visit comes at a crucial moment in the war as Biden looks to keep allies unified in their support for Ukraine as the war is expected to intensify with both sides preparing for spring offensives. Zelenskyy is pressing allies to speed up delivery of pledged weapon systems and is calling on the West to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine — something that Biden to date has declined to do.

In Kyiv, Biden announced an additional half-billion dollars in U.S. assistance — on top of the more than $50 billion already provided — including shells for howitzers, anti-tank missiles, air surveillance radars and other aid but no new advanced weaponry.

Ukraine has also been pushing for battlefield systems that would allow its forces to strike Russian targets that have been moved back from frontline areas, out of the range of HIMARS missiles that have already been delivered. Zelenskyy said he and Biden spoke about “long-range weapons and the weapons that may still be supplied to Ukraine even though it wasn’t supplied before.” But he did not detail any new commitments.

“Our negotiations were very fruitful,” Zelenskyy added.

Biden also got a short firsthand taste of the terror that Ukrainians have lived with for close to a year, as air raids sirens howled over the capital just as he and Zelenskyy were exiting the gold-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral, which they visited together. Looking solemn, they continued unperturbed as they laid two wreaths and held a moment of silence at the Wall of Remembrance honoring Ukrainian soldiers killed since 2014, the year Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and Russian-backed fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine.

Biden’s mission with his visit to Kyiv, which comes ahead of a scheduled trip to Warsaw, Poland, is to underscore that the United States is prepared to stick with Ukraine “as long as it takes” to repel Russian forces even as public opinion polling suggests that U.S. and allied support for providing weaponry and direct economic assistance has started to soften. For Zelenskyy, the symbolism of having the U.S. president stand side by side with him on Ukrainian land as the anniversary nears is no small thing as he prods the U.S. and European allies to provide more advanced weaponry and to step up the pace of delivery.

“I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about U.S. support for Ukraine in the war,” Biden said.

Biden’s visit marked an act of defiance against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had hoped his military would swiftly overrun Kyiv within days. Biden recalled speaking with Zelenskyy on the night of the invasion, saying, “That dark night one year ago, the world was literally at the time bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Perhaps even the end of Ukraine.”

A year later, the Ukrainian capital remains firmly in Ukrainian control, and a semblance of normalcy has returned to the city as the fighting has concentrated in the country’s east, punctuated by cruise missile and drone attacks against military and civilian infrastructure.

Biden warned that the “brutal and unjust war” is far from won. “The cost that Ukraine has had to bear has been extraordinarily high. And the sacrifices have been far too great,” Biden said. “We know that there’ll be very difficult days and weeks and years ahead. But Russia’s aim was to wipe Ukraine off the map. Putin’s war of conquest is failing.”

“He’s counting on us not sticking together,” Biden said of the Russian leader. ”He thought he could outlast us. I don’t think he’s thinking that right now. God knows what he’s thinking, but I don’t think he’s thinking that. But he’s just been plain wrong. Plain wrong.”

The trip gave Biden an opportunity to get a firsthand look at the devastation the Russian invasion has caused on Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians have been killed, millions of refugees have fled the war, and Ukraine has suffered tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure damage.

Biden pledged long-term support for Ukraine, saying that “freedom is priceless. It’s worth fighting for for as long as it takes.”

“And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President, for as long as it takes,” Biden promised. Zelenskyy, speaking in English, responded: “We’ll do it.”

The Ukrainian leader, wearing a black sweatshirt, as has become his wartime habit, said through an interpreter that the “wide discussion” in their meeting “brings us closer to the victory” — hopefully, he added, this year.

“Right now, in Ukraine, the destiny of the international order ... is decided,” Zelenskyy said. He added words of gratitude to Biden and to the American people for their support. “Ukraine is grateful to you, Mr. President, to all the U.S. citizens, to all those who cherish freedom just as we cherish them.”

Though Western surface-to-air missile systems have bolstered Ukraine’s defensives, the visit marked the rare occasion when a U.S. president has traveled to a conflict zone where the U.S. or its allies did not have control over the airspace. The White House would not go into specifics but said that “basic communication with the Russians occurred to ensure deconfliction” shortly before Biden’s visit in an effort to avoid any miscalculation that could bring the two nuclear-armed nations into direct conflict.

The U.S. military does not have a presence in Ukraine other than a small detachment of Marines guarding the embassy in Kyiv, making Biden’s visit more complicated than other recent visits by prior U.S. leaders to war zones.

While Biden was in Ukraine, U.S. surveillance planes, including E-3 Sentry airborne radar and an electronic RC-135W Rivet Joint aircraft, were keeping watch over Kyiv from Polish airspace.

Speculation has been building for weeks that Biden would pay a visit to Ukraine around the Feb. 24 anniversary of the Russian invasion. But the White House repeatedly had said that no presidential trip to Ukraine was planned, even after the Poland visit was announced earlier this month.

Since early morning on Monday many main streets and central blocks in Kyiv were cordoned without any official explanation. Later people started sharing videos of long motorcades of cars driving along the streets where the access was restricted.

At the White House, planning for Biden’s visit to Kyiv was tightly held — with a relatively small group of aides briefed on the plans — because of security concerns. The president traveled with an usually small entourage, with just a few senior aides and two journalists, to maintain secrecy.

Asked by a reporter on Friday if Biden might include stops beyond Poland, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied, “Right now, the trip is going to be in Warsaw.” Moments later — and without prompting — Kirby added, “I said ‘right now.’ The trip will be in -- to Warsaw. I didn’t want to make it sound like I was alluding to a change to it.”

Biden quietly departed from Joint Base Andrews near Washington shortly at 4:15 a.m. on Sunday, making a stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany before making his way into Ukraine. He arrived in Kyiv at 8 a.m. on Monday.

Other western leaders have made the trip to Kyiv since the start of the war.

In June, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi traveled together by night train to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak visited Kyiv in November shortly after taking office.

This is Biden’s first visit to a war zone as president. His recent predecessors, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, made surprise visits to Afghanistan and Iraq during their presidencies to meet with U.S. troops and those countries’ leaders.

___

Madhani and Miller reported from Washington.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.

AP · by EVAN VUCCI, JOHN LEICESTER, AAMER MADHANI and ZEKE MILLER · February 20, 2023

3. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 19, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-19-2023

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on February 19:

Member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Fedir Venislavskyi stated that Russian forces have already deployed all their combat-ready units to the frontlines in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts as well as parts of Zaporizhia Oblast.[23]
Ukrainian forces will reportedly be able to deploy only 50 Western-provided tanks to frontline areas by April, out of a promised total of 320 tanks.[24]
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) confirmed that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 1st Army Corps and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) 2nd Army Corps are official formations in the Russian Armed Forces while denying accusations that it dismissed DNR Military Command spokesperson Eduard Basurin or any other LNR/DNR commander.[25] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin seized on the controversy over Basurin’s reported dismissal by publicizing a meeting he had with Basurin in which Prigozhin continued several informational lines of attack against the Russian MoD.[26]
Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov publicly applauded Prigozhin after likely refusing to join Prigozhin’s renewed campaign against the Russian MoD.[27] Kadyrov also indicated that he may be interested in forming a paramilitary company of his own after completing his government service.[28]
The Russian MoD falsely claimed that Ukrainian officials are preparing a radiological false flag attack in order to accuse Russia of violating the Convention on Nuclear Safety ahead of the 11th emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly.[29]
Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin claimed that the completed investigation into the October 10, 2022 explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge in Crimea proves that Ukrainian Special Services planned and conducted a terrorist attack.[30] The attack would have been a legitimate military operation, not a terrorist attack, had Ukraine conducted it.
A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces crossed the Russian border into Kharkiv Oblast and occupied unspecified border settlements.[31]
Russian forces continued offensive operations northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.[32] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces are strengthening frontline positions west and northwest of Kreminna.[33]
Russian forces likely secured marginal gains in the northern suburbs of Bakhmut and in the eastern outskirts of the city.[34] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that degraded Wagner Group formations are narrowing the scope of their offensives in the Bakhmut area due to a lack of forces.[35]
Russian forces reportedly continued offensive operations along the western outskirts of Donetsk city and around Vuhledar.[36]
Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted a localized ground attack near Novodanylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast and amplified footage showing Wagner Group fighters arriving in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[37]
Crimean occupation parliament head Vladimir Konstantinov stated that Crimean occupation officials nationalized tens of billions of rubles (at least 10 million USD) worth of Ukrainian property and plan to use funds from the sale of the property to support Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.[38]
A Russian milblogger claimed that the Commander of Russian 45th Separate Special Purpose Brigade of the Russian Airborne Forces Vadim Pankov was promoted to Major-General.[39]
A Russian Lancet drone manufacturer and Kalashnikov Concern subsidiary is reportedly producing drones in a public sauna following disputes over access to its facilities, prompting another Russian drone manufacturers to call for the mass assembly of drones despite the lack availability of proper facilities.[40]
Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are unable to repair modernized S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems near the frontlines due to logistics problems and have to transfer these systems to manufacturing plants in Russia.[41]

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 19, 2023

Feb 19, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 19, 2023

Karolina Hird and Frederick W. Kagan

February 19, 7:30pm ET

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

ISW is publishing an abbreviated campaign update today, February 19. This report forecasts the unlikelihood of significantly increased Russian offensive operations this winter based on an assessment of Russian forces already committed to active operations compared with Russia’s overall ground forces order of battle.

The major phase of Russian offensive operations in Luhansk Oblast is underway, and Russia likely lacks sufficient uncommitted reserves to dramatically increase the scale or intensity of the offensive this winter. Russian conventional ground forces are generally deploying and fighting in normal doctrinal formations and units rather than in battalion tactical groups or other ad hoc structures. The observed absence of several critical tank units suggests that the Russian military continues to struggle to replace equipment, especially tanks, lost during previous failed offensive operations. Russian forces almost certainly still have some reconstituted mechanized units in reserve, but the commitment of these limited reserves to the Luhansk Oblast frontline is unlikely to change the course of the ongoing offensive dramatically. The Russian offensive will very likely continue for some time and may temporarily gain momentum as the final reserves are committed—if they are—but will very likely culminate well short of its objectives and likely short of achieving operationally significant gains.

The current pattern of commitment in Luhansk Oblast indicates that Russian forces in this area are deploying in doctrinal units and formations from the military-district level down to the brigade/regiment level at least, and likely down to the battalion level as well. Russian forces operating in and near the Luhansk Oblast frontline are drawn almost entirely from the Western Military District (WMD) with a few reinforcements from other force groupings. This disposition suggests that the Russian military command has returned to the traditional military district command-and-control structure wherein all units in a discrete geographical area fall under the area of responsibility of a single military district. Two full WMD divisions (the 144th Motorized Rifle Division and the 3rd Motorized Rifle Division) have each deployed their maneuver regiments in line allowing the division commanders to operate as divisions are designed to do. These regiments have been reconstituted with mobilized personnel, indicating that the Russian command is using mobilized soldiers as replacements in doctrinal structures instead of creating ad hoc formations.[1]

Russian forces have deployed throughout this war in various non-standard and non-doctrinal structures, starting with the battalion tactical group but encompassing also volunteer regiments, BARS (National Combat Reserve) units, and militia units belonging to the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR respectively), to say nothing of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) formations of convicts. The return to doctrinal structures represents an inflection in Russian force structure and campaign design. As ISW has previously assessed, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is currently engaging in a number of reforms meant to formalize and professionalize the Russian Armed Forces and prepare to fight a protracted war in Ukraine as a conventional army.[2] The current array of forces along the Luhansk Oblast frontline likely reflects the ongoing shift in Russian military procedure towards the Russian MoD establishment.

The Russians are receiving less benefit from this return to normal in military operations than they might have hoped because of the badly degraded condition of their forces. They did not leave enough time to train their mobilized reservists to standards sufficient to support large-scale offensive mechanized maneuver warfare, as ISW has repeatedly observed; and they clearly lack the equipment necessary to kit out their reconstituted units. The coherent 3rd and 144th Motorized Rifle Divisions attacking on the Luhansk Oblast axis have thus made relatively few gains since the offensive began.

The Russian military has committed a large majority of the conventional elements belonging to the Western Military District (WMD) to its decisive offensive effort in Luhansk Oblast, leaving relatively few elements either in reserve or unobserved. ISW has observed elements of Russia’s WMD, along with some supplemental Central Military District (CMD), Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic (DNR and LNR) and airborne (VDV) elements, arrayed along the Luhansk Oblast frontline, with a specific concentration of units along the Svatove-Kreminna line. The WMD has fully committed both rifle divisions of the 20th Combined Arms Army (CAA)—the 144th Motor Rifle Division (144th MRD) and 3rd Motor Rifle Division (3rd MRD)—to the Svatove-Kreminna line in Luhansk Oblast.[3] ISW has observed both of the 144th MRD’s rifle regiments (the 254th Guards Motor Rifle Regiment and the 488th Guards Motor Rifle Regiment) and its tank regiment (the 59th Guards Tank Regiment) committed along the Svatove-Kreminna line but has only observed the 752nd and 252nd Motorized Rifle Regiments of the 3rd MRD by name.[4] ISW has also observed reports that elements of the 4thTank Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army, of the 26th Tank Regiment of the 47thTank Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army, and of the 27th Separate Tank Brigade of 1stGuards Tank Army are deployed along the line from Svatove north toward Kupyansk.[5] The CMD has additionally committed elements of the 6th Tank Regiment of the 90th Tank Division to the Svatove area, and unspecified elements in the Lyman direction west of Kreminna.[6] DNR units and ad hoc formations are apparently supporting WMD operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line in limited numbers, and LNR units (particularly the 4th Motorized Rifle Regiment) are engaged in the Bilohorivka area south of Kreminna.[7] Limited VDV elements, particularly of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division and of the 98th Airborne Division, appear to be supporting WMD operations in the Kreminna area as well.[8]

ISW has not observed the commitment of the 2nd Motor Rifle Division (2nd MRD) of the 1st Guards Tank Army to combat even though the unit was reported to have deployed to Luhansk Oblast. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) noted on January 25 that the 2nd MRD partially redeployed to Luhansk Oblast from training areas in Belarus.[9] ISW has not yet observed indications that the 2nd MRD or its constituent elements—the 15th Guards Motor Rifle Regiment, 1st Tank Regiment, or 1st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment—appear near the frontline. 2nd MRD elements are therefore likely being held in reserve in the rear of Luhansk Oblast and likely could deploy to the frontline in the future. It is possible that elements of the 2nd MRD have already been committed to the line in some capacity, but that ISW has simply not observed evidence of their commitment. That scenario is unlikely because of the fanfare this unit generally receives when it operates and because of the detail with which Russian and Ukrainian sources have been reporting on the Russian units fighting in Luhansk Oblast. The absence of the 2nd MRD from active engagement suggests that Russian forces are holding most of a division in reserve. With two motorized rifle divisions already likely fully committed along with other reinforcements, however, the addition of the two or possibly three regiments of the 2nd Motorized Rifle Division to the fight is unlikely to generate a nonlinear change in Russian offensive capacity.

The absence of several elite and prominent WMD elements from the Luhansk Oblast line and elsewhere in theater suggests that the Russian military continues to face challenges in reconstituting combat units and specifically tank units. The WMD commands three army-level maneuver formations—the 6th and 20th Combined Arms Armies (CAA) and the 1st Guards Tank Army (GTA). The 20th CAA is heavily committed along the Svatove-Kreminna line, as noted above. ISW has only observed limited mentions of the 6th CAA and partial mentions of 1st GTA formations in Luhansk Oblast, however, and has not observed these elements anywhere else in theater, suggesting that some of these units and formations have likely not been reconstituted yet.[10] A delay in the reconstitution of tank units in particular could result from the fact that several critical (and previously elite) Russian tank units and mechanized formations have suffered devastating defeats over the course of the first year of the war. The 1st GTA, for example, suffered massive losses during its assault in Chernihiv Oblast early in the war and then once again in autumn of 2022 during Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast.[11] The 1st GTA’s 4th Tank Division, specifically its 12th and 13th Guards Tank Regiments, famously lost nearly 100 tanks (a full regiment’s worth) in a few days in September of 2022.[12]

Russian tank losses have been enormous in this war, amounting to the equivalent of around 16 tank regiments worth, which is likely hindering Russia’s ability to reconstitute its tank units rapidly. Recent intelligence estimates presented by Dutch open-source investigative organization Oryx and the British research institute International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) depict these losses clearly. Oryx verified over 1,000 distinct Russian tank losses and 500 captured tanks on February 9, which likely means that Russia has lost half of its pre-war tank fleet in the first year of the war.[13] IISS similarly noted on February 15 that Russia has lost about 50 percent of its pre-war number of T-72B and T-72B3M main battle tanks.[14] A single tank regiment requires just short of 100 tanks, so rebuilding two tank regiments from scratch (as the 12th and 13thTank Regiments likely required) would demand 200 tanks, which the Russian armed forces do not appear to have in usable stocks and do not appear able to produce quickly.[15] Widespread tank losses also impact the capacities of motorized rifle formations to function effectively, but motorized rifle units require fewer tanks in each and can make better use of the large amount of relatively untrained manpower the rushed Russian reserve mobilization has generated. The absence of reconstituted tank regiments and brigades, however, deprives the Russian ground forces of the kind of punch required to make and exploit operationally significant breakthroughs—which may explain why the WMD has so far failed to make any.

The pattern of Russian deployments in other parts of the theater strongly suggests that most of the available maneuver elements of the other military districts and the Airborne Forces are already committed and thus do not constitute a large reserve that Moscow could suddenly hurl into the fray in Luhansk Oblast or elsewhere. ISW has previously assessed that various elements of the Southern Military District (SMD) are currently engaging in unsuccessful offensive efforts throughout Donetsk Oblast and holding defensive positions on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.[16] Elements of the Eastern Military District (EMD) and the 40thand 155th Naval Infantry Brigades have been predominantly fighting near Vuhledar in western Donetsk Oblast and have suffered catastrophic losses over the past weeks.[17] DNR troops are heavily committed along the outskirts of Donetsk City and elsewhere throughout Donetsk Oblast.[18] The Central Military District (CMD), which suffered devastating losses during Ukrainian counteroffensive operations near Lyman in fall 2022, appears to mainly be reinforcing WMD elements in the Kreminna area.[19] VDV elements are scattered throughout the theater, gradually supplementing and increasingly supplanting the Wagner Group in its assaults around Bakhmut and maintaining a presence in southern Ukraine as well as a limited presence in Luhansk Oblast.[20] The commitment of Russian forces throughout Ukraine suggests that the 2nd MRD is the only obvious candidate for a theater reserve unless the missing tank regiments/brigades begin to appear. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) has previously confirmed this assessment with the suggestion that an absolute majority of the Russian military is already committed in Ukraine.[21]

There may well be more Russian elements online in Luhansk Oblast than ISW has observed at this time. Other research organizations have suggested that additional units of the 6th CAA are operating along the Luhansk Oblast line.[22] ISW cannot verify the sources of these other assessments but has no reason to question them. If elements of the 6th CAA or other formations have indeed been committed, then Russian theater reserves available for commitment to subsequent offensive or defensive operations are even smaller. The offensive will likely continue and may briefly increase in intensity if reserve elements such as the 2nd MRD are committed, but these increases in intensity will likely be brief and unable to make operationally significant gains.

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on February 19:

Member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Fedir Venislavskyi stated that Russian forces have already deployed all their combat-ready units to the frontlines in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts as well as parts of Zaporizhia Oblast.[23]
Ukrainian forces will reportedly be able to deploy only 50 Western-provided tanks to frontline areas by April, out of a promised total of 320 tanks.[24]
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) confirmed that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 1st Army Corps and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) 2nd Army Corps are official formations in the Russian Armed Forces while denying accusations that it dismissed DNR Military Command spokesperson Eduard Basurin or any other LNR/DNR commander.[25] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin seized on the controversy over Basurin’s reported dismissal by publicizing a meeting he had with Basurin in which Prigozhin continued several informational lines of attack against the Russian MoD.[26]
Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov publicly applauded Prigozhin after likely refusing to join Prigozhin’s renewed campaign against the Russian MoD.[27] Kadyrov also indicated that he may be interested in forming a paramilitary company of his own after completing his government service.[28]
The Russian MoD falsely claimed that Ukrainian officials are preparing a radiological false flag attack in order to accuse Russia of violating the Convention on Nuclear Safety ahead of the 11th emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly.[29]
Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin claimed that the completed investigation into the October 10, 2022 explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge in Crimea proves that Ukrainian Special Services planned and conducted a terrorist attack.[30] The attack would have been a legitimate military operation, not a terrorist attack, had Ukraine conducted it.
A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces crossed the Russian border into Kharkiv Oblast and occupied unspecified border settlements.[31]
Russian forces continued offensive operations northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.[32] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces are strengthening frontline positions west and northwest of Kreminna.[33]
Russian forces likely secured marginal gains in the northern suburbs of Bakhmut and in the eastern outskirts of the city.[34] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that degraded Wagner Group formations are narrowing the scope of their offensives in the Bakhmut area due to a lack of forces.[35]
Russian forces reportedly continued offensive operations along the western outskirts of Donetsk city and around Vuhledar.[36]
Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted a localized ground attack near Novodanylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast and amplified footage showing Wagner Group fighters arriving in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[37]
Crimean occupation parliament head Vladimir Konstantinov stated that Crimean occupation officials nationalized tens of billions of rubles (at least 10 million USD) worth of Ukrainian property and plan to use funds from the sale of the property to support Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.[38]
A Russian milblogger claimed that the Commander of Russian 45th Separate Special Purpose Brigade of the Russian Airborne Forces Vadim Pankov was promoted to Major-General.[39]
A Russian Lancet drone manufacturer and Kalashnikov Concern subsidiary is reportedly producing drones in a public sauna following disputes over access to its facilities, prompting another Russian drone manufacturers to call for the mass assembly of drones despite the lack availability of proper facilities.[40]
Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are unable to repair modernized S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems near the frontlines due to logistics problems and have to transfer these systems to manufacturing plants in Russia.[41]

[9] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/na-terytorii-bilorusi-perebuvaiut-maizhe-6000-rosiiskykh-viiskovykh.html

[23] https://www.ukrinform dot ua/rubric-ato/3672113-fedir-venislavskij-predstavnik-prezidenta-u-parlamenti-clen-komitetu-vr-iz-pitan-nacbezpeki-i-oboroni.html

[24] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/19/the-times-ukraina-k-nachalu-vesennego-nastupleniya-rossii-poluchit-menshe-chetverti-obeschannyh-zapadnyh-tankov; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/less-than-quarter-leopard-2-challenge...

[30] https://tass dot com/russia/1578535

[38] https://ria dot ru/20230219/natsionalizatsiya-1852940782.html

understandingwar.org

4. Putin's Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

Will Putin's War bring the end of Putin?

Putin's Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

AP · by ANDREW KATELL · February 20, 2023

February 20, 2023 GMT

Vladimir Putin says he learned from his boyhood brawls in his native St. Petersburg: “If you want to win a fight, you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”

That lesson, cited in the most recent biography of the Russian president, seems to be guiding him as his invasion of Ukraine suffers setbacks and stalemates. The Kremlin strongman, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it in a minute, appears to be determined to prevail, ruthlessly and at all costs.

Stoking his countrymen this month on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that turned around Moscow’s fortunes in World War II, he said: “The willingness to go beyond for the sake of the Motherland and the truth, to do the impossible, has always been and remains in the blood, in the character of our multiethnic people.”

But so far, Putin’s gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbor seems to have backfired spectacularly and created the biggest threat to his more than two-decade-long rule.

HISTORY AND MODERN ROADBLOCKS

He began the “special military operation” in the name of Ukraine’s demilitarization and “denazification,” seeking to protect ethnic Russians, prevent Kyiv’s NATO membership and to keep it in Russia’s “sphere of influence.” While he claims Ukraine and the West provoked the invasion, they say just the opposite — that it was an illegal and brazen act of aggression against a country with a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Putin laid the foundation for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in 2021, in which he questioned Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation. That was only the latest chapter in a long obsession with the country and a determination to correct what he believes was a historical mistake of letting it slip from Moscow’s orbit. He reached back three centuries, to Peter the Great, to support his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.

But rectifying history soon hit modern roadblocks.

“Literally everything that he set out to do has gone disastrously wrong,” said British journalist Philip Short, who published his biography, “Putin,” last year.

Despite armed interventions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia, Putin overestimated his military and underestimated Ukrainian resistance and Western support. Russian media try to boost his authority with images of a bare-chested Putin riding a horse, shooting at a military firing range and dressing down government officials on TV, but the war has exposed his shortcomings and the weakness of his military, intelligence services and some economic sectors.

Ukrainian forces have liberated more than half the territory Russia seized. The war has killed tens of thousands on both sides, caused widespread destruction, and induced not only Ukraine but Sweden and Finland to seek NATO membership. It has increased the security threat to Russia and scuttled decades of Russia’s integration with the West, bringing international isolation.

Increasingly, Putin seems to be improvising in a conflict much longer and more difficult than he expected. For example, he’s threatened to use nuclear weapons, then backed off. The strategy is familiar from his lifelong passion, judo: “You must be flexible. Sometimes you can give way to others if that is the way leading to victory,” Putin recounted in flattering 2015-17 interviews with American director Oliver Stone.

In Putin’s view, an aggressive West wants to crush Russia. His narrative, along with increasingly repressive measures to stifle domestic dissent, has galvanized patriotic support among many of his countrymen. But it runs up against an inefficient, top-down power structure inherited from the Soviet Union, against the interconnected world’s porous borders, and against the sacrifices Russians are suffering firsthand.

AN ERRATIC BUT DETERMINED LEADER

In interviews with The Associated Press, Short, other analysts and a former Kremlin insider describe the 70-year-old Putin as an erratic, weakened leader, rigid and outdated in his thinking, who overreached and is in denial about the difficulties.

They say he seems concerned about waning, though still strong, domestic public opinion — albeit from unreliable polls. Mostly isolated due to COVID-19 concerns and his personal security, Putin speaks with a small set of advisers, but they appear reluctant to provide honest assessments.

Observers see a long, grinding war that Putin is determined to win, with his way out hard to predict.

“It’s not Putin that rules Russia. It’s circumstances which rule Putin,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Short believes the Kremlin leader “has painted himself into a corner. … He will be looking for ways to push ahead, but I don’t think he’s found them.” Giving up is unlikely, Short said, recalling that “his character was always to double down and fight harder.”

Fiona Hill, who served in the past three U.S. administrations and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes Putin wanted to win quickly in Ukraine, install a new president in Kyiv and force it to join Belarus in a Slavic union with Russia. A successor would run Russia, she said, with Putin elevating himself to lead the larger alliance.

But now, according to Stanovaya, “It feels like there is not any hopes that the conflict can be solved any other way than militarily. And this is scary.”

WHAT’S AHEAD

Analysts see several scenarios for Putin, depending on battlefield developments. The scenarios, not mutually exclusive, range from what could be his biggest nightmare -- a coup or uprisings like those he saw as a KGB agent in East Germany in 1989, in the USSR in 1991 or Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 -- to winning reelection next year. That would extend what is already the longest rule of any Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin.

Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and professor at Free University in Riga, Latvia, said Putin could revise his goals in Ukraine, declaring he achieved them by establishing a land corridor from Russia to Crimea and taking over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east. Then he could announce, “We punished them. We showed them who is the boss in the house. We have defeated all NATO countries,” Oreshkin added.

But Kyiv has shown no willingness to cede territory, and for Putin to sell this as a victory, Orsehkin believes “he needs to convince himself that he defeated Ukraine. And he understands better than anyone that, in fact, he lost.”

As military setbacks mount, Russians are withdrawing morally and psychologically, and thinking, “Yes, we see that something is wrong in the war, but we do not want to know,” according to Oreshkin.

Such tuning out, along with economic hardships, could blow back on Putin, he said, perhaps this spring, as Russians ask, “You promised victory, so where is it?”

Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said the Russian president doesn’t admit mistakes or defeats, and “desperately needs a victory just to prove the point that he’s a strongman.”

Even some in the military are turning critical, he said.

“When he becomes hated by more than half -- and we’re driving in this direction -- the chances for a coup, elite coup, military coup, will increase,” Gallyamov said, giving a timeline of 2024 “plus a couple of years.”

Stanovaya and Short believe no uprising is imminent.

“Even if people are suffering, and they can be discontented and angry, there is no way to make it political,” Stanovaya said.

Gallyamov sees a way out for Putin if he can gain recognition of “new territories, plus a declaration of NATO that it stops expansion, for example, or Ukrainian introduction into their constitution of their neutral status ... or their declaration that Russian will be the second official language.”

DEATH OR SUCCESSION

Another possibility is Putin dying in office, but CIA Director William Burns is skeptical.

“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health, and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy,” Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July.

Short said Putin has established such tight security controls and rival power centers that he’s more likely to suffer “a totally unanticipated heart attack than to be overthrown by the people around him.”

He and Hill believe Putin will eventually look for a successor. Gallyamov lists “technocrats” such as Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin as possibilities. Hill said Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin tapped as president from 2008-12, “seems to be auditioning for that role again.”

For the moment, Putin remains very much in charge. In his authorized 2000 biography, he noted: “There are always a lot of mistakes made in war. ... You have to take a pragmatic attitude. And you have to keep thinking of victory.”

When a reporter asked him in December if his “special military operation” in Ukraine has been taking too long, Putin replied with a Russian idiom about big goals being achieved incrementally: “The hen pecks grain by grain.”

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by ANDREW KATELL · February 20, 2023

5. Pilots Advised Of Large White High-Altitude Balloon East Of Hawaii (Updated)

As we focus on balloons, what are we missing? What gaps and seams have we created when we adjust our surveillance capabilities?

All warfare is based on deception.

Pilots Advised Of Large White High-Altitude Balloon East Of Hawaii (Updated)

The balloon was supposedly called-out by the FAA as being roughly 600 miles east of Hawaii at between 40,000 and 50,000 feet.

JOSEPH TREVITHICK, TYLER ROGOWAY

PUBLISHED FEB 19, 2023 10:31 PM

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway · February 20, 2023

According to multiple reports, the FAA notified pilots of a sighting of a large white balloon at between 40,000 and 50,000 feet roughly 600 miles east of the Hawaiian Islands. Subsequent ACARS (Aircraft Communications, Addressing and Reporting System) messages show aircraft in the area — which is normally quite busy as it sits on the route from the U.S. west coast to Hawaii — acknowledging the alert, which includes a request to report back if they spot any such object.

It's unclear when the initial report of the balloon was made to FAA, but alerts about it appear to have been going out to pilots since at least 7:46 AM local time in Hawaii, or nearly 10 hours ago.

The War Zone has reached out to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) to see if they are tracking the object or have scrambled fighter aircraft to inspect it. We have also reached out to the FAA to authenticate that there was indeed a balloon spotted as the ACARS messages to pilots refer to and to get more on the status of the balloon if that is indeed the case. We will let you know what we hear as soon as we get a response.

Mysterious balloon activity near the strategic islands is not unheard of. Just a year ago nearly to the day, we reported on a large balloon loitering off Kauai, Hawaii's northernmost large island, near where a sensitive missile defense test site is located. F-22's from Honolulu went to inspect the balloon, which caused quite the stir. It turns out, this balloon belonged to the Chinese spying program which has now been disclosed as having existed for years, with multiple known operations near or over U.S. territory. It has also been reported that the balloon shot down off South Carolina was originally intended to pass over or near Guam and Hawaii.

Hopefully, we will get more information that can confirm the existence of the balloon. We will update this post with more details as soon as we get them.

UPDATE: 10:37PM EST—

A Navy P-8 Poseidon was heading in the direction of where the balloon was reported just moments ago before it dropped off the tracker. It was at cruise altitude and speed. We cannot say with any certainty that it was on a mission to search for the balloon and observe it, but it would match with the direction for doing so. Still, P-8s often reposition back to the continental United States along these types of routes, so it is just interesting at best at this point.

ADSBExchange.com

UPDATE: 3:36AM EST—

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has gotten back to us with the following:

"U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is aware of the reports of a large white balloon by civilian aircraft. We are looking into the reports and have nothing additional at this time."

This reply validates reports of this being at least an issue of interest.

As for that P-8, thanks to some sharp-eared radio aficionados, we know it did not head back to the continental U.S., it went on a mission for about six hours in the general direction of where the balloon was spotted under 'due regard.' This is where the aircraft's commander assumes responsibility for keeping from colliding with other traffic. Hence it's transponder being turned off.

Based on the info available, this P-8 could be a 'special' Poseidon that can be equipped to carry one of the most capable radars on the planet in a ventral canoe. Working in a secondary mode, this could be especially useful for detecting slow moving aerial targets like a balloon, although from what we understand about the system it is mainly a air-to-surface type that is especially capable of surveilling littoral areas. Regardless, if it is indeed one of these aircraft, it is one of the most capable intelligence gathering platforms available.

We must stress that we do not know if it is on a mission related to the balloon. P-8s of any configuration have an array of missions they could be executing in this area, but if U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is interested in the target in question, this would be a relevant long-range asset to send out to take a look.

Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway · February 20, 2023

6. Rise in sea tensions expected with impending military drills (Balikatan -Philippines /US)

Excerpts:

The Philippines has given the US access to four more military bases under their Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. Mr. Marcos earlier this month expressed willingness to a three-way defense pact with the US and Japan, which are seen as major obstacles to China’s global ambitions.

“The agreed EDCA locations, especially the additional ones, joint patrols with the US in the South China Sea and a brewing trilateral security arrangement with the US and Japan may signal where Manila stands in the US-China competition,” Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, a research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation, said in a Messenger chat.

“This may limit the country’s legroom in navigating this growing great power gulf and puts it in a precarious position should tensions escalate.”

Mr. Pitlo said the Philippines’ aggressiveness in pursuing defense deals happen while its neighbors in the region “remain on the fence.”

Regional peers are “probably agreeing for more strongly worded expressions of concern and call for restraint but are unlikely to offer military access to either side.”

Rise in sea tensions expected with impending military drills - BusinessWorld Online

bworldonline.com · by Neil · February 19, 2023

PHILIPPINE COAST GUARD FACEBOOK PAGE

By Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza, Reporter

TENSIONS between the United States and China could worsen in the Indo-Pacific region this year as Washington holds its biggest joint military drills with the Philippines since 2015, according to security analysts.

The two superpowers are expected to use their economic and cultural platforms to gain influence in the region, which has been beset by the South China Sea dispute and tensions between China and self-ruled Taiwan, they said.

“There will be a tug of war of military strength as the US is expected to mount its biggest Balikatan exercises with the Philippine Armed Forces,” Chester B. Cabalza, who studied national security and policymaking at the University of Delaware, said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

“This is while China is perfecting its simulation of new weapon system using electronic and cyber-capabilities.”

Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr., 65, took office in June amid tensions in the South China Sea and naval competition between the US and China.

Analysts said his independent foreign policy talks would be challenged by regional tensions as well as economic realities facing the Philippines, which is under pressure to fund its economic recovery programs.

“We will see an intensified showdown of economic prowess in the Philippines between the world’s two biggest economies,” Mr. Cabalza said.

“We will see heightened cognitive warfare as the two superpowers are expected to compete for people and cultural engagements to win the hearts and minds of people through scholarships, alumni associations and recognition of historical ties,” he added.

He noted that Washington has boosted the US Trade and Development Agency, which links US businesses to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which counters China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

“If mainland Chinese businesses become convinced or are brought on side by the Chinese Communist Party in its posturings in the region, that’s when we should be really worried,” Hansley A. Juliano, a political economy researcher, said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

“If Belt and Road is doing its job of carving the intended Chinese sphere of influence, it really doesn’t make sense for them to escalate.”

He said the US and European Union (EU) might impose economic sanctions on the US once it continues with aggressive activities in the region.

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait have also undermined regional stability, with analysts expecting China to invade self-ruled Taiwan in the coming years.

“The Russia-Ukraine case is being seen as the test case since the contraction of the Russian economy via imposed economic sanctions from the US and European Union is also what can deter China,” Mr. Juliano said. “However, if China has already realized its preferred economic supply chain via Belt and Road, that might blunt the effects of US-EU sanctions.”

“Scholars, security analysts and journalists must watch out for that.”

Mr. Marcos visited New York last year for the United Nations General Assembly, where he called for a rule-based order in the South China Sea, which is being claimed by China almost in its entirety.

On the sidelines of the United Nations event, Mr. Marcos met with US President Joseph R. Biden. 

Last month, the Philippine leader met with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing, with Mr. Xi promising to find a solution to avoid tensions in the South China Sea. The two leaders signed bilateral deals covering agriculture, energy, maritime security and tourism.

‘WATERS AND ROCKS’

But despite the Philippine-China talks, conflicts have persisted.

The Philippine Coast Guard has accused its Chinese counterpart of trying to block a resupply mission at Second Thomas Shoal on Feb. 6 by pointing a military-grade laser on a Philippine vessel.

The Philippines has filed a diplomatic protest, but China insists it had only used a handheld laser to ensure navigational safety.

“As long as Xi Jinping leads China, his hawkish leadership toward his country’s stronger armed forces will be direct and astute in the contested waterways of the West Philippine Sea,” Mr. Cabalza said, referring to areas of the sea within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

He said China would continuously challenge the Philippines’ claims to the South China Sea “while pushing Manila to its limits.”

“Not only will Beijing test Washington’s commitments to Manila but it will try to distract it until the ties crack.”

On Saturday, Mr. Marcos said the laser incident committed by China was not enough for him to invoke the Philippines’ 1995 Mutual Defense Treaty with the US.

“Chinese control over the sea has been a pretty transparent, objective, and recent episodes do not bode well that China will respect borders in good faith — not when they have found it easy to intimidate and play with former President Rodrigo R. Duterte and Marcos, Jr.,” Mr. Juliano said.

The Philippines has given the US access to four more military bases under their Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. Mr. Marcos earlier this month expressed willingness to a three-way defense pact with the US and Japan, which are seen as major obstacles to China’s global ambitions.

“The agreed EDCA locations, especially the additional ones, joint patrols with the US in the South China Sea and a brewing trilateral security arrangement with the US and Japan may signal where Manila stands in the US-China competition,” Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, a research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation, said in a Messenger chat.

“This may limit the country’s legroom in navigating this growing great power gulf and puts it in a precarious position should tensions escalate.”

Mr. Pitlo said the Philippines’ aggressiveness in pursuing defense deals happen while its neighbors in the region “remain on the fence.”

Regional peers are “probably agreeing for more strongly worded expressions of concern and call for restraint but are unlikely to offer military access to either side.”

He urged the Marcos government to address its sea dispute with China peacefully, especially since US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China’s top diplomat Wang Yi had both agreed to address South China Sea tensions diplomatically on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

“If rival great powers who clash across the board continue to hold talks, why not neighbors quarrelling over waters and rocks?” Mr. Pitlo said.

bworldonline.com · by Neil · February 19, 2023

7. We Need a Peace Time Draft

Incoming. Keep your heads down.

Excerpts:

A final reason for a new draft comes from the Vietnam experience. Americans, even young people, were politically engaged because they knew that they or their family members could be drafted. They demanded the war’s end, ending Johnson’s presidency and forcing Nixon’s hand. When citizens must personally face the consequence of their elected leaders’ decisions, they hold those politicians accountable. When someone else faces those consequences, such as in an all-volunteer military consisting of less than 1% of the population, people are less engaged and demand less accountability.

Military service binds a diverse citizenry and protects democracy. It is time to bring back the peace time draft.

On this President's Day, recall the words of George Washington for dealing with "any very interesting emergency."

"It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal services to the defence of it, and consequently that the Citizens of America (with a few legal and official exceptions) from 18 to 50 Years of Age should be borne on the Militia Rolls, provided with uniform Arms, and so far accustomed to the use of them, that the Total strength of the Country might be called forth at a Short Notice on any very interesting Emergency."

We Need a Peace Time Draft

By Michael Szalma

February 20, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/02/20/we_need_a_peace_time_draft_882671.html?mc_cid=6a9996682a

Our nation is facing a national security threat: there are not enough military age people joining the U.S. Armed Forces. Yet, the world is still a threatening place, necessitating a robust American military. Democracy is being tested in Ukraine. China is a looming threat over another democracy, Taiwan. The United States must be ready to answer these and other potential challenges. A peace time draft can help solve this problem. At the same time, drafting politically polarized Americans can help bring the American people back together through a shared sacrifice and a sense of patriotism that military service fosters while simultaneously ensuring the political engagement of modern youth.

The Department of Defense in 2022 found that only 23% of people in prime military age (ages 17 to 24) qualify for service. Why so low? Obesity, drugs, mental/physical health, or a combination of these. Obesity is the largest single factor.

To combat this trend, in 2022 the U.S. Army created two “prep-courses” that recruits can attend prior to Basic Training. One 90-day prep-course helps recruits meet body fat standards. The other course helps recruits achieve higher scores on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. The U.S. Navy recently announced that it has raised its age limit to 41 years, the oldest of any service (thus far).

This is sounding alarm bells. The recruiting pool is getting shallower.

There has been much discussion recently in how to fix this problem within the framework of the all-volunteer military. Perhaps it is time to put into action an old saying, “If you want a new idea, look in an old book.”

Bring back the peace time draft.

In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt pushed the Congress to do something never tried before in American history: a peace time draft. The resulting expanded military, although limited in its use by Congress, provided a foundation when the United States entered World War 2 in December 1941. Despite achieving victory in 1945, the U.S. Government continued the draft until 1973. The world had changed, or at least Americans’ role in it. A near-permanent era of crisis had set in – the Cold War. Having a strong military at the ready became an important facet of American strategy and diplomacy.

Three decades later, due to the internal tensions regarding the war in Vietnam, the military became an all-volunteer force as the United States ended its part in the hostilities in Southeast Asia. Since then, the United States has been able to sustain its global dominance through this professional force despite the near-permanent state of crisis continuing.

But this experiment in an all-volunteer force has come with a price, a price we are now being asked to pay. An entire generation of servicemembers fighting the Global War on Terror found themselves deployed multiple times, with relatively short “dwell times” between deployments. Exhaustion of personnel and their families set in, not to mention an exhaustion of equipment. Yet the general public was woefully unaware of much of this. By having an all-volunteer military, Americans have essentially contracted their war-making to a small caste of their fellow countrymen. Out of sight, out of mind.

This must end.

It is time for all Americans to share the responsibilities that come with enjoying the benefits of living in a democracy. The founders of this nation knew this, hence their use of militias to augment the small numbers of professionals during times of crisis. Citizen soldiers had been a hallmark of American history until 1973, only serving when needed, for however long it took to quell the crisis. Between 1940 and 1973, in an era of near-permanent crisis, the citizen soldier answered the call by either volunteering or mustering through the draft board for a few short years of service. Military service was almost accepted as routine – almost every American had a veteran in the family or knew someone whose family member had served. It was considered a patriotic duty.

This is what is missing in today’s military age youth: patriotism. A shared American identity. A July 2021 Pew Research Center study is revealing. Among Americans aged 65 or older, the last generation to be drafted, only 10% believed that other countries are better than the United States. In contrast, 42% of those aged 18 to 29 believed that.

In one sense, this is understandable, as the culture wars have led to open talk of a civil war between conservatives and liberals. Bringing back the citizen soldier today, through a new peace-time draft, offers an opportunity to address this issue, beyond its immediate goal of safeguarding the nation by filling the ranks. Since President Truman ordered racial integration, the military has also been a social laboratory. Race in the late 1940s. Sex in the 1970s, when women were fully integrated into the military. A silent integration of sexuality in the 1990s with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that became explicit in 2011. Currently, there is debate regarding transexuals. In each case, the predictions of doom prophesied by some never came to fruition. Another form of integration can be added to this history: political belief and social class.

The military reflects the nation. Liberals and conservatives serve together, with politics rarely interfering with completing the mission. Throughout American history, servicemembers have often reported that they do not care who is next to them – just as long as that person does the job. Furthermore, shared military service is a conduit for members of a diverse population to interact regularly. Those from “blue” coastal areas interact with those from “red” interior areas. With shared military service comes mutual understanding, respect, and trust. It is not a coincidence that a bipartisan group of veterans serving in the House of Representatives formed the For Country Caucus. Perhaps this group can serve as a model to remedy some of today’s political polarization.

But such integration can go beyond the polarized political parties. We can restore the lost experience of social classes working together in common cause. This could be an important bridge in an era of resentment and hostility between the classes. During World War Two, the “Greatest Generation” serving in the military included both the wealthy and poor. Hollywood elites like Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Clark Gable all served. Even politicians’ families served. All of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons and six of his seven grandsons served in the war. So did their cousins: all of FDR’s sons served, despite being the sons of the sitting president. Millionaires or their children went to war, too. A prime example is the Kennedy family, one of whom was killed while the other, long before becoming President, was injured while serving as a PT Boat skipper. Today’s military also includes millionaires, but they are the notable exceptions. But when the rich and powerful serve alongside the poor, the entire society benefits. That same “Greatest Generation” went on to establish the world order that many now believe is crumbling. They did it out of a sense of shared sacrifice and communal effort that military service teaches and demands. This is why any new peace time draft should not provide any educational deferments, which favors the wealthy. Furthermore, all medical deferments should come exclusively from military doctors, with no input from civilian doctors that the wealthy can afford but the poor cannot.

A final reason for a new draft comes from the Vietnam experience. Americans, even young people, were politically engaged because they knew that they or their family members could be drafted. They demanded the war’s end, ending Johnson’s presidency and forcing Nixon’s hand. When citizens must personally face the consequence of their elected leaders’ decisions, they hold those politicians accountable. When someone else faces those consequences, such as in an all-volunteer military consisting of less than 1% of the population, people are less engaged and demand less accountability.

Military service binds a diverse citizenry and protects democracy. It is time to bring back the peace time draft.

Michael Szalma is a retired U.S. Army officer, having served in the Active Army, the Army Reserves, and the Army National Guard, deploying with each to Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, respectively. He is currently a professor of history at Valencia College in Central Florida.

8. U.S. Deterrence Failed in Ukraine

A lot ot parse here. A very useful historical overview of the past decade oand more.

Excerpts:

Most of all, the United States seemed to be convinced, as Moscow was, that Ukrainian resistance would rapidly crumble in the face of a Russian assault. Given the United States’ paltry efforts to build Ukraine’s military into one that could credibly deter Russia, it should not be surprising that both nations made this miscalculation. On Feb. 14, 2022, just prior to the invasion, the United States sent another important signal that further communicated a lack of commitment to Ukraine and a resignation that the war was already lost: It announced it was closing its embassy in Kyiv. By comparison, the United States refused to close its embassy in Paris even as Nazi Germany threatened France and maintained an embassy in Vichy after the surrender and occupation. The closure of the Kyiv embassy echoed moves by the U.S. military to withdraw the vast majority of military advisors days earlier.

Both actions conveyed clearly that the United States had little stake in Ukraine and was not willing to risk American lives. In many ways, it gave a green light for the Russian assault that Moscow anticipated to be a fait accompli repeat of Crimea. To the Ukrainians, it sent the message that instead of fighting, they should pursue a diplomatic solution as they had done, unsuccessfully, for Crimea in 2014.

...

When the invasion came, U.S. actions spoke louder than words. Officials in the Biden administration believed that Ukraine could not win and that Kyiv would fall within days. The United States even offered to evacuate Zelensky, to which he famously replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Publicly communicating an expectation that the invasion would be over quickly only undermined deterrence by signaling the cost would be minimal to Russia. It was only after Ukraine demonstrated capability and resolve that significant military assistance began flowing and punishing sanctions were enacted—actions that, ironically, might have deterred Russia in the first place.

The sad irony is that U.S. leaders, of both parties, chose to avoid deterrence for fear of escalating conflict—only to find themselves continually escalating their support once conflict started. Time after time, the United States chose the option that was perceived as the least provocative but that instead led to the Russians becoming convinced that they were safe to carry out the most provocative action of all: a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The United States ignored the eternal wisdom of the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) and instead hoped that half-steps and compromise would suffice. While so far those decisions have prevented direct conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, they have caused Russia and the West to be locked in a continuing series of escalations with an increasing danger of a miscalculation that could lead to exactly that scenario.

U.S. Deterrence Failed in Ukraine

Washington’s prewar efforts were weak and inadequate.

FEBRUARY 20, 2023, 7:00 AM

By Liam Collins, a senior fellow at New America and retired U.S. special forces colonel. , and Frank Sobchak, the chair of irregular warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and a retired U.S. special forces colonel.

Foreign Policy · by Liam Collins, Frank Sobchak · February 20, 2023

A great deal of praise has been heaped on Europe and the United States for their sustained and determined response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with much of the congratulatory talk centered on the damage being done to Russia. Kyiv’s Western allies have provided the fledgling Ukrainian military with Javelin and Stinger missiles, rocket artillery, and, most recently, modern tanks. Yet, until Feb. 24, 2022, the United States made little effort to deter Russia, despite ample evidence that it intended to invade.

From President George W. Bush’s tepid response to the 2008 invasion of Georgia to the Biden administration’s antebellum halfhearted gestures of support for Ukraine, U.S. policies left the perception that the United States was not willing to make a renewed assault painful for Russia. The result was yet another war and a tremendously costly one at that.

It is often difficult to determine when deterrence works because, almost by definition, it is the proverbial dog that does not bark. Absent being in the room when leaders remark that they are not carrying out an action due to a threat, it is difficult to assign the cause to deterrence.

Ukraine soldier in front of bombed building

Caesar, a 50-year-old Russian who joined the Freedom of Russia Legion to fight on the side of Ukraine, stands in front of a destroyed monastery in Dolyna, eastern Ukraine, on Dec. 26, 2022. SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP via Getty Images

When it comes to war, realist scholars such as John Mearsheimer have noted that for deterrence to succeed, the state seeking war should perceive that the chances of success would be low and the costs high. Part of altering a state’s calculus is simple numbers: how many tanks, missiles, aircraft, and other weapons the defending state possesses. In his seminal work Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling artfully puts it, “The power to hurt is bargaining power.”

This created the central failure of U.S. policy. Refusing to send sophisticated weapons to Ukraine failed to signal to Russian leaders that an invasion of Ukraine would hurt—and potentially even fail.

In the run-up to the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin thought that his forces would march into Kyiv in a matter of days with few losses. After all, the international community did little when he annexed Crimea in 2014. Washington’s muted reaction to previous Russian provocations signaled an unwillingness to incur any costs to prevent Russia from doing what it wanted. U.S. intransigence toward providing lethal aid seemed to confirm that Ukraine lacked the capacity to resist, further reinforcing the Russian belief that the invasion would likely be easy and quick. The recent war in Ukraine is, therefore, a direct result of the West’s lack of resolve and failure to credibly deter Russia. Moscow thought it could get away with murder—as it had in the past.

Georgian youth walk in front of damaged buildings.

Georgian youth walk in front of damaged buildings in Gori, Georgia, on Sept. 4, 2008. MUSTAFA OZER/AFP via Getty Images

Recall the aftermath of the 2008 invasion of Georgia. The Bush administration airlifted Georgian soldiers serving in Iraq back to Georgia to fight, provided a humanitarian aid package, and offered tersely worded denouncements and demarches. But it categorically rejected providing Georgia with serious military assistance in the form of anti-tank missiles and air defense missiles and even refrained from implementing punishing economic sanctions against Russia. The United States’ lack of resolve to punish Russia for its gross violation of international law was underscored when U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s remark “Are we prepared to go to war with Russia over Georgia?”—made during a National Security Council meeting after the war started—was later released to the media.

When the Obama administration took office, his team sought to reset relations with Russia. In short order, the United States abandoned Bush administration plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, canceled sanctions against Russian arms sector, and reduced the U.S. presence in Europe. By 2013, there were no U.S. tanks on German soil, a historic end to a deterrent force that had been in place for nearly seven decades. U.S. Army troops across Europe shrunk to a historic low of 30,000, just one-tenth of the commitment during the Cold War.

The United States did little to prevent or respond to the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rejecting calls from within the administration and a bipartisan coalition in Congress, the Obama White House outright refused to provide any form of lethal aid to embattled Ukrainian defenders.

People protest with flags and signs.

Demonstrators hold flags and signs outside the White House in Washington during a protest on March 12, 2014, ahead of meetings between U.S. President Barack Obama and Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

President Barack Obama, encouraged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was worried that providing even defensive weapons could result in an uncontrollable escalation. Ukraine also suffered from significant corruption, and there was fear that the weapons might fall into the wrong hands—a consideration that hadn’t come into play in far more corrupt states like Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, Ukrainian pleas for Javelin anti-tank missiles, Apache attack helicopters, and other weapons were ignored. Instead, the administration rapidly provided $120 million in security assistance and another $75 million in military equipment such as night vision goggles, medical supplies, Humvees, and unarmed unmanned aerial systems. During Obama’s tenure, total military assistance amounted to $600 million—but never included weapons.

For its primary response to the 2014 invasion, the administration banked on punishing sanctions to alter Russian behavior. These amounted to travel bans levied on senior Russian political, military, and economic leaders; frozen assets; and economic restrictions. Key business leaders and cronies of Putin were targeted, and entire industries were banned from doing business with the United States. Many allies followed suit.

Such actions were seen as “smart sanctions” that focused, like precision-guided munitions, on hitting critical industries or individuals involved in the conduct of the war. The hope was to minimize the damage to common Russians. But without making the public pay a price for war, the economic pain was inherently limited. Russia simply devalued the ruble and cashed out the reserves it had built up in its central bank from a decade of high energy prices to weather the sanctions-induced recession—a cost it felt worth paying in return for the seizure of Crimea.

A firefighter fights a fire.

A firefighter works to extinguish a fire amid the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner that was shot down near the town of Shakhtarsk, in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, on July 17, 2014. DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP via Getty Images

The shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014 by Russian-controlled separatists was also met with a muted response from Washington. The U.S. response was limited to assisting the investigation and calling on Russia to end the war against Ukraine. While some additional sanctions were levied against Russia, particularly by Europe, the attack actually served to harden Obama’s resolve against providing weapons to Ukraine, reflecting his worries about further escalation.

Instead, to improve deterrence against Russia, the administration pushed for NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. The new defense posture consisted of four multinational battalion-sized units deployed to areas—the Baltic states and Poland—most likely to be attacked. However, these measures were meant to deter Russian aggression only against NATO states and had no bearing on the danger of future conflict in Ukraine.

Next, the Obama administration established the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine in 2015 with the mission of training, equipping, training center development, and doctrinal assistance to the Ukrainian armed forces. The group included hundreds of trainers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Lithuania. Notably, U.S. trainers were limited to providing only “nonlethal training” to the Ukrainians, producing a muddled and incoherent set of rules. For example, U.S. trainers could train Ukrainians on small unit tactics that involved “shooting, moving, and communicating” but were prohibited from teaching sniper skills because these were considered “lethal.” That lack of commitment signaled, yet again, that the United States was not willing to give Ukraine the training or firepower it would need to repel Russia.

Petro Poroshenko shakes hands with a soldier.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (left) shakes hand with a Ukrainian service member during the opening ceremony of the joint Ukraine-U.S. military exercise at the Yavoriv training ground in Lviv, Ukraine, on April 20, 2015. GENYA SAVILOV/AVP/Getty Images

The Trump administration aimed to make a clean break with its predecessor and demonstrate strength. But in reality, President Donald Trump’s approach differed little from the previous two administrations. He reversed the prohibition on providing lethal aid to Ukraine and agreed to ship the much-desired Javelin missiles. Still, only 210 were delivered along with a paltry 37 launchers. More importantly, they were banned from being used in combat and instead were required to be locked up in a storage facility to serve as a “strategic deterrent.”

The amount of security assistance saw similar cosmetic changes, with a modest bump up to $350 million in the administration’s first year. But those unexceptional annual increases came with caveats and considerable drama. In 2019, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Trump for more Javelins, he demurred and blocked the delivery of nearly $400 million in assistance unless Zelensky agreed to investigate former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden—his opponent in the 2020 election—and his son. Trump held up the assistance for 55 days, only releasing it when his actions became public, eventually leading to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even though Trump begrudgingly allowed the Javelins and more aid, his administration was unwilling to send a general officer to serve as the senior defense official in Ukraine. The Obama administration had appointed retired Gen. John Abizaid to be the senior defense advisor to Ukraine, but he was only a part-time consultant and no longer on active duty. Abizaid supported assigning an active-duty general to Ukraine to coordinate the U.S. effort and made this known to U.S. European Command and the Defense Department. The response was that the U.S. military did not have a general it could dedicate to the mission.

Previously, when the priority was great enough, the U.S. miliary has assigned generals or admirals to serve in the U.S. embassies in Israel, the U.K., Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq—yet could not spare even one of its 620 generals or admirals for Ukraine.

A transcript of a call

A transcript of a call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is shown in Washington on Nov. 13, 2019. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Further weakening the U.S. deterrent posture, Trump began questioning the United States’ commitment to NATO and even declined to affirm NATO’s Article 5, its most important mutual defense clause. Worse, in 2018, Trump employed heavy-handed tactics more suited for a transactional relationship than an alliance, explicitly threatening member states that he would not come to their aid in the event of a Russian attack unless they paid up. Trump described NATO as “obsolete” and, like a 1940s union boss, harshly decried its European members for not paying their dues.

By some accounts, Trump was even considering the nuclear option: leaving NATO altogether. The message to Russia from such fratricidal melees was clear: If the United States would not protect fellow NATO states that it was treaty-bound to defend, then the United States would definitely not defend a non-NATO country in Russia’s backyard.

The poor signaling only continued with the Biden administration. Even as it became clearer that Russia was considering an attack, the United States drastically limited the supply of weapons that it provided to Ukraine. In November 2021, U.S. officials snubbed Ukrainian requests for shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles—a purely defensive weapon.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba meets with United States Secretary of State at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Munich, Germany, on February 18, 2023.

Ukraine’s Push for Fighter Jets Takes Flight in Munich

But the West is worried that Kyiv might run out of ammo first.

Then, in December, barely two months before the invasion, the White House hesitated approving a package of “lethal and nonlethal assistance” that included Javelins, counter-artillery radars, sniper rifles, small arms, and other equipment because it worried that the assistance would be “too provocative to Russia.”

Only when it became clear that the invasion was imminent did the United States provide a modicum of uptick in aid, consisting of a limited number of Javelin and Stinger missiles, with the latter coming from U.S. allies as opposed to from the United States itself. Useful as those proved, they did not alter Russia’s cost-benefit analysis. And with little talk of additional aid, this was a clear signal to Russia that the United States’ commitment would hardly be different from what it was in 2014.

A soldier stands near trucks with missiles on them.

A Ukrainian soldier stands near a truck loaded with FGM-148 Javelin missiles provided by the United States at Kyiv’s airport on Feb. 11, 2022. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images

Most of all, the United States seemed to be convinced, as Moscow was, that Ukrainian resistance would rapidly crumble in the face of a Russian assault. Given the United States’ paltry efforts to build Ukraine’s military into one that could credibly deter Russia, it should not be surprising that both nations made this miscalculation. On Feb. 14, 2022, just prior to the invasion, the United States sent another important signal that further communicated a lack of commitment to Ukraine and a resignation that the war was already lost: It announced it was closing its embassy in Kyiv. By comparison, the United States refused to close its embassy in Paris even as Nazi Germany threatened France and maintained an embassy in Vichy after the surrender and occupation. The closure of the Kyiv embassy echoed moves by the U.S. military to withdraw the vast majority of military advisors days earlier.

Both actions conveyed clearly that the United States had little stake in Ukraine and was not willing to risk American lives. In many ways, it gave a green light for the Russian assault that Moscow anticipated to be a fait accompli repeat of Crimea. To the Ukrainians, it sent the message that instead of fighting, they should pursue a diplomatic solution as they had done, unsuccessfully, for Crimea in 2014.

In the final weeks before the invasion, there was some debate in Washington as to whether to impose withering sanctions in an attempt to deter Russia or afterward as a punishment and future deterrent. But Russia had already amassed more than 100,000 troops at Ukraine’s border, a momentous strategic move that bore considerable costs. Barring a significant deterrent act by the United States and its allies, the die had already been cast. Sanctions could possibly have inflicted enough of a cost to deter the invasion, but one of Russia’s key lessons from 2014 was that it could weather any new measures that the United States and its allies were likely to implement.

Volodymyr Zelensky appears on a screen.

Zelensky virtually addresses the U.S. Congress in Washington on March 16, 2022. DREW ANGERER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

When the invasion came, U.S. actions spoke louder than words. Officials in the Biden administration believed that Ukraine could not win and that Kyiv would fall within days. The United States even offered to evacuate Zelensky, to which he famously replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Publicly communicating an expectation that the invasion would be over quickly only undermined deterrence by signaling the cost would be minimal to Russia. It was only after Ukraine demonstrated capability and resolve that significant military assistance began flowing and punishing sanctions were enacted—actions that, ironically, might have deterred Russia in the first place.

The sad irony is that U.S. leaders, of both parties, chose to avoid deterrence for fear of escalating conflict—only to find themselves continually escalating their support once conflict started. Time after time, the United States chose the option that was perceived as the least provocative but that instead led to the Russians becoming convinced that they were safe to carry out the most provocative action of all: a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The United States ignored the eternal wisdom of the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (“If you want peace, prepare for war”) and instead hoped that half-steps and compromise would suffice. While so far those decisions have prevented direct conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, they have caused Russia and the West to be locked in a continuing series of escalations with an increasing danger of a miscalculation that could lead to exactly that scenario.

The authors would like to thank Steven Pifer, Lionel Beehner, Alexander Lanoszka, and Michael Hunzeker for their thoughtful feedback.

Foreign Policy · by Liam Collins, Frank Sobchak · February 20, 2023

9. In a World Awash in Satellites, Why Use Spy Balloons?

Multiple redundancies, complementary capabilities, fills gaps and seems, deception, to cause political problems among enemy nations.

Excerpts:

“This is something that the Chinese seem to use a lot,” said William Kim, a consultant at the Marathon Initiative think tank who researches spy balloons. “The U.S. tends to use satellites a lot more.”

Initial assessments from U.S. officials indicate that the Chinese spy balloon shot down in early February was set up to collect electronic communications, known as signals intelligence. Officials said this week that debris recovered off the coast of South Carolina included electronic sensors. Balloons of that nature are typically made out of polyethylene, varying in thickness depending on the degree of internal air pressure, and powered by a large solar panel with an antenna array and additional systems needed to steer the balloon itself.

The Chinese balloon’s sheer size makes it a bit of an outlier when it comes to spy balloons; Pentagon official Melissa Dalton described it as 200 feet tall with a payload the size of a jetliner.

“This is a massive, massive balloon,” Kim said, adding that its altitude of 60,000 feet was at the lower end of the typical range. “This is what’s a little surprising to me, that they would send something like this over the U.S.—it’s so much easier to spot.”

The balloon’s reported use of a rudder to navigate also “doesn’t sound like the most advanced technology” and likely limited its maneuverability, Kim said, with advances in artificial intelligence making balloons more capable of detecting and following wind patterns.

In a World Awash in Satellites, Why Use Spy Balloons?

And what we know about China’s infamous eye in the sky.

By Rishi Iyengar, a reporter at Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Rishi Iyengar · February 17, 2023

Suddenly, balloons are everywhere. Ever since the United States spent a week finding, following, and finally shooting down a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this month, sightings and shootings of similar objects have dotted the military and geopolitical landscape (including, perhaps, some innocent hobbyist balloons). U.S. and Canadian authorities downed three more aerial objects over the weekend over their respective airspaces.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that those objects were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions” and not tied to China’s spy program but added that “if any object presents a threat to the safety and security of the American people, I will take it down.”

In an era of automated drones and laser-guided missiles, let alone spy satellites, balloons may seem a rudimentary tool of espionage and warfare. But experts note that balloons have a long and lofty history and boast reasons for their continued use even with the advent of far more advanced aerial spying capabilities.

“Historically, balloons are kind of a low entry point technology,” said Thomas Paone, a museum specialist at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., who curates the “lighter-than-air” collection. “They’re easy to make, easy to fill up with a lifting gas—whether helium or hydrogen—and they’re easy to launch.”

The use of balloons in warfare and espionage dates back to the French Revolution, with the earliest recorded use in 1794 by the French Aerostatic Corps. They made their U.S. military debut during the Civil War, and a technological leap during World War I saw phone lines attached to the balloons to relay information down in real time. Balloons also played a role in World War II, with the United States using steerable blimps to observe enemy movements and Japan briefly (and mostly unsuccessfully) deploying thousands of balloons to float bombs into U.S. territory. The first U.S. efforts to use balloons for espionage came during the Cold War, through two successive programs known as Project Moby Dick and Project Genetrix, which involved deploying hundreds of balloons with attached cameras over the Soviet Union.

“It really did not prove to be super effective,” Paone said, adding that only a handful of the 500-plus balloons were recovered and many were discovered, causing diplomatic incidents. “The project was scrapped pretty quickly.”

The advent of stealth aircraft such as Lockheed’s U-2 and SR-71, as well as the development of satellites, meant that balloons as an espionage tool by Washington took a relative back seat (though the U.S. military did deploy a version tethered to the ground during the Iraq War in the early 2000s, and the Defense Department has tested stratospheric balloons multiple times in recent years).

But as the past few weeks demonstrate, balloons continue to be very much in use by countries around the world. Ukraine said this week that it took out Russian reconnaissance balloons spotted over Kyiv.

“This is something that the Chinese seem to use a lot,” said William Kim, a consultant at the Marathon Initiative think tank who researches spy balloons. “The U.S. tends to use satellites a lot more.”

Initial assessments from U.S. officials indicate that the Chinese spy balloon shot down in early February was set up to collect electronic communications, known as signals intelligence. Officials said this week that debris recovered off the coast of South Carolina included electronic sensors. Balloons of that nature are typically made out of polyethylene, varying in thickness depending on the degree of internal air pressure, and powered by a large solar panel with an antenna array and additional systems needed to steer the balloon itself.

The Chinese balloon’s sheer size makes it a bit of an outlier when it comes to spy balloons; Pentagon official Melissa Dalton described it as 200 feet tall with a payload the size of a jetliner.

“This is a massive, massive balloon,” Kim said, adding that its altitude of 60,000 feet was at the lower end of the typical range. “This is what’s a little surprising to me, that they would send something like this over the U.S.—it’s so much easier to spot.”

The balloon’s reported use of a rudder to navigate also “doesn’t sound like the most advanced technology” and likely limited its maneuverability, Kim said, with advances in artificial intelligence making balloons more capable of detecting and following wind patterns.

The recent diplomatic fiasco notwithstanding, Kim said there are several advantages to spy balloons that heighten their appeal over more high-tech surveillance methods. The first and most obvious advantage is cost—making a balloon and filling it with helium is simply much cheaper than launching a rocket to place a satellite in orbit. A balloon’s relative proximity to potential targets and slower speed mean it can also more effectively capture data about a more targeted area.

“All things being equal, you’ll get a better performance out of the sensor if you’re at 10 or 20 kilometers [altitude] versus 300 or 250 kilometers,” Kim said. “They’re probably going at 50 miles per hour versus satellites that are moving at something like 50,000 miles per hour, where you’re kind of whipping over the Earth in orbit.”

Paradoxically, the more predictable movements of satellites make them easier to defend against, and balloons have traditionally been effective at evading radar. U.S. officials developed a method to track Chinese spy balloons only in the past year, CNN reported, and the three subsequent shootdowns last weekend were likely a result of the United States adjusting its detection parameters to slower-moving aerial objects after the first balloon.

“We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky,” Biden said Thursday, adding that Washington was working to define a framework for better detecting illicit flying objects without getting more benign ones caught in the crossfire. “We’re now just seeing more of them, partially because [of] the steps we’ve taken to … narrow our radars.”

More easily evading radar has been a big part of the appeal.

“We know when the Chinese satellites are overhead,” Kim said. “It really all depends again on the payload, but the balloon itself isn’t going to [trigger] radar. It’s not going to produce a ton of heat if it doesn’t have an engine or anything. So these things can comparatively be a little hard to detect, although not impossible of course.”

Foreign Policy · by Rishi Iyengar · February 17, 2023

10. Biden pledges new military aid for Ukraine during Kyiv visit

Biden pledges new military aid for Ukraine during Kyiv visit

Reuters · by Max Hunder

Summary
U.S. president makes unannounced trip to Kyiv
Biden promises more military aid for Ukraine
Aid includes artillery ammunition, anti-armour systems

KYIV, Feb 20 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden promised new military aid for Ukraine worth $500 million during a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, almost a year to the day since Russia's invasion.

Biden also said additional sanctions would be announced this week against the Russian elite and companies trying to evade sanctions to "back the Russian war machine".

The military aid package will include artillery ammunition, anti-armour systems, and air surveillance radars "to help protect the Ukrainian people from aerial bombardments," he said.

"The cost that Ukraine has had to pay is extraordinarily high. Sacrifices have been far too great," Biden told reporters in Kyiv, where he held talks with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Biden appeared to make no mention of fighter jets, which Ukraine has been seeking from Western allies to help it push back Russian forces.

Air raid sirens blared as Biden, 80, walked with Zelenskiy through central Kyiv but there were no reports of Russian missile or air strikes.

Visiting Kyiv for the first time since the start of Russia's war on Ukraine, Biden said Washington would stand with Ukraine as long as it takes.

Biden said his trip was intended to "reaffirm our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine's democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity."

The United States has been by far the largest supplier of military assistance to help Ukraine repel better-equipped Russian invaders.

"This visit of the U.S. president to Ukraine, the first for fifteen years, is the most important visit in the entire history of Ukraine-US relations," Zelenskiy said.

Zelenskiy's chief of staff posted photographs of Biden in sun glasses walking side-by-side with Zelenskiy, who was wearing his trademark military-style clothing.

Kyiv is preparing for a possible major new Russian offensive that some military analysts say is already under way in the east.

In a speech, Biden commended Ukraine's courage during the war, adding: "I knew I would be back.".

The air raid sirens wailed while Zelenskiy and Biden were inside the St Michael's Golden-Domed Cathedral on a square in central Kyiv where burnt-out Russian tanks have been placed.

Biden's trip fell on the day that Ukraine marks the deaths of more than 100 people - now known as the Heavenly Hundred - at anti-government protests that eventually toppled a Moscow-backed president in 2014.

Several main roads in central Kyiv were closed off to traffic on Monday morning. Drivers stood waiting in traffic as gathering crowds of pedestrians peered over barricades to get a glimpse of who had come to the capital.

Writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Timothy Heritage

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Max Hunder

11. After Munich meeting, the US-China relationship is still a mess

Excerpts:

Though it seems that the friction between the US and China is at a peak right now, it’s worth remembering that Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in power for 10 years already, coinciding with three different US administrations.

Core ideological differences underpin the hostilities between China and the US, Chong said. “The PRC is fundamentally distrustful of the US system and ideas, believing that their spread into China could present a threat to CCP rule,” while “Washington increasingly [sees] PRC support of authoritarian regimes as destabilizing and inimical to its own interests.”

Though the meeting between Wang and Blinken opens up direct communication between the two countries, Blinken’s Sunday interview indicates that the dialogue was less than productive; Wang didn’t apologize for the balloon incident, nor did he reassure his US counterpart that China wouldn’t provide weapons to Russia.

That’s not surprising, Chong said, given Wang’s adherence to “wolf warrior diplomacy,” a term for the belligerent and coercive foreign policy strategy employed under Xi. “Wang did not previously have a reputation of being particularly harsh or strident before the Xi leadership,” Chong said, but “as the Xi leadership undertook a more strident and forceful tone on the global stage, Wang became a faithful implementer of ‘wolf warrior diplomacy.’ Indeed, he seems have become emblematic of that PRC brand of approach to foreign policy.”

Without clear communication lines, both diplomatically and militarily — China’s defense minister has reportedly refused calls with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — there’s no path to dial down the tension and steer forward a path As Kirby wrote:

After Munich meeting, the US-China relationship is still a mess

Antony Blinken and Wang Yi’s conversation didn’t cool friction over Taiwan and Russia.

By Ellen Ioanes Feb 19, 2023, 4:01pm EST

Share this story

Vox · by Ellen Ioanes · February 19, 2023

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks at the 2023 Munich Security Conference.

Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, weeks after Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing was cancelled due to what the US says was a Chinese surveillance balloon shot down on February 4. Relations between the two nations are at the lowest point in decades, and Saturday’s meeting didn’t do much to improve the situation.

The primary focus of the conference was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the one-year anniversary of which is approaching, but Wang and Blinken’s meeting was a critical and much-watched sideshow to the main event given recent tensions over the Chinese balloon. Wang took the opportunity to paint the US response to the device, which China maintains was a civilian weather balloon that was blown off-course, as “hysterical” and “absurd.”

Though European nations and the US expressed solidarity with Ukraine and a commitment to providing the country with weapons, Wang was more circumspect, saying only that China supported dialogue and an end to the war. Blinken, for his part, told CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that he was concerned China might provide material weapons support to Russia. “We have seen [Chinese companies] provide non-lethal support to Russia for use in Ukraine,” Blinken said, though he did not specify what that support entails. “The concern that we have now is based on information we have that they’re considering providing lethal support, and we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.”

According to a February 13 report by the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, China has not thus far provided military support to Russia, at least as far as publicly available information shows, despite providing economic support in the form of increased trade.

But China’s “no limits” relationship with Russia and the surveillance balloon are just the latest points of tension between the two major world powers; long-standing issues over trade, US presence in the Pacific, and the opposing world views of the West and Xi Jinping have laid the groundwork for the present tension.

China sees the world differently

As Vox’s Jen Kirby wrote earlier this month, the crisis over the alleged Chinese spy balloon “show just how unstable the current relationship is between these two countries.”

A primary cause of tension is US presence in the East and South Pacific; strong US military relationships with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines threaten Chinese power in the region, particularly over disputed areas like Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.

“Beijing has been warning against what they see as US plans for containment and perhaps encirclement,” Ja Ian Chong, associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore and non-resident scholar at Carnegie China, told Vox in an interview Saturday. “An important component of this criticism is a claim that Japan is reverting to its militarist pre-World War II past. Taiwan, along with the East and South China Seas, are important access routes for the PRC and are in positions to affect the PRC’s ease of reach into the Pacific,” and play key military and nationalistic roles, too.

As it concerns Taiwan, China has presented an increasingly bellicose posture toward the island, and US military support for it, since at least the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui, who leadership in Beijing perceived as pursuing Taiwanese independence, made an unofficial visit to the US in June of 1995, sparking Chinese military exercises and missile tests within range of Taiwan over several months; Washington responded by sending two aircraft carrier groups, one to the East China Sea and one to the Taiwan Strait, in a show of support for Taiwan.

That incident helped precipitate increased defense spending and development in China, which has in turn precipitated an increasingly antagonistic military presence. “On the PRC side, as they become more capable, they appear more willing to adjust the world to their preferences—which is something major powers tend to do,” Chong said. “Beijing became more willing to assert its claims over areas it believes it ought to own, such as large areas of the East and South China Seas, and Taiwan.”

Although there are key historical and political differences between China’s relationship to Taiwan and Russia’s relationship to Ukraine, there are parallels, too, especially in the present moment as leadership in China insists that Taiwan is part of mainland China.

My key #MSC2023 moment.

Asked by @ischinger to reassure audience military escalation over Taiwan not imminent Wang Yi chose to reassure audience that Taiwan is part of territory while launching diatribe against Taiwan „separatists“.

No word on preference for peace. pic.twitter.com/cYvXEL00QG

— Thorsten Benner (@thorstenbenner) February 19, 2023

More recent incidents, such as former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to Taiwan and trade disputes during the Trump administration, have played into the friction — all of which came to a head over China’s support for Russia and now the balloon incident.

Can the US and China come back from the brink?

Though it seems that the friction between the US and China is at a peak right now, it’s worth remembering that Chinese President Xi Jinping has been in power for 10 years already, coinciding with three different US administrations.

Core ideological differences underpin the hostilities between China and the US, Chong said. “The PRC is fundamentally distrustful of the US system and ideas, believing that their spread into China could present a threat to CCP rule,” while “Washington increasingly [sees] PRC support of authoritarian regimes as destabilizing and inimical to its own interests.”

Though the meeting between Wang and Blinken opens up direct communication between the two countries, Blinken’s Sunday interview indicates that the dialogue was less than productive; Wang didn’t apologize for the balloon incident, nor did he reassure his US counterpart that China wouldn’t provide weapons to Russia.

That’s not surprising, Chong said, given Wang’s adherence to “wolf warrior diplomacy,” a term for the belligerent and coercive foreign policy strategy employed under Xi. “Wang did not previously have a reputation of being particularly harsh or strident before the Xi leadership,” Chong said, but “as the Xi leadership undertook a more strident and forceful tone on the global stage, Wang became a faithful implementer of ‘wolf warrior diplomacy.’ Indeed, he seems have become emblematic of that PRC brand of approach to foreign policy.”

Without clear communication lines, both diplomatically and militarily — China’s defense minister has reportedly refused calls with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — there’s no path to dial down the tension and steer forward a path As Kirby wrote:

Neither Washington nor Beijing have a clear sense of how to communicate or deconflict, and don’t even have many channels to regularly practice doing so. That ambiguity makes a miscalculation or an escalation more likely. As China seeks to build its power abroad, and the US seeks to contain or restrain it, the possibility of close calls or misunderstandings will build with it.

Nonetheless in his Sunday interview, Blinken called for communication with the Chinese government. “We have to manage this relationship responsibly,” he said. “We have to make sure that the competition that we’re clearly engaged in, does not veer into conflict, into a new Cold War.”

Vox · by Ellen Ioanes · February 19, 2023

12. Congress delegation visits Taiwan in tense US-China moment

Everyone wants to go to Taiwan.

Congress delegation visits Taiwan in tense US-China moment

ABCNews.com · by ABC News

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A delegation of U.S. lawmakers met with the head of Taiwan's legislature on Monday as part of a five-day visit to the self-ruled island that comes as U.S.-China relations remain tense after weeks of trading accusations over a spy balloon.

The delegation that arrived Sunday includes Reps. Ro Khanna of California, Tony Gonzales of Texas, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and Jonathan Jackson of Illinois.

They are expected to meet President Tsai Ing-wen as well as business people. On Monday, they held talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's founder Morris Chang, considered the father of the island's chip industry.

Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, said he was in Taiwan to learn about the island's role in the semiconductor industry. Khanna and Auchincloss are both members of the new House select committee focused on competition with China.

He addressed the implicit threat facing their visit, as China opposes any form of exchange between Taiwan and foreign governments. China claims the island as part of its territory to be united by force if necessary, and has stepped up military and diplomatic harassment of Taiwan.

“Our efforts to come here are in no way provocative of China, but consistent with the president's foreign policy that recognizes the importance of the relationship like Taiwan, while still seeking ultimately, peace in the region,” Khanna said.

Head of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, You Si-kun, used the speech to hit back at Wang Yi, the Chinese Communist Party’s most senior foreign policy official, who said over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference that Taiwan “has never been a country and it will not be a country in the future.”

“China ignores historical fact and claims to have sovereignty over Taiwan. Taiwan has already become an independent sovereign nation ... Taiwan has never been ruled by the People's Republic of China for a single day,” You said.

The delegation's visit follows a sensitive trip made by a senior Pentagon official on Friday, reported by the Financial Times.

A Pentagon spokesperson did not comment on the visit by Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, repeating that "our commitment to Taiwan is rock-solid and contributes to the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and within the region.” Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had no information about any such visit.

Tensions between the U.S. and China again ratcheted up last month after Washington accused Beijing of sending a spy balloon that was shot down over the American East Coast, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a trip to Beijing. Blinken also said over the weekend that the United States was concerned that China would provide weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine.

___

Associated Press video producer Johnson Lai contributed to this report.

ABCNews.com · by ABC News

13. Taiwan visit by Chinese delegation spurs internal political tensions

With multiple groups converging on Taiwan, maybe Taipei can broker talks between US and Chinese delegations.

Taiwan visit by Chinese delegation spurs internal political tensions

Visit to Taipei by Shanghai officials was arranged by mayor from opposition Kuomintang party, attracting accusations of secrecy

The Guardian · by Helen Davidson · February 20, 2023

A Chinese government delegation has visited Taiwan for the first time since the start of the pandemic, sparking some partisan tension on the island over cross-strait interactions as Beijing reiterated its intentions to annex it.

The delegation of six officials, including the deputy head of the Shanghai office of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Li Xiaodong, arrived in Taipei with plans to visit the Lantern festival and hold talks with local officials. They were invited by the city government, led by mayor Chiang Wan-an, of the opposition Kuomintang party (KMT).

The group arrived on Saturday, and were quickly driven away without answering questions from gathered reporters, local media said. Around a dozen pro-Taiwan independence supporters protested against their arrival outside the airport, shouting “Taiwan and China, separate countries” and “Chinese people, get out”, while on the airport road another small group of pro-China supporters shouted their welcome.

Truss urges west to safeguard Taiwan security ‘before it’s too late’

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said it had approved the application for a three-day visit, on the condition that it be low-key and without public political statements. But members of the ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP) accused Chiang of being secretive about the visit, keeping information away from the DPP and the public, out of fear it would attract protest or controversy.

The visit has added to domestic tensions around cross-strait communication. The KMT has traditionally sought closer ties with China’s government, and its vice-chairman, Andrew Hsia, recently visited Beijing. Hsia was criticised for his 10-day visit, the second since a controversial visit shortly after the Chinese military drills that followed Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year. Hsia was accused of colluding with an aggressive state, but he and the KMT defended the trip, saying they believed the trip helped reduce tensions. The KMT is seen as having a chance at regaining power in Taiwan’s presidential elections in 2024.

The KMT’s stance is in contrast with that of the DPP, whose current leadership maintains that Taiwan is a sovereign independent nation, whose people overwhelmingly reject Beijing’s plan for what it terms “reunification”.

The Chinese government cut communication with Taipei upon their election in 2016, labelling them separatists, but city-to-city visits continued until the pandemic closed borders. In that time, China’s military harassment of Taiwan has increased. Air force and navy sorties around Taiwan are now a near-daily occurrence, including frequent crossings of the median line.

Lev Nachman, a political science professor at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, said the cross-strait visits were seen as controversial by those on the “green” (pro-DPP) side of Taiwan’s politics, because “there is worry these actions are at the risk of Taiwan’s safety and sovereignty”.

“It’s worth noting that if you are blue-leaning [pro-KMT], these trips are not controversial,” Nachman said. “It’s possible to support cross-strait dialogue without supporting reunification.”

At the same time, Taipei officials welcomed the Chinese delegation, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi resisted calls to reassure the world that further Chinese military escalation was not imminent.

Speaking on stage to the Munich security conference on the weekend, Wang instead accused “separatist forces” on Taiwan of seeking to change the status quo. “I will briefly assure the audience that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory,” he said. “It has never been a country and it will not be a country in the future.”

The Mainland Affairs Council rejected Wang’s characterisation that the status quo was a subordinate Taiwan, saying that the Republic of China (ROC), Taiwan’s official name, has not been and never will be a part of the People’s Republic of China.

The Guardian · by Helen Davidson · February 20, 2023

14. Is Taiwan the next Ukraine? It's more complicated.

Excerpts:

Taiwan has been compared to Ukraine because of China’s repeated threats to use force and its increased military activity in the seas and airspace around the island, said Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

However, despite their similar claims and growing economic and defense partnerships, Russia and China are very different actors with different incentives, economies and societies.

In recent decades, while Russia stagnated and became dependent on fossil fuel exports, China’s economy expanded rapidly through global trade and investment.

While there is little doubt Beijing hopes to annex Taiwan, questions remain about the timing and methods, including whether the ruling Communist Party is seriously contemplating abandoning its peaceful unification strategy. Indeed, some scholars have argued that Beijing has no intention of forcing unification now or anytime soon.

“There is no evidence that China is in a hurry to attack Taiwan, despite a number of U.S. government and military officials citing 2027 or even 2025 as a potential deadline for forcible unification,” said Zhiqun Zhu, an international relations professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

The alarm bells being sounded by some government officials may be the result of multiple factors, he said, including an overabundance of caution and policies designed to help preserve the status quo.

While Xi Jinping has made unification with Taiwan a key element of his goal to “rejuvenate the Chinese nation” — reiterating in 2022 that Beijing will “not renounce the use of force” — he is far from the first Chinese leader to tout this ambition.

Instead, Xi may be hoping for an easier road ahead.

“China’s main strategy is to absorb Taiwan without needing to fight, through a combination of military intimidation, diplomatic isolation and economic coercion or inducement,” said Joel Wuthnow, an expert on Chinese military affairs at the National Defense University in Washington.

Is Taiwan the next Ukraine? It's more complicated.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/19/asia-pacific/ukraine-war-anniversary-taiwan-comparison/

BY GABRIEL DOMINGUEZ
STAFF WRITER
Feb 19, 2023

When Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago this week, many lawmakers and experts in the U.S., Europe and Asia warned that the move could embolden China to carry out its long-standing threat to forcibly unify the mainland with self-ruled Taiwan.

The concern was that China and its increasingly capable People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would draw inspiration from Moscow’s aggression and invade Taiwan, further tilting the regional balance of power in its favor, particularly after the two sides had claimed to have a “no-limits” friendship.

The invasion prompted a number of political shifts unseen in years, as Japan — as well as a number of other countries — began bolstering their defenses and expanding security networks. Tokyo, for its part, adopted a mantra as the war broke out: “Ukraine may be the East Asia of tomorrow.”

Indeed, the Ukraine conflict has served as a stark reminder that cross-border invasions are not a thing of the past and that deterrence may ultimately fail to prevent wars of aggression.

It’s unclear how China truly views the Ukraine conflict, offering up only opaque statements on the invasion. But if the Russian military’s struggles and its diplomatic and economic isolation are any indication, Beijing may think twice about the advisability of the military option with Taiwan.

At the same time, it’s worth noting that all analogies have their limits, and while there are parallels between Moscow’s war on Ukraine and Beijing’s approach to Taiwan, the scenarios and countries involved are also markedly different.

Many of the similarities revolve around Russia and China being authoritarian states that challenge the U.S.-led international order, with both targeting democracies that they claim are crucial parts of their territory.

A Ukrainian Border Guard serviceman holds a door open in the contested area near Bakhmut on Thursday amid Russia’s invasion of the country. | AFP-JIJI

Taiwan has been compared to Ukraine because of China’s repeated threats to use force and its increased military activity in the seas and airspace around the island, said Ian Chong, a professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

However, despite their similar claims and growing economic and defense partnerships, Russia and China are very different actors with different incentives, economies and societies.

In recent decades, while Russia stagnated and became dependent on fossil fuel exports, China’s economy expanded rapidly through global trade and investment.

While there is little doubt Beijing hopes to annex Taiwan, questions remain about the timing and methods, including whether the ruling Communist Party is seriously contemplating abandoning its peaceful unification strategy. Indeed, some scholars have argued that Beijing has no intention of forcing unification now or anytime soon.

“There is no evidence that China is in a hurry to attack Taiwan, despite a number of U.S. government and military officials citing 2027 or even 2025 as a potential deadline for forcible unification,” said Zhiqun Zhu, an international relations professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

The alarm bells being sounded by some government officials may be the result of multiple factors, he said, including an overabundance of caution and policies designed to help preserve the status quo.

While Xi Jinping has made unification with Taiwan a key element of his goal to “rejuvenate the Chinese nation” — reiterating in 2022 that Beijing will “not renounce the use of force” — he is far from the first Chinese leader to tout this ambition.

Instead, Xi may be hoping for an easier road ahead.

“China’s main strategy is to absorb Taiwan without needing to fight, through a combination of military intimidation, diplomatic isolation and economic coercion or inducement,” said Joel Wuthnow, an expert on Chinese military affairs at the National Defense University in Washington.

A different track record

Key differences can also be seen in the ways Moscow and Beijing have wielded their vast military power in recent years.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has deployed troops for combat missions to a range of countries, including Georgia, Syria and Ukraine.

The Chinese military, meanwhile, has engaged in provocations, confrontations and even violent clashes around its periphery. But it has refrained from large-scale combat operations since 1979.

But the PLA not only lacks combat experience, it also does not currently have the operational readiness and transport capacity needed to mount an invasion of Taiwan, said James Char, a China expert at the Singapore-based S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

While Russia has exhibited less patience toward its adversaries, China has shown a willingness to play the long game to achieve a regional hegemony and control the territory it considers its own without using force.

Taiwan’s armed forces hold two days of routine drills to show combat readiness ahead of Lunar New Year holidays at a military base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Jan. 11. | REUTERS

Another potentially crucial difference between Ukraine and Taiwan might be the level of support in the event of a conflict.

Almost a year into the invasion, NATO member states and other countries continue to provide Kyiv with economic and military lifelines, despite Ukraine not being a member of the military alliance. However, the fighting is being carried out by Ukrainian forces as no NATO troops have been deployed on the ground.

Taiwan has longer and more rooted relationships with both NATO and the United States than Ukraine, and there are growing indications that Washington would intervene militarily in a conflict over the island, possibly with support from key allies such as Japan and Australia.

Although Washington’s ties with Taipei are technically “unofficial” due to the United States’ “One China” policy, the relationship has strengthened in recent years. The U.S. has also increased military assistance to the island and President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack.

While those remarks have later been walked back, their significance is unlikely to be lost on Beijing.

Beijing’s red lines

“Strategically speaking, Taiwan is more important for the United States than Ukraine,” said Bucknell’s Zhu.

And as the U.S.-China rivalry intensifies, the island’s strategic value will only grow for both sides, so much so that military confrontation is not unthinkable if they fail to manage their differences, he added.

In fact, many experts see an unbridled U.S.-China rivalry as the greatest risk of conflict in the near- to midterm.

China has historically drawn red lines on Taiwan. It has warned that it reserves the right to attack the island if: a third party stations forces there, the island develops nuclear weapons or Taipei declares independence or postpones unification negotiations indefinitely.

“The Chinese need to believe that the door to peaceful unification remains open,” Wuthnow said. “If they conclude that no such option exists, the likelihood of force becomes much greater.”

This judgment could result from overt moves toward independence by a future Taiwanese leader or a conclusion that Washington has effectively abandoned its One China policy and fully supports de jure independence for Taiwan.

Moreover, a one-sided U.S. focus on military deterrence could also risk undermining shared goals and cooperative initiatives, said Jake Werner, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington.

“If China doesn’t see a place for itself in the world the U.S. wants, that makes trust on the most dangerous tensions in the relationship impossible,” he said.

Different conflict scenarios

Should it come to a military confrontation, a war over Taiwan would look very different from the one in Ukraine, with the former largely taking place at sea and in the air.

Ukraine is a vast territory that shares land borders with several countries, including one with Russia stretching almost 2,000 kilometers. This allowed for a relatively easy Russian incursion but has also facilitated NATO’s provision of weapons and supplies through Poland.

Former U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief Phil Davidson attends a meeting with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen at the Presidential Office in Taipei on Feb. 2. | TAIWAN PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE / VIA REUTERS

Taiwan is a narrow island located about 160 kilometers from the Chinese coastline. Although islands typically offer the defender an advantage by forcing the attacker to undertake an amphibious landing, there are also downsides.

Unlike Ukraine, a similar arrangement for military support from friendly neighboring countries would be far more difficult for Taiwan, as China could simply isolate the island — possibly for weeks or even months.

“An air or maritime blockade of Taiwan could be viable for the PLA as a way to significantly ramp up pressure on Taiwan,” said the National Defense University’s Wuthnow.

Beijing’s top aim, according to Wuthnow, would be to achieve a quick victory at an acceptable cost, ideally before U.S. intervention can take place.

Perhaps more importantly, a Chinese invasion attempt would also risk expanding the conflict with the United States and its allies. These countries are already preparing for a potential conflict by reinforcing their militaries, placing assets in key strategic locations and strengthening security alliances.

This is a scenario China would want to avoid as the success of an amphibious invasion in the face of a U.S.-led coalition would be uncertain. Any inability to make good on its decadeslong promise to unify Taiwan with the mainland risks tarnishing the Communist Party’s legitimacy — or worse.

Still, this doesn’t mean Beijing wouldn’t be willing to fight should it determine that the issue cannot be resolved peacefully.

Even though a conflict over Taiwan would likely be very costly to China, and certainly for Taipei, Beijing would probably be willing to accept significant losses, including heavy casualties and damage to its economy, should it believe the actions are worth the cost, the National University of Singapore’s Chong said.

But — despite the numerous differences between Ukraine and Taiwan — perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from the war in Europe is that it could serve as a cautionary tale for Beijing.

No longer can a war between a small country and a big power be considered an automatic walkover for the bigger side. Instead, such a conflict could threaten to devolve into an expensive and drawn-out affair, with no guarantee of success, as Russia is painfully finding out.

15. EXCLUSIVE: Ukraine’s M1 Abrams tanks could come from US stockpiles, official says

EXCLUSIVE: Ukraine’s M1 Abrams tanks could come from US stockpiles, official says - Breaking Defense

The Biden administration may change course and use presidential drawdown authority to provide tanks to Ukraine, suggested Stanley Brown, the principal deputy assistant secretary for the bureau of political-military affairs.

By ASHLEY ROQUE

on February 20, 2023 at 5:34 AM

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · February 20, 2023

An M1A2 fires during a competition at Fort Benning, Ga. in 2022 (US Army)

IDEX 2023 — Nearly a month after announcing its decision to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the United States is still deciding which version is best and whether it will pull those vehicles from existing stockpiles or have them produced, according to a top US State Department official.

When Washington announced in late January that it was sending 31 Abrams tanks to Kyiv, it said those vehicles would be M1A2s and that the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative would be used to acquire them. That suggested the vehicles would be procured, rather than pulled from US stocks as part of presidential drawdown authority, a different mechanism to supply arms to Ukraine. However, that decision has not actually been finalized, according to Stanley Brown, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

“They potentially could be a combination of built and out of stockpiles,” he said during an interview with Breaking Defense on the sidelines of IDEX 2023 in the United Arab Emirates.

“We have Abrams in the inventory. We have different versions of Abrams, some older…, and I don’t know what specific ones that Ukraine will ultimately get,” he separately added. Brown said it is not clear when a final decision will be made or when those tanks may arrive in Ukraine.

Breaking Defense will be reporting from the show floor of IDEX 2023. Click HERE to keep up with the latest coverage.

Such a move could potentially speed up the delivery of Abrams tanks to Ukraine, in part, because the US should have all the equipment for two US Army armored brigades — including about 87 late-model M1A2 tanks each — already on the continent, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of US Army forces in Europe, estimated last month.

“If the administration had the sense of urgency to help Ukraine win, then they’d bring Ukrainian tank crews and commanders to Poland or Germany to match them up with these tanks for training and then put them on a train to Ukraine to be employed how and where and when the Ukrainian General Staff is ready,” he wrote in a Jan. 26 email to Breaking Defense. “This could all happen within the next two or three months.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond off-hours to questions about that possible change of course or what prompted it. However, Brown’s comments highlight the evolving calculus inside the Biden Administration around fielding new weapons to Ukrainian forces, showing a unified front with international partners and allies, and striking a balance between existing inventories and production lines.

For example, on Jan. 25 Washington announced it would send Abrams tanks to Ukraine just hours before Berlin said it too would free German-made Leopards for the fight but at a quicker clip.

Although the Biden administration went ahead with that announcement, it declined to disclose details about the plan except to say it would take months as opposed to weeks to get tanks to Ukraine, and those vehicles would not come from units or existing stockpiles. By using the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, it said it would have time to train Ukrainians how to use the vehicles and figure out the in-theater logistics footprint.

“While the deliveries will take some time, because this is a procurement, the United States will begin now to establish a comprehensive training program for their use,” one administration official said at the time. “These tanks are complex systems that require a significant amount of training and maintenance, so [the Department of Defense] is currently working through the mechanisms to deliver the fuel and equipment Ukraine will need to operate and to maintain the Abrams.”

Later that day, Assistant Secretary of the US Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Douglas Bush told reporters the service was creating a laundry list of options for Pentagon officials to consider before deciding which way to go.

“There are multiple courses of action, and it’s not just the tanks,” he said. “We have to be able to [deliver] tanks, support equipment, the training, the ammunition, the fuel… It’s really a bigger picture.”

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · February 20, 2023

16. Indispensable but Insufficient: The Role and Limits of Special Operations in Strategic Competition

Some excellent thoughts from Dr. David Ucko:

Excerpts:

Unconventional warfare traditionally implied sponsoring an insurgency against an illicit or occupying government, but SOF now consider this work as supporting “resistance” capabilities for states facing foreign invasion or seeking to deter such a threat. Put differently, resilience protects against foreign subversion and resistance makes an invasion more painful—and therefore less likely.

U.S. efforts to build resilience and resistance have proved themselves in Ukraine and can help other partners defend against or deter similar threats. Yet these tasks are also highly demanding, requiring institutional readiness and protracted engagement abroad. To meet the demand, SOF should rebalance in favor of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare and focus on the skills that these missions will require within this new strategic era. This will mean an emphasis on language training, cultural know-how, political awareness, and strategic acumen—all at scale—with major implications for SOF recruitment and career tracks. It will mean fewer deployments, more educational opportunities, and less emphasis on direct action and traditional combat skills more broadly. The decline of high-tempo counterterrorism operations provides an opportunity for such a shift, but the challenge of reform is significant and the complexity of the task high.

My interpretation of Dr. Ukco's excellent comments on resistance and resilience deriving from unconventional warfare is that SF/SOF must apply "UW thinking" to complex political military problems and create dilemmas for our adversaries that arw drawn from the UW experience throughout history and then adapted for the modern era.

My thoughts UW thinking:

Watch the new USASOC Command video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClWZjoNwOxA) nd then consider about my comments on the "UW mindset:"

The Unconventional Warfare Mindset must be Sustained

1. Strategic Competition, the Gray Zone, and Irregular Warfare may be the current terms of art in the Department of Defense, but it is the Unconventional Warfare mindset that ensures the continued success of Special Forces.

2. Irregular Warfare is the military contribution to Political Warfare and Competitive Statecraft, but the Unconventional Warfare mindset makes the military contribution successful.

3. Essence of UW: UW thinking informs everything SF/SOF should do

• UW is fundamentally problem solving; using unique, non-doctrinal and non-conventional methods, techniques, people, equipment to solve (or assist in solving) complex political-military problems

• And creating dilemmas for our adversaries

• UW is fundamentally about influencing behavior of target audiences (which can include a population, a segment of the population, a political structure, or a military force); therefore, it is integral to the action arms of IO/PSYOP/CA.

4. What is “Unconventional warfare thinking?”

It is the two SF/SOF “trinities:”

(1) Missions

Irregular Warfare,

Unconventional Warfare,

Support to Political Warfare

(2) The comparative advantage of SOF:

Influence,

Governance,

Support to Indigenous Forces and Populations

It is thinking about the human element in the full spectrum of competition and conflict up to and including conventional and nuclear war. It includes, but is not limited to, all aspects of lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, terrorism, political resistance, non-violent resistance, political violence, urban operations, stability operations, post-conflict operations, cyber operations, operations in the information environment (e.g., strategic influence through information advantage, information and influence activities, public diplomacy, psychological operations, military information support operations, public affairs), working through, with, and by indigenous forces and populations, in irregular warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, alliances, diplomacy, and competitive statecraft in all regions of the world.

Indispensable but Insufficient: The Role and Limits of Special Operations in Strategic Competition

By David Ucko Sunday, February 19, 2023, 10:01 AM

lawfareblog.com · February 19, 2023

Editor’s Note: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, special operations forces (SOF) were often the point of the counterterrorism spear. As the United States shifts away from counterterrorism and focuses on the threats that Russia and China pose, SOF can play a vital role, according to David Ucko, a professor at the National Defense University. To do so, however, Ucko argues that SOF must recalibrate, changing their composition and their focus.

Daniel Byman

David H. Ucko is a professor and department chair at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University. His most recent books include The Insurgent’s Dilemma (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2022) and, with Thomas Marks, Crafting Strategy for Irregular Warfare (NDU Press, 2022). He is a 2023 non-resident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative. The views expressed are the author's and do not necessarily represent the Department of Defense or National Defense University.

***

The United States finds itself in an era of strategic competition, as China, Russia, and other revisionist states challenge the norms and order that define American power. The U.S. government is now focused on how to respond, but that question is compounded by its adversaries’ diverse and global methods of attack. As America’s rivals privilege ambiguity and subterfuge, they deliberately avoid U.S. strengths, particularly in the military domain.

U.S. special operations forces (SOF) can contribute to strategic competition through their specialization in irregular warfare. In recent years, SOF have broadened their application of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare—both irregular warfare missions and SOF core activities—to fit this new strategic setting. Foreign internal defense traditionally meant aiding a friendly government against an insurgency, but SOF now see it as a means of boosting a country’s “resilience” against foreign-sponsored interference. Unconventional warfare traditionally implied sponsoring an insurgency against an illicit or occupying government, but SOF now consider this work as supporting “resistance” capabilities for states facing foreign invasion or seeking to deter such a threat. Put differently, resilience protects against foreign subversion and resistance makes an invasion more painful—and therefore less likely.

U.S. efforts to build resilience and resistance have proved themselves in Ukraine and can help other partners defend against or deter similar threats. Yet these tasks are also highly demanding, requiring institutional readiness and protracted engagement abroad. To meet the demand, SOF should rebalance in favor of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare and focus on the skills that these missions will require within this new strategic era. This will mean an emphasis on language training, cultural know-how, political awareness, and strategic acumen—all at scale—with major implications for SOF recruitment and career tracks. It will mean fewer deployments, more educational opportunities, and less emphasis on direct action and traditional combat skills more broadly. The decline of high-tempo counterterrorism operations provides an opportunity for such a shift, but the challenge of reform is significant and the complexity of the task high.

A second challenge is that foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare entail more than just military tasks. In foreign internal defense, the assets trained by SOF must be supported by a capable security sector, undergirded by sustainable institutions, and operating alongside civilian agencies that can address political, societal, and economic vulnerabilities. In unconventional warfare, fostering the potential for armed resistance is most effective when it is complemented by a whole-of-society effort that provides a legal framework, engages with allies and partners, builds a narrative for mobilization, and legitimizes the action in the eyes of the public. This calls for greater interagency coordination and integration, even in executing what many policymakers view narrowly as a SOF task.

The reliance on nonmilitary institutions and authorities is particularly pronounced where the enemy strategy, while nefarious, is nonmilitary in nature. Where domination is achieved indirectly, and with no compelling threat of violence, SOF’s work on resilience and resistance risks veering into civilian realms where other agencies should have the lead. Some defense analysts have, for example, suggested that SOF prioritize “cognitive access denial” or “financial access denial”—to wit, resisting propaganda and disrupting “proxy, patronage, or corruption networks.” It is unclear whether SOF can adequately train and prepare for these technical tasks, at least without losing the core and demanding functions already expected of them. Even where SOF have relevant capabilities—for example, their military information support operations assets, which can engage with hostile disinformation online—so do civilian actors, be they within the Department of State, the Agency for Global Media, or the embassy’s country team.

A third challenge for SOF is that strategic competition is primarily nonmilitary in nature. As America’s competitors seek to avoid its military strengths, they resort instead to weaponized corruption, election interference, media penetration, political infiltration, dodgy trade deals, and infrastructure development. Against such a broad attack, there are clear limits on how much the United States can and should expect from SOF—which, despite their expanding list of responsibilities, are still a military force. Instead, a more diverse set of skills will be needed. Developing the required portfolio of capabilities within the relevant government agencies has proved challenging, but while SOF are often viewed as the “problem solver” for tasks that cannot be accomplished by others, their role in countering these nonmilitary tactics requires careful delimitation.

In seeking a role within this strategic competition, SOF’s main contribution might be to empower an interagency solution, by adding that special ingredient that allows a broader response to unfold. There is precedent for such arrangements. For example, when he was commander of Special Operations Command-Pacific (SOCPAC), Gen. Jonathan B. Braga oversaw an impressive effort to counter Chinese malign influence in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Through partnerships with the Department of the Treasury, the FBI, and the Department of Justice at Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), a small SOCPAC team was able to recover and analyze evidence relating to criminal networks linked to the Chinese Communist Party, resulting in the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioning these actors under the Global Magnitsky Act. In a similar manner, SOCPAC worked with the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to investigate, report on, and check Chinese fishing companies operating illegally in the South Pacific. Through military information support operations, SOCPAC was able to broadcast horrific images of this illicit activity to senior policymakers at INDOPACOM, the Coast Guard, and the State Department, as well as other advisers and decision-makers in Washington.

These types of partnerships should extend to general purpose forces, particularly as concerns security force assistance and persistent engagement. These are areas where SOF have clear value but are limited by their size and scope. The Army and Marine Corps have belatedly established a units specialized for security force assistance, recognizing the importance of this form of engagement and the need for partner capacity to defend against common threats, be they state or non-state actors. The National Guard’s State Partnership Program also engages in this mission and produces uniquely enduring bonds of security cooperation in 100 nations around the globe. Rather than threaten SOF equities, these assets should allow for a calibrated division of labor, with SOF and conventional forces working together to extend America’s reach.

The need for interagency collaboration is recognized in SOF’s guidance and statements, but it rubs up against SOF’s desire to carve out relevance in a new strategic era and their occasional (and by no means universal) tendency to operate in parallel rather than in support of others. The problem is compounded by the tendency of political leaders to look to SOF for seemingly low-risk and small-footprint solutions to unorthodox problems. Unless the present opportunity to recalibrate is seized, the outcome will likely be that SOF are handed ever more missions—missions for which they are not ready and for which they cannot prepare without accepting risk elsewhere—all while the broader portfolio of interagency capabilities remains underfunded and underutilized.

Three Areas for Improvement

In the words of a former assistant secretary of defense, there is no “SOF easy button” for strategic competition. SOF’s contribution will in itself be demanding, requiring careful preparation. For strategic effectiveness, greater investment is also needed across the U.S. national security enterprise—an enterprise that extends far beyond the traditional security sector. Three key requirements stand out: awareness, integration, and strategic clarity.

Awareness

Despite some progress, U.S. civilian agencies have struggled to adapt in strategically effective ways to the competition underway. Meanwhile, too few within the military community are well versed with the civilian capabilities that exist or how they could be empowered. Across the board, greater awareness is required: of the competition at hand, its nature, and the roles of different components in generating a tailored response.

This awareness could be achieved through interagency strategic education, training, and sensitization. The College of International Security Affairs (CISA) at the National Defense University provides a model for such education that could be scaled up for even greater effect. Programming at CISA’s Fort McNair campus draws together senior officials from across the armed services, the intelligence community, U.S. government agencies, and key partner nations for education in irregular warfare and associated strategies. At its program at Fort Bragg, civilian academics teach an irregular warfare curriculum to SOF officers and noncommissioned officers alongside international SOF students and State Department personnel. Both programs could be expanded to encourage the cultural and organizational awareness needed for strategic competition.

Integration

A second key requirement is better integration in executing a truly national American response. Much could be achieved through cross-functional teams, liaison officers, and other structural ways of cutting across agencies, allowing for the synchronization of respective strengths. The newly formed Irregular Warfare Center could play a leading role in this initiative, as it provides a focal point for irregular warfare and taps into existing networks devoted to this topic. As of the fiscal year 2023 defense budget, the center was granted authorities to engage across agencies to enhance America’s capability for irregular warfare and strategic competition. It is also working with the Army to define an operational concept for irregular warfare across the force, thereby helping to institutionalize relevant capabilities and career tracks.

Strategic Clarity

The final need is for strategic clarity. Despite a welter of commentary on strategic competition, it is often left unsaid what the United States and its partners are competing for and what success might look like. Put differently, what is the political essence of the problem? In which areas must the United States stand firm, and where can it cooperate? The lack of clarity on these questions leads to a reactive posture where everything, everywhere is the problem, to be addressed all at once.

The ultimate requirement is therefore for a strategy that proceeds according to a clearly elaborated theory of success rather than simply the means and capabilities at the U.S. government’s disposal. This, in turn, requires greater familiarity with how to craft strategy for the ambiguous and variegated attack presently underway.

lawfareblog.com · February 19, 2023

17. America’s Special Operations Problem

I would call this a contrarian view of SOF but I think this might be closer to the mainstream view particularly of those in the Pentagon and the services.

Although I can find fault with a number of the points that I think are cherry picked and taken out of context, everyone associated with SOF should read this and then look in the mirror and read it again.

As an aside, I am often asked to review SOF related articles for JFQ/NDU press but I wonder why they did not send this one to me for review! :-) Despite my disagreement with certain points I still would have recommended publication. "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

America’s Special Operations Problem

ndupress.ndu.edu

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Colonel R.D. Hooker, Jr., USA (Ret.), Ph.D., is a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

Navy SEALs conduct High Altitude Low Opening airborne operation in support of exercise Arctic Edge 2022, in Deadhorse, Alaska, March 4, 2022 (U.S. Navy)

Since the failure of the Iran hostage rescue mission in 1980, U.S. special operations forces (SOF) have come into their own as the most high-profile community in the Armed Forces. Originally quite small and highly selective, they have exploded in size, taking center stage in the war on terror. Well-resourced and able to draw on the best of the military’s talent pool, SOF are today the face of the U.S. military. The iconic muddy trooper of yesteryear has been replaced by a bearded, heavily tattooed commando, wearing a baseball cap backward and festooned with exotic kit. Most commentary about SOF is admiring, if not adulatory. But there is more to the story.

Undeniably, SOF have a key role to play in national security. In the unique circumstances of the post-9/11 era, they saw dramatic growth, more than doubling in size. A fourth battalion was added to each Special Forces group, and a Special Troops Battalion and Military Intelligence battalion was added to the 75th Ranger Regiment, which also added a fourth rifle company and a support company to each battalion. The Air Force Special Operations community today includes more SOF wings than USAF bomber wings and more aircraft and Airmen than many nations, while the Navy Special Warfare Community now boasts around 4,000 SEALS, ten times as many as at the height of the Cold War. Even the Marine Corps, famously resistant to such specialization, was forced to stand up an entire “Raider” regiment, whose mission set closely resembles that of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. Today, the U.S. Special Operations community is larger than the entire German army. In 2021, U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)’s budget request was larger than the entire defense budget of Poland, one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s largest and strongest militaries—although much of SOF funding is provided by the Services themselves or drawn from overseas contingency funds.

Following the end of large-scale operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the winding down of the campaign to counter the so-called Islamic State, this growth has continued, even as the conventional force has been reduced. Indeed, as these conflicts ended, USSOCOM requested further increases. As SOF are optimized for the low end of the conflict spectrum, being very light and limited in firepower, such a heavy investment is at odds with the National Security, National Defense, and National Military strategies, which explicitly prioritize Great Power and near-peer competition, not counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, or security assistance.

This growth is not confined to operational units. Today, USSOCOM is far larger than the Army staff, which oversees a force that is seven times larger. Today, Army Special Forces consists of five Active-component groups and one training group, each commanded by a colonel—and 19 generals. The Navy Special Warfare community, with fewer than 10,000 Sailors, boasts 13 admirals. The push to super-empower the SOF community is seen clearly in recent efforts to elevate the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict to Service secretary status. This massive overhead does not encourage agility and rapidity of thought and action. Rather, it equips U.S. SOF to fight and win in the inter-Service, intergovernmental scramble for funding and authorities.

The expansion of SOF and their prioritization since 9/11 have also led to overlap and redundancy, blurring the distinctions between them. For example, Army Special Forces (“white SOF”) were founded and organized principally to train and lead indigenous forces in unconventional warfare. The community fields a remarkable number—378—of 12-man A detachments (Active- and Reserve-component), each capable of training and leading a battalion of indigenous fighters. Nevertheless, Army Special Forces largely neglected that mission during the war on terror (except for Iraqi and Afghan commandos) in favor of direct action, also the favored mission for Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders, and Army and Navy special mission units. Each likes to stress its “unique” capability, but for most of the war on terror, each was used more or less interchangeably as raid forces on land—not to train and advise and not in maritime environments.

This explosive growth comes at a steep price. First, the drain on the conventional force is extraordinary but underreported. Particularly in the Army, conventional units are regularly stripped of quality young leaders for service in the Rangers and Special Forces. An example of its effect is seen in the case of a rifle platoon from the 82nd Airborne Division’s Ready Brigade, which deployed “no-notice” to Kuwait in early January 2020 following the death of Qassim Soleimani with none of the E-6 squad leaders authorized. (The 82nd is supposedly maintained at the highest readiness of any Army division.) The same unit experienced a turnover of four platoon leaders in a single platoon in one calendar year, as junior officers departed for the SOF community. Increasingly, service in the Rangers is seen as essential for career progression by Army infantry leaders, as battalion command positions are increasingly monopolized by Ranger alumni.

This drain of quality leaders from the conventional force and into SOF had been flagged as a serious concern as far back as World War II, when many such units were formed. On this point Field Marshal William Slim, arguably the most successful British commander in that war, is worth quoting: “These formations, trained, equipped, and mentally adjusted for one kind of operation only, were wasteful. They did not give, militarily, a worthwhile return for the resources in men, material, and time that they absorbed.” Moreover, Slim stated:

The result of these methods was undoubtedly to lower the quality of the rest of the Army, especially of the infantry, not only by skimming the cream off it, but by encouraging the idea that certain of the normal operations of war were so difficult that only specially equipped corps d’elite could be expected to undertake them. Armies do not win wars by means of a few bodies of super-soldiers but by the average quality of their standard units.

Paradoxically, though SOF units are expected to conduct operations with the highest levels of discipline and discretion, in fact a disproportionate number of the most egregious mishaps in the war on terror befell them. These include a Special Forces raid near Hazar Qadam in Afghanistan in January 2002 that resulted in 16 civilian deaths, an errant AC-130 attack on friendly forces during Operation Anaconda in March 2002 that killed or wounded more than a dozen U.S. and Afghan soldiers, and the “Roberts Ridge” disaster in the same battle, resulting in the loss of an MH-47 Chinook and the death of seven U.S. special operations troops. The Pat Tillman fratricide imbroglio in 2004 needs no elaboration; its echoes continue today. In 2005, an SOF element entered a village outside Baghdad at night and arrested Mohsen Abdul-Hamid and his sons. Hamid was head of Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political party and former president of the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council. His arrest provoked a storm of criticism, landing on the front page of the Washington Post. A similar SOF operation mistakenly detained the son of Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of Iraq’s strongest Shia party in 2007 and a recent visitor to the Oval Office, provoking another political controversy.

There are many other examples. Operation Red Wings in 2005 resulted in the death of 19 special operations personnel and the loss of another Chinook; the March 2007 incident in Shinwar District in Afghanistan involved the death or injury of dozens of civilians; an AC-130 strike in Azizabad, Pakistan, in August 2008, killed a reported 91 civilians; the August 2011 Chinook shootdown in the Tangi Valley in Afghanistan killed 30 U.S. Servicemembers, including 15 Navy SEALs; the November 2011 attack near Salala, inside Pakistan, killed 26 Pakistani soldiers, wounded 11, and caused a crisis in diplomatic relations; and the October 2015 AC-130 strike on a Médecins sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz killed 42 civilians and wounded more than 30.

A particularly painful incident occurred in February 2010 near Gardez in Afghanistan, when Navy SEALs entered a compound in search of a high-value target. The target was absent, but the occupant—a local and friendly official—was killed, along with his brother, two other men, and three women, two pregnant. At the time, the raiders claimed that the women had been killed before their arrival in an honor killing—a deliberate falsehood that later collapsed under investigation. In recent years, allegations of war crimes, drug use, and even homicide have dogged the elite SEAL community. Despite their branding as the “Quiet Professionals,” SOF have figured prominently in many military disasters and scandals since 9/11. Under congressional pressure, and citing “incidents of misconduct and unethical behavior [that] threatened public trust,” the USSOCOM commander accordingly directed a comprehensive review of the community in 2019. That review uncovered “not only potential cracks in the SOF foundations at the individual and team level, but also through the chain of command, specifically in the core tenets of leadership, discipline and accountability.”

A common explanation for these behaviors is an excessively high operations tempo, leading to burnout. In fact, for most of the war on terror, Tier 1 special mission units typically deployed for only 3 months at a time, while others, such as Army Special Forces, served 6-month tours. Conventional units during this period served repetitive 12- (and in some cases 15-) month tours. For many years, the conventional force maintained a 1:1 ratio between time in garrison and time deployed, while the SOF community was able to maintain a more sustainable 2:1 ratio featuring much shorter tours. Operations tempo should not be ignored, but it obscures deeper and more compelling factors.

Army Green Berets assigned to 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), observe target for Navy Sikorsky HH-60 helicopter with Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 85 during close air support training, Okinawa, Japan, May 13, 2021 (U.S. Army/Caleb Woodburn)

An obvious issue is a drop in quality. The expansion of SOF since 9/11 has inevitably diluted the force by increasing the demand for more special operations candidates, creating pressure for lowered standards and driving commanders at times to overlook behaviors that previously demanded elimination. A corollary is that commissioned officers often have less authority in SOF units than in the conventional force. Unlike enlisted leaders, they tend to come and go in SOF assignments, rotating between operational and staff postings. Often, they must acquiesce to the informal leadership of senior enlisted leaders who have far longer tenure and greater actual influence. (Special operations units are characterized by the presence of very senior enlisted leaders [E8 and E9] at very low levels.) Officers who insist on strict standards of accountability and conduct are not always welcome and may be removed and reassigned, as happened to future USSOCOM commander Admiral William McRaven earlier in his SEAL career. Lieutenants and captains in the 75th Ranger Regiment or Army Special Forces who do not conform to informal enlisted norms similarly risk reassignment.

Another contributing factor is the tendency to wall off or stovepipe SOF. SOF operations are typically poorly coordinated with conventional battlespace owners—a chronic problem exacerbated by the tendency to employ SOF outside of the normal chain of command. Even in extremis, conventional units cannot expect assistance from nearby SOF assets such as the AC-130 gunship or uncrewed aerial vehicles, as seen in the epic battles at Wanat, COP Keating, and the Ganjgal in Afghanistan. A glaring example was seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where special mission units (“black SOF”) were not task-organized under theater joint force commanders but instead reported to the combatant commander in Tampa. (By doctrine, theater special operations commands reported to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, not to theater joint force commanders such as the International Security Assistance Force commander in Afghanistan or Multi-National Force–I in Iraq.) Given the lack of tactical focus at such high levels, visibility and supervision of daily SOF operations were not realistic.

This issue played out in theater and campaign strategy. For years, the SOF community pursued “raiding” strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly aimed at destroying terrorist and insurgent networks through continuous night raids. Though many people were killed, enemy networks showed remarkable resilience, while the animosity engendered by constant violence in local communities worked against campaign objectives by intensifying local hatreds. Too often, the innocent were targeted while the enemy escaped. The result was independent operations that often worked against campaign objectives by alienating the very populations the coalition sought to protect and win over. Conventional commanders were often unaware that raids and other special operations were taking place in their areas, although they were required by default to deal with the painful aftermath. Protected by a large special operations headquarters in theater and the even larger USSOCOM, the special operations community operated with freedom of action throughout the war on terror.

These behaviors comport with an iron rule of bureaucratic politics; namely, to maximize one’s own organization’s autonomy and share of resources. SOF’s high degree of independence was compounded by short tours, leading to a lack of the situational awareness that comes only from a sustained presence in operations. Exemption from Service regulations and standards of conduct accentuated the intentional contrast between the SOF and conventional communities, causing friction and generating distrust. These trends were complicated by a lack of interoperability with conventional forces, which generally do not share secure communications with SOF units. These units almost never train with conventional counterparts in peacetime, do not collocate their headquarters in wartime, and, as a rule, do not routinely exchange intelligence.

As the war on terror waned, Great Power competition returned to the forefront, and the SOF community began to reorient. There is surely an important place for special operations at the high end of the spectrum of conflict, as the magnificent performance of Ukrainian SOF in the recent Russian invasion has demonstrated. The move to refocus SOF is both necessary and appropriate, and, if they are properly integrated with theater and campaign plans, SOF can contribute in major ways to campaign success.

But the United States does not win wars with commandos. While versatile and high-quality, lightly armed SOF formations cannot take and hold ground and do not, whatever their proponents may say, deliver decisive strategic results. Neither are they true economy-of-force assets; as we have seen, they come at a price in funding and manpower that does not square with their actual contributions to campaign success. Soldier for soldier, they are far more expensive to recruit, train, equip, and retain. Perhaps most important, their operations are often poorly coordinated, even as they drain an inordinate amount of leadership talent and quality from the conventional force. These disabilities must be addressed as the joint force prepares to fight and win against Great Powers.

Army Ranger with 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, aims rifle during Military Operations in Urban Terrain training, Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, Marine Corps Base Hawaii, June 10, 2022 (U.S. Marine Corps/Brandon Aultman)

Fortunately, solutions to these problems are readily at hand. When right-sized, properly supervised, and appropriately integrated into joint operations, SOF can better fulfill their intended roles. This suggests a sharp reduction in size, to pre-9/11 numbers, beginning with cuts to the excessively large staffs. SOF units, like all others, must be subordinated to designated joint force commanders in the theater of operations and not allowed to operate autonomously. Detailed coordination with battlespace owners, fused intelligence, interoperable communications, and a genuine and shared commitment to joint and combined operations are the ideal. Above all, a return to a disciplined and ethical foundation is crucial. The Quiet Professional was a worthy sobriquet. It can be again.

This review may provoke commentary and even controversy, but the discussion needs to take place. From modest beginnings, the SOF community has become a juggernaut, operating largely independently and consuming resources disproportionate to its strategic contributions. Accordingly, national leaders should rigorously assess current investments in SOF and rationalize these decisions against other important priorities. There is an important, and indeed essential, place for SOF in the national military establishment that must be preserved. But strategic balance must ever be the goal. Today, that means a streamlined SOF, less bloated and more responsive to joint force commanders and better integrated with the entire joint force. JFQ

Notes

1 Mark F. Cancian, U.S. Military Forces in FY 2021: The Last Year of Growth? (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2021), available at <https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/210318_Cancian_Military_Forces.pdf?6iYr0beO.Ps9rQJQCQjTPPPKndGuLGxg>.

2 Walter Haynes, “The Hidden Costs of Strategy by Special Operations,” War on the Rocks, April 17, 2019, available at <https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/the-hidden-costs-of-strategy-by-special-operations/>.

3 See Andrew Feikert, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress, RS21048 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, May 11, 2022), available at <https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/RS21048>.

4 Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, Defense Manpower Requirements Report: Fiscal Year 2020 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 2019), available at <https://prhome.defense.gov/Portals/52/Documents/MRA_Docs/FINAL%20FY20%20DMRR%20Cleared%20for%20Open%20Publication.pdf?ver=2019-04-24-114457-517>.

5 “ASD (SO/LIC) will continue to report directly to the Secretary of Defense in exercising authority, direction, and control of special operations–peculiar administrative matters . . . ensuring that the ASD (SO/LIC) has a seat at the table alongside the Secretaries of the Military Departments in key decision forums, such as . . . Service Secretary meetings, the Deputy’s Management Action Group, and the Joint Requirements Oversight Council.” Statement of Christopher P. Maier, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Defense, House Committee on Appropriations, 117th Cong., 2nd sess., April 7, 2022, available at <https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP02/20220407/114577/HHRG-117-AP02-Wstate-MaierC-20220407.pdf>.

6 Fletcher Schoen, “Reorganization Is Imperative to Fixing Special Forces’ Bent Unconventional Culture,” Small Wars Journal, June 29, 2015, available at <https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/reorganization-is-imperative-to-fixing-special-forces’-bent-unconventional-culture>.

7 Interview with an 82nd Airborne Division company grade officer participating in the operation described. As a battalion commander in the 82nd Airborne Division, the interviewee experienced the loss of 16 noncommissioned officers to Special Forces in a single year, a crippling blow to unit cohesion and performance.

8 “Origins of the Special Forces,” National Army Museum (UK), available at <https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/special-forcesWW2>.

9 William Slim, Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1956), 547.

10 Jay Taylor, “The Error of Thinking We Can Do It Ourselves,” Washington Post, June 16, 2002, available at <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/06/16/the-error-of-thinking-we-can-do-it-ourselves/d346e062-e502-46ce-8ec4-55307b3d15c3/>.

11 Richard L. Kugler, Michael Baranick, and Hans Binnendijk, Operation Anaconda: Lessons for Joint Operations (Washington, DC: NDU Press, March 2009).

12 Dwight Jon Zimmerman, “The Battle of Roberts Ridge,” DefenseMediaNetwork, September 9, 2012.

13 Justin Lowe, “‘Tillman Story’ Sad Tale of a Military Cover-Up,” Reuters, February 3, 2010, available at <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-film-tillman/tillman-story-sad-tale-of-a-military-cover-up-idUSTRE61305320100204>. See also Review of Matters Related to the Death of Corporal Patrick Tillman, U.S. Army, Report No. IPI2007E001 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, March 26, 2007), available at <https://media.defense.gov/2018/Aug/16/2001955054/-1/-1/1/TILLMAN_REDACTED_WEB_0307-1.PDF>.

14 Kimberly Dozier, “U.S. Raid’s ‘Mistake’ Iraqi Grab,” CBS News, May 31, 2006, available at <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-raids-mistake-iraqi-grab/>.

15 “U.S. Forces Detain Son of Powerful Iraqi Politician,” Reuters, February 23, 2007, available at <https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSCOL350795>.

16 Andrew R. MacMannis and Robert B. Scott, “Operation Red Wings: A Joint Failure in Unity of Command,” Marine Corps Gazette, December 2006.

17 Brett Murphy, “Inside the U.S. Military’s Raid Against Its Own Security Guards That Left Dozens of Afghan Children Dead,” USA Today, December 29, 2019, available at <https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/12/29/security-guards-afghan-warlords-mass-civilian-casualties/2675795001/>.

18 Sarah Pruitt, “The Costliest Day in SEAL Team Six History,” History, January 17, 2017, available at <https://www.history.com/news/the-costliest-day-in-seal-team-six-history>.

19 “Pakistan Outrage After ‘NATO Attack Kills Soldiers,’” BBC, November 26, 2011, available at <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-15901363>.

20 Tim Craig, Missy Ryan, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “By Evening, a Hospital. By Morning, a War Zone,” Washington Post, October 10, 2015, available at <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/story-of-how-a-kunduz-hospital-was-shelled-by-us-gunship-in-question/2015/10/10/1c8affe2-6ebc-11e5-b31c-d80d62b53e28_story.html>; and Matthew Rosenberg, “Pentagon Details Chain of Errors in Strike on Afghan Hospital,” New York Times, April 29, 2016.

21 Despite the cover-up, no special operations forces members were disciplined. Jerome Starkey, “How Truth Emerged About Special Forces Killing of Civilians in Gardez,” The Times (UK), April 9, 2010.

22 Geoff Ziezulewicz, “How the Navy Plans to Deal With Drug Use and War Crimes Allegations in the SEAL Community,” Navy Times, February 13, 2019, available at <https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/02/13/how-the-navy-plans-to-deal-with-drug-use-and-war-crimes-allegations-in-the-seal-community/>.

23 Dave Phillips, “Pentagon Begins Independent Inquiry Into Special Ops and War Crimes,” New York Times, January 28, 2021.

24 See United States Special Operations Command Comprehensive Review (MacDill Air Force Base, Florida: U.S. Special Operations Command, January 23, 2020), available at <https://sof.news/pubs/USSOCOM-Comprehensive-Ethics-Review-Report-January-2020.pdf>.

25 Todd South, “2-Star Responds to Anonymous Email Blasting Watered-Down Special Forces Training Standards,” Army Times, November 30, 2017, available at <https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2017/11/30/2-star-responds-to-anonymous-email-blasting-watered-down-special-forces-training-standards/>.

26 Matthew Cole, “The Crimes of SEAL Team 6,” The Intercept, January 10, 2017, available at <https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/>.

27 See Joint Publication 3-05, Special Operations (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, July 16, 2014), available at <http://edocs.nps.edu/2014/July/jp3_05.pdf>.

28 Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has been outspoken in criticizing “raiding strategies,” observing that “targeting does not equal strategy.” See Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., “Gen McMaster: Raiders, Advisors and the Wrong Lessons from Iraq,” Breaking Defense, March 30, 2013, available at <https://breakingdefense.com/2013/03/gen-mcmaster-raiders-advisors-and-the-wrong-lessons-from-iraq/>.

29 Christopher J. Lamb and Megan Franco, “National-Level Coordination and Implementation: How System Attributes Trumped Leadership,” in Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War, ed. Richard D. Hooker, Jr., and Joseph J. Collins (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2015), 192, available at <https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Publications/Books/Lessons-Encountered/Article/915848/chapter-3-national-level-coordination-and-implementation-how-system-attributes/>.

30 Andrew White, “Ukraine Conflict: Ukrainian Special Operations Forces in Focus,” Janes, March 4, 2022, available at <https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/ukraine-conflict-ukrainian-special-operations-forces-in-focus>.

ndupress.ndu.edu

18. These 26 words 'created the internet.' Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them

It is interesting to read the entire legislation here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

These 26 words 'created the internet.' Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

CNN · by Brian Fung · February 18, 2023

Washington CNN —

Congress, the White House and now the US Supreme Court are all focusing their attention on a federal law that’s long served as a legal shield for online platforms.

This week, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on two pivotal cases dealing with online speech and content moderation. Central to the arguments is “Section 230,” a federal law that’s been roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for different reasons but that tech companies and digital rights groups have defended as vital to a functioning internet.

The TikTok logo is displayed outside a TikTok office on December 20, 2022 in Culver City, California.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Banning TikTok in the US 'should be looked at,' says Schumer

Tech companies involved in the litigation have cited the 27-year-old statute as part of an argument for why they shouldn’t have to face lawsuits alleging they gave knowing, substantial assistance to terrorist acts by hosting or algorithmically recommending terrorist content.

A set of rulings against the tech industry could significantly narrow Section 230 and its legal protections for websites and social media companies. If that happens, the Court’s decisions could expose online platforms to an array of new lawsuits over how they present content to users. Such a result would represent the most consequential limitations ever placed on a legal shield that predates today’s biggest social media platforms and has allowed them to nip many content-related lawsuits in the bud.

And more could be coming: the Supreme Court is still mulling whether to hear several additional cases with implications for Section 230, while members of Congress have expressed renewed enthusiasm for rolling back the law’s protections for websites, and President Joe Biden has called for the same in a recent op-ed.

Here’s everything you need to know about Section 230, the law that’s been called “the 26 words that created the internet.”

A law born in the early days of the World Wide Web

Passed in 1996 in the early days of the World Wide Web, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was meant to nurture startups and entrepreneurs. The legislation’s text recognized that the internet was in its infancy and risked being choked out of existence if website owners could be sued for things that other people posted.

One of the law’s architects, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, has said that without Section 230, “all online media would face an onslaught of bad-faith lawsuits and pressure campaigns from the powerful” seeking to silence them.

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 01: U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, strikes the gavel to start a hearing on U.S. southern border security on Capitol Hill, February 01, 2023 in Washington, DC. This is the first in a series of hearings called by Republicans to examine the Biden administration's handling of border security and migration along the U.S.-Mexico border. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

House Judiciary chairman subpoenas big tech executives for company communications with executive branch

He’s also said Section 230 directly empowers websites to remove content they believe is objectionable by creating a “good Samaritan” safe harbor: Under Section 230, websites enjoy immunity for moderating content in the ways they see fit — not according to others’ preferences — although the federal government can still sue platforms for violating criminal or intellectual property laws.

Contrary to what some politicians have claimed, Section 230’s protections do not hinge on a platform being politically or ideologically neutral. The law also does not require that a website be classified as a publisher in order to “qualify” for liability protection. Apart from meeting the definition of an “interactive computer service,” websites need not do anything to gain Section 230’s benefits – they apply automatically.

The law’s central provision holds that websites (and their users) cannot be treated legally as the publishers or speakers of other people’s content. In plain English, that means that any legal responsibility attached to publishing a given piece of content ends with the person or entity that created it, not the platforms on which the content is shared or the users who re-share it.

The seemingly simple language of Section 230 belies its sweeping impact. Courts have repeatedly accepted Section 230 as a defense against claims of defamation, negligence and other allegations. In the past, it’s protected AOL, Craigslist, Google and Yahoo, building up a body of law so broad and influential as to be considered a pillar of today’s internet.

“The free and open internet as we know it couldn’t exist without Section 230,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has written. “Important court rulings on Section 230 have held that users and services cannot be sued for forwarding email, hosting online reviews, or sharing photos or videos that others find objectionable. It also helps to quickly resolve lawsuits cases that have no legal basis.”

In recent years, however, critics of Section 230 have increasingly questioned the law’s scope and proposed restrictions on the circumstances in which websites may invoke the legal shield.

Bipartisan criticism, for different reasons

For years, much of the criticism of Section 230 has come from conservatives who say that the law lets social media platforms suppress right-leaning views for political reasons.

By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Section 230 does shield websites from lawsuits that might arise from that type of viewpoint-based content moderation, though social media companies have said they do not make content decisions based on ideology but rather on violations of their policies.

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., new chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, is joined at left by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member, as he advocates a bill to limit work-from-home rules and telework for federal workers as part of the new Republican majority's agenda, in the House Rules Committee, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. A (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Oversight chairman and former Twitter employees strike deal on subpoenas in exchange for testimony

The Trump administration tried to turn some of those criticisms into concrete policy that would have had significant consequences, if it had succeeded. For example, in 2020, the Justice Department released a legislative proposal for changes to Section 230 that would create an eligibility test for websites seeking the law’s protections. That same year, the White House issued an executive order calling on the Federal Communications Commission to interpret Section 230 in a more narrow way.

The executive order faced a number of legal and procedural problems, not least of which was the fact that the FCC is not part of the judicial branch; that it does not regulate social media or content moderation decisions; and that it is an independent agency that, by law, does not take direction from the White House.

Even though the Trump-era efforts to curtail Section 230 never bore fruit, conservatives are still looking for opportunities to do so. And they aren’t alone. Since 2016, when social media platforms’ role in spreading Russian election disinformation broke open a national dialogue about the companies’ handling of toxic content, Democrats have increasingly railed against Section 230.

By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Democrats have said, Section 230 has allowed websites to escape accountability for hosting hate speech and misinformation that others have recognized as objectionable but that social media companies can’t or won’t remove themselves.

The result is a bipartisan hatred for Section 230, even if the two parties cannot agree on why Section 230 is flawed or what policies might appropriately take its place.

“I would be prepared to make a bet that if we took a vote on a plain Section 230 repeal, it would clear this committee with virtually every vote,” said Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at a hearing last week of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem, where we bog down, is that we want 230-plus. We want to repeal 230 and then have ‘XYZ.’ And we don’t agree on what the ‘XYZ’ are.”

Courts take the lead

The deadlock has thrown much of the momentum for changing Section 230 to the courts — most notably, the US Supreme Court, which now has an opportunity this term to dictate how far the law extends.

Tech critics have called for added legal exposure and accountability. “The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law. It is highly irregular for a global industry that wields staggering influence to be protected from judicial inquiry,” wrote the Anti-Defamation League in a Supreme Court brief.

For the tech giants, and even for many of Big Tech’s fiercest competitors, it would be a bad thing, because it would undermine what has allowed the internet to flourish. It would potentially put many websites and users into unwitting and abrupt legal jeopardy, they say, and it would dramatically change how some websites operate in order to avoid liability.

The social media platform Reddit has argued in a Supreme Court brief that if Section 230 is narrowed so that its protections do not cover a site’s recommendations of content a user might enjoy, that would “dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”

“‘Recommendations’ are the very thing that make Reddit a vibrant place,” wrote the company and several volunteer Reddit moderators. “It is users who upvote and downvote content, and thereby determine which posts gain prominence and which fade into obscurity.”

People would stop using Reddit, and moderators would stop volunteering, the brief argued, under a legal regime that “carries a serious risk of being sued for ‘recommending’ a defamatory or otherwise tortious post that was created by someone else.”

While this week’s oral arguments won’t be the end of the debate over Section 230, the outcome of the cases could lead to hugely significant changes the internet has never before seen — for better or for worse.

CNN · by Brian Fung · February 18, 2023

19. Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?

What is the acceptable durable political arrangement that could bring peace and stability to the region?

Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?

One year on, there is no sign of an endgame

BY ARTA MOEINI

unherd.com · by Arta Moeini · February 18, 2023

Barely a day had gone by from Ukraine’s successful request for German Leopard-2 tanks when the government in Kyiv called on Nato countries to yet again prove their solidarity by supplying it with US-made F-16 fighter jets. While military experts doubt these vehicles will significantly alter the situation on the battlefield, Kyiv touts them as important symbols of Western political resolve.

“War is a continuation of policy with other means,” wrote Clausewitz in 1832. A year into the Russo-Ukrainian War, what is that policy where Ukraine is concerned? Or America, Germany, and other Nato allies? Are Ukraine’s repeated calls for more support and the West’s accommodating response a case of leveraging “strategic publicity”, performative diplomacy, alliance solidarity, or something else entirely? After all, as much as the Ukrainians are fighting Russian forces and suffering massive casualties to protect the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state, today Nato is openly engaged in a proxy war that risks spiralling into a catastrophic conflict between the West and Russia.

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Although foreign policy realism can help sketch, even predict, the general contours of the war and explain policy in Moscow and Kyiv, this mainstream realist position, as represented by the likes of John Mearsheimer, provides an incomplete account of the behaviour of most Western allies, especially the United States. To understand Western decision-making and the peculiar inter-alliance dynamics of Nato, we need a more radical realism that takes seriously the non-physical, psychological, and “ontological dimensions” of security — encompassing a state or an organisation’s need for overcoming uncertainty by establishing orderly narratives and identities about its sense of “self”.

Still, “structural” realist accounts — centred on systemic anarchy, physical security, the balance of power, and political dimensions of strategy — can help explain aspects of Ukraine’s strategic decision-making. In a recent study for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, which I co-authored, we investigated the structural reasons that drive Ukraine’s strategic calculus. We suggested that, as a “regional balancer”, Ukraine took a massive risk in defying the Russian redlines about Kyiv explicitly rejecting Nato overtures and stopping any military integration with the West. This was a maximalist gambit that presupposed Western military support and risked actively provoking Moscow to its own strategic disadvantage.

In choosing the riskier, zero-sum strategy aimed at thwarting the historical and geopolitical sphere of influence of a neighbouring regional and civilisational power, Ukraine was perhaps imprudent — but by no means irrational. As we wrote:

“Practically all of America’s security alliances today are asymmetrical arrangements between the United States and regional balancers — a class of smaller, more peripheral regional states seeking to balance against the dominant middle powers in their respective regions. As a great power, America possesses an inherent capacity to encroach on other regional security complexes (RSCs). In this context, it is reasonable for regional balancers to attempt to coax and exploit American power in the service of their particular regional security interests.”

Setting such a lofty objective, however, effectively meant that Kyiv could never succeed without active Nato intervention shifting the balance of power in its favour. By virtue of its decision, Ukraine, along with its closest partners in Poland and the Baltic nations, became the classic “trojan ally” — smaller countries whose desire for regional clout against the extant middle power (Russia) is predicated on their ability to persuade an external great power and its global military network (here, the US and, by extension, Nato) to step in militarily on their behalf. As we noted in our study, “this comes at great risk to the regional balancer and at great cost to the external great power”. For ultimately, the arrangement depends on “the threat of the use of force and military intervention” by that external great power, without which the regional balancer would fail.

Ukraine’s strategic ambition is to overcome Russia once and for all and break away from Moscow’s historical control. Putting aside the specious and facile Russian justifications for the invasion that seek to lampoon Nato’s military intervention in Yugoslavia, it is crushing this larger Ukrainian ambition that motivates the Kremlin. This explains Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, its aspirations for the Minsk agreements, and this final resort to military action.

Once the Russian invasion began, Kyiv’s goal of thwarting Moscow and keeping intact its territories became impossible without Western military intervention. Ukraine’s future as a sovereign state would now hinge on its ability to successfully engineer an escalation. From Ukraine’s perspective, therefore, the desire for supplies of ever more sophisticated weaponry from the more powerful Western nations is not primarily motivated by their immediate practical and tactical impact — after all, the delivery of and training for these systems will still be months away. No, Ukrainian demands largely stem from what the introduction of these weapons would represent politically, as well as their long-term geostrategic consequences for the next phase of the war.

For it is in Kyiv’s interests to steer Nato into becoming more closely entangled in the war. Ukraine has resorted to a combination of tactics — including information warfare and exploiting historic Western guilt — to instigate an informational and reputational cascade among Nato members that would assure accedence to Ukrainian demands. Given its clear long-term weaknesses in quality manpower, artillery, and ammunition, the Zelenskyy government has shrewdly fought a hybrid war from the start, knowing that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without Nato fighting on its side. The question now is whether the West should allow itself to be entrapped into that war and jeopardise the fate of the entire world in doing so.

In the materialist framing of security offered by most realists, there is little upside for America and western Europe, and certainly no genuine national or strategic interest, in getting dragged into what is essentially a regional war in Eastern Europe involving two different nationalistic states. From an ontological standpoint, however, an Anglo-American foreign policy establishment that strongly “identifies” itself with US unipolarity has been heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, and preventing the formation of a new collective security architecture in Europe, which would be centred on Russia and Germany rather than the United States. As geopolitical analyst George Friedman observed in 2015: “For the United States, the primordial fear is… [the coupling of] German technology and German capital, [with] Russian natural resources [and] Russian manpower.”

Perhaps following a similar logic, the US establishment has worked to destroy any possibility of a Berlin-Moscow axis forming by aligning itself with the Intermarium bloc of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea, repeatedly opposing (and openly threatening) Nord Stream gas pipelines, and deliberately rebuffing Russian insistence on a neutral Ukraine. In relation to Ukraine, the initial objective for an ideological Western alliance that is skewed toward “shared values”, as Nato has become with the dissolution of the USSR, was to turn that country into a Western albatross for Russia, to bog down Moscow in an extended quagmire to weaken its regional power and influence, and even to encourage regime change in the Kremlin.

If one were to accept the logic of this strategy, then a limited Western military support of the Ukrainian war aims — directed towards creating an attritional, frozen conflict — seems plausible. Yet, even in such a scenario, any expansion in scope and degree of that support to include advanced weapon systems, such as F-16s or long-range missiles, is not only unwise but increasingly suicidal in any cost-benefit calculation. Such explicitly hostile support could escalate the proxy war into a direct, conventional war — a World War III scenario, which President Biden insists he wants to avoid. Moreover, in the unlikely event that such expansive military assistance is successful in driving Russian forces out of the Donbas, let alone Crimea (where Russia holds a large naval base), it would dramatically increase the likelihood of a nuclear event, given how Moscow regards protecting its strategic stronghold in the Black Sea as an existential imperative.

Why, then, does the West continue to oblige Ukraine and give in to reputational pressure and arm-twisting from Nato’s newest members in the Intermarium corridor? There are a number of causes, ranging from the private and institutional interests of the liberal internationalist establishment to the spread of a Manichaean worldview in the alliance. Most important, however, is the phenomenon of group compulsion toward escalation aggravated by ontological insecurity — which happens when abrupt and tragic world-historical events such as the Russian invasion disrupt one’s unified sense of order and continuity in the world.

Exacerbated by Nato’s enlargement and transformation into an institutional behemoth of some 30-odd nations with differing perceptions of threat and security, this compulsion has shaped and reinforced a unified “identity” among Western nations — a narrative of us against them. Under the condition of ontological insecurity, socio-psychological and emotional undercurrents enable reputational cascades, enforce conformity in the name of Western unity, and empower “group polarisation” around the riskier choice, which ensures the more extreme and escalatory policies are ultimately adopted. And, crucially, trojan allies understandably use these dynamics to advance their very real national and security interests from within the alliance, giving them a far more prominent role in decision-making than their relative power might suggest.

A closer inspection of the inter-alliance discourse within Nato also reveals an activist psychology lurking beneath the political and ideological signalling. Given that ideology — namely liberal humanitarianism and democratism — plays a key role in the maintenance of the alliance, its decision-making process is predisposed to the action bias fallacy: the idea that doing something is always better than doing nothing. This sort of reciprocal, mutually reinforcing mentality among alliance peers who profess an activist “ethic of care” reflexively interprets responsibility as taking action, while rebuking hesitance and restraint as inhumane. The dynamic recalls Nietzsche’s observation in The Birth of Tragedy that “action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion” — here, that “veil of illusion” is provided by the ontological process of identity-formation and the shared narratives of “collective responsibility” and “Western unity”.

Within the context of inter-alliance decision-making, such an ethic cannot help but indulge any demands put upon it, especially since the loudest peers can dress up this compulsion under the allegedly moral imperative of advancing Western unity, defending “our values”, and fighting reactionary evil. The ontological security-seeking of a global and hegemonic great power such as the US foregrounds the need for an ideology that can offer it a sense of coherence, make its actions appear to itself meaningful and justified. The same phenomenon applies to Nato, which — despite not being a state but an institution — is today practically an alter-ego of the US.

Now, this may seem to indicate an inherent tension between the desire for an anchoring tale about “who we are” and the more traditional material security that is based around physical self-preservation. But while this is true in some cases, especially in relation to ideological great powers such as the US, whose idealistic self-narrative of American exceptionalism often collides with its real interests, ontological and physical security-seeking are more congruent in smaller and middle-tier states for whom both interests and identities are more rooted, localised, and real.

In the Anglosphere, perhaps owing to the legacy of imperialism and the historical reality of unipolarity, there is currently a disconnect between authentic national interests, narrowly and concretely defined, and the behaviour of its liberal internationalist foreign policy establishment that prioritises ontological security-seeking with global ramifications. This fact needs rectifying. Thankfully, there are early signs that President Biden and at least some of his advisors, including the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, have sensed this dreadful reality and its potentially dangerous fallout, and are now beginning to speak of the need for negotiations and diplomatic settlement in Ukraine.

As we begin the second year of the war, it has finally dawned on many in Washington that the likely outcome of this tragedy is stalemate: “We will continue to try to impress upon [the Ukrainian leadership] that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” one senior Biden administration official said this week. For all the talk of Ukrainian agency, that agency depends entirely on Nato’s commitment to continue to support Kyiv’s war effort indefinitely. Such a maximalist desire for “complete victory” is not only highly attritional and suggestive of yet another endless war, but it is also reckless; its very success could trigger a nuclear holocaust.

Moscow has already paid a high price for its transgressions in Ukraine. To prolong the war at this point in an ideological quest for total victory is both strategically and morally questionable. For many liberal internationalists in the West, the clamour for a “just peace” that is sufficiently punishing to Russia suggests little more than a thinly-veiled desire to impose a Carthaginian peace on Moscow. The West has indeed wounded Russia; now it must decide if it wants to let this wound fester and conflagrate the entire world. For unless Moscow is provided with a reasonable off-ramp that recognises Russia’s status as a regional power with its own existential imperatives of strategic and ontological security, that is the precipice towards which we are heading.

unherd.com · by Arta Moeini · February 18, 2023

20. Miles Yu On Taiwan: Three misconceptions about Taiwan’s defense

Excerpts;

Just like Israel, Taiwan and its democracy have a huge impact on the world. The people of Taiwan should stand proud, confident that the support of the democratic countries of the world has no ulterior motives. They can have this confidence because the vast majority of democratic countries and alliances, such as NATO and the EU, have come to the new realization that the crux of Taiwan’s struggle is not just an issue of sovereignty, but more importantly one of the continuing epic struggle between democracy and freedom on one side, tyranny and repression on the other. Who wins and loses on this fundamental issue is of great importance, and its significance goes far beyond the narrow Taiwan Strait.

Furthermore, today’s Taiwan is no longer the Taiwan of the past. Taiwan is now an important country in the global economic, trade and technological systems. Taiwan has one of the most educated citizenries in the world, has first-class commercial, industrial, and trade management talents, and occupies a leading, and often dominant, position in many fields that are critical to the world economy.

It is true that China stands as the third-largest trading partner of the United States. But Taiwan’s size is 267 times smaller than that of China, its population is nearly 70 times smaller, with a per capita GDP exceeding those of Japan, South Korea and of course China, Taiwan proudly stands as the United States’ eighth-largest trading partner among the more than 200 countries in the world, and this trade relationship is constantly strengthening. Taiwan also has its own considerable advantages and strengths in finance, technology, politics, and even some aspects of modern warfare. On the other hand, the economic difficulties, social tensions, institutional defects and other international and domestic challenges faced by the CCP are quite severe. The cannon fodder theory serves only Beijing’s interests as Taiwan itself holds many advantages of its own over its giant communist neighbor, both materially and inspirationally.

Finally, it should be noted that whatever tension exists in the Taiwan Strait is the result of provocations perpetrated by Communist China. If the CCP gives up its ambition to conquer a democratic, free, and independent Taiwan, both sides of the Strait will win; if Taiwan succumbs to the CCP’s ambition and cognitive manipulations, the independence, freedom and sovereignty the Republic of China enjoys will cease to exist. With stakes as high as these, Taiwan must do all it can to understand and combast Beijing’s efforts to undermine it.

Mon, Feb 20, 2023 page8

Miles Yu On Taiwan: Three misconceptions about Taiwan’s defense

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2023/02/20/2003794672

The Chinese Communist Party is waging a cognitive war against Taiwan that is presently in full swing. In this effort it is taking advantage of Taiwan’s free-media environment, which makes it all too easy for many people to fall into the public opinion traps the CCP sets up. As a result, people — some unwittingly — spread malicious rumors, echo China’s false narratives, bamboozle some in Taiwan into believing these deepfakes about their country. All of this is detrimental to Taiwan’s democratic and free system, and to the future of the island democracy.

Beijing’s cognitive war has cultivated three major misconceptions among some Taiwanese people. To win that war, these falsehoods must be understood and combated.

The first misconception Beijing has pushed, and reiterated by some pundits in Taiwan, is skepticism about America’s resolve to defend Taiwan: doubts about the strategic intent, determination, and ability of the United States to militarily intervene if the CCP invades Taiwan. With the deepening and strengthening of the CCP’s interference on Taiwan’s elections, suspicion of the United States in Taiwan has spread quietly alarmingly.

This suspicion has deepened just within the past couple of years. It is now openly questioned among some Taiwanese whether the United States would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. Some pundits even suggested that TSMC’s establishment of a factory in the United States is a sign of American abandonment of Taiwan because the US is already getting Taiwan’s crown jewel of industry and technology. Others argue that even if the United States supports Taiwan militarily, it will, as it has allegedly done in Ukraine, only use Taiwan as a proxy battlefield between the United States and China to contain and consume the power of the Chinese Communist Party. These suspicions only exacerbate Taipei’s anxiety that it is being used as a chess piece in a game between Beijing and Washington. This of course plays directly into Beijing’s hands.

But these suspicions do not reflect the truth and reality. Instead, the guarantee of US military intervention in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan has never been in doubt: there has never been any “strategic ambiguity.” Since the abolition of the Sino-US mutual defense treaty in 1980, not a single US president has stated ambiguously about this, and whenever the CCP has fomented a crisis around Taiwan, the sitting US president without exception has publicly declared or demonstrated the determination and will of the US to directly intervene with military force.

At present, the CCP is heightening its belligerence and military ambition across the Strait, and often engages in saber-rattling. As is the case in the past decades, the current US President, Joseph Biden, has publicly stated on at least four occasions in the past two years that the United States will not hesitate to intervene militarily in the event of the CCP’s armed attack on Taiwan. Though some contend that the US State Department has “corrected” the president’s statements, this contention however is utterly inaccurate and false. On the contrary, whenever a US president, including President Biden, has expressed his determination to protect Taiwan by force, the US State Department has always steadfastly stated that the president’s words are completely consistent with the US policy towards China and Taiwan, and therefore nothing is out of the ordinary.

So what exactly is US policy toward China and Taiwan when it comes to Taiwan’s defense? It includes three inseparable components. First, the United States recognizes that there is a claim that Taiwan is a part of China; second, the United States opposes any use of force to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait; third, any solution to the Taiwan issue must be agreed to by the people on both sides of the Strait. These three integral points have existed in concert since the Nixon era, and they make clear that there is no contradiction between the US presidents’ repeated announcements of strategic intent to militarily defend Taiwan, and long-term US policy. On the contrary, every statement made by the US State Department in the aftermath of a presidential declaration of America’s strategic intent to militarily defend Taiwan further confirms America’s resolve for military intervention. No one can find any public “correction” by any active senior government officials in this universe that specifically states US presidential declarations of military intervention in the event of a CCP invasion of Taiwan is incorrect or wrong. Because there is none.

Those skeptical of that resolve also ignore a fundamental fact: no CCP leader has any doubts about Washington’s determination to intervene militarily were Beijing to attempt to take Taiwan by force. This is so because these skeptics fail to understand why a democratic and free Taiwan is so important to the national interests of the United States. Taiwan is the first link in the CCP’s chain of aggression in the Indo-Pacific region. If the US sits idly for a military attack on Taiwan, US allies in the Indo-Pacific region and the world over will have immeasurable doubts and concerns about the value of America’s word and the worth of their alliance with the US. The United States also knows that all countries in the Indo-Pacific region that have been bullied, intimidated, and coerced by the Chinese Communist Party, such as Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, India, Australia, and the Philippines, count on the United States to lead a resolute counterattack against a military invasion of Taiwan. Because they all understand that as Taiwan goes, so goes the region.

The second misconception Beijing has cultivated in its cognitive war on Taiwan is the false narrative that if the CCP does not invade Taiwan by force, Taiwan will declare independence. The so-called “Taiwan Independence” is a red herring perpetrated and grossly exaggerated by the CCP. The CCP has used this propaganda line as a pretext for aggression for many years. Yet it, too, runs counter to the reality of Taiwanese public opinion, which has long been to maintain the status quo of neither independence nor unification.

It is under this status quo that Taiwan remains a de facto independent sovereign state, the Republic of China, that has never been under the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China for one single day. The political leader in Taiwan, either from the Kuomintang or the Democratic Progressive Party, is called the president of the independent Republic of China, justly and democratically elected by the Taiwanese people. Taiwan’s major political parties share the belief that because Taiwan is already a sovereign country called the Republic of China, there is no need for Taipei to declare independence at all, contrary to the CCP’s insistence on the phantom existence of a robust “Taiwan Independence Movement.”

The truth is that regardless of whether the appellation “Taiwan” appears in brackets after the Republic of China, the existence of an independent Republic of China is an undeniable fact. Based on all my experience working in the US government, and my interactions with all the US political and diplomatic leaders I have dealt with, I have never met or heard of any Taiwan political leader or activist coming to Washington to lobby for Taiwanese independence. The CCP has always been chasing rumors, creating things out of nothing, and looking for trouble where none exists. It is unfortunate that there are also many people in Taiwan who exaggerate the possibility of Taiwan independence without any restraint, ignoring the recognition of the sovereign and independent Republic of China by the vast majority of Taiwanese people.

The third misconception Beijing pushes is the false narrative of cannon fodder: that the United States uses Taiwan to check and balance China, and in the event of an invasion would only use the Taiwanese people as cannon fodder to weaken the PRC for America’s self-interest. This falsehood is as provocative and reckless as it is wrong.

The United States’ commitment to Taiwan’s defense is to protect the free and democratic system that the people of Taiwan have achieved through unremitting struggle. The US and all its democratic allies in the world admire the great achievements the people of Taiwan have made over the past few decades. This admiration stems from an awareness that China’s ambitions for Taiwan are also a result of a deep fear about the enormous inspirational impact of a Chinese-speaking liberal democracy in Taiwan upon the repressed and chained Chinese people in the mainland. Taiwanese who hold to the “cannon fodder” theory fail to realize the great threat that Taiwan’s free and democratic system poses to the CCP’s authoritarian communist government, and its great appeal to the mainland people who lack these freedoms.

The American commitment to Taiwan is for the protection of universal values and democratic and free systems. There is no need for the people of Taiwan to feel that they are a small country with few people, a pawn in the politics of big countries. Many small countries in the world can profoundly affect the world.

Israel, with less than 40 percent of Taiwan’s population and only one-third of Taiwan’s territory, has also endured prolonged diplomatic encirclement, political blockade and cognitive warfare attacks. Yet Israel is not afraid of its existential threats from all sides and strives for self-determination and protects its inviolable sovereignty and democracy. It allies itself with the democracies of the world and serves as a beacon of freedom, democracy, and prosperity in the Middle East.

Just like Israel, Taiwan and its democracy have a huge impact on the world. The people of Taiwan should stand proud, confident that the support of the democratic countries of the world has no ulterior motives. They can have this confidence because the vast majority of democratic countries and alliances, such as NATO and the EU, have come to the new realization that the crux of Taiwan’s struggle is not just an issue of sovereignty, but more importantly one of the continuing epic struggle between democracy and freedom on one side, tyranny and repression on the other. Who wins and loses on this fundamental issue is of great importance, and its significance goes far beyond the narrow Taiwan Strait.

Furthermore, today’s Taiwan is no longer the Taiwan of the past. Taiwan is now an important country in the global economic, trade and technological systems. Taiwan has one of the most educated citizenries in the world, has first-class commercial, industrial, and trade management talents, and occupies a leading, and often dominant, position in many fields that are critical to the world economy.

It is true that China stands as the third-largest trading partner of the United States. But Taiwan’s size is 267 times smaller than that of China, its population is nearly 70 times smaller, with a per capita GDP exceeding those of Japan, South Korea and of course China, Taiwan proudly stands as the United States’ eighth-largest trading partner among the more than 200 countries in the world, and this trade relationship is constantly strengthening. Taiwan also has its own considerable advantages and strengths in finance, technology, politics, and even some aspects of modern warfare. On the other hand, the economic difficulties, social tensions, institutional defects and other international and domestic challenges faced by the CCP are quite severe. The cannon fodder theory serves only Beijing’s interests as Taiwan itself holds many advantages of its own over its giant communist neighbor, both materially and inspirationally.

Finally, it should be noted that whatever tension exists in the Taiwan Strait is the result of provocations perpetrated by Communist China. If the CCP gives up its ambition to conquer a democratic, free, and independent Taiwan, both sides of the Strait will win; if Taiwan succumbs to the CCP’s ambition and cognitive manipulations, the independence, freedom and sovereignty the Republic of China enjoys will cease to exist. With stakes as high as these, Taiwan must do all it can to understand and combast Beijing’s efforts to undermine it.

Miles Yu served as the senior China policy and planning advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the Trump Administration.

21. How drones, start-ups and civilian spotters have changed conflict for ever in Ukraine War

A whole of society approach. Resistance and resilience.

How drones, start-ups and civilian spotters have changed conflict for ever in Ukraine War

A year after the Russian invasion, the Ukraine war has brought dramatic change to both the battlefield and life behind the frontlines as technology shapes tactics and some defence manufacturers use the conflict as a shop window for weaponry

inews.co.uk · by Cahal Milmo · February 19, 2023

Somewhere near the Ukrainian frontline this month, Lieutenant “Oleksandr” surveyed the equipment available to him and his battle-hardened unit of infantrymen as they confronted Russian forces across the frozen landscape in the Donbas.

Alongside assault rifles and rocket-propelled tank destroyers sat a dish allowing access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, an array of drones and a box of plastic “fins” produced by volunteers on a 3D printer ready to turn hand grenades into improvised bombs ready to be dropped on Russian trenches.

Although he was unable to comment on the nature and source of any intelligence material, it is likely that at least some of the information provided to his assault force on the distribution of Kremlin units and equipment would have come from civilians behind enemy lines using dedicated smartphone apps to communicate with Kyiv.

Precise detail on the location of the enemy, right down to the names and faces of Russian soldiers, is likely to have been further gleaned via the use of Western artificial intelligence software used to quickly sift vast quantities of intercepted enemy mobile phone traffic and social media postings.

In the meantime, Oleksandr, whose real name is not being used by i for security reasons, and the members of other Ukrainian infantry units can move to and from the frontline in an array of vehicles provided by countries including Britain, Canada, France and Turkey.

Overhead, there is the persistent noise of artillery and guided munitions shipped to Ukraine from, among other countries, the US, the UK, Sweden, Finland and Italy.

The result is a year-old war which has become vast, shape-shifting and bloody petri dish for the ways in which conflicts present and future are to be fought.

It is an armed confrontation in which civilians have become involved on an unprecedented scale in roles from spotters behind enemy lines to digital partisans; in which the private sector as well as governments have helped shape Ukrainian military capabilities; and in which defence giants and states on both sides have been able use Ukraine’s 230,000 square miles of territory as a laboratory – even a shop window – for equipment and tactics hitherto confined to testing grounds and top secret drawing boards.

It is also a war of paradoxes in which the grim nature of conflict remains unchanged. What is undoubtedly the most technologically advanced war in human history is also being fought in trenches and across landscapes denuded of trees by that bring to mind the Western Front. On the Russian side at least, it is also a war increasingly being fought by poorly-trained and seemingly expendable units of conscripts and convicts.

Ukrainian soldiers in trenches in the frontline close to Bakhmut (Photo: Libkos/AP)

As Oleksandr, 33, who worked as a salesman before the war, put it: “It is for us a war of improvisation, of learning. We are good at using different things, many different equipments. We are much better than the Rashists [a derogatory Ukrainian term for Russian forces] because we have to be. We cannot afford to send 10, 50, 1,000 men to die for a few metres or a few houses. We have to be clever.”

The Ukrainian response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion on 24 February last year has been described as an exercise in the “democratisation of military power” – a term which seeks to encapsulate the fact that the battlefield has expanded far beyond the frontline charnel houses of places like Bakhmut to involve new hybrid battalions ranging from digital warriors hacking Russian television stations to volunteers fashioning body armour to the largely quiet contributions of experts in Silicon Valley and beyond in bolstering Kyiv’s arsenal.

Consequently, the Kremlin has found itself confounded by a resilience and inventiveness forged in years of post-Soviet struggle. Orysia Lutsevych, a Ukraine and Eurasia expert at the Chatham House think-tank, explained: “Ukraine’s military resistance has proved to be agile and creative – from mounting weapons on vehicles, thus improving range and mobility, to rejigging sensors so American equipment is compatible with old Soviet jets. The formidable strength of Ukrainian resistance has come from total mobilisation across society. Millions of citizens are doing their bit.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than among the three million or so Ukrainians who now find themselves living under Russian occupation in the southern and eastern regions which Putin claims to have annexed for Moscow in sham referenda.

Prior to the war, Ukraine had become one of the countries to pioneer the use of a one-stop government app to provide services from paying parking fines to reporting potholes.

After the invasion, the app – Diia – was swiftly updated to include an additional function allowing members of the public to send geolocated images of Russian military equipment and movements, as well as intelligence on officials collaborating with Moscow.

The amount of data received via the app, and similar software set up by the Ukrainian security services, has been vast. Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s dynamic minister of digital transformation, who was instrumental in persuading Musk to provide Starlink, announced that just five weeks into the invasion some 257,000 reports on Russian troop locations and atrocities had been received.

The information provided via the app is one ingredient fed into a centrally aggregated map and database used by Ukraine’s intelligence forces to plot fast counterstrikes against Kremlin forces. Ukrainian officials have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been vigorous in encouraging the flow of data. The country’s security service at one point sent out mass messages advertising an anonymous reporting service on the Telegram platform with the slogan: “We will win together.”

It is a model which experts have suggested is likely to be widely used in future conflicts where, thanks to the all-pervasive smartphone, a tech-literate and motivated population can become a real-time intelligence tool.

But others point out that it also risks “blurring” the vital boundary that distinguishes between combatants and the far larger civilian population who, at least according to the laws of war, cannot be deliberately targeted in a conflict.

Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who previously served as a human rights expert in the Obama administration, says the age-old practice of citizens resisting occupiers has been put on a different footing in Ukraine.

He told i: “Digital technologies and mobile apps have lowered the barrier to entry for civilian involvement on the battlefield… The scale and rapidity of civilian involvement has significantly increased. Digital tech has blurred the line, leading to problematic ambiguity about the scope of international legal protections in conflict.”

A local resident carries humanitarian aid while walking through an empty area in Bakhmut. Ukrainian forces have been holding the city as Russian Wagner paramilitary forces press a winter offensive, at great cost to both sides (Photo: John Moore/Getty)

For now at least, the practicalities of countering the Kremlin’s numerical advantage in the war have a higher priority and it is in the nexus between the sort of targeting data provided by Diia and another key innovation of the conflict – drones – that Kyiv has carved out another notable innovation in the waging of war.

Oleksandr and his comrades, like dozens of other Ukrainian combat units along the endless frontline, have access to at least two or three different types of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) to target the enemy. Controlled using screens or laptops, the drones are used in combination with larger surveillance UAVs to monitor Russian positions and smaller armed machines used to drop munitions – often hand grenades or RPG warheads fitted with the 3D-printed stabilising fins – on trenches and armoured vehicles.

Security sources insist that the system, a combination of Western and Ukrainian technologies which in places forms a co-ordinated matrix of air cover designed to permanently harass and degrade Russian morale and material, is significantly superior to anything in Moscow’s possession. As Oleksandr put it: “It is psychology. If you are a Rashist you must expect there is nowhere to hide. The sky is your enemy. We are watching 24/7.”

It appears to be a view shared by at least some in the Russian military, with one officer (first spotted by American UAV expert Samuel Bendett) this month decrying Moscow’s lack of an effective equivalent to Ukraine’s multi-layered drone forces.

Explaining what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Kyiv’s UAV system, the Russian officer wrote: “They often flew in swarms and hunted for ammunition delivery and command staff vehicles. If five or six such copters were hovering over the vehicle, then there was almost no chance of getting away.” The officer added that Russian tactics to safeguard their own drones against Ukrainian jamming had relied “unsuccesfully” on attaching fishing line to the machines. He noted: “The difference in technical equipment was significant.”

Residents use a Starlink terminal, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Chasiv Yar, Donetsk region, Ukraine January 31, 2023. (Photo: Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters)

Overarching Kyiv’s ability to monitor the battlefield and maintain communications has been the Starlink system provided by Musk’s SpaceX venture, which provides the Ukrainian military and civilian organisations with high-speed broadband access impervious to Russian jamming technology via a constellation of shoe box-sized satellites. It has been the most lauded example of private-sector intervention in the conflict, at least until earlier this month when the company provoked anger in Kyiv when it announced it had tweaked its system to prevent it being used to control military drones and accused Ukraine of having “weaponised” the technology.

Other Western companies at the forefront of technological innovation have adopted a lower profile stance with regards to their support for Ukraine.

MARSS, a UK-based security company, has supplied its anti-UAV surveillance system to Kyiv but declines to comment on whether its “drone killer” interceptor system – potentially of considerable use in destroying Iranian-made Shahed-136 loitering munitions unleashed in large numbers on Ukraine in recent months – is in place. Anduril, a fast-emerging American defence and surveillance start-up specialising in the use of artificial intelligence, confirmed in December that it has had a presence in Ukraine “since the first few weeks of the conflict” but is again circumspect about what exactly from its product range, which also includes its highly-rated Anvil drone interceptor, it has deployed.

Other companies, such as California-based AI company Primer, which has developed a system capable of analysing huge quantities of intercepted communications from non-secure mobile phones used by Russian troops, declined to discuss whether they have a presence in Ukraine.

At the same time, Iran has wasted no time in publicising the “success” of the Shahed-136 “kamikaze drones” used by Russia to cripple Ukrainian energy infrastructure late last year in search of orders from other countries.

It is all part of a wider picture of a renewed focus on defence and security in a rapidly polarising world.

Even before the war, global military spending was rising, increasing in 2021 to a record $2.1trn (£1.7trn). A recent analysis by consultancy McKinsey suggests that annual European defence spending will increase by as much as 65 per cent to 488bn euros (£432bn) a year by 2026.

It is therefore unsurprising that the companies whose weaponry has helped score some of the most high-profile successes in Ukraine have seen burgeoning order books.

Baykar, the Turkish manufacturer of the Bayraktar TB2 drone used with conspicuous success by Ukraine to pick off Russian convoys in the early phase of the war, last month added Kuwait as the latest customer of the UAV following deliveries 28 other countries, including Poland.

The company last year struck a deal worth £1.65bn with United Arab Emirates to supply 120 of the weapons as countries catch on to the fact that the latest drones offer a cut-price airborne capability previously only available to nations operating expensive fleets of fast jets.

Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defence manufacturer, has announced increasing sales of its Himars rocket system, among the most effective Western weapons supplied to Ukraine after it was used to devastate Russian supply dumps and command posts with its satellite-guided munitions capable of striking 50 miles behind enemy lines.

Among the deals signed was a $10bn (£8.2bn) package of the mobile rocket systems to be delivered to Poland.

At the same time, multiple defence manufacturers are awaiting orders to simply replenish the huge amounts of military equipment that have been transferred to Ukraine from existing Western state stocks.

Thales, the Anglo-French arms giant, announced in December that it had received an order for its Belfast facility to manufacture “several thousand” of the Nlaw anti-tank weapons for the British Army after UK stocks were used to dramatic effect by Ukraine in the early stages of the war.

A Ukrainian serviceman shows an anti-tank missile system during an interactive exhibition where different anti-tank weapons including the British-made NLAW were shown in the western city of Lviv (Photo: Yuriy Dyachshyn/AFP)

Indeed, within the defence sector there is a certain realpolitik about the opportunities and demands presented by Ukraine’s agony. As one executive with a manufacturer with a large UK presence put it: “No-one sits there rubbing their hands at what is going on. If anything, the last 12 months have shown the benefits of investment and innovation in defence. Ukraine has been extraordinary in its resilience. But would it be where it is today without Himars, TB2s and all the other kit that has crossed from the West?”

All of which is to run the risk of failing to remember that there is in this unwanted war a potent and unrepentant aggressor looking for fresh advantage despite the setbacks and humiliations of the past year.

Moscow already had a record of using Ukraine as a testing ground for cyber attacks, unleashing a series of crippling ransomware attacks in 2018 known as NotPetya. The malware used against multiple Ukrainian targets was traced to the Sandworm unit operated by Moscow’s GRU military intelligence unit and is believed by many cyber experts to be a precursor to the Solarwinds attack on American corporations and government bodies in 2020. Similarly, software aimed at crippling Ukrainian agencies during the early weeks of the invasion was later aimed at logistics hubs in Poland supplying Kyiv.

But observers of the conflict, among them British Ministry of Defence, harbour concerns that the Kremlin is using Ukraine as a grim experiment in a post-Soviet military doctrine known to have found favour with Putin – Strategic Operation for the Destruction of Critically Important Targets, or Sodcit – which is based on the idea that defeat of an enemy should be attained by attacking the underpinnings of a society, such as energy infrastructure or economic capacity, as well as targeting its military.

It is a doctrine of grinding attrition which it is increasingly feared the Kremlin will attempt to roll out with renewed ferocity and fresh waves of missiles and Iranian drones as it approaches the anniversary of its invasion with further manpower-hungry assaults.

It is also a burden which Oleksandr and his comrades seem determined to shoulder. He said: “Does Russia have a deep capacity for pain? Yes, it does. Can we turn them back? Yes, we will. We have to.”

inews.co.uk · by Cahal Milmo · February 19, 2023

22. How the War in Ukraine Ends

Conclusion:

This war is just—it’s so painful. My whole life was writing about Stalin, and I would get absorbed in that. But then I put that down, and I had kids to hug, and I had a wife who loved me, and I had students that I could harangue in the classroom. Now I put the Stalin thing down—and then I got the Stalin thing again. In the real world. In real time. So it hurts. This whole thing hurts a lot. There’s no relief from this part of the world.

How the War in Ukraine Ends

An eminent historian envisions a settlement among Russia, Ukraine, and the West.

The New Yorker · by David Remnick · February 17, 2023

Last year, not long after Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, I turned to the historian Stephen Kotkin for illumination and analysis. I’ve been doing that, for good reason, since the final years of the Soviet empire. Kotkin has published two volumes of a projected three-part biography of Stalin, and his works on the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its aftermath are without peer in their precision and depth. After spending more than thirty years at Princeton, he is now at Stanford.

In our conversation last year, we delved into the nature of the Putin regime, his decision to invade, and what the war could look like as time unfurled. Now we know: the Russian invasion has been a catastrophe in every sense. There have been hundreds of thousands of casualties––it is folly to attempt a more accurate reckoning––and much of Ukraine’s infrastructure is in ruins. Once the Russian military failed to achieve its early hope of taking the capital, Kyiv, and supplanting the Ukrainian leadership, it has prosecuted a vicious war of attrition, in which more and more human beings on both sides are sacrificed to Putin’s pitiless ambitions.

Kotkin is a top-flight scholar, but his ties to the subject are not limited to the archives and the library. He is well connected in Washington, Moscow, Kyiv, and beyond; his analysis of the war draws on his conversations with sources as well as on his own base of knowledge. We spoke again last week, and our discussion, which appears in different form on The New Yorker Radio Hour, has been edited for length and clarity.

Last year, you told me, at a very early stage of the war, that Ukraine was winning on Twitter but that Russia was winning on the battlefield. A lot has happened since then, but is that still the case?

Unfortunately. Let’s think of a house. Let’s say that you own a house and it has ten rooms. And let’s say that I barge in and take two of those rooms away, and I wreck those rooms. And, from those two rooms, I’m wrecking your other eight rooms and you’re trying to beat me back. You’re trying to evict me from the two rooms. You push out a little corner, you push out another corner, maybe. But I’m still there and I’m still wrecking. And the thing is, you need your house. That’s where you live. It’s your house and you don’t have another. Me, I’ve got another house, and my other house has a thousand rooms. And, so, if I wreck your house, are you winning or am I winning?

Unfortunately, that’s the situation we’re in. Ukraine has beaten back the Russian attempt to conquer their country. They have defended their capital. They’ve pushed the Russians out of some of the land that the Russians conquered since February 24, 2022. They’ve regained about half of it. And yet they need their house, and the Russians are wrecking it. Putin’s strategy could be described as “I can’t have it? Nobody can have it!” Sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now.

How do you even begin to analyze Putin as a strategic figure in this horrendous drama?

He is not a strategic figure. People kept saying he was a tactical genius, that he was playing a weak hand well. I kept telling people, “Seriously?” He intervened in Syria, and he made President Obama look like a fool when President Obama said that there would be a red line about chemical weapons. But what does that mean? It means that Putin became the part owner of a civil war. He became the owner of atrocities and a wrecked country, Syria. He didn’t increase the talent in his own country, his human capital. He didn’t build new infrastructure. He didn’t increase his wealth production. And so if you look at the ingredients of what makes strategy, how you build a country’s prosperity, how you build its human capital, its infrastructure, its governance—all the things that make a country successful—there was no evidence that any of the things that were attributed to his tactical genius, or tactical agility, were contributing in a positive way to Russia’s long-term power.

In Ukraine, what is it that he’s gained? If you look over the landscape, he’s hurt Russia’s reputation—it’s far worse than it ever was. He consolidated the Ukrainian nation, whose existence he denied. He is expanding NATO, when his stated aim was to push NATO back from the expansion undertaken since 1997. He’s even got Sweden applying for NATO membership. And, so, all across the board, it’s a disaster.

The problem is that he’s in power. And soft Russian nationalists, who were semi-critical of Putin, now have no place to go because you’re either all in, or you flee to Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. He’s wrecking his own country in a way, although in a very different way from the murdering that he’s carrying out in Ukraine.

What has been revealed about Russia’s military and its intelligence capabilities in the past year?

The war’s a tragedy. There’s no way to spin it as other than tragic, given what’s happened: the number of deaths in Ukraine; the amount of destruction; the consequences for other countries, including food insecurity. But there have been some pleasant surprises. One was the Ukrainians’ ability and will to fight. It’s been very inspiring from the get-go. We knew they would fight to a certain extent, because they twice overthrew a domestic dictator: in 2004 and in 2014. They went out into the streets, risked life and limb, and were willing to confront those domestic tyrants. Now you have a foreign tyrant. We knew that they would resist, but it’s been a pleasant surprise, the depth of their courage and resistance.

The other pleasant surprise has been Russia’s failures. We knew that there were issues with Russia: many of us thought that the Russian Army was really only about thirty thousand or fifty thousand strong, maximum, in terms of trained fighters who had up-to-date kit—as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dog-food-eating conscripts, untrained or poorly trained, badly equipped soldiers under corrupt officers. But, still, the depth of the Russian failure in Ukraine, from a military point of view of their objectives, was a pleasant surprise for many of us, myself included.

And there’s Europe’s adaptability and fortitude, right? Everybody said, “If Europe doesn’t have its cappuccinos in the morning and its espressos after lunch, there’s no way they could put up with this.” Look what’s happened: they switched from their dependence on Russian energy much faster than anybody thought. They’ve rallied in support of Ukraine pretty much across the board.

Then there’s been what I would call an unfavorable surprise. Despite the sanctions, the Russian economy didn’t shrink, let alone shrink massively. It turns out that the Russian people proved extremely adaptable to the sanctions regime and figured out how to survive—and, in some cases, how to prosper. Russian imports are back, and Russian exports are back. Russian employment is looking O.K. Yes, the figures are a secret, but there are indirect ways that we can figure it out. How much is Turkey exporting? That helps us figure out how much Russia is importing, even though Russia’s keeping it a secret. So it turns out that the sanctions are not having the effect of inflicting severe pain in the short term. We’ll see what the long-term impact is. But so far the pressure to make Russia reconsider its policy of criminal aggression against Ukraine has not been there—even less than I thought it would be, and I was a skeptic on sanctions.

Steve, last year we talked about Sun Tzu, the great Chinese theorist of war, who said that you have to build your opponent “a golden bridge” so that he can find a way to retreat. A year later, do you have any thoughts on what that might look like, and is anybody even thinking about it at this point?

That would be a great thing, if we could do that. But there’s nothing like that in sight. You win the war on the battlefield. There are some shortcuts that could potentially enable you to get to a victory more quickly—for example, if the Russian Army disintegrated in the field. I said, a year ago, that that seemed unlikely, and there hasn’t been any evidence that the Russian Army is disintegrated in the field. In fact, the call-up of the several hundred thousand new recruits—they’ve been deployed, they’re on the front lines, and they’re fighting. The other shortcut we talked about was an overthrow of the Putin regime in Moscow and his replacement by a capitulatory, not an escalatory, Russian leader. But there was no evidence that the regime was in trouble. Authoritarian regimes can fail at everything—they can even launch self-defeating wars—so long as they succeed at one thing, which is the suppression of political alternatives. He’s very good at that. And then the third shortcut was the idea of the Chinese exerting pressure to force Russia to climb down. We didn’t think that China had this leverage, and we certainly didn’t think they would use their imaginary leverage.

So, without the shortcuts, we’re at the battlefield. And the problem with the battlefield is that victory is misdefined here. You have to win on the battlefield, but how do you then win the peace as well? What would winning the peace look like? We know you can win on the battlefield and lose the peace, right? Sadly, we’ve experienced that in our own country, with some of the wars that we’ve been involved in.

Vietnam, for example.

Yes. And then some of the more recent ones in the Middle East.

So here we are with Ukraine, and their definition of victory—as expressed by President Zelensky, who has certainly more than risen to the occasion—is to regain every inch of territory, reparations, and war-crimes tribunals. So how would Ukraine enact that definition of victory? They would have to take Moscow. How else can you get reparations and war-crime tribunals? They’re not that close to regaining every inch of their own territory, let alone the other aims.

If you look at the American definition of what the victory might look like, we’ve been very hesitant. The Biden Administration has been very careful to say, “Ukraine is fighting, Ukrainians are dying—they get to decide.” The Biden Administration has effectively defined victory from the American point of view as: Ukraine can’t lose this war. Russia can’t take all of Ukraine and occupy Ukraine, and disappear Ukraine as a state, as a nation.

But what would Biden—and U.S intelligence and the U.S. military—really like to see, in terms of a shift in attitude, if that’s the case?

We are slowly but surely increasing our support for Ukraine. First it was “Oh, no, we’re not sending that.” And then we send it. “Oh, no, we’re not sending HIMARS,” the medium-range rocket systems. We sent them. “Oh, no, we’re not sending tanks.” Well, yes, we’re sending tanks. So there’s been a kind of grudging, gradual escalation because of the fear of what Putin could do on his side in an escalatory fashion. And so we’ve given enough so that Ukraine doesn’t lose, so that they can maybe push a little more on the battlefield, regain a little bit more territory, and be in a better place to negotiate.

Here’s the better definition of victory. Ukrainians rose up against their domestic tyrants. Why? Because they wanted to join Europe. It’s the same goal that they have now. And that has to be the definition of victory: Ukraine gets into the European Union. If Ukraine regains all of its territory and doesn’t get into the E.U., is that a victory? As opposed to: If Ukraine regains as much of its territory as it physically can on the battlefield, not all of it, potentially, but does get E.U. accession—would that be a definition of victory? Of course, it would be.

Says you, but would the Ukrainian leadership and the Ukrainian people accept a situation in which they’re in the E.U., but Donbas and Crimea remain in Russian hands?

Well, you accept it or you don’t accept it—meaning you continue to fight. And, if you continue to fight, your country, your people, continue to die, your infrastructure continues to get ruined. Your schools, your hospitals, your cultural artifacts get bombed or stolen. Your children get taken away as orphans. That’s where we are right now. I understand they want all of that territory back. But let’s imagine that they can’t take all the territory back on the battlefield. What then? We’re in a war of attrition right now, and in a war of attrition there’s only one way to win. You ramp up your production of weaponry, and you destroy the enemy’s production of weaponry—not the enemy’s weapons on the battlefield, but the enemy’s capability to resupply and produce more weapons. You have to out-produce in a war of attrition, and you have to crush the enemy’s production.

What’s an example of that historically?

Every war that’s ever been fought. There are two ways that major wars evolve. They all start as wars of maneuver because somebody attacks. There’s a lot of movement at first, and then they meet resistance and the offensive stalls out because it’s hard to maintain an offensive, and the other side’s resistance gets ramped up. Then what happens is you radically expand your industrial base for weapons. That’s what the U.S. did in World War Two, and that’s how we won the war.

And so think about this: We haven’t ramped up industrial production at all. At peak, the Ukrainians were firing—expending—upward of ninety thousand artillery shells a month. U.S. monthly production of artillery shells is fifteen thousand. With all our allies thrown in, everybody in the mix who supports Ukraine, you get another fifteen thousand, at the highest estimates. So you can do thirty thousand in the production of artillery shells while expending ninety thousand a month. We haven’t ramped up. We’re just drawing down the stocks. And you know what? We’re running out.

Is Russia running out?

We’ll get to that in a second. But we’re on the hook for Taiwan, and we’re four years behind now in supplying Taiwan for contractual orders of American and allied military equipment. General [Mark] Milley, [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], God bless him, he’s there in the Pentagon, in that big E-ring where all the important people sit, and he turns his head because all his stuff is going out the door. Everything in our stocks is going right out the door, right past his desk. And it’s not going to Taiwan, which is a place that we want to send it. And so we would have to radically ramp up production, us and our allies, to fight a war of attrition.

And, at the same time, the sanctions were supposed to destroy Russia’s ability to produce weapons, and that’s not happening. Russia can produce about sixty missiles a month under sanctions. So that’s two horrible barrages against Ukrainian civilian homes and infrastructure, their energy infrastructure, their water supply—sixty missiles a month. That doesn’t include what they’re buying back from Africa that they previously sold. What they’re trying to get in deals with North Korea or Iran. The Soviet arsenal, the biggest arsenal ever assembled—a lot of it is rotting, but not all of it is rotting. Some of the production is still ongoing, not as much as Russia would like, but enough to carry out the strategy of “If I can’t have it, nobody can have it.”

If you’re in a war of attrition, you’ve got to be bombing the other side’s production facilities. You have to be denying the other side the ability to resupply on the battlefield. And you have to be ramping up your production like we did in the previous wars where we were directly engaged, but we haven’t done here. So tell me: How do you fight a war of attrition with your left hand tied behind your back and your right hand tied behind your back? The Ukrainians are amazing. It’s just so inspiring to see what they’re doing. But if we get every inch of territory back—and we’re not close to that—we still need an E.U. accession process. Ukraine will need a demilitarized zone, no matter how much territory it gets back, including if it somehow gets Crimea back. It’s got the problem that, next year, the year after, the year after next, this could happen again.

Recently, in the Washington Post, there was an interview with [Kyrylo Budanov], the very young head of Ukrainian intelligence. What did I get out of the interview? Two things. One: a sense of optimism that includes not only doing well on the battlefield but getting back Crimea within the next year. And, number two, he said with great confidence that Vladimir Putin is extremely sick. I have the suspicion that the rumors of Putin’s poor health are—the origins of that are—from Ukrainian intelligence. Can you address those two points?

Of course, we fully understand Ukrainian intelligence has to be optimistic. He’s not going to go in the Washington Post and say, “Our chances of taking Crimea are next to zero. We’re going to have another hundred thousand casualties over the course of the next year or so. Even if the tanks arrive by May or late April.” He can’t say stuff like that.

Is there any evidence that Putin’s health is actually poor?

The director of the C.I.A., William Burns, publicly announced that there’s no evidence that Putin is sick. Once again, we want it to be true, because we want a shortcut to a Ukrainian victory. The problem is, we have to live in the circumstances we’ve got. If you look at the North Korea–South Korea outcome, it’s a terrible outcome. At the same time, it was an outcome that enabled South Korea to flourish under American security guarantees and protection. And, if there were a Ukraine, however much of it—eighty per cent, ninety per cent—which could flourish as a member of the European Union and which could have some type of security guarantee—whether that were full NATO accession, whether that were bilateral with the U.S., whether it were multilateral to include the U.S. and Poland and Baltic countries and Scandinavian countries, potentially—that would be a victory in the war.

Now, if Ukraine can achieve its stated victory of every inch of territory, reparations, and war-crimes tribunals, it still has to get into the West in order to consolidate those gains. It still needs a security guarantee. So we’re arguing over some issues which are deeply important to the Ukrainians because of the atrocities committed against them. At the same time, it’s maybe not the definition of victory that would get Ukraine to a better place, in a more reasonable amount of time with fewer casualties, given the situation.

Western patience and Western supplies are not a given for all kinds of factors. Various European factors. You have a Republican Congress now that is not as likely to accede to Ukrainian requests as the Democratic one was. Am I right?

I’m not worried about resolve here. I came up with this equation early in the process, which is: Ukrainian valor plus Russian atrocities equals Western unity and resolve. And it’s held. Because the Ukrainian valor continues—and it continues to inspire the whole world, not just their own war effort internally. The Russian atrocities continue because that’s what this war is. It’s an atrocity. It’s more like murder than it is like war. So I’m good on the Western alliance holding together. My problem is material. I don’t have a military-industrial complex on the scale to continue this indefinitely. I’m running my own stocks down. I’m not supplying my other allies, including Taiwan. And I have an opportunity-cost issue here.

But wait a minute. Russia has the same problem, with a different look. It has proven that its military—on a level of organization and supply and strategy—is nothing like what it had been advertised. We have the so-called Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, going from prison to prison, taking thousands of people who were serving time, and throwing them onto the Ukrainian battlefield within days.

He’s a former convict himself!

A former chef and former convict. But what does that suggest about Russia’s military? It, too, is being depleted rather quickly, no? Or are you just saying, because of the sheer population and scale, Russia’s advantages are obvious?

Russia is much bigger; it has many more people. Also, the Russian leadership doesn’t really care about its people. If the Russian leadership throws twenty thousand untrained recruits into the meat grinder and three-quarters of them die, what do they do? Do they go to church on Sunday and ask forgiveness from God? They just do it again. People talk about Stalin and the big sacrifices that the Soviet people made in World War Two, losing twenty-seven million people. They were enslaved collective farmers. He had millions and millions more of them. He threw them into the meat grinder and they died. Then he threw more into the meat grinder!

In that respect, isn’t the Stalin era different than the Putin era? Ever since the controversial mass conscription, you saw political repercussions in Russia that you would not have seen in Stalin’s time.

Sort of. You saw tens of thousands of people resist and flee. You also saw a couple of hundred thousand get deployed. You know, Leonid Bershidsky, of Bloomberg, got this right. He said we focus on those who resist the call-up, the conscription. We don’t focus on those who are actually deployed. The Russian leadership has no trouble expending its weaponry and sending its people to death. The value of life in the Putin regime is just not there. When you talk about Roosevelt not wanting to take Berlin before Stalin did, because he didn’t want to sacrifice human lives—and then people complain that he should have done it anyway? Democracies don’t fight wars which are intentionally a meat grinder, to just throw their people away. And a war of attrition is what we’re asking of the Ukrainians. They’re doing the fighting. We’re not doing any of the fighting.

Much of the challenge here comes from the fact that President Biden and the European allies have decided that there will be no direct engagement between NATO forces and Russian forces. There’s been a ceiling on how far we would go in assisting the Ukrainians. We don’t want an escalation of direct confrontation with the Russians or Russians using some of the capabilities that Putin has, that we all know about—and we’re right to be concerned about.

People say, “It would be irrational if Putin were to use nuclear weapons. It would be self-defeating. He would just get destroyed himself in retaliation.” And the answer is: from our point of view, certainly that would be really stupid. Just like this war. Starting this war looks really stupid, from our point of view.

But he thought that he could take Kyiv, and arrest or kill Zelensky. That was the plan, that it would be a matter of days or weeks, tops. It hasn’t gone that way. On the use of nuclear weapons––it’s been made clear to him by representatives of Western governments and the United States precisely what kind of retaliation he could expect.

Yes, I think that’s a great policy. I’m very happy that that happened. But here’s the problem. He has the capabilities. He’s got a lot of capabilities short of nuclear weapons. He could poison the water supply in Kyiv with chemical and biological weapons. He could poison the water supply in London, and then he could deny that it’s his special operatives that are doing that. He could cut the undersea cables, so that we could not do this radio broadcast. He can blow up the infrastructure that carries gas or other energy supplies to Europe. He’s got submersibles, he’s got a submarine fleet, he’s got special ops who can go right down to the ocean floor where those pipelines are located.

What does restrain him?

We don’t know. You tell me. When someone has these capabilities, you have to pay attention. You can’t say, “Oh, you know, that would be crazy if he did that. That would be totally self-defeating. What idiot would do that?” And the answer is: O.K, but what if he does it?

We have to be concerned about escalation. I have been in favor of greater supply, more quickly, of more weapons to the Ukrainians from the beginning. But not because I’m blasé about the capabilities that Russia has.

Why are you in favor of that?

Because I think the Ukrainians deserve the chance to try to win on the battlefield before we get to that part that you described as: each side has to sit down and make unpleasant concessions, and you have to sit down across from representatives of your murderer, and you’ve got to do a deal where your murderer takes some of the stuff he has stolen—and killed your people in the process. That’s a terrible outcome. But that’s an outcome which may not be the worst outcome. The point being that, if you get E.U. accession, it balances the concessions you have to make.

How big has the Ukrainian exile been—or how many Ukrainians have left?

We don’t know exactly, but we’re in the multimillions. And that’s your future. That’s the future of your country. The hope is that it’s temporary and they get them back, and they can go back to a peacetime country. And they can be prosperous and they can have careers and they can show what they can do—not just on the battlefield, like their elders are doing now, with the incredible ingenuity that we see from the Ukrainians—but that they can do that and establish civilian companies. Then you have a reconstruction issue. Even if you win, you’re wrecked. You’ve got to have reconstruction. You know what kind of numbers we’re talking about? Three hundred and fifty billion dollars is one of the numbers being tossed around.

If things ended today?

Yeah. And who knows what the actual number is? What was Ukrainian G.D.P. before the war? About a hundred and eighty billion dollars. So you’re talking double G.D.P., in reconstruction funds, has to somehow enter that country and not disappear, not vanish. What happened to the COVID funds in our country? We’re still trying to find some of them. Billions disappeared. And so you’re talking double their prewar G.D.P. So for that you need functioning institutions, not wartime resistance institutions. You need a civil service. You need an independent judiciary. You need a lot of stuff—a banking system—to manage that type of reconstruction and doing that honestly, fairly, and smartly. Right now, there’s no prospect of those reconstruction funds being able to be used well, because they don’t have those functioning institutions. They’re at war. And they didn’t have such functioning institutions before the war started, as you know.

It was interesting to see Zelensky get rid of a few top officials for corruption charges very recently, in the middle of the war.

What choice does he have? Part of it is real, and part of it is performance. He’s an incredible leader in a wartime situation, and we owe him a lot. We owe him the rejuvenation of the West—the rediscovery of the West—in institutional, not geographic, terms, including our Asian partners, Japan, Australia.

We’re in a situation where the sooner we get to a reconstruction of Ukraine in some form, where we don’t lose a generation of kids who grow up to be eighteen in Poland—we want to get those kids back. We want to build a South Korea-style Ukraine, part of the E.U., behind the D.M.Z., where there’s an armistice, not a settlement; where there is no legal recognition of any Russian annexations unless there’s some type of larger bargain, peace settlement; where the Russians make significant concessions as well and there is the move toward an actual security guarantee rather than discussion and promises of a security guarantee. We need to get to the other side of this in a way that gives Ukraine a chance to be the country that they want to be, deserve to be, and could be with our support.

It’s one thing for them to now get the tanks and see if they can pull off an offensive, likely in the summer—or, at a minimum, stave off a Russian offensive, which is under way as we speak, in the eastern part of Ukraine. There is the makings of a Russian offensive under way, with some of those hundreds of thousands of conscripts who got brought in. So when do we get to the point where we understand that it is E.U. accession, reconstruction, bringing people home to live—the end of hostilities in some form—to build a Ukraine, a peacetime Ukraine, on some version of Ukrainian territory, which doesn’t concede that the rest of the territory is no longer Ukrainian territory, even if they don’t control it?

Let’s remember a divided Berlin, and East and West Germany. You lived through that. Nobody thought that would happen, but it was the right thing to do: to build a successful West Germany, integrated into Europe with a NATO security guarantee. You can look at that as decades and decades of commitment, but also success. You can look at the Korean Peninsula as a worse situation because it’s still divided.

People talk about the Cold War being over. It sort of is—except for the places where it’s not. And so that outcome is suboptimal. The better outcome is a Russia that looks like France. That is to say, it’s a regular big country, that behaves under rule of law and international norms, and is proud of its own culture, and has a large army but doesn’t threaten its neighbors, and wants to live peacefully in the region in which it’s in. That would be a great outcome. Let’s hope that we see that outcome for the Russian people, as much as for their neighbors. But, until we see that outcome, what are we going to do?

Say Ukraine takes back some of its territory—this spring and summer, maybe. And then, two years from now, there’s another Russian gear-up, to something else that might happen. How do we prevent ourselves from having hostilities continue indefinitely? Which I’m not sure they can, given our industrial base when it comes to production of weaponry. We have other priorities—as we should, as a country—where we want to expend taxpayer funding and resources, and build, and do a lot of things that your staff writers write about all the time in your magazine. And so I’m in favor of a Ukrainian victory. I’m against the Russian victory. But I’m defining a Ukrainian victory within the circumstances in which we live.

Let’s say there is such a settlement. Where does that leave Russia? Where does that leave a Putin regime?

Slobodan Milošević—you’ll remember him as the former tin-pot dictator in Serbia––lost four wars before he was kicked out. Four wars. So maybe the Putin regime experiences some domestic turbulence if it’s unable to achieve its maximal war aims. Maybe he survives—he lasts for a while. Russian power going forward degrades even further. Their status as an energy superpower degrades. Their status as a junior partner in a grand Chinese Eurasia gets more dependent, provided the Chinese will accept Russia as a junior partner. Russia’s hemorrhaging human capital. The whole new economy fled Russia.

All the I.T. people, called ITshniki.

They’re all gone.

In the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.

They have no future there. The Ukrainian ones are still there. They’re the brilliant people running the social-media side of the defense ministry. They’re the ones re-rigging those drones—commercial drones, bought off the shelf for ninety-nine dollars, that they attach a catapult and a grenade to. Those Ukrainian twentysomething-year-olds—and in some cases teen-agers—are still in Ukraine, many of them. And they’re on the side of their country. Russia has lost those people at least for the time being, but maybe for a generation or more.

That kind of cosmopolitan, urban life in Russia that you saw is gone.

And so we have a Russia which looks more and more like the Putin regime as a society, not just as a regime, potentially. We have all the flotsam of the xenophobic hard right in Russia complaining that the war is not being fought properly, wanting to nuke Ukraine, nuke the West, as they go on social media and express the extremism that unfortunately social media facilitates and encourages. And so that’s the Russia we have already. Russia has already been transformed utterly. Wars are transformational in all ways.

This war is just—it’s so painful. My whole life was writing about Stalin, and I would get absorbed in that. But then I put that down, and I had kids to hug, and I had a wife who loved me, and I had students that I could harangue in the classroom. Now I put the Stalin thing down—and then I got the Stalin thing again. In the real world. In real time. So it hurts. This whole thing hurts a lot. There’s no relief from this part of the world.

The New Yorker · by David Remnick · February 17, 2023

23. PLA Information Warfare and Military Diplomacy: A Primer on Modernization Trends

Conclusion:

Since the mid 1970’s, the PRC has sought to modernize their information warfare and military diplomacy efforts. Through a deliberate consolidation of forces and refinement of mission sets, the PLA established the PLASSF to serve as a dedicated information warfare force. More than simply a “support force” for the PLA Army, Navy, and Air Force, the PLASSF was purpose built to execute integrated space, cyber, and information operations. From a PLA military diplomacy standpoint, what began as PKO in the early 1990s transformed into a global initiative – although most concentrated in the Indo-Pacific region – to leverage military exercises, PKOs, competitions, and a variety of other engagements to extend Beijing’s foreign policy through military means. While PLA military diplomacy and information warfare serve as mutually reinforcing mechanisms to assist the PLA in winning “informatized,” and “intelligentized” local wars, they are not without weaknesses or constraints. U.S. policymakers would be wise to aggressively modernize their own military’s information warfare capabilities, capacity to operate in a contested space, cyberspace, and information environment, foster interoperable military partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific, and seek to influence and develop partner governments in the “global south.” The PRC may remain the U.S. pacing threat and most significant competitor for decades to come. Understanding and outmaneuvering our chief adversary is key to sustaining U.S. influence in an increasingly multipolar world.

Sun, 02/19/2023 - 11:49am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/pla-information-warfare-and-military-diplomacy-primer-modernization-trends

PLA Information Warfare and Military Diplomacy: A Primer on Modernization Trends

By Patrick Cunningham

The opening remarks of the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) highlight the views held by many leaders within the United States on the current security environment: that “we are living in a decisive decade,” that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “remains our most consequential strategic competitor” for the foreseeable future, and that the PRC is the only country with both the intent and capacity to reshape the international order.[1] Underscoring these beliefs is the Department of Defense’s most current version of the “China Military Power Report” which asserts that the PRC seeks to harness all elements of national power to attain a “leading position” in strategic competition, “accelerate the integrated development of… informatization, and intelligentization” of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and cultivate an environment hospitable to the PRC’s strategic goals to create a “community of common destiny.”[2] Comparatively, the PRC’s “2019 Defense White Paper” emphasizes that the PLA is in “urgent need of improving its informationization” and that building a “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind” crucially supports the PRC’s “National Defense Policy in the New Era.”[3] Given these deliberate assessments from both U.S. and PRC perspectives, this paper seeks to examine the mutually reinforcing modernization of PLA information warfare and military diplomacy, the effects of these modernization initiatives on regional and global stability, and key weaknesses that the U.S. and partners can exploit.

PLA Information Warfare Modernization

Although the PLA has experienced various modernization efforts and reforms since its inception and especially from the 1970s onward, perhaps some of the most dramatic reforms to its structure, warfighting, and organizational culture occurred in 2015, when the PLA established the Strategic Support Force (PLASSF).[4] Combining space, cyber, electronic warfare (EW), and psychological operations (PSYOP) forces from across the PLA services and its former General Departments, the PLASSF was established as the PLA’s primary arm for the conduct of information warfare.[5] Although the PLA publicized the growing concept of information warfare in a series of Liberation Army Daily articles by “Senior Colonels” Wang Baocun and Li Fei in June of 1995, the predominant mentality was that forces would shrink due to advanced technology rather than reorganize to maximize information warfare capability.[6]

Prior to the creation of the PLASSF in 2015 and centralization of forces through PLA reform efforts, information warfare efforts were essentially disparate and located under separate organs of former PLA General Staff Departments.[7] In creating the PLASSF, the PLA took a remarkably practical approach towards information warfare by fusing operational elements responsible for airspace surveillance, satellite navigation control, and a variety of navigation, meteorological, and oceanographic space systems that comprised the Survey, Map, and Navigation Bureau from the PLA First Department; a myriad of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) analysts, collection managers from the PLA Second Department; cyber surveillance personnel and systems from the PLA Third Department, and the entirety of the former “Informatization” Department responsible for PRC command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4ISR) as well as some degree of science and technology contracting and development.[8] Members of the former General Political Department, specifically the 311 Base responsible for PLA PSYOP, was also consolidated from the former General Political Department and into the new Political Work Department of the PLASSF in order to unify cyber, EW, and psychological warfare capabilities.[9]

The emergence of the PLASSF in 2015 from an assortment of siloed PLA units and capabilities signaled a broader philosophical evolution of effects-based targeting methodology, as the core strategy behind PLASSF employment is to “paralyze the enemy’s operational system-of-systems,” sabotage adversarial mission command during the initial stages of conflict, and shape public opinion before, during, and after the conflict occurs.[10] Moreover, the founding of the PLASSF also reflected a domain-based shift in Chinese military thinking from seeking to dominate “land-based territorial defense” to instead maintaining “extended power projection” and “[protecting] Chinese interests in the strategic frontiers of space, cyberspace, and the far seas.”[11] Through these reforms, the PLASSF became the PRC’s conduit for joint information warfare and a means by which the PLA could overcome a militarily superior adversary.[12]

Following the consolidation of forces into the PLASSF, two primary departments were formed to serve as the nexus for information warfare: the Space Systems Department and the Network Systems department. Alongside the Staff, Political Work, Logistics, and Equipment Departments, these two primary arms actualize the PLASSF’s enduring mission of “securing information dominance by carrying out strategic, operational, and tactical [space, information, and] cyberspace operations” to “seize access to information, maintain decision making advantage during joint operations, and ensure national network security,” as well as the PLASSF’s wartime mission of seizing and exploiting the “information domain to enable other PLA forces to achieve decision superiority” and coordinating information-related capabilities to capitalize on kinetic strikes.”[13] Together, the PLASSF Space Systems Department and the Network Systems Department enable a variety of operations across space, cyberspace, and within the information environment. Collectively, these two departments enable what the 2015 National Defense University version of the Science of Military Strategy refers to as “integrated reconnaissance, attack, and defense” in the space and cyber domains, marking a distinction in PLA thinking that operations in these domains are “operations in their own right” as opposed to merely supporting efforts to operations across land, air, or maritime domains.[14]

The PLASSF’s two departments also enable the execution of the PLA’s now ubiquitous “Three Warfares” – a PRC warfighting model that encourages the synchronization of psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare to gain an advantage over an adversary.[15] PRC Psychological Warfare “seeks to undermine an enemy’s ability to conduct combat operations” by deterring, shocking, demoralizing, or eliciting specific behaviors from adversary military personnel and supporting target audiences. Public opinion warfare seeks to mold domestic and international public perceptions towards the PRC’s military actions and dissuade adversaries from taking actions contrary to Beijing’s interests. Legal warfare employs international and domestic law to assert legal superiority and backing behind the PRCs operations, activities, and interests, build international consensus, and restrict non-Chinese freedom of movement in multiple domains.[16]

Broadly, the PRC and PLA have employed these three warfare methodologies to pursue and reinforce several key narratives across the Indo-Pacific: Chinese dominance is the historic norm and is inevitable, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s objectives are permanent and unchanging, the CCP and PLA cannot be deterred and will pay any price to achieve Beijing’s objectives, and that the U.S. is an increasingly weak, unpredictable, and unreliable ally.[17] In Singapore, the CCP has sought to influence many Singaporean elites to maintain open trade with China and at the very least remain “unopposed” towards China’s efforts to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership – ironically an organization that exists to advance a liberal, rules-based economic order in the Indo-Pacific.[18] In Thailand, China has endeavored to influence the public opinion of many decision-makers in order to gain opportunities to construct high-speed rail, proliferate Huawei’s 5G network, and sell comparatively cheaper military equipment, such as submarines, to the Thai military.[19] China’s state-media, diplomatic personnel, and business entities operating in the Solomon Islands – and across the South Pacific – employed each of the aforementioned narratives to elicit Belt and Road Initiative participation, diplomatic recognition of China over Taiwan, and encourage the denouncement of western ideals by political officials.[20] China has also launched an international and domestic influence campaign to label human rights violations and Uyghur genocide as “counterterrorism operations” and continues to bombard Taiwan with disinformation and a blend of psychological and public opinion warfare to encourage peaceful reunification with the mainland. Both of these attempts have largely failed, but the PRC’s deep-seated focus on eliminating internal threats and “Taiwanese separatists” continue to breathe life into these ineffective influence campaigns.[21]

PLA Military Diplomacy Modernization

PLA Military Diplomacy serves as another aspect of overarching PRC foreign policy efforts designed to forge a more favorable international image, develop soft power, mold international discourse, shape China’s security environment, and learn from advanced militaries.[22] Several PLA documents reinforce these key goals, stating that military diplomacy encompasses “personnel exchange, military negotiations, arms control negotiations, military aid, military intelligence [and technology] cooperation, international peacekeeping, military alliance activities” and is “an important component of a country’s foreign relations” and a “necessary part of national interest.”[23] PLA academics have also distinguished that the roles of military diplomacy differ in times of peace and war. During peacetime, military diplomacy “maintains and develops bilateral security relations,” assists in “handling international security issues… molds the [PRC’s] strategic environment… provides a platform to enhance international influence of the [PRC] and the [PLA]… and promotes national defense and military construction.”[24] Comparatively, during war the primary focus of military diplomacy is to “strengthen our alliances and weaken those of the enemy… win military aid and material support for combat… win international moral and legal support… provide a channel to end the war… and resolve post war problems.”[25] Interestingly, unlike the United States, the PLA does not view Building Partner Capacity (BPC) as a goal of military diplomacy, but rather an arm of foreign policy and an learning experience – strengthening bilateral relations and observing techniques of other militaries as opposed to improving interoperability between nations.[26]

“Military diplomacy” as “an official policy” first appeared in the 1998 defense white paper, and although some form of PLA military diplomacy had been occurring from 1949, some of the most well documented examples emerge from 2003 onward, coinciding with the first full year of the Hu Jintao era.[27] Despite China’s efforts to reform and “open up” in the late 1970s, the PLA lagged behind most other parts of the Chinese government in engaging other militaries – likely due to fear of revealing military weaknesses or an inability to match the standards of more advanced militaries.[28] Still, China did employ PLA troops in support of military diplomacy through United Nations Peace Keeping Operations (UNPKO) when it sent five military observers to the UN Truce Supervision Organization in 1990. Since then, China’s contributions to UNPKO have increased dramatically, with China having deployed over 27,000 PLA personnel across the globe in support of 23 UNPKOs.[29] From 2005 onward, PRC military diplomacy expanded to include Shanghai Cooperation Organization representatives that participated in exercises alongside Russia that included counterterrorism, air defense, and aerial refueling drills.[30]

Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, PLA military diplomacy increased dramatically. Starting in 2013, PLA engagements with U.S. treaty allies in Asia skyrocketed and overall military exercises increased roughly 600% from 2013 to 2016. PLA military diplomacy increased most substantially in Army and Navy international military exercises focused on “Combat Support” activities such as engineering, communications, resupply, survival skills, and fleet navigation and maneuvers; “military operations other than war” which include PKO; and military competitions.[31] Since 2014, the PLA Army and Air Force have participated in multilateral military competitions hosted by Russia, which reflects a “growing confidence” that the PLA can “match international [military] standards.”[32] China scholars Kenneth Allen, Phillip Saunders, and John Chen assessed that from 2003-2006, 83 percent of PLA military diplomacy included “senior-level meetings,” or meetings that include Central Military Commission (CMC) Vice Chairmen and CMC member-grade levels, that focused on constructing a “favorable security environment” to the PRC and “promoting common development.”[33] Since 2018, the PLA has continuously emphasized the roles of defense attachés and the professional military education (PME) opportunities offered by China to foreign military officers.[34] An examination of PLA military diplomacy from 2003 onward highlights that these activities – collective training, PKOs, competitions, and education exchanges – reflect a growing PLA confidence in their capabilities and that they will not embarrass themselves and undergird the concept that “almost all military diplomatic activities support China’s overall diplomatic efforts.”[35]

Constraints and Weaknesses of PLA Information Warfare and Military Diplomacy

Taken together, PLA information warfare and military diplomacy are mutually reinforcing and symbiotic activities. Messaging efforts through legal, psychological, and public opinion means highlight historic and inevitable Chinese dominance, the undeterrable dedication of the CCP and PLA, and their respective benefits over the U.S. PLA military diplomacy often reinforces these narratives through physical actions and engagements, with many talking points of senior-level engagements aiming to match scripted word with deed.[36] Yet, despite Beijing’s growing effort to modernize information warfare and military diplomacy capabilities, they are not without weaknesses, constraints, and areas for exploitation.

PLA’s approach to information warfare suffers from several key weaknesses: bureaucratic infighting, cumbersome approval processes, centralized decision-making, and a seeming overconfidence in their own data-sensing capabilities. Together, these factors are a recipe for strategic miscalculation or disaster. The continued refinement and development of the PLASSF underscores the PLA’s increasing focus and prioritization of the space, cyber, and information domains, but Beijing’s increasing faith in the efficacy of their data and collection systems leaves them vulnerable to deception activities and disruption. Clandestinely degrading PLA collection mechanisms, employing deception to prompt misallocation of resources, executing influence activities to expose contradictions in Beijing’s information operations and or elicit PLA infighting, and disrupting PLA command and control are all possible means for the U.S., allies, and partners to exploit weaknesses in the PLA’s information warfare apparatus.

Regarding the PLA’s military diplomacy, several constraints and exploitation opportunities exist. Military diplomacy incurs an opportunity cost, both in terms of personnel time and monetary expenses.[37] The PLA also concentrates its military diplomacy in Asia, with a lesser but growing emphasis in the “global south.” PLA culture tends to prioritize “form over substance” and this manifests itself in terms both rigidity of personal interactions with partner forces and talking points, as well as fairly unmodifiable engagement schedules. All of these factors make it difficult to “build strong personal or institutional ties with foreign counterparts.”[38] U.S. engagement – whether through U.S. embassy diplomats, military attaches, or special operations forces charged with building partner capacity, can take advantage of the PLA’s lower maneuverability, higher opportunity costs, and lackluster interpersonal tact by doubling down on areas of strategic importance and taking every opportunity to build personal ties and deliver superior training or education.

Conclusion

Since the mid 1970’s, the PRC has sought to modernize their information warfare and military diplomacy efforts. Through a deliberate consolidation of forces and refinement of mission sets, the PLA established the PLASSF to serve as a dedicated information warfare force. More than simply a “support force” for the PLA Army, Navy, and Air Force, the PLASSF was purpose built to execute integrated space, cyber, and information operations. From a PLA military diplomacy standpoint, what began as PKO in the early 1990s transformed into a global initiative – although most concentrated in the Indo-Pacific region – to leverage military exercises, PKOs, competitions, and a variety of other engagements to extend Beijing’s foreign policy through military means. While PLA military diplomacy and information warfare serve as mutually reinforcing mechanisms to assist the PLA in winning “informatized,” and “intelligentized” local wars, they are not without weaknesses or constraints. U.S. policymakers would be wise to aggressively modernize their own military’s information warfare capabilities, capacity to operate in a contested space, cyberspace, and information environment, foster interoperable military partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific, and seek to influence and develop partner governments in the “global south.” The PRC may remain the U.S. pacing threat and most significant competitor for decades to come. Understanding and outmaneuvering our chief adversary is key to sustaining U.S. influence in an increasingly multipolar world.

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[1] U.S. Department of Defense, “2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America,” October 27, 2022, 3.

[2] U.S. Department of Defense, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China: 2022 Annual Report to Congress,” Annual (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, November 29, 2022), 1.

[3] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, China’s National Defense in the New Era, First Edition 2019 (Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press, 2019), 6–10.

[4] John Costello and Joe McReynolds, China’s Strategic Support Force: A Force for a New Era, China Strategic Perspectives 13 (Washington, D.C: National Defense University Press, 2018), 1.

[5] Costello and McReynolds, 1–5.

[6] Baocun Wang and Fei Li, “Information Warfare” (Beijing, China: Academy of Military Science, June 13, 1995), https://irp.fas.org/world/china/docs/iw_wang.htm.

[7] “The Strategic Support Force: China’s Information Warfare Service,” Jamestown, https://jamestown.org/ program/the-strategic-support-force-chinas-information-warfare-service/.

[8] Kevin Pollpeter and Ken Allen, PLA as Organization 2.0 (Air University, Maxwell AFB, AL: China Aerospace Studies Institute, 2018), 142–51, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1082742.pdf.

[9] Costello and McReynolds, China’s Strategic Support Force: A Force for a New Era, 10.

[10] Costello and McReynolds, 2.

[11] Costello and McReynolds, 1.

[12] Caitlin Campbell, “China’s Military: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA),” 40.

[13] Joel Wuthnow and National Defense University Press, eds., The PLA Beyond Borders: Chinese Military Operations in Regional and Global Context (Washington, D.C: National Defense University Press, 2021), 154.

[14] Costello and McReynolds, China’s Strategic Support Force: A Force for a New Era, 12.

[15] Costello and McReynolds, 10.

[16] Morgan Martin, “China’s Three Information Warfares,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol 147, no. 3 (March 2021): 1417, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021/march/chinas-three-information-warfares.

[17] John Lee, “Chinese Information and Influence Warfare in Asia and the Pacific,” Policy Memo (Washington, DC: Hudson Institute, September 2022), 6.

[18] Lee, 9.

[19] Lee, 9–10.

[20] Lee, 12–13.

[21] A. A. Bastian, “China Is Stepping Up Its Information War on Taiwan,” Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/02/china-pelosi-taiwan-information/; “China’s Application of the ‘Three Warfares’ in the South China Sea and Xinjiang,” Orbis 63, no. 2 (2019): 199–207, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2019.02.007.

[22] Allen, Kenneth, Phillip C Saunders, and John Chen, Chinese Military Diplomacy, 2003-2016: Trends and Implications (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2017), 1.

[23] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 8.

[24] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 8.

[25] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 8.

[26] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 11.

[27] Penghong Cai, “ASEAN’s Defense Diplomacy and China’s Military Diplomacy,” Asia Policy, no. 22 (2016): 91, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24905114; Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, Chinese Military Diplomacy, 2003-2016: Trends and Implications, 67.

[28] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, Chinese Military Diplomacy, 2003-2016: Trends and Implications, 22.

[29] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 41.

[30] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 11.

[31] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 31–33.

[32] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 3.

[33] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 12.

[34] U.S. Department of Defense, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China: 2022 Annual Report to Congress,” 164.

[35] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, Chinese Military Diplomacy, 2003-2016: Trends and Implications, 58.

[36] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 60.

[37] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 13.

[38] Allen, Kenneth, Saunders, and Chen, 4.

About the Author(s)

Patrick Cunningham

MAJ Patrick Cunningham is an active duty U.S. Army Psychological Operations officer pursuing his Master of Science degree at the Naval Postgraduate School. He maintains a broad range of operational experiences across multiple domains in multiple AORs.

24. For U.S. forces in Indo-Pacific, it’s two steps forward, one step back

For U.S. forces in Indo-Pacific, it’s two steps forward, one step back

Deployments, base controversies reflect sensitivities of Asian alliances

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/feb/19/us-forces-indo-pacific-its-two-steps-forward-one-s/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, right, talks to the media as Indonesian Armed Forces Chief Gen. Andika Perkasa, left, listens, after their meeting at Indonesian military headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia, Sunday, July 24, 2022. The Chinese military has become significantly more aggressive and dangerous over the past five years, the top U.S. military officer said during a trip to the Indo-Pacific that included a stop Sunday in Indonesia. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

By Andrew Salmon - The Washington Times - Sunday, February 19, 2023

SEOUL — The world’s attention has been focused on Chinese balloons in near space, but a far more terrestrial struggle is playing out across East Asia with the Biden administration’s moves to deepen America’s economic, diplomatic and military footprints along China’s periphery.

In recent weeks, the U.S. cheered Japan’s plan to vastly expand its defense budget and worked to improve relations between Tokyo and Seoul. In the Philippines, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed a deal with Manila to expand U.S. military access to the archipelago’s bases.

Pacific Island nations wooed by Washington and Beijing are signing cooperation agreements with the U.S., and regional leaders said last week that they are expecting visits from President Biden in the near future. Meanwhile, work is proceeding on the U.S.-British-Australian AUKUS pact, which is widely seen as an initiative to restrain China.

The push also demonstrates challenges to the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command as it confronts a rising and increasingly aggressive Beijing. Questions remain about many of the military and diplomatic deals reached in recent months, and the Biden administration is under pressure to keep its focus on the region when problems seem to be multiplying elsewhere.

While Russia is waging a “big war” in Ukraine, America’s most advanced fighter aircraft has taken out its first target. The target, however, was in the skies just off the South Carolina coast.

“The F22’s first kill was not a Russian or Middle Eastern aircraft. It was a Chinese balloon,” said Steve Tharp, a retired Army lieutenant colonel residing in South Korea. “Hence, it’s a natural thing to see buildup in the Indo-Pacific.”

Many officers seem to agree. A string of leaks offers predictions about when China’s rising threat will peak.

Those leaks are under widespread criticism, and U.S. moves in the Indo-Pacific are overshadowed by the fighting consuming the U.S. and its allies in the heart of Europe.

“Right now, it’s Ukraine versus the Indo-Pacific, and I don’t think we have a unified strategy like we did in World War II,” said David Park, a retired U.S. Army major who divides his time between Tokyo and Washington. “The Army has traditionally been deployed in Europe, the Middle East and Korea, while the Navy and Marines have been Indo-Pacific.”

Mr. Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are Army men. “Navy guys are second-tier in the DoD,” Mr. Park said.

China is a far more formidable, multisphere U.S. competitor than is Russia.

Beijing manages the world’s second-largest economy, with a diversified industrial base that successfully competes for infrastructure projects in the developing world.

China is also the leading trade partner of key regional allies such as South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.

Unlike Moscow’s sledgehammer invasion of Ukraine, Beijing is conducting a subtler “salami-slicing” land acquisition strategy in the Himalayas and the South China Sea while increasingly intimidating Taiwan.

Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has been forced back from Ukraine’s coast, but Beijing possesses a blue-water navy that has surpassed the U.S. Navy in vessel numbers. With U.S. fleets outnumbered and dispersed among global commitments, China’s navy is concentrated regionally.

These factors compel U.S. forces to deepen terrestrial toeholds around China, but a tangle of military, political and economic issues makes the task complex.

Marines on the move

A ceremony to mark the first-phase transfer of U.S. Marines from Japan’s Okinawa to Guam on Jan. 26 was hailed by some as a sound dispersal of forces.

Granted, it removes muscle from the “First Island Chain.” Okinawa and its southern isles, Taiwan and the Philippines create chokepoints that Beijing’s fleets must transit to reach the open ocean.

The island chain adds strength to far-flung U.S. bases in the Pacific, creating a tiered regional defense against naval and missile threats to the mainland.

“I think it is genuinely a U.S. repositioning of forces to the ‘Second Island Chain’ and the ‘Third Island Chain’ — Midway, Wake, Saipan and Hawaii,” said Alexander Neill, a fellow at the Pacific Forum think tank. “The First Island Chain is a hard line of engagement. This is creating a new line of geographic capability.”

The move also increases the chances that a significant American force would survive a first assault and be ready to counterattack. Although Okinawa and Guam lie within Chinese and North Korean missile range, distance offers comfort.

“Firing a missile across half the Pacific gives the U.S. time to detect it, figure out where it is going and engage it,” said Lance Gatling, a former operational planning officer with U.S. Forces Japan. “A missile fired from a couple of hundred miles away gives less time to react.”

The move also pre-positions Marines for contingencies in the South Pacific, where China is working to gain influence.

Yet the decision to shift 4,000 Marines to Guam — a major chunk of the 18,000 Marines in Japan — is political, not strategic. It relieves Okinawans long unhappy with the American military presence, which is denser and more intrusive than in mainland Japan.

“Japanese are genuinely afraid of North Korea missiles and take the Senkaku Islands dispute [with China] very seriously,” said Mr. Park. “But they don’t necessarily like GIs in Okinawa.”

The ongoing redeployment removes Marines from core regional flashpoints: Korea, Taiwan and the South China Sea.

The decision resulted from “breathtaking miscalculations [and cowardice] on the part of U.S. and Japanese alliance managers,” said Grant Newsham, a retired Marine officer and diplomat. “It had nothing much to do with actual military strategy and a lot to do with being cowed by a noisy Okinawa minority.”

Apathy in Manila, caution in Seoul

A Feb. 4 agreement between Manila and Washington to open more sites to U.S. forces in the Philippines potentially places American boots on strategic soil in the range of Taiwan and the South China Sea.

No information was offered about the locations of the four sites or the timing of their readiness. Progress on five previous sites was sluggish. U.S. troops in the Philippines will rotate temporarily rather than form permanent garrisons.

The apparent lack of preparation before the announcement has raised questions about the depth of Manila’s commitment.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has added a capability without friction on its only toehold on the Asian mainland. On Dec. 14, a U.S. Space Force contingent joined the 28,000-strong American force stationed in South Korea.

The Space Force unit will likely focus on “resilience, drones, [drones] at sea and in the air, and [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] for data collection, targeting and deception,” said Daniel Pinkston, an international relations professor at Troy University. “All these things are linked and integrated.”

With North Korea now a nuclear-armed threat, U.S. forces are largely withdrawn from the DMZ. Major American bases now line South Korea’s west coast, across from Chinese naval bases and shipyards on the Yellow Sea.

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.

25. Biden Visits Kyiv, Ukraine’s Embattled Capital, as Air-Raid Siren Sounds

At least he was able to ride a train! Something he rarely gets to do in the US anymore! (say that with some respectful tongue and cheek knowing of his love for trains).

Biden Visits Kyiv, Ukraine’s Embattled Capital, as Air-Raid Siren Sounds

By Marc Santora, Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear

Marc Santora reported from Kyiv, Ukraine; Peter Baker from Washington; and Michael D. Shear from Warsaw.

Feb. 20, 2023

Updated 8:21 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Peter Baker · February 20, 2023

President Biden took an hourslong train ride from the border of Poland in a demonstration of his administration’s resolve in the face of Russia’s yearlong invasion of Ukraine.

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President Biden has made American support for Ukraine the centerpiece of his argument for a revitalized alliance in Europe.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

By Michael D. Shear and

Feb. 20, 2023, 5:02 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — President Biden made a secret trip to the besieged capital of Ukraine on Monday, arriving after an hourslong train ride from the border of Poland in a demonstration of his administration’s resolve in the face of Russia’s yearlong invasion of the country.

The visit to Kyiv was conducted covertly because of security concerns, with Mr. Biden departing Washington without notice after he and his wife had a rare dinner out at a restaurant on Saturday night.

Mr. Biden had already been publicly scheduled to arrive in Warsaw on Tuesday morning for a two-day visit, and officials had repeatedly denied that there were any other plans they could announce about a trip to Ukraine while he was there. Indeed, the White House on Sunday night issued a public schedule for Monday showing the president still in Washington and leaving in the evening for Warsaw, when in fact he was already half a world away.

But the president has made American support for Ukraine the centerpiece of his argument for a revitalized alliance in Europe, and he had told advisers that he wanted to mark the first anniversary of the invasion as a way of reassuring allies that his administration remains committed.

Mr. Biden arrived in Ukraine’s capital at a pivotal moment of the war, both at home and abroad. Some of America’s staunchest allies have pressed Ukraine to begin negotiating a peace deal that might involve giving up territory to Russia. And in the United States, the newly installed House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and some of his fellow Republican lawmakers have demanded an end to what they call “a blank check” for the war effort.

Mr. Biden’s surprise visit came just a day before a scheduled speech by President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday in which the Russian leader is expected to speak about his country’s war effort amid indications that a spring offensive in Ukraine is already underway.

Mr. Biden had been scheduled to meet with President Andrzej Duda of Poland on Tuesday morning and deliver a speech from the Warsaw Castle later that afternoon — creating a split-screen image of Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin each speaking about Ukraine on the same day. It was unclear whether his schedule would change because of the visit to Kyiv.

The State of the War

Western Support: Nearly one year into the war, American and European leaders pledged to remain steadfast in their support for Ukraine amid worries about how long their resolve will last.
Harris’s Comments: Vice President Kamala Harris declared that the United States had formally concluded that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity” in its invasion of Ukraine.
A Russian Mole in Germany?: A director at Germany’s spy service was arrested on suspicion of passing intelligence to Russia. German officials and allies worry just how deep the problem goes.
Rebuilding Ukraine: As Ukraine’s leaders lay postwar plans, businesses around the world are positioning themselves for what could be a multibillion-dollar effort.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned into a long, brutal slog, with Ukrainian forces — backed by the United States and other Western allies — putting up a fierce fight, especially in the east.

But Mr. Putin’s forces, bolstered by an army of private soldiers conscripted into service, have begun a fresh assault on those positions even as Russia continues its practice of bombardment of civilian infrastructure in cities across Ukraine.

Mr. Biden’s visit to Kyiv recalled the secret missions flown by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to Iraq and Afghanistan during the height of the wars in those countries.

In 2003, Mr. Bush made a Thanksgiving visit to troops in Iraq that was so covert that even members of his Secret Service detail thought he was still at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. In 2010, Mr. Obama made a similar trip to Kabul, Afghanistan, leaving from Camp David to avoid detection.

Mr. Biden’s trip to Ukraine — an active war zone but without the sort of American troops that were on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan to help protect a visiting president — was particularly tricky. In the last year, American officials who have traveled to Kyiv have opted not to fly directly there because of the dangers from missiles.

Instead, top American officials have typically ridden an overnight train from Poland, which can take more than seven hours but is considered more secure, spent several hours on the ground in Kyiv and then departed by train again without staying overnight. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken made the trip in September and Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, visited in November.

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Mr. Biden’s visit comes after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made his own high-profile visit to Washington just before Christmas Day last year, his first trip outside Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion, as he pleaded with Western leaders to provide more support.

Mr. Zelensky made that appeal during meetings with Mr. Biden at the White House and in an emotional speech to Congress. Like Mr. Biden’s trip to Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky’s visit was kept secret until the eve of his arrival for security reasons.

“Ukraine is alive and kicking,” Mr. Zelensky told the lawmakers during his speech. “And it gives me good reason to share with you our first joint victory: We defeated Russia in the battle for minds of the world.”

Two days after Mr. Zelensky’s speech, Congress approved nearly $50 billion in additional emergency aid for Ukraine, much of it military equipment aimed at allowing the country to fight back against Russia. That pushed the total amount of U.S. aid approved for Ukraine since the war started past $100 billion.

Initially, Mr. Biden and his top aides had been reluctant to use the money to provide Ukraine with the most advanced weapons systems, capable of being used to attack deep into Russian territory. The president said he was wary of giving Mr. Putin a justification to escalate the conflict more broadly.

Mr. Biden remains opposed to supplying U.S. fighter jets, but his resistance to other equipment has softened. The president announced last month that he would provide M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine this year and his administration has committed to delivering a Patriot air defense battery to the country and training Ukrainian troops to use it.

But Ukraine has not yet defeated Russia on the battlefield, and the grinding conflict has been costly for both sides, with thousands dead and millions of Ukrainians fleeing to neighboring countries like Poland as refugees.

American officials had described Mr. Biden’s mission to Poland as a continuation of his effort to cement the allied coalition that is supporting Ukraine’s population.

“President Biden will make it clear that the United States will continue to stand with Ukraine, as you’ve heard him say many times, for as long as it takes,” John F. Kirby, a top spokesman for the National Security Council, said on Friday before Mr. Biden’s departure.

But there has been some fraying of that coalition in the long year of war, and Mr. Biden is getting pressure from all sides, including those who oppose sending so much taxpayer money to a far-off war and others who insist the United States needs to do even more in the face of Russian aggression.

Administration officials dismiss the idea of pulling back support for Ukraine, saying there are only a handful of Republican lawmakers who have pushed that idea.

“Yes, there are a small number of members on Capitol Hill, in the House Republicans specifically, that have expressed publicly their concerns about support for Ukraine,” Mr. Kirby said. But he added: “If you talk to the House leadership, you won’t hear that. And you certainly aren’t going to hear it on the Democratic side. And you don’t hear it in the Senate.”

But some former American diplomats said Mr. Biden had opened the door to criticism because he had not made the most expansive case possible for supporting Ukraine.

John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a senior director at the Atlantic Council, said the president needed to be more direct about describing why support for Ukraine was vital to American interests.

“Instead of saying simply, we will stay with Ukraine as long as it takes, we would say, we have a vital interest in delivering a strategic defeat to Putin or Ukrainian victory or both,” Mr. Herbst said.

Officials declined to say whether Mr. Biden would announce new weapons shipments to Ukraine during his previously announced trip to Poland, but Mr. Kirby hinted that the president would offer specifics about support.

“I think you’ll hear from the president, in his speech, continued, tangible support for Ukraine going forward,” Mr. Kirby said.

The New York Times · by Peter Baker · February 20, 2023

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

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

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Statement from President Joe Biden on Travel to Kyiv, Ukraine - The White House

Biden in Ukraine ahead of war anniversary: 'Kyiv stands'

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About the Author(s)

For U.S. forces in Indo-Pacific, it’s two steps forward, one step back

Biden Visits Kyiv, Ukraine’s Embattled Capital, as Air-Raid Siren Sounds

The State of the War

In a World Awash in Satellites, Why Use Spy Balloons?

By Rishi Iyengar, a reporter at Foreign Policy.