Quotes of the Day:
"It's all surreal for me and I don't get how such silly things can happen in a civilized world in the 21st century"
- A Ukrainian reservist learns fighting skills she hopes never to use
“Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.”
- G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789
1. Opinion | What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine
2. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 5
3. The west knows the cost of appeasement. We can’t rule out any option for stopping Putin
4. In Ukraine, is it a Russian ‘invasion’ or something less?
5. Reality Is a Tank (Putin and Ukraine)
6. Ben & Jerry’s Ukraine Tweet Is Not Just About Russia
7. To Stop Iran’s Proxy Terrorists, Stop Iran
8. On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel
9. FDD | Russia-Georgia 2008: a Blueprint for Russia-Ukraine 2022?
10. 'War is my biggest horror': Russians brace for deadly conflict, economic hardship as Putin orders invasion
11. Sharpening the Spear: Moving SOF’s Operating Concept Beyond the GWOT
12. US attack helos, F-35s and infantry heading to Baltics amid Ukraine invasion
13. Don’t Trust the Process: Moving from Words to Actions on the Indo-Pacific Posture
14. #Reviewing Three Dangerous Men (Three Dangerous Men: Russia, Iran, China, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare. Seth G. Jones)
15. The Russian Incursion No One Is Talking About
16. Opinion | Putin Is Making a Historic Mistake
17. It's time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia
18. A prototype spy plane is tracking Russian force movements for the US Army
19. The Ukraine Cyber Crisis: We Should Prepare but not Panic
20. Facing the Inevitable: Preparing for the Next War Requires Changing Paradigms
21. A CIA Cold Warrior on the Intelligence War Over Ukraine
1. Opinion | What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine
Opinion | What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine
Contributing columnist
Yesterday at 5:39 p.m. EST
Let’s assume for a moment that Vladimir Putin succeeds in gaining full control of Ukraine, as he shows every intention of doing. What are the strategic and geopolitical consequences?
The first will be a new front line of conflict in Central Europe. Until now, Russian forces could deploy only as far as Ukraine’s eastern border, several hundred miles from Poland and other NATO countries to Ukraine’s west. When the Russians complete their operation, they will be able to station forces — land, air and missile — in bases in western Ukraine as well as Belarus, which has effectively become a Russian satrapy.
Russian forces will thus be arrayed along Poland’s entire 650-mile eastern border, as well as along the eastern borders of Slovakia and Hungary and the northern border of Romania. (Moldova will likely be brought under Russian control, too, when Russian troops are able to form a land bridge from Crimea to Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria.) Russia without Ukraine is, as former secretary of state Dean Acheson once said of the Soviet Union, “Upper Volta with rockets.” Russia with Ukraine is a different strategic animal entirely.
The most immediate threat will be to the Baltic states. Russia already borders Estonia and Latvia directly and touches Lithuania through Belarus and through its outpost in Kaliningrad. Even before the invasion, some questioned whether NATO could actually defend its Baltic members from a Russian attack. Once Russia has completed its conquest of Ukraine, that question will acquire new urgency.
One likely flash point will be Kaliningrad. The headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, this city and its surrounding territory were cut off from the rest of Russia when the Soviet Union broke up. Since then, Russians have been able to access Kaliningrad only through Poland and Lithuania. Expect a Russian demand for a direct corridor that would put strips of the countries under Russian control. But even that would be just one piece of what is sure to be a new Russian strategy to delink the Baltics from NATO by demonstrating that the alliance cannot any longer hope to protect those countries.
Indeed, with Poland, Hungary and five other NATO members sharing a border with a new, expanded Russia, the ability of the United States and NATO to defend the alliance’s eastern flank will be seriously diminished.
The new situation could force a significant adjustment in the meaning and purpose of the alliance. Putin has been clear about his goals: He wants to reestablish Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe. Some are willing to concede as much, but it is worth recalling that when the Russian empire was at its height, Poland did not exist as a country; the Baltics were imperial holdings; and southeastern Europe was contested with Austria and Germany. During the Soviet period, the nations of the Warsaw Pact, despite the occasional rebellion, were effectively run from Moscow.
Today, Putin seeks at the very least a two-tier NATO, in which no allied forces are deployed on former Warsaw Pact territory. The inevitable negotiations over this and other elements of a new European security “architecture” would be conducted with Russian forces poised all along NATO’s eastern borders and therefore amid real uncertainty about NATO’s ability to resist Putin’s demands
This takes place, moreover, as China threatens to upend the strategic balance in East Asia, perhaps with an attack of some kind against Taiwan. From a strategic point of view, Taiwan can either be a major obstacle to Chinese regional hegemony, as it is now; or it can be the first big step toward Chinese military dominance in East Asia and the Western Pacific, as it would be after a takeover, peaceful or otherwise. Were Beijing somehow able to force the Taiwanese to accept Chinese sovereignty, the rest of Asia would panic and look to the United States for help.
These simultaneous strategic challenges in two distant theaters are reminiscent of the 1930s, when Germany and Japan sought to overturn the existing order in their respective regions. They were never true allies, did not trust each other and did not directly coordinate their strategies. Nevertheless, each benefited from the other’s actions. Germany’s advances in Europe emboldened the Japanese to take greater risks in East Asia; Japan’s advances gave Adolf Hitler confidence that a distracted United States would not risk a two-front conflict.
Today, it should be obvious to Xi Jinping that the United States has its hands full in Europe. Whatever his calculus before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he can conclude only that his chances of successfully pulling something off, either in Taiwan or the South China Sea, have gone up. While some argue that U.S. policies drove Moscow and Beijing together, it is really their shared desire to disrupt the international order that creates a common interest.
Long ago, American defense strategy was premised on the possibility of such a two-front conflict. But since the early 1990s, the United States has gradually dismantled that force. The two-war doctrine was whittled down and then officially abandoned in the 2012 defense policy guidance. Whether that trend will be reversed and defense spending increased now that the United States genuinely faces a two-theater crisis remains to be seen. But it is time to start imagining a world where Russia effectively controls much of Eastern Europe and China controls much of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Americans and their democratic allies in Europe and Asia will have to decide, again, whether that world is tolerable.
A final word about Ukraine: It will likely cease to exist as an independent entity. Putin and other Russians have long insisted it is not a nation at all; it is part of Russia. Setting history and sentiment aside, it would be bad strategy for Putin to allow Ukraine to continue to exist as a nation after all the trouble and expense of an invasion. That is a recipe for endless conflict. After Russia installs a government, expect Ukraine’s new Moscow-directed rulers to seek the eventual legal incorporation of Ukraine into Russia, a process already underway in Belarus.
Some analysts today imagine a Ukrainian insurgency sprouting up against Russian domination. Perhaps. But the Ukrainian people cannot be expected to fight a full-spectrum war with whatever they have in their homes. To have any hope against Russian occupation forces, an insurgency will need to be supplied and supported from neighboring countries. Will Poland play that role, with Russian forces directly across the border? Will the Baltics? Or Hungary? And if they do, will the Russians not feel justified in attacking the insurgents’ supply routes, even if they happen to lie in the territory of neighboring NATO members? It is wishful thinking to imagine that this conflict stops with Ukraine.
The map of Europe has experienced many changes over the centuries. Its current shape reflects the expansion of U.S. power and the collapse of Russian power from the 1980s until now; the next one will likely reflect the revival of Russian military power and the retraction of U.S. influence. If combined with Chinese gains in East Asia and the Western Pacific, it will herald the end of the present order and the beginning of an era of global disorder and conflict as every region in the world shakily adjusts to a new configuration of power.
2. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 5
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 5
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
February 22, 4:00 pm ET
Russian President Vladimir Putin set information conditions for a military operation against Ukraine at a moment of his choosing on February 22. Russia will likely commence military operations to seize additional territory in eastern Ukraine within the coming days. ISW published its assessment of Russia’s likely immediate course of action at 1:00 pm ET on February 22.
Key Takeaways February 22
- Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as covering the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces) and secured unrestricted formal parliamentary authorization to deploy Russian forces abroad on February 22, setting conditions for a further offensive against Ukraine.
- The US and its European allies defined Putin’s recognition of the DNR and LNR as an invasion of Ukraine and imposed a first round of sanctions.
- Ukraine called for further sanctions on Russia and Western military support, stressing its readiness to resist further Russian aggression.
- Russia’s allies declined to immediately recognize the DNR and LNR and Russia faced widespread international condemnation.
- The Russian stock market and Rouble plummeted as the Kremlin sought to reassure Russia’s population that Russia can weather Western sanctions.
- The US redeployed existing forces in Europe to support Eastern European allies.
Key Events February 21, 5:00 pm ET – February 22, 4:00 pm ET
Military Events
The Kremlin likely continued to deploy forces to Donbas but has not yet announced overt deployments on February 22. Reuters reported locating five unmarked tanks in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) on February 22.[1] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov did not confirm the presence of Russian troops in Donbas but emphasized that all developments in Donbas would be oriented around saving the lives of Russian citizens from Ukrainian aggression.[2] The Russian Foreign Ministry stated Russia may establish military bases in Donbas under cooperation treaties with DNR and LNR.[3]
Russian social media users observed an estimated two battalions, likely of the Russian 4th Tank Division, heading toward a likely assembly area near Golovchino, Belgorod, Russia, on February 21.[4] Russian 1st Tank Army elements in Golovchino are likely postured against the Velyka Pysarivka-Okhtyrka axis and could support efforts to envelop Kharkiv or cut Ukrainian forces in southern and eastern Ukraine off from Kyiv. Russian social media users additionally observed that Russian vehicle formations near Ukraine’s borders are using at least three different tactical markings as of February 22; vehicles are marked in paint with the letter “Z,” circular markings, and triangular markings. These markers could indicate different task forces within a larger formation or echelon.[5]
Russian Activity
Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as covering the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces) and secured unrestricted formal parliamentary authorization to deploy Russian forces abroad on February 22.[6] Considerable parts of those oblasts remain in Ukrainian control with the heavily fortified “line of contact” running through both and Putin will need to seize them militarily to make good on his recognition of the DNR and LNR claims to them. Russia’s Federation Council, the Russian senate, additionally approved an authorization for Putin to use Russian forces abroad.[7] The authorization stipulates no restrictions on the size, timing, duration, or purpose of Russian military operations abroad. Putin’s speech and the Federation Council’s authorization today significantly increases the likelihood of a Russian military operation into unoccupied eastern Ukraine.
Putin falsely claimed Ukraine abandoned the Minsk II Accords, and replaced the accord’s demands of Ukraine with his own:
- Recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea;
- Formally renounce all aspirations to join NATO;
- Enter peaceful negotiations with the LNR and DNR; and
- “Demilitarize,” with no set demands other than claiming Russia must monitor Ukraine’s “nuclear ambitions.”
Putin’s demands and recognition of DNR and LNR claims to Ukrainian-held territory is a soft declaration of war against Ukraine. Putin will likely continue to phase his operations—gauging Ukrainian and Western responses to his February 22 speech before initiating his next course of action. Putin will likely seize the remainder of the Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, probably through a mechanized invasion accompanied by an air and missile campaign across unoccupied Ukraine as ISW has previously forecasted. He can choose various pretexts for such an attack depending on the informational conditions he can set in the coming hours and days.
Senior Kremlin officials justified Russia’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) as necessary to protect Russian citizens and falsely claimed Ukrainian aggression on February 22. The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) stated that Russia recognized the DNR and LNR because Kyiv abandoned the Minsk II Accords and sought to solve the conflict in Donbas with force.[8] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of “Russophobia” in not recognizing the DNR and LNR.[9] State Duma International Affairs Committee Chairman Leonid Slutsky stated that recognition is necessary for preserving the ”Russian World,” Russian language, and Russian culture.[10] Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia had “no right” to “abandon” the 800,000 Russian citizens living in Donbas.[11] Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya stated that Kyiv deployed 120,000 troops near Donbas and insinuated that Western security assistance to Ukraine threatened the population in Donbas.[12]
The Kremlin sought to downplay the likely negative effects of Western sanctions to the Russian population and international markets on February 22. The Moscow Exchange Index fell by 10.5 percent and the ruble plunged to 80 against the US dollar after Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics on February 21.[13] The Russian Central Bank announced measures to support Russian financial markets amid these ruble and Russian stock depreciations on February 22.[14] Russian state wire TASS misreported that Russian state-owned Sberbank’s share value increased on February 22, when Sberbank’s share value actually decreased.[15] Senior Kremlin officials issued nationalist rhetoric claiming that Russia is impervious to sanctions on February 22. Deputy Chairman of the Russian National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev posted a vitriolic tweet warning that Europeans will pay 2,000 euros per 1,000 cubic meters of gas after German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz announced that Germany will halt the certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.[16] TASS reported that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko stated Russia is “not afraid of anything,” including what TASS called “anti-Russian sanctions.”[17] The Kremlin likely seeks to mitigate the domestic discontent likely to follow the imposition of Western sanctions on Russia.
The Russian Foreign Ministry announced on February 22 it will evacuate Russia’s foreign missions in Ukraine “in the very near future” due to claimed Russophobia and nationalist threats; the evacuation is likely primarily driven by Russian plans for further military operations.[18] The Russian Foreign Ministry also announced it will establish diplomatic relations with Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.[19] Social media users also reported noticing Russian consulate staff burning documents in both Odesa and Kyiv.[20]
Proxy Activity
The Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) reiterated claims they should rightfully control all territory in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and continued to accuse Ukrainian forces of attacking Donbas on February 22. DNR and LNR authorities reiterated 2014 claims that their polities should control the entire territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, respectively, on February 22.[21] A senior LNR official demanded Ukrainian troops withdraw from Ukrainian government-controlled Luhansk Oblast on February 22.[22] DNR officials accused Ukrainian forces of firing multiple launch rocket systems against the DNR for the first time since 2018 on February 22.[23] The LNR accused Ukrainian forces of killing one LNR serviceman with artillery on February 22.[24] DNR officials accused Ukrainian saboteurs of conducting a car bomb terrorist attack that killed three DNR citizens on February 22.[25] DNR authorities ordered the conscription of all eligible DNR citizens born from 1995-2004 who are not yet in the DNR’s reserve and began organizing “special formations” for unspecified combat missions on February 22.[26]
The Kremlin continued evacuating women and children from Donbas on February 22 to create the false narrative of a Ukrainian “genocide” against Donbas. Russian authorities claim Russia has accepted over 90,000 refugees from Donbas and that approximately 30 Russian provinces plan to host refugees as of February 22.[27] Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced it formed mobile reception centers in eight Russian regions for evacuated DNR and LNR residents.[28] Rostov Oblast has become a major refugee hub in particular; Rostov’s regional government announced that DNR and LNR citizens in Rostov are eligible for “forced migrant“ status or temporary asylum.[29]
Russian allies did not recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) on February 22 after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decree for immediate recognition. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry stated it “respected and understood” the Kremlin’s decision to recognize the independence of DNR and LNR given rising Western provocations in Eastern Europe but did not recognize the proxy republics.[30] Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry asserted its neutrality and did not recognize the territories but noted that Kazakhstan is currently developing its official position.[31] Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad claimed that Syria wants to recognize the DNR and LNR “as early as possible” through the Syrian parliament to strengthen long-standing relations with the republics.[32] Abkhazian officials praised DNR and LNR leadership for obtaining international recognition.[33] Other Russian proxy republics will likely recognize the DNR and LNR in the coming days.
Belarusian Activity
N/A
Ukrainian Activity
Ukrainian officials decried Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR), called for immediate sanctions on Russia, and called for calm in Ukraine on February 21-22. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that DNR and LNR recognition may create a legal basis for further Russian aggression against Ukraine but maintained that Russia will not conduct a full-scale invasion.[34] Zelensky and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated that Putin’s decision required an immediate response from allies and sanctions.[35] Zelensky and the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry (MFA) sent a request to United Nations (UN) member states to hold immediate consultations with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signatories.[36] Zelensky stated that the MFA sent him a request to sever diplomatic relations with Russia. Ukraine's parliament called on the international community to block Nord Stream-2, to disconnect Russia from the SWIFT international banking system, and ban Russian technology and military imports.[37] Leaders of the Ukrainian ruling party Servant of the People told MPs not to leave Kyiv for the next two weeks.[38] The Ukrainian Armed Forces increased their readiness and stressed the need for calm. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov stated Ukraine might experience losses and fear but will be triumphant against Putin’s desire to reunite the Soviet Union.[39] The Ukrainian Defense Ministry refuted Kremlin-sponsored media claims that the Ukrainian Armed Forces shelled a Russian border checkpoint in the Rostov Oblast.[40]
US Activity
The White House expanded sanctions against Russia and the Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR) People’s Republics on 22 February, altering the February 21 White House’s statement that Russia’s recognition of its proxies did not count as an invasion.[41] US President Joe Biden stated that Russia’s aggression is the ”beginning of an invasion of Ukraine” in a televised address on February 22. Biden announced new sanctions on two Russian financial institutions and confirmed the halt of Nord Stream 2‘s certification process on February 22 --marking a shift from the White House’s February 21 stance on Russian deployments to Donbas.[42] US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed Biden’s comments and reaffirmed the US’ support for Ukraine in a call with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on February 21.[43] Blinken emphasized President Putin’s decision calls for a swift and firm response and emphasized the United States will take appropriate actions alongside its allies.[44] Biden also met with Kuleba before announcing sanctions against Russia in Washington on February 22.[45]
US President Joe Biden authorized additional deployments of troops, jets, and helicopters in Europe to strengthen allies and defend NATO on February 22.[46] A US defense official specified that the United States will move F-35 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and approximately 800 troops already in Europe to the Baltic states, Romania, and Poland.
CNN cited anonymous US officials saying that the US discussed options with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to travel from Kyiv to Lviv, in Western Ukraine, if Russia continues to escalate on February 21.[47] The White House said that it is Zelensky’s decision to relocate.
NATO and EU Activity
The European Union condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) and Russian deployments to these areas on February 22.[48] The EU stated that Russia’s decision violates international law and agreements, including UN Security Council Resolution 2202 and the Minsk Agreements. The EU called on Russia to reverse its decision and uphold its commitments to work within the Normandy format and the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG). The EU said it will impose economic sanctions on Russia for violating Ukrainian sovereignty and warned of additional political and economic sanctions should Russia use the recognition as a pretext for taking further military action against Ukraine. EU states—including Germany, Poland, Italy, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—also issued individual statements condemning Russia’s actions as a violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.[49] EU Foreign Ministers discussed specific sanctions against Russia, including Russian banks and individuals involved in recognizing the DNR and LNR, to limit Russia’s access to European capital and financial markets on February 22.[50] No readouts have been published on this meeting as of 4:30 pm ET.
The NATO-Ukraine Commission held an extraordinary meeting to address the security situation in Ukraine on February 22.[51] NATO condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) but said that diplomacy is still an option, echoing the European Union’s response. NATO warned that Russian forces are “ready to strike” and that NATO will do whatever is necessary to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression.
The G7 foreign ministers agreed on a sanctions package against Russia and reiterated support for Ukraine in a joint phone call on February 22.[52] UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss announced that the foreign ministers agreed on a “strong package of coordinated escalatory sanctions” in response to Russia’s violation of its “international commitments.” The G7 is comprised of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Japan, Italy, and France. The foreign ministers did not issue further details as of February 22, 5:00 pm.
Other International Organization Activity
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) condemned Russia’s decision to recognize the Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR) People’s Republic and order troops to Ukraine during an emergency session on February 21.[53] The US, UK, and Ukraine said that Russia’s decision is a violation of Ukrainian territorial integrity and Ukrainian sovereignty and violated international norms and agreements.[54] Representatives from China and India called for all parties to exercise restraint and to seek mutually amicable solutions, breaking from other member states’ full condemnation of Russia’s actions.[55] Russian Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebenzya said that UNSC member states should, "not make the situation worse” and that Russia would continue to concentrate on "how to avoid war."[56]
Individual Western Allies’ Activity
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced Germany will pause the authorization of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline on February 22.[57] Germany’s temporary pause will harm the Kremlin’s European energy policy. Scholz’s decision is reversible if the EU assesses a greater energy need or diplomatically favorable conditions to continue with the project in the coming months, however. The US and UK supported Germany’s decision to halt certification.[58] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev threatened a severe increase in natural gas prices for Europe in response to Scholz’s announcement.[59]
The UK imposed a first round of sanctions against Russia on February 22.[60] UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sanctioned five Russian government-run banks (Rossiya, IS Bank, GenBank, Promsvyazbank, and Black Sea Bank), several oligarchs and businesspeople with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Russian Duma and Federation Council members who voted to recognize the DNR and LNR. UK officials reiterated their commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and warned that Russia may be laying the groundwork for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The UK will extend its standing territorial sanctions on Russian-occupied Crimea to the DNR and LNR. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss threatened further sanctions on the Russian financial sector, Russian oligarchs, and businesses to prevent Russian access to sovereign debt on UK markets and isolate Russia from the global economy if the Kremlin continues with its escalation in Ukraine. lvi The UK called on Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine, meet its obligations under the UN Charter, and fulfill the commitments it made under the Helsinki Final Act, the Minsk Agreement, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.[61]
Hungarian Defense Minister Tibor Benko announced that Hungary will deploy an unspecified number of troops to its eastern border with Ukraine on February 22.[62] Benko said that Hungary must prepare for “every eventuality, including humanitarian tasks and border protection.” He announced that Hungary will prepare for the arrival of Ukrainian refugees.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Marcon condemned Russia’s “blatant attack on freedom and democracy” in a February 22 call.[63] Johnson and Macron agreed that they must continue to work together to target Russian individuals and entities who finance Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions. They reiterated that the UK and France will continue to defend European security against Russian aggression.
Turkey rejected Russia's recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) and reiterated support for Ukraine but remains wary of imposing sanctions against Russia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held a phone call on February 22. President Zelensky suggested including Turkey, Ukraine, and Germany in a summit with the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members.[64] Erdogan emphasized that Russia’s recognition of the DNR and LNR is unacceptable and stressed the need for diplomacy in a statement after the call.[65] The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement on February 21 that classified Russia’s actions as a clear violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity but refrained from calling for sanctions against Russia—a break from most NATO allies’ sanctions-oriented approach.[66]Turkey still seeks to maintain close defense and diplomatic ties with Ukraine but likely wants avoid a possible retaliatory response from Russia and the spillover financial impact of Russia-targeted sanctions. Turkish Presidential Advisor Ibrahim Kalin recommended against sanctions in an earlier statement on February 19.[67] Erdogan also cut short his three-day Africa trip and returned to Turkey on February 22—likely in response to recent Russian escalations in Ukraine.
Other International Activity
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called on all parties involved in the worsening Ukraine conflict to show restraint in a phone call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on February 22.[68] Yi’s abstention from taking a hardline stance on the issue likely signals China’s reluctance to harm its already deteriorating ties with the West nor its growing relationship with Moscow. Yi said the security concerns of any country must be respected and urged the involved parties to resolve differences through dialogue.[69] Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin reiterated Yi‘s statements during a briefing on February 22 and said China will contact all involved parties “based on the merits of the matter.”[70] Chinese ambassador the United Nations Zhang Jun echoed Yi and Wenbin’s messaging in an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on February 22.[71] Jun said that all parties must exercise restraint and avoid any action that may fuel tensions.
[3] https://iz dot ru/1295166/2022-02-22/v-mide-zaiavili-ob-otsutstvii-u-rf-planov-po-razmeshcheniiu-voennykh-baz-v-donbasse.
[8] https://mid dot ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1799883/.
[9] https://mid dot ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1799937/.
[13] https://tvrain dot ru/news/tsb_objavil_o_merah_podderzhki_rossijskih_bankov_iz_za_padenija_rynka-548320/?from=rss
[14] https://tvrain dot ru/news/tsb_objavil_o_merah_podderzhki_rossijskih_bankov_iz_za_padenija_rynka-548320/?from=rss
[19] https://mid dot ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1800042/
[26] https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/13799343; https://iz dot ru/1295114/2022-02-22/pushilin-podpisal-ukaz-o-prizyve-na-sluzhbu-grazhdan-1995-2004-godov-rozhdeniia
[27] https://iz dot ru/1295162/2022-02-22/okolo-90-tys-bezhentcev-uzhe-pribyli-iz-donbassa-v-rossiiu
[32] https://iz dot ru/1295094/2022-02-22/siriia-podderzhala-reshenie-rossii-priznat-nezavisimost-dnr-i-lnr; https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/13798799
3. The west knows the cost of appeasement. We can’t rule out any option for stopping Putin
Key excerpt:
Western leaders now grappling with Russia’s escalating aggression have one advantage over Neville Chamberlain in 1938: they know that appeasement can have disastrous consequences. They can see, too, thanks to Russia’s December proposals on European security, that Putin’s ambitions aren’t limited to controlling Ukraine: he wants to reverse changes in Europe’s post-cold war security arrangements. If Joe Biden, Macron, Scholz and Boris Johnson want to prevent a horrendous war – on a much larger scale than the Balkan wars of the 1990s – they need to focus on deterring Putin, not accommodating him.
The west knows the cost of appeasement. We can’t rule out any option for stopping Putin | Ian Bond
The Russian leader has shown he cares enough about Ukraine to shed blood over it. He needs to know the gain won’t be worth the pain
Vladimir Putin’s recognition of two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine as independent, along with his subsequent deployment of troops and tanks to the regions, has moved Europe closer to the brink of war.
Despite many differences, there are echoes of 1938 in current developments. Putin may not be Hitler; Ukraine in 2022 isn’t Czechoslovakia in 1938; and French president Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, and their western colleagues aren’t some sort of collective Chamberlain. But 1938 does carry important lessons: the most important being that deterrence may seem more expensive and risky than accommodation today, but it is essential for Europe’s long-term security.
Putin, though a brutal authoritarian leader, is not a charismatic madman like Hitler. He has used targeted repression and assassinations to control the Russian opposition, rather than concentration camps. His ideology is flexible: for all his anti-western rhetoric, he and his associates have often kept their money and their families in the west.
What Putin has in common with Hitler, however, is a mystical belief in a nation stretching beyond his country’s current borders. Putin sees Ukraine as the key to this “Russian world”. In his speech on Monday announcing the recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, Putin spoke of Ukraine as an “integral part of our own history, culture and spiritual space” and described the creation of a Ukrainian Soviet republic by Lenin as “the tearing away from Russia of a part of its own historical territories”. Last year he wrote that there was no historical basis for a Ukrainian people separate from Russians.
Ukrainians disagree. Despite the lazy cliche that Ukraine is divided into a Russian-speaking, pro-Russian east and a Ukrainian-speaking, nationalist west, in 1991 every region of Ukraine, even Crimea, voted in favour of Ukrainian independence. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is more comfortable speaking Russian than Ukrainian, yet won almost three-quarters of the vote in the 2019 presidential election, and was the leading candidate even in most parts of the supposedly nationalist west. Many of the Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline are Russian-speakers and also Ukrainian patriots.
Ukraine in 2022 is more important strategically and economically than Czechoslovakia was in 1938. It is Europe’s largest country after Russia. Many of its population of more than 44 million would become refugees if war broke out. Globally, it is a crucial exporter of maize and seventh for wheat, and a key supplier of agricultural produce to the EU. World food prices would rocket if Ukraine’s fields were full of tanks rather than tractors. And Ukraine is an important transit route for Europe’s energy.
Western leaders now grappling with Russia’s escalating aggression have one advantage over Neville Chamberlain in 1938: they know that appeasement can have disastrous consequences. They can see, too, thanks to Russia’s December proposals on European security, that Putin’s ambitions aren’t limited to controlling Ukraine: he wants to reverse changes in Europe’s post-cold war security arrangements. If Joe Biden, Macron, Scholz and Boris Johnson want to prevent a horrendous war – on a much larger scale than the Balkan wars of the 1990s – they need to focus on deterring Putin, not accommodating him.
Deterrence will be impossible, however, if leaders keep telling Putin what they are not prepared to do, or if they turn up the pressure on him so slowly that he can always adapt. Biden has said that he won’t send US forces to fight in Ukraine; the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has publicly expressed doubts about cutting Russia off from the global payments system Swift; the Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, has said that sanctions should not hit gas imports from Russia; and the EU, US and UK have already indicated that the recognition of the “people’s republics” looks unlikely to trigger full-scale economic sanctions at this stage, despite Putin’s deployment of troops.
The western desire not to escalate is understandable. Putin is doing his best to show that Ukraine matters enough to him to shed blood over it, and he has past form: in the war he launched in Chechnya thousands of Russian troops were killed, according to Russian human rights organisations.
But if Putin goes on to attack the rest of Ukraine, as his posture of force suggests he will, the costs of the resultant war for the west will be much higher than those of wide-ranging sanctions or providing military support to Ukraine, and Europe will be destabilised for decades. On 21 February, Putin advanced, but not far. If he is to be deterred from going further, even at this late stage, the west needs to make him uncertain that the gain will be worth the pain. Everything must be on the table.
Ian Bond is the director of foreign policy at the independent thinktank, the Centre for European Reform, and a former British diplomat.
4. In Ukraine, is it a Russian ‘invasion’ or something less?
Excerpts:
And while there may have been confusion as to the word “invasion,” another much-used word suggested unity on both sides of the Atlantic.
These sanctions, Biden said, were the “the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs on Russia.” In London, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Parliament that the sanctions were “the first tranche, the first barrage of what we are prepared to do.”
The “invasion”/non-“invasion” question is still out there — especially on social media (whatever the policymakers may think, #UkraineInvasion has been trending on Twitter). The debates may have given pleasure to Putin, who is known to enjoy any developments that divide his enemies.
Meanwhile, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul — now a professor at Stanford University — offered this via Twitter: “IR101 final exam question: If Country X sends soldiers and tanks into Country Y without an invitation, what’s that called?”
In Ukraine, is it a Russian ‘invasion’ or something less?
Policymakers tied themselves in verbal knots after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into two regions in Ukraine. It’s much more than a semantic question.
Tom Nagorski
Global Editor
President Vladimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops to two Russia-controlled regions in Ukraine sparked international outrage — and a debate about when an invasion is an invasion.
It’s an academic-sounding dispute that is anything but. For weeks, the U.S. and its European allies have frequently and publicly telegraphed a series of broad and punitive sanctions they would impose at the moment of a Russian invasion.
But almost immediately following Putin’s Monday speech, ambiguity intruded.
President Joe Biden offered that Putin’s moves marked “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” in a speech from the East Wing announcing new sanctions against Russia.
“Beginning of a Russian invasion” marked a significant evolution from what U.S. officials had been saying less than 24 hours earlier, in the wake of Putin’s announcements. Late Monday, a senior administration official told reporters that the U.S. didn’t consider what Russia had done a “new step.”
On cleanup duty, Deputy National Security Adviser waded into the discussion Tuesday. “We think this is, yes, the beginning of an invasion, Russia’s latest invasion into Ukraine,” Finer said. “I think ‘latest’ is important here,” he went on. “An invasion is an invasion, and that is what is underway, but Russia has been invading Ukraine since 2014.”
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“Latest invasion”? “Further invade”? “Beginning of an invasion”? Not “fully fledged”?
It’s a semantic mashup that reflects a core reality: In calling these moves an “invasion,” leaders would be forced to react with maximum measures — potentially losing their leverage in the next phase of the crisis. A crisis that still has a chance at ending without a full-scale war.
Earlier “invasions”
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014; it has had troops there ever since. Russian forces have been in the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, for nearly eight years. Intermittent fighting between Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces in the region has taken nearly 14,000 lives in that period.
So, a fair question: Has Putin ordered an invasion of the Luhansk and Donetsk enclaves? Or is this the reinforcing of an existing reality on the ground?
A linguistic purist might say, given that Russian forces are there, and have been there for years, “invasion” might not be the right word.
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Hence, the Russian American journalist Julia Ioffe’s formulation: She tweeted that Russia had “reinvaded Ukraine.” New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta called it “a calculated act by President Putin to create a pretext for invasion.” Others used strong language — but not the “I”-word: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chose “an act of unprovoked aggression and a brazen violation of international law.”
Again, the words mattered. “Invasion” — based on past pronouncements by policymakers in the U.S. and Europe — would have been a trigger for a powerful response.
The response
The sanctions that had been prepared by the Biden administration and its European allies in the event of a Russian invasion were wide-ranging and potentially damaging:
Sanctions against Russian state-owned banks and the country’s energy and mining sectors; tight controls on exports of U.S. technology to Russia; targeted sanctions against senior Russian oligarchs; and the banning of Russian banks from SWIFT, the communications network through which financial institutions conduct global payments and other financial transactions. As Grid’s Josh Keating reported, sanctions against Putin himself were not off the table.
In the hours after Putin’s announcement, the definitional confusion surrounding “invasion” seemed to influence the response. Far from the immediate trigger of these sanctions, the administration announced sanctions that would impact only the two Russian-backed enclaves in question. The president issued an executive order that would prevent new investment in the Luhansk and Donetsk enclaves, and shut down U.S. trade with the regions. It was a punishment that seemed to fit the misdemeanor (“new step”) rather than the grave crime (“invasion”).
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On the day after, two important things happened to change the calculus — and the policy:
First, fury rained down from congressional Republicans, and some Democrats as well, as what they saw as a feeble and unclear message to Putin.
The “I-word” made a comeback.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said, “Russia has invaded Ukraine. The Biden Administration and our allies must impose [a] full set of crippling sanctions now.” From Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.): “The consequences for this invasion must be swift and I stand ready to support harsh sanctions on Putin and his officials for this attack.”
And on the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) was no less forceful.
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“If you know the history of aggressive dictators, you know it’s critical not to lose clarity. Putin is invading Ukraine. Full stop,” Himes wrote.
Meanwhile, a hard line — and the punishment to match — came from an unlikely source: Berlin.
Newly minted Prime Minister Olaf Scholz took the step that he and other German leaders had waffled on for months: the shutting down — for now — of Nord Stream 2, the pipeline owned by Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom.
Nord Stream 2 was about to go online, after an investment of more than 10 years and $11 billion. It was to be an economic juggernaut for Russia — doubling its gas exports to Germany. But it was also seen as a hugely important source of energy for Germany, which has jettisoned nuclear power and is already enduring a spike in basic energy costs. Germany had shown little inclination to play politics with the pipeline, but on Tuesday it did.
Biden: “beginning of a Russian invasion”
With pressure from Capitol Hill, and the tough stand from Germany, Biden came to the East Room Tuesday and announced a tough new set of sanctions on Russia. They were punishment, he said, for “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
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“Beginning” of an invasion.
Again, the threading of the semantic needle seemed to influence the policy. Here were a raft of strong measures — but not the full sweep. Biden and other U.S. and European officials have made the point that it is important to keep further sanctions on the table, to deter Russia from further aggression.
For now, Biden said the U.S. will block two major Russian banks from dealings with the U.S. and Europe, impose what he called “comprehensive sanctions” on Russian sovereign debt and enforce a set of punitive measures against Russian “elites.”
And while there may have been confusion as to the word “invasion,” another much-used word suggested unity on both sides of the Atlantic.
These sanctions, Biden said, were the “the first tranche of sanctions to impose costs on Russia.” In London, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Parliament that the sanctions were “the first tranche, the first barrage of what we are prepared to do.”
The “invasion”/non-“invasion” question is still out there — especially on social media (whatever the policymakers may think, #UkraineInvasion has been trending on Twitter). The debates may have given pleasure to Putin, who is known to enjoy any developments that divide his enemies.
Meanwhile, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul — now a professor at Stanford University — offered this via Twitter: “IR101 final exam question: If Country X sends soldiers and tanks into Country Y without an invitation, what’s that called?”
5. Reality Is a Tank (Putin and Ukraine)
Excerpts:
Our presidents were not alone. Much of Conservatism Inc. has become functionally pro-Russia. And much of the American foreign policy establishment decided that it could live in whatever reality it preferred. Their signal accomplishment was killing America’s two-war doctrine.
Reality Is a Tank
Vladimir Putin has been clear-eyed about the world. We're the ones who lost touch with reality.
A serviceman of a motor rifle unit of the Russian Southern Military District is seen on a T-72B3 tank of the tank force of the Russian Western Military District as he takes part in a cross country driving exercise at Kadamovsky Range. Erik Romanenko/TASS (Photo by Erik Romanenko\TASS via Getty Images)
1. Putin Is Winning
There’s a lot of “OMG Putin is a madman how could he do this!” today. Here is the single most daft expression I’ve seen from a serious person:
Carl Bildt was once the prime minister of Sweden, the head of a sovereign state. And he is a fool. Because Vladimir Putin is firmly in touch with “reality.” It is men and women like Bildt, who believe that the international order is secured by pen and ink, who have been living in a fantasy land. They have spent a generation inviting catastrophe into their sitting rooms.
They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.
They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.
In response these same men and women decommissioned nuclear power plants in Europe and built gas pipelines to Russia so that they could have good feelings about “environmentalism” while also pocketing economic windfalls.
They crossed their fingers and closed their eyes.
You tell me who “lost contact with reality.”
And it’s not just the lotus-eating Europeans. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both got rolled by Putin. Donald Trump was practically Putin’s gofer.
Our presidents were not alone. Much of Conservatism Inc. has become functionally pro-Russia. And much of the American foreign policy establishment decided that it could live in whatever reality it preferred. Their signal accomplishment was killing America’s two-war doctrine.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates's efforts to focus the Defense Department on the wars at hand – not the ones being waged in the minds of futurists fixated on China or Russia – is the guiding principle behind a new strategic document that sets the Pentagon’s priorities for the next several years.
Those silly futurists. Fixated on the prospective threats of China or Russia.
Since World War II, U.S. military planners have argued that we need to fight two major theater wars at the same time. The two-war doctrine has become something like Holy Writ or an idée fixe. The idea was somewhat well-founded during the Cold War when we plausibly could have faced simultaneous crises in, for example, Germany and Korea, or Germany and Cuba.
However, holding onto this idea for the last twenty years has looked increasingly disconnected from reality. Obama’s new strategy goes through contortions to claim that we will, sort of, maybe, continue to be able to almost fight and nearly win two wars at the same time. But it fails, like every defense strategy has for two decades, to explain why this precise formulation is worth defending.
And so the two-war doctrine was tossed aside in favor of a “one-plus” doctrine.
The goal of the two-war doctrine was to prevent America from having to fight any major wars. Because when you have the ability to fight two conventional ground wars, you deter all of your enemies.
A one-war doctrine, on the other hand, invites conflict.
Think about it: America could, in theory, go to war against either Russia or China. But not both. Which means that both China and Russia are emboldened to pursue their interests: They know that we are unlikely to respond to aggression because in any given instance we will be paralyzed by the need to be able to deter a second aggressor.
The two-war doctrine was a victim of its own success. It was so effective at deterring large-scale aggression that Americans became convinced it wasn’t needed. That we could pocket the savings and get the same level of security through norms and agreements and economic interdependence.
Here is a thing everyone except Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seems to have forgotten: Reality is a tank.
Not a memorandum. Not a summit. Not a promise.
In 1994, Russia signed a very nice piece of paper pledging to defend Ukraine from aggression if they would just give back the old Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons.
One week ago, after a summit with Emmanuel Macron, Putin said he was withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border.
Joe Biden has promised that the United States would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
None of these were policies. They were sentiments.
Over the last 20 years, Americans experienced the very real costs of being the global hegemon and decided that, all things being equal, we’d rather not have the job.
We are about to experience the very real costs of not being the hyperpower.
I would like to think the American people will survey the situation and come to the hard conclusion that while it is expensive and arduous to be the enforcer of the international order, it’s ultimately cheaper and safer than the alternative. And that we will then select leaders who will carry out this brief.
But I’ve lived through the last three years, just like you. I’ve watched half of America whine like children over being asked to wear a KN-95 at the grocery store. I’ve seen a third of this country refuse to get a life-saving vaccine because they are so detached from reality.
In my darker moments I suspect that Vladimir Putin has taken our measure quite precisely.
If you’d been reading the Triad, then Putin’s invasion would not be surprising in the least. I’ve been banging on about this for weeks:
This, for instance, is from the January 25 newsletter:
I do not believe there is anything the Biden administration or NATO can do to forestall Putin’s aggression at this point. So the questions shifts from “How do we stop it” to “How do we thwart Russia’s strategic aims and impose the largest possible strategic cost on Putin’s regime?”
If you want a clear-eyed view of the world delivered to your inbox, every day, then you should be with us.
2. Strategic Ambiguity
I hate that we have to fight the Trump culture wars while talking about real war. But like I said: We are not a serious people. So you have Rich Lowry tweeting this:
There’s a kernel of truth here. Unpredictability is a strategic asset and it was a big advantage for Trump in his conquest of the Republican party. Especially in the early days of 2015 to 2018: Republican elites didn’t understand him and couldn’t predict his behavior.
But in the realm of foreign relations, Trump was entirely predictable. There was a simple playbook for foreign leaders: Flatter Trump, tell him what he wanted to hear, and he would roll over for you.
Look at his love affair with Kim Jong-Un.
Look at him giving Xi Jinping the go ahead for concentration camps just so long as he could have a trade “deal” to announce.
Look at the Helsinki Summit, where he took Vladimir Putin’s side against his own intelligence apparatus.
So why is Putin pushing into Ukraine now? Not everything in the world is about Donald Trump and Putin has been playing a very long game.
But if I had to guess what Trump’s influence on Putin was, I’d say:
Putin realized that he could get much of he wanted from Trump for free. Trump was even talking about pulling out of NATO—which is Putin’s endgame. Why do anything that might jeopardize the free gifts Trump was giving him?
On the other hand, once Biden came to power and it was clear that the relationship would be more adversarial, Putin figured that he might as well go on offense and take his lumps in pursuit of the strategic objectives that could only be achieved by force.
3. Hank the Tank
Thank you. For all the book recommendations last week. The book that got more votes than any other was A Gentleman in Moscow, so that’s what I loaded onto my Kindle.
And you guys did not steer me wrong. It’s tremendous.
You’re the best. Thanks.
Now, my gift to you: Hank the tank:
Since the summer, a black bear known as Hank the Tank has made a 500-pound nuisance of himself in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., breaking into more than two dozen homes to rummage for food and leaving a trail of damage behind.
So far, nobody has been able to deter Hank, said Peter Tira, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Department officials and the local police have tried to “haze” the bear with paintballs, bean bags, sirens and Tasers, but he is too drawn to humans and their food to stay away for long.
“It’s easier to find leftover pizza than to go in the forest,” Mr. Tira said on Sunday. . . .
At 500 pounds, Hank is “exceptionally large,” the state wildlife authorities said. The average black bear in the western United States weighs 100 to 300 pounds, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. . . .
“He didn’t get fat like that eating berries and grubs,” she said, adding that it was not clear how Hank developed a taste for human food.
6. Ben & Jerry’s Ukraine Tweet Is Not Just About Russia
Excerpts:
To be fair, Unilever isn’t alone. Many corporations that advertise their commitment to ESG are rather selective in their application. Take, for example, the major sponsors of the Beijing Olympics. Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Toyota, and Panasonic all purport to adhere to ESG principles, with dedicated pages on their websites to all the good they do for the world. Yet, they have all chosen, for the sake of profit, to ignore the documented genocide destroying the lives of millions of Uighur Muslims in China.
The goal here is not merely to single out these companies for hypocrisy. In a sense, they are victims of a growing malady. Corporate boards increasingly feel the need to keep pace with politically charged causes to avoid “cancellation.” Companies often find themselves under duress for support of the wrong cause (or nonsupport of the right ones). This explains why they have sought out the counsel of ESG consultants and experts who purportedly know how to navigate this complicated space.
Here's the rub: these experts have no idea what they are doing. Even the most seasoned ESG consultants will quietly cede that there are no rules in this field. It’s entirely subjective. There is, in fact, no correct way to commit to ESG principles.
Ben & Jerry’s Ukraine Tweet Is Not Just About Russia
Ben & Jerry’s is now a cautionary tale on the dangers of the Environmental, Social, Governance movement run amok.
by Jonathan Schanzer Richard Goldberg
This month’s tweet from Ben & Jerry’s urging President Joe Biden not to send troops to eastern Europe to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine was roundly and deservedly jeered on Twitter by Russia experts, military hands, and foreign policy specialists.
“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” the ice cream company stated. “We call on President Biden to de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war. Sending thousands more US troops to Europe in response to Russia’s threats against Ukraine only fans the flame of war.”
One critic of this naïve statement went so far as to suggest a new flavor for the occasion: Appease Mint.
But the tweet was more than an embarrassing gaffe. It was a clarifying moment. The Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) movement has lost its way. Corporate leaders with little to no experience in foreign affairs increasingly feel entitled to weigh in on complex policy challenges. If they are lucky, it only results in embarrassment. It’s time to provide ESG with some guardrails, if not all-out reform.
Ben & Jerry’s is now a cautionary tale on the dangers of ESG run amok. Last year the company, which is owned by parent company Unilever, announced it would terminate its license to distribute in Israel. In doing so, the company picked sides in a century-old clash of nationalist aspirations that has vexed even the sharpest diplomatic minds. The 2021 decision was particularly odd, given that the company failed to take such strident positions on other disputed territories.
To be fair, Unilever isn’t alone. Many corporations that advertise their commitment to ESG are rather selective in their application. Take, for example, the major sponsors of the Beijing Olympics. Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Toyota, and Panasonic all purport to adhere to ESG principles, with dedicated pages on their websites to all the good they do for the world. Yet, they have all chosen, for the sake of profit, to ignore the documented genocide destroying the lives of millions of Uighur Muslims in China.
The goal here is not merely to single out these companies for hypocrisy. In a sense, they are victims of a growing malady. Corporate boards increasingly feel the need to keep pace with politically charged causes to avoid “cancellation.” Companies often find themselves under duress for support of the wrong cause (or nonsupport of the right ones). This explains why they have sought out the counsel of ESG consultants and experts who purportedly know how to navigate this complicated space.
Here's the rub: these experts have no idea what they are doing. Even the most seasoned ESG consultants will quietly cede that there are no rules in this field. It’s entirely subjective. There is, in fact, no correct way to commit to ESG principles. The embrace of ESG is more about virtue signaling and branding than substantive change. Corporations often adopt the policies that impact their businesses the least. But they don’t want to risk running afoul of the latest corporate craze. So, they invest valuable time and resources to demonstrate their commitment to ESG.
Consultants who purport to be ESG gurus are paid top dollar to train corporations in how to get high ESG investment ratings and be included in ESG-based index funds. For a hefty fee, the C-suite can gain a coveted ESG stamp of approval. Yet, after doing so, they often continue with business as usual. Petroleum companies continue to have a heavy carbon footprint. Big pharma continues to produce drugs that can cause social upheaval. Multinationals continue to work in jurisdictions with poor human rights records. But they vow to be better global stakeholders, with occasional divestments or statements that reflect the latest political trends. In the era of ESG, this accounts for something.
One might argue that if corporations wish to project their softer side, ESG is a fairly innocuous way of doing so. However, this may not necessarily be the case. Morningstar, for example, acquired the ESG rating company Sustainalytics last year. This means that Sustainalytics’ ESG analysis will be used in twenty-nine countries by millions of investors. This also means that the subjective interpretation of Sustainalytics on political, social, and environmental issues will influence those millions of investors. Who is to say that this particular company’s perspective on a wide range of contentious issue is correct?
How are investment and divestment decisions being made? What data or analysis feeds into such recommendations? How does one company end up boycotting the pluralistic democracy of Israel while others enable a genocide in China? For a movement built on calls for transparency, these corporations are increasingly making decisions based on non-transparent, politicized information without regard to fiduciary responsibilities and shareholder value.
Deluged with complaints and concerns about the company’s ESG standards, Morningstar has hired a law firm to audit its process.
This is a welcome development. But Morningstar is not the only company that requires oversight. This was something that the SustainAbility Institute observed, which led to its sputtered effort to “rate the raters.” Absent such efforts from within the ESG community, it may be time for federal investment authorities, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to take a close look at the analytical practices wielded by financial firms providing ESG research and by corporations, themselves. This may be more urgent than ever given a Department of Labor proposal that would allow corporations to drag pension investments into the ESG abyss.
Last month, one top Unilever investor said the company had “lost the plot” due to its fixation on ESG. The same could be said for any number of corporations today. The commitment to being better corporate citizens is laudable. But when ice cream executives start weighing in on complex conflicts a half a world away, it just might be time to re-assess.
Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer), a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for the nonpartisan think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg), a former U.S. Senate aide and National Security Council official, is senior adviser.
Image: Reuters.
7. To Stop Iran’s Proxy Terrorists, Stop Iran
Excerpt:
During the May 2021 conflict, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which Tehran also supports, made extensive use of human shields. In one example, footage shared by pro-Hamas channels shows rockets being launched at Israel from neighborhoods in Gaza.
By using terrorist proxies, the regime in Iran is attempting to attack its neighbors while concealing where the blow came from and escaping the consequences. Washington, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and other regional partners should recognize that these terrorist attacks all bear Tehran’s fingerprints. Better to address the puppet master together than fight its puppets alone.
To Stop Iran’s Proxy Terrorists, Stop Iran
The U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and UAE must do more to stop Tehran together.
By BRADLEY BOWMAN, JOE TRUZMAN and RYAN BROBST
FEBRUARY 22, 2022 10:48 AM ET
The United States sent F-22 fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates on Feb. 12, following last month’s Houthi missile attack on an Emirati base hosting American troops. While the added firepower is a welcome development, such deployments will not deter the Houthis or other Iranian proxies unless the hardware is reinforced by coordinated action by the United States, Israel, and Arab partners.
Recognizing that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis have the same benefactor and share many of the same goals, methods, and weapons is an essential prerequisite for developing a more cooperative and effective regional response. That response should include the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and UAE sharing technical information on Iranian weapons, especially the rockets, missiles, and drones that all three proxies operate. This could include sharing intelligence about the smuggling routes Tehran uses to deliver weapons to proxies and the financial vehicles Iran uses to fund its proxies. Israel and Gulf Arab states, along with U.S. Central Command, should also build on recent progress related to combined military exercises. There are specific opportunities associated with the recurring Noble Dina, Blue Flag, and Iron Union exercises.
Tehran has long used terrorist groups to attack, undermine, and control other regional governments, such as with Hamas, in Gaza, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and the Houthis, in Yemen. Iran would rather its adversaries remain divided and distracted, attempting to respond unilaterally and without holding Tehran accountable for the actions of its proxies. To be sure, the origins and attributes of the three terrorist groups vary. They also come from various religious backgrounds, be it Sunni like Hamas, Twelver Shiite like Hezbollah, or Zaydi Shiite like the Houthis. But they share many similarities thanks to their links to the ultra-radical regime in Tehran, to which the three terrorist groups owe much of their resilience and lethality.
Consider, for example, the fact that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are united in their desire to kill Americans, Israelis, and often other Arabs.
The Houthis have attacked U.S. forces on at least two occasions. In 2016, the Houthis fired anti-ship cruise missiles at the USS Mason, a Navy destroyer operating in international waters near Yemen. The Houthis attacked American forces again last month by launching ballistic missiles at the Al Dhafra Air Base, which houses U.S. forces. Notably, Hezbollah and Hamas praised that Houthi attack, while Israel condemned it and expressed support for Abu Dhabi.
Israelis, of course, have suffered at the hands of Iranian-supported terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, too. That hostility is not surprising given that the founding principles or documents of both groups call for the destruction of Israel. The Houthi slogan of “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam” aligns with Hamas, Hezbollah, and their common patron, Iran.
In May 2021, Hamas publicly thanked Iran for supplying military support during the terror group’s war with Israel earlier that month. The support enabled Hamas and other Iran-backed factions in Gaza to launch more than 4,360 rockets at Israelis civilians during the 11-day conflict. If it were not for Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system and bomb shelters, those attacks could have killed thousands of civilians.
Iran’s additional efforts to provide its terrorist proxies with anti-ship cruise missiles are particularly worrisome. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis each operate near vital military and commercial waterways. Hamas has recently experimented with undersea drones to threaten offshore infrastructure and vessels in the eastern Mediterranean not far from the Suez Canal. Hezbollah damaged the INS Hanit in 2006, and the group could easily target other vessels. Houthis have already targeted shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Combined with Iran’s own capabilities in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, Tehran and its proxies can threaten several of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints.
During the May 2021 conflict, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which Tehran also supports, made extensive use of human shields. In one example, footage shared by pro-Hamas channels shows rockets being launched at Israel from neighborhoods in Gaza.
By using terrorist proxies, the regime in Iran is attempting to attack its neighbors while concealing where the blow came from and escaping the consequences. Washington, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and other regional partners should recognize that these terrorist attacks all bear Tehran’s fingerprints. Better to address the puppet master together than fight its puppets alone.
Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, or FDD.
Joe Truzman is a research analyst at Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal.
Ryan Brobst is a research analyst at the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
8. On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel
Excerpts:
There is, however, one very effective way to end the occupation, and it still boggles the mind that it isn’t the top of the agenda for all the activists and intellectuals who claim to believe that ending the occupation is their first and foremost priority.
That way is called making peace.
Nothing in the Amnesty report and nothing in this absolute car crash of an interview suggest that its authors or the intellectual community they represent assign any importance at all to that.
They are welcome in Ramallah to sit with the Palestinian president (as Callamard did the very next day after this interview) and present their report precisely because no one imagines for a second that they might criticise the PA’s human rights violations, its delayed and cancelled elections, its pay-for-slay sponsorship of terrorist families, its antisemitic incitement, or the Holocaust denial of the president himself.
Their recommendations include no criticism for the refusal to make peace with Israel and no call for any affirmative action that might lead in that direction.
On the contrary, they insist the Palestinians waste one more generation on demonisation of an enemy they can’t defeat rather than pursue a reconciliation for the benefit of all. They will fly home. The people they presume to help will stay right where they are.
On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel
by Shany Mor
When the two most senior Amnesty officials presented their new report in Israel they struggled to answer the most basic questions. Their responses, writes Shany Mor, were ‘a mix of exasperation, ignorance, self-contradiction, and conspiratorial magical thinking’.
Most of the meta-event around the Amnesty apartheid report followed a grimly predictable script. The outlandish claims, the colourful pdf’s, the outraged responses, the too-smart-for-you response that the outraged responses were only drawing attention to the report — and the relative indifference of nearly everyone who is not involved in the western ‘debate’ about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians (including most Israelis and Palestinians).
But in one corner of the media there was a very minor event that didn’t quite go according to script. This was a short interview that the Times of Israel’s diplomatic correspondent Lazar Berman conducted with the two most senior Amnesty officials presenting the report. Berman asked Agnes Callamard, the organisation’s Secretary General, and Philip Luther, its Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director, a few entirely reasonable questions about the report and its context, none of which should have been surprising for them, and yet they struggled to provide answers even to the simplest ones.
Their responses to simple questions were, for the most part, a mix of exasperation, ignorance, self-contradiction, and conspiratorial magical thinking. Luther in particular was almost comically unprepared for the most obvious of questions, and he seemed genuinely resentful at being asked them.
The most obvious question, of course, is why the obsessive and disproportionate focus on Israel in the human rights community. There are a few coherent, even if not terribly persuasive ways, to deal with the question. One would be to argue that all of the attention of Amnesty, HRW, the UNHRC and others is completely justified because Israel truly is a unique evil on the global scene and much worse than all other countries combined. Another would be to deny completely that there is a disproportionate focus on Israel. And a third would to be acknowledge it, maybe claim that it is a problem of other organisations, but argue that in this specific case it is not what is happening.
What is incoherent is trying to do all three, which is precisely what Luther does. He wants to ‘push back’ on the idea that there is a large focus on Israel. Two sentences later, he tacks in the other direction: ‘I’m not sure what the problem is.’ And later again ‘I don’t think there evidence for that.’ When confronted with the specific example of the UNHRC, which year after year passes more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined, Luther is flatfooted. He avoids the question, isn’t sure about the facts. He seems unaware of the ‘permanent item’ dedicated to Israel on the Commission’s agenda, when no such item exists for any other country.
No one expects an Amnesty director to sound like AIPAC speaker. But it is not expecting too much for someone whose entire professional life is dedicated to the topic of human rights in the Middle East to have an opinion of some kind on the matter.
And it’s jarring that people who believe so fervently in human rights don’t see something amiss in this. Let’s imagine a village with 193 families in it, and the local police assigns one of its only cops to follow only one family’s car and constantly measure its speed, and the tax department goes over every receipt of this same family looking for irregularities, and a grand jury sits permanently to investigate any possible crimes of this same family, and the local paper has a reporter permanently assigned to sniff out any infidelities or disputes inside the family. You don’t need to be an expert with 20 years experience (as Luther reminds us in the interview he has) in the field of human rights to understand what is wrong with this situation.
When Berman comes back to the UN issue one last time, Luther gives perhaps the most astonishing response. He says Israel has actually managed to ‘shut down scrutiny using the power of its relationships’ and charges that the UN is actually a locus of inaction because Israel ‘has influence over powerful allies who then manage to stop it, stop the scrutiny.’
And that of course is the appeal of anti-Israel activism in the West: the sincerely held belief that by engaging in it you are somehow standing up to dark powerful forces at home. There’s a word for this pathology.
Besides the conspiratorial tone (there will be more of that in the interview), it’s an odd claim to make when elsewhere Luther argues that Amnesty can’t investigate other countries for the crime of apartheid precisely because they, unlike Israel, are actually able to stop scrutiny of their actions.
That’s not even the furthest extreme of Luther’s conspiratorial claims. Later in the interview he claims that what makes it hard to see the apartheid in Israel is the ‘smokescreen’ created by Israel’s ‘democratic system’ and ‘judicial institutions.’ These, according to Luther, ‘make it challenging to disentangle’ the picture of the apartheid he and others claim to have found. What he refers to as ‘the Israeli state’ is ‘a driver of complexity and a driver of resources unnecessarily spent on investigations by anybody.’
These passages were rightfully mocked online, but it’s worth pausing over what he is saying and the psychological process he is describing. He knows Israel—ahem, ‘the Israeli state’—is guilty of not just committing a grievous crime but of being a grievous crime. But what he observes are a complex set of practices and institutions that don’t quite appear to be the unvarnished evil he knows is there, and to him this is not cause to revisit his assumptions, but actually further proof of just how nefarious the ‘Israeli state’ is.
In activist circles this is known as ‘washing,’ the belief that when Israel appears to be doing something good or at least not purely evil, that this is nothing more than a deliberate feint designed to fool the weak-willed, and that the deliberate feint which the righteous have identified is actually proof of just how awful the Israelis actually are. So there is pink-washing, green-washing, yellow-washing, aid-washing, vaccine-washing, sport-washing, and so on.
Throughout the interview, Berman keeps asking why Amnesty chose to investigate Israel, and why it did so now. The democratic ‘smokescreen’ isn’t the only reason, even according to Luther. But whenever Berman asks for others, there is no coherent answer coming. Luther assures Berman that in the next year Amnesty will be examining other countries for possible apartheid, but he refuses to divulge which. Luther doesn’t want to talk about China, because he’s not a China expert. His field is MENA (Middle East and North Africa).
So Berman asks him about countries in the Middle East, and uses Amnesty’s definition of apartheid (‘systematic attempt to dominate’). When he gets to Syria, Luther answers with a terse ‘all right,’ whereas on Turkey he just says ‘maybe we’ll get there. I don’t know,’ adding that Berman is ‘hung up on the idea’ that Amnesty is selectively choosing to investigate one nation and not another and that ‘this is somehow so important.’
Well, yes, I suppose Berman and others are hung up on the idea. And if we’re already in a conversation about racism and bigotry, it seems like a pretty reasonable idea to be hung up on. It also seems like the kind of thing a human rights activist would care about or have an opinion about. In fact, it seems like the kind of thing a human rights activist would absolutely hate being accused of and do as much as possible to refute. Or maybe just it’s a hang up. Alright.
Anyway, as Luther is keen to point out, it is not the case that Amnesty has only accused Israel of apartheid. It also issued a report in 2017 accusing Myanmar of committing the crime of apartheid.
This is perhaps the biggest red herring in the entire interview. A comparison of the Myanmar report and the Israel report only serves to make Berman’s questions even more urgent and Luther’s answers even more inadequate.
The Myanmar report deals with specific policies of institutionalised discrimination and forcible population transfers in Rakhine State (one of 21 regions in the country) affecting a minority that comprises roughly 1 per cent of Myanmar’s total population. The Israel report casts the entire existence of Israel as a tainted enterprise. The very basis of Israeli society is a putative crime.
The Burmese government could conceivably implement each of Amnesty’s policy recommendations tomorrow and Myanmar would continue to exist. The recommendations proposed for Israel would end the existence of a Jewish state and leave its six million Jews vulnerable to mass murder and expulsion.
Another big difference: The claims against Myanmar will not be used to mobilise violence against ethnic Burmese around the world.
And another: The Myanmar report is a response to an actual event happening. A massive campaign of state-sponsored violence got underway in 2016 and took a particularly violent turn in 2017. No surprise that a major human rights organisation issues a damning report in 2017.
On Israel, there is no major event, no watershed, no legal or diplomatic change of any kind that would precipitate such a radical conclusion.
Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and ruled over both directly until the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. The complicated patchwork of self-rule and shared control in the West Bank is the result of the OSLO II agreement in 1995.
The only major change since then was the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli soldiers and settlers from the 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip that had not been handed over in 1994. There has been no legal change since then.
So why now? Luther says, ‘I cannot tell you the strategic reasons in terms of the focus [on Israeli apartheid]. I can just give you in generic terms.’
It wouldn’t be such a riddle if it were just one report. But Amnesty’s report joins at least two other major human rights organisations’ glossy tomes which in the past year have made the same conclusion with the same fanfare.
The fact that so many self-styled human rights organisations all arrived at the same conclusion at the same time despite there being no legal change and no landmark event on the ground is proof that anti-Israel activism is a social activity more than a political one. It is a profession of faith and of membership in the community of the good rather than an effort to change policy or even to make an authentically political action.
Luther doesn’t shy away from the charge that Amnesty’s report was sparked by the reports of other human rights organisations. He presents it as responding to ‘a growing debate’ and elsewhere refers to this as ‘external factors… that [are] part of the strategic landscape.’ Again, one needn’t be an expert in human rights, bigotry, or due process to understand just how shoddy such reasoning is or how it might lead an investigator of any kind to only seek bias confirming findings.
In this case, the ‘strategic landscape’ was calling for a renewed public avowal of the central tenets of faith in its larger ecclesiastical community as to who is evil, who is outside the community of the good, who it is that stands in the way of the message of light, whose powerful networks seek to divert the righteous from the path of truth.
Pressed one last time to say something, anything at all, about the seeming obsession with Israel of Amnesty and the rest of the human rights community, Luther interrupts the journalist interviewing him with a rhetorical question that is supposed to definitively end the debate: ‘How many other countries have a fifty-year occupation?’
But all this does is reveal even further just how unserious his grasp of the Arab-Israeli conflict is.
An occupation is not the cause of a conflict; it is usually the outcome of one, and it lasts as long as the conflict is unresolved. To discuss the occupation without mentioning (1) how it came about and (2) why it persists is manifestly unserious.
In this case, it came about (1) because a coalition of Arab armies was defeated in a war whose openly stated and broadly celebrated goal was to destroy the Jewish state and murder and expel its people.
It lasted because (2) following defeat there was a near total refusal to reach any peace agreement which would end the occupation.
Wherever there has been a willingness to come to terms with Israel, occupied territories have been recovered. But to acknowledge any of this is verboten for Amnesty and the broader human rights community, where there is no conflict at all, only a racist and irredeemably evil Israel.
‘Occupation’ as Amnesty uses isn’t a legal or territorial description, but an assignment of moral culpability to the Jewish state. This is why it was so important to Amnesty to redefine occupation in 2005 in a way that the term had never been used before so that it could still be applied to the Gaza Strip.
The point is that Israel can leave a piece of territory, but the mark of Cain stays with it. This is true regardless of which of three methods Israel might use to try to end the occupation.
If it endeavours to reach a final status peace deal with the Palestinians, but the Palestinians reject this three times in the same decade and pursue suicidal terror instead, that is Israel’s fault.
If it just leaves a piece of territory entirely without even getting a peace deal, that is an ‘open-air prison’ and Amnesty and other humanitarians will invent whole-cloth a new definition of occupation suited just for that.
If it carries partial withdrawals in accordance with an international agreement establishing an interim phase which is then frozen because the Palestinian side refuses to reach a final status deal, then the complicated overlapping power-sharing arrangements get refashioned as ‘fragmentation’ and ‘parallel legal systems’ which form the basis of the apartheid calumny.
And that’s the point of redefining apartheid especially for Israel too (something all three reports, which claim to be based on ‘international law’ but none of which use the actual legal definition of apartheid, and each of which invents another unique one): even if Israel were to effect a full and unconditional withdrawal from every bit of disputed territory, it will still be tainted.
There is, however, one very effective way to end the occupation, and it still boggles the mind that it isn’t the top of the agenda for all the activists and intellectuals who claim to believe that ending the occupation is their first and foremost priority.
That way is called making peace.
Nothing in the Amnesty report and nothing in this absolute car crash of an interview suggest that its authors or the intellectual community they represent assign any importance at all to that.
They are welcome in Ramallah to sit with the Palestinian president (as Callamard did the very next day after this interview) and present their report precisely because no one imagines for a second that they might criticise the PA’s human rights violations, its delayed and cancelled elections, its pay-for-slay sponsorship of terrorist families, its antisemitic incitement, or the Holocaust denial of the president himself.
Their recommendations include no criticism for the refusal to make peace with Israel and no call for any affirmative action that might lead in that direction.
On the contrary, they insist the Palestinians waste one more generation on demonisation of an enemy they can’t defeat rather than pursue a reconciliation for the benefit of all. They will fly home. The people they presume to help will stay right where they are.
9. FDD | Russia-Georgia 2008: a Blueprint for Russia-Ukraine 2022?
Excerpts:
Today, with an estimated 190,000 Russian troops surrounding Ukraine on three sides, the Georgia debacle may provide signs of what comes next. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated last fall, “I hope that even the current Kiev regime won’t follow the path of Mikhail Saakashvili of August 2008.”
Pushback from Ukraine’s northern neighbor, Belarus, is not likely. After barely surviving popular protests two years ago, the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, depends on Putin for political survival. In 2008, after Russia’s blitzkrieg attack on Georgia was over, Lukashenko opined: “Russia acted calmly, wisely and beautifully.”
According to Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin, Lukashenko and Putin have decided that Russia will keep its 30,000 soldiers in Belarus indefinitely. Khrenin said the decision was taken because of “increasing military activity on eastern borders and the worsening situation in the Donbas.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that the situation now could deteriorate into “the biggest war in Europe since 1945.” While there will likely be many surprises, much of the plan appears to mirror the Georgia crisis of 2008.
FDD | Russia-Georgia 2008: a Blueprint for Russia-Ukraine 2022?
fdd.org · by James Brooke Visiting Fellow · February 21, 2022
The Olympics were about to start in Beijing. Thousands of miles to the west, Russia was wrapping up a big military exercise in a border region. Across the border, women and children were evacuated from a secessionist area to Russia “for safety.” Citing the safety of thousands of secessionists with Russian passports, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned of Moscow’s “responsibility to protect.”
The German chancellor called for diplomacy. Then, secessionist artillery shelling started killing government troops and policemen. Russia’s army exercise ended. But the tanks and armored personnel carriers remained at the Russian border. Mysterious cyberattacks targeted government ministries.
This is not the story of Ukraine this week. Rather, it describes Georgia in the first week of August 2008. With Russia extending its military exercises in Belarus, Russia’s playbook in Georgia may serve as a guide for Ukraine.
On Wednesday, at a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Putin accused Ukraine of committing “genocide” in southeastern Ukraine. The key to avoiding war, Putin said, is an ironclad guarantee the Ukraine will never join NATO. The Russian-led secessionists in the Donbas later ramped up shelling of Ukrainian government-controlled trenches and villages. Over the weekend, the secessionist leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk went live on local TV to order a mass evacuation of “women, children and the elderly.” The local leaders say they aim to evacuate nearly all the 720,000 residents issued Russian passports over the last two years.
Russia’s Duma voted last Tuesday to ask President Vladimir Putin to recognize the secessionist-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states. Today, in a fiery speech broadcast on national television, Putin announced Russia would do just that. He then ordered Russian “peacekeepers” into the occupied territories.
Back in March 2008, largely unnoticed to the outside world, Russia’s Duma approved a similar resolution asking Putin to recognize Georgia’s two breakaway areas — Abkhazia and South Ossetia. On April 2, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, President George W. Bush campaigned for offering a Membership Action Plan to Georgia and Ukraine. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany opposed, and the proposal was tabled.
The next week, Russia announced the adoption of “steps of a different nature” to block the two countries from joining NATO. Planning immediately started for a military invasion and “regime change” in Georgia.
That summer, Russia’s Railway Troops upgraded the 90-mile rail line from Russia’s Sochi to Sokhumi, the capital of Abkhazia. As analyst Pavel Felgenhaue observed, “Where Railway Troops go, military action follows.”
In late July, during Russia’s military exercises just north of Georgia, Russian soldiers were given a pamphlet: “Soldier! Know your probable enemy!” The pamphlet described the Georgian Land Forces.
In 2008, Russian military planners knew their window of action would close in October, when snow starts to fall in the Caucasus Mountains, hampering mobility. Today, many analysts believe that Putin’s window closes in mid-March, when Ukraine’s frozen farmland turns into a sea of mud. If the ground is frozen hard, armored personnel carriers can fan out across the countryside, avoiding asphalt roads and roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices.
In August 2008, Russian television aired footage of the evacuation of 20,000 women and children to Russia’s North Ossetia. Although about 90 percent of South Ossetia’s civilian population was bused to safety, Russian journalists began to call the empty streets evidence of “genocide.” Russia’s then-President Dmitry Medvedev charged that Georgian troops committed “genocide” in South Ossetia, killing “thousands.” Many South Ossetians said these accusations prompted them to back the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages. Five months after the war, the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation released the death toll: 162 Ossetian civilians.
In early August, the Russian army was moving tanks, trucks, and armored personnel carriers toward the 2.3-mile-long Roki Tunnel, separating Russia and Georgia. Georgian forces attacked South Ossetia and briefly seized its capital. However, they failed to close the tunnel through the mountains. The Russians immediately counter-punched and retook Tskhinvali. They drove down to Gori, cutting Georgia in half. A Russian convoy drove to within 25 miles to Tbilisi, stopping only after frantic mediation by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
On the coast, Russia’s Black Sea fleet saw its first action since 1945, as the Georgian Navy suffered losses. Invading one week after a U.S.-Georgia military exercise, the Russians seized four Humvees and four reinforced inflatable rafts left behind by the 1,000 departing U.S. troops. Russia seized Poti, Georgia’s main Black Sea port.
In Tbilisi, people were blindsided. Russian trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers streamed steadily out of the Roki Tunnel. Soon, Russian troops cut Georgia’s central east-west road and rail links. The Russian Air Force then bombed the international airport and at least one military airfield.
Washington was blindsided. Photos show President Bush chatting with President Putin at the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. The White House said they talked about Georgia. But Bush did not seem to know that Russia was already starting to pour as many as 10,000 soldiers through the Roki Tunnel into Georgia.
Back in Washington three days later, Bush issued a statement: “Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.” Bush urged Russia to sign an EU-mediated ceasefire agreement. Otherwise, Russia would “jeopardize” its standing with the West.
In the political aftermath, Putin got his way, shifting Georgia to a more neutralist position and putting NATO membership out of reach. Putin succeeded in weakening Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili. In fact, Saakashvili’s political career never recovered from his military defeat. In the next elections, in 2012, his party was defeated by a movement headed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a pro-Russian businessman. Georgia’s richest man, Ivanishvili made his billions during Russia’s wild privatizations of the 1990s.
Today, with an estimated 190,000 Russian troops surrounding Ukraine on three sides, the Georgia debacle may provide signs of what comes next. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated last fall, “I hope that even the current Kiev regime won’t follow the path of Mikhail Saakashvili of August 2008.”
Pushback from Ukraine’s northern neighbor, Belarus, is not likely. After barely surviving popular protests two years ago, the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, depends on Putin for political survival. In 2008, after Russia’s blitzkrieg attack on Georgia was over, Lukashenko opined: “Russia acted calmly, wisely and beautifully.”
According to Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin, Lukashenko and Putin have decided that Russia will keep its 30,000 soldiers in Belarus indefinitely. Khrenin said the decision was taken because of “increasing military activity on eastern borders and the worsening situation in the Donbas.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has warned that the situation now could deteriorate into “the biggest war in Europe since 1945.” While there will likely be many surprises, much of the plan appears to mirror the Georgia crisis of 2008.
James Brooke is an adjunct fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). James has held senior reporting and editing positions at The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Voice of America. Until recently, he published a business newsletter about Ukraine. For more analysis from James and CMPP, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CMPP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by James Brooke Visiting Fellow · February 21, 2022
10. 'War is my biggest horror': Russians brace for deadly conflict, economic hardship as Putin orders invasion
There is going to be a lot more economic hardship than just in Russia I am afraid. I doubt the president can tell us to just go to the mall.
'War is my biggest horror': Russians brace for deadly conflict, economic hardship as Putin orders invasion
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Putin recognizes Ukraine's rebel regions
Russia's President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of separatist regions in eastern Ukraine and paved the way to provide the separatists with military support. (Feb. 22)
AP
"I am too old to be afraid of anything, but the war is my biggest horror," said Svetlana Gracheva, 67, who lives in western Russia and was in Moscow visiting her younger brother to celebrate a national holiday.
"I wake up thinking about the war with that overwhelming fear that we Russians all have in our genes," she said. "Generations and generations of our boys died in wars, so I hoped I would live my life without seeing another (one), without seeing coffins with killed boys or more crying mothers."
At Moscow's Christmas Market, children played under their mothers' watchful eyes while tourists listened attentively to a guide talking about the debate over whether to keep Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square.
“There will be a quick war; our army is already in Ukraine," said a security guard at the square who declined to give his name out of fear of retribution for speaking to a Western media outlet. "They are going to launch a few rockets at Ukrainian military bases and storages with weapons. And all Ukrainian forces will surrender to or army. And that’s it.”
Russians were glued to their televisions on Monday, like much of the rest of the world, when President Vladimir Putin recognized two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine as "independent" and signed decrees sending troops into those territories to "maintain peace."
His moves were tantamount to an invasion and raised the specter of the worst military conflict in Europe since 1945, unleashing an international backlash with far-reaching consequences.
In London, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled sanctions against five Russian banks and three wealthy individuals. In Berlin, German officials announced they would halt certification of the $11 billion Russian-owned natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2.
In Washington, the Biden administration vowed a "severe response," and deputy national security adviser Jon Finer said the White House would be rolling out sanctions "in a matter of hours."
Even before Putin's announcement on Monday, the Russian stock market fell by a record 10.5%, the most in seven years, and continued its slide into Tuesday. The value of the ruble, Russia's currency, plunged as well. Some Russians withdrew cash from ATMs, and housewives – long used to social and political crises – stocked up on buckwheat.
Vladimir Khrykov, /a businessman, told USA TODAY that he felt very unhappy watching Putin’s big television appearance on Monday. “The speech was so murky, so unprepared, but these decisions affect our business, our future, directly,” Khrykov said.
He was even more unsettled by an earlier broadcast Monday in which Putin publicly mocked the head of his foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin. Khrykov said it seemed to reveal cracks and confusion in Putin's inner circle as Naryshkin struggled to respond to Putin's questions.
“It turns out that even inside the Kremlin’s tiny circle of decision-makers, they had no clarity about what to do about Donbas," the Russian businessman said, referring to the region in eastern Ukraine that has been a flash point in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
"Nobody – even Naryshkin – could figure out if Putin wanted to make the self-proclaimed republics a part of Russia or recognize them as independent," Khrykov said.
The exchange could make foreign powers think Russian authorities are incompetent, he added.
Demian Kudryavstev, an investor in Moscow, said he and others were bracing for sanctions from Washington, but he said sanctions will not hurt Russia's wealthiest oligarchs.
“Ordinary Russians, small business will suffer from the new package of the U.S. sanctions," Kudryavstev said. “As for businessmen worth more than $100 million, they have secured their future by buying foreign passports (and) investing in the West. Some might move to live in Dubai temporarily.”
Putin has an "endless list of options of how to increase pressure" on Russia's neighbor, Kudryavstev said, while "all the West has is sanctions."
In Kitai Gorod, the oldest part of Moscow, near the Kremlin, there were no visible signs of the global furor aimed at Putin's Russia.
Nastya, a 25-year-old barista, was making coffee for her clients at the Central Market, a popular place among Moscow’s hipsters. But her thoughts were “storming,” she said.
Putin’s speech made her completely rethink her life, she said.
“Putin is convinced that all Russians would cope with his decision, but lots of young people, my friends, disagree,” Nastya told USA TODAY on Tuesday morning. Like others interviewed, she declined to give her last name for fear of being fired or even arrested.
She used to tell her mother that she had dreamed of a progressive future in Russia. Not now.
"My plan is to emigrate now," she said. "I will have to explain to my mom that I simply don’t believe in a happy future here anymore."
Nearby, two middle-aged men discussed Putin’s speech over espressos.
“Putin’s last words amused me most: ‘I am sure that Russians will support me,'" Maksim told USA TODAY.
"He does not have any doubts that we want his war," he added. But “only idiots can support the idea of sanctions and the country’s lost reputation.”
11. Sharpening the Spear: Moving SOF’s Operating Concept Beyond the GWOT
Some useful thoughts that should contribute to the NDAA requirement for USSOCOM to articulate an operational concept to support the Joint Warfighting Concept.
Excerpts:
The “special” in special operations forces refers to a group of servicemembers who are specially selected, specially trained, specially equipped, specially organized, and—most critically—specially employed. Though conventional forces, the vast majority of the military, are sometimes referred to as general purpose forces, over nearly twenty years of counterterrorism-focused operations, the special operators were often called to perform missions for a general purpose, while conventional forces became more specialized. Because special operations forces are scalable and inexpensive, relative to conventional forces, to deploy and to employ, these forces became the primary tool for any mission, anywhere. If anything this contrast has sharpened in recent years, as conventional forces such as the Army’s sought a greater emphasis on large-scale combat operations. This creates a situation where conventional forces are only meaningfully employed on a “break glass in case of war” basis while special operations forces, who already possess an almost pathological inability to refuse opportunities for employment, conduct operations that simply do not warrant their involvement. This should be reversed, to an extent, a sentiment shared by at least one former secretary of defense.
It’s true—USSOCOM embracing greater degrees of specialization by its components does limit the overall flexibility of special operators to respond to any and every crisis. Reducing the number of core special operations missions for each component may also decrease USSOCOM’s overall budget. However, this greater specialization enables special operations forces to increase their capability to accomplish the missions that the command sees as most important—those that most directly support the overall objectives of the joint force.
If USSOCOM can jettison some cultural norms and expectations from two decades of war in the Middle East, embrace its service-like responsibilities, and be judicious about the missions that it takes on, the command can craft an operating concept that supports the joint force. By providing purpose and realistic constraints to the special operations forces, USSOCOM will empower the components to build the right capabilities that can guide special operations force design for the next decade.
Sharpening the Spear: Moving SOF’s Operating Concept Beyond the GWOT - Modern War Institute
Emerging from the shadows in the aftermath of 9/11 through the campaign that toppled the Taliban, special operations forces became the favored tool for military and civilian leaders alike. This newfound prominence brought United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) more funding and a broader set of missions, and it fed special operators, regardless of parent service, into the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. After twenty years of conflict, the various special operations components—from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines—look remarkably similar in many ways. More than twenty years after entering the public consciousness, the end of operations in Afghanistan provides USSOCOM with an opportunity to reshape the joint special operations force for future conflict.
Under the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), USSOCOM must articulate an operating concept that supports the Joint Warfighting Concept—the Department of Defense’s overarching vision for what requirements each service needs to provide. To articulate an effective operating concept, leaders in USSOCOM must do three things: First, they must overcome a deep sense of nostalgia for the lavish support and prime billing that special operations forces received during the preceding two decades of war. Second, they must resist the urge of special operations component commanders to subordinate their operating concepts to those of their parent services. Lastly, they must exercise the will to contract, not expand, the special operations force’s mission set.
Surveying the Joint Landscape
The US military services each establish operating concepts that guide the long-term direction of the force. These capstone concepts anticipate the character of future conflict, creating a benchmark against which to measure changes in doctrine, training, equipment, and organization. These changes are informed by the anticipated future requirements of the force employers—the geographic combatant commanders in charge of overseeing military operations within specific regions.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a role that former Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford described as “global force integrator,” has loosely refereed this process in recent years through the development of a capstone concept for joint operations. However, the draft Joint Warfighting Concept is a significant departure from the past, insofar as it will be the first overarching operating concept that seeks to more deliberately define the missions that each service will have to perform, channeling collective efforts to build capability and capacity for future conflict.
USSOCOM is not a military service or department, but a unified combatant command with service-like responsibilities. Special operations forces are employed under the control of theater special operations commands—led by generals or admirals from the ranks of the special operators—not under the immediate control of land, air, or maritime component commanders. Since special operations forces are a joint asset, it makes sense that USSOCOM would have a responsibility for articulating the logic of the overall contribution to the joint force. This concept must shape where the special operations components divest and how they prioritize their focus geographically.
Global War on Terror Nostalgia
The wars in the Middle East led to an unprecedented expansion of the role of special operations. Special operators became the main effort in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. Better trained, better equipped, and more agile than conventional forces, special operators were ideally suited to take the fight to an elusive enemy. Such prominence won USSOCOM lavish resources. Responding to an increase in demand for their services, every service expanded the ranks of its special operators, with the Marine Corps going so far as to create an entirely new special operations component.
The GWOT experience sets a false expectation for the future of special operations. Individual special operations components should expect their budgets, and their overall end strength, to continue to shrink in the coming years. Any new operating concept must embrace this reality.
The prominence of the special operators may shrink, as well. With American military focus shifting toward the Indo-Pacific, a theater of definitively naval character, the prominence, influence, and support afforded the Navy must grow, as well. This does not mean that special operations forces have a marginal role in this theater, only that the priority of their efforts must be secondary, or at least supporting, to that of the maritime component.
The Army, Navy, and Marine special operations components performed almost identical missions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This bred redundancy and created expectations for the employment of every special operations service component in any conflict. The character of a future war might be limited in scope and exclusively maritime, playing to the strengths of the Navy’s special operators. Alternatively, it could be a proxy war based upon support to an insurgency that caters to the strength of the Army’s special operators.
Beware the Service Silos
With a transition away from a focus on counterterrorism, USSOCOM’s four service components are all moving closer to their parent services. This paradoxically makes it more difficult for USSOCOM to support the joint force. After directing USSOCOM to develop an operating concept that nests with the Joint Warfighting Concept, the 2022 NDAA also directs the command to explain “the manner in which the joint operating concept relates to and integrates into the operating concepts of the Armed Forces.” This may be interpreted by the special operations commands as a directive for individual special operations components to integrate their operating concept with those of their parent services. This would be an abdication of USSOCOM’s service-like responsibilities. The more difficult, but more responsible, approach is to untether the special operations service components’ operating concepts from those of their parent services and create a joint operating concept that supports the joint force—both nesting under the Joint Warfighting Concept and integrating with the service concepts.
American special operations are inherently joint, and any capstone concept should force the creation of varying degrees of jointness. Army special operators, for instance, should not have to participate in every single iteration of the Army’s combat training centers, the major training venues for Army conventional forces. Instead, they should seek consistent roles in Navy, Marine, and Air Force service exercises. Regionally aligned special operations forces ought to seek out opportunities for integration that best match their likely operating environment. This means that forces aligned to the Pacific seek more work with the Navy and Marines, while special operations units oriented toward Europe and the Middle East deepen partnerships with the Army and Air Force. Defining a joint special operations concept for employment will help to break down the cultural divide between special operators from one service and conventional forces from another.
Though leaders at USSOCOM appear to have little appetite for advocating for the creation of a separate service, they would do well to minimize the operational alignment of special operations components to their parent services. Marine special operators, for instance, should view themselves as special operations forces first, and Marines second, reflecting the likelihood of employment alongside or in support of any of the services.
In 2020, the US Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), in partnership with Army Futures Command, published a pamphlet that described the role of Army special operations within the US Army’s broader operating concept—multi-domain operations. This was an important and necessary step toward articulating the role of Army special operators in future conflict. However, USSOCOM must articulate an operating concept that supports multiple service concepts. For instance, it is highly likely that a future war in Asia would see the maritime services—both the Navy and Marine Corps—in the lead. While the Army would probably have an eventual role in such a conflict, this role would likely come later. However, given the regional alignment of USASOC and the fact that the command is larger than all of the other special operations components combined, Army special operators will have a significant role in the conflict, likely well before the Army’s conventional forces.
Willful Contraction
USSOCOM must exercise the will to resist mission creep. Empowered with purpose and with clear divisions of labor, the special operations components can develop the capabilities required for future competition and conflict.
Army Special Forces traces its lineage to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, which focused on operations with guerrillas behind Axis lines. In keeping with this lineage, Special Forces ought to focus on its principal missions of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare. So-called direct action—pinpoint attacks against the adversary—are sometimes secondary missions within foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare. By being regionally focused, Special Forces add value through their ability to accomplish missions with and through partner forces. Anything that smells of unilateral action should be jettisoned. As independent missions on land, direct action should be the prerogative of the 75th Ranger Regiment and other elements that exclusively focus on precise, unilateral attacks.
Special operations civil affairs and psychological operations soldiers are assigned as members of the Army special operations component. Both the Army and Marine Corps have reserve component civil affairs units and the Marines have psychological operations elements, but these conventional forces lack the capabilities of special operations civil affairs or psychological operations. Like Special Forces, these civil affairs and psychological operations soldiers are regionally aligned, but work alongside special operators from across the joint force. The role of these specialists in the operating concept must be suitably broad to allow them to leverage their regional expertise and ability to operate autonomously, providing information-related capabilities that enable freedom of maneuver to special operations forces in both competition and conflict.
Naval Special Warfare’s return to the sea has already begun. Unlike its Army counterpart, for whom war with and through a local partner force was always the primary mission, naval special operations forces have never been as partner-focused as their Army counterparts and were historically far more focused on direct action and reconnaissance against targets at sea and along the littorals. This is a sensible mandate and leaders should seek to limit the employment of naval special operators in anything that is not a clearly maritime environment.
Air Force special operations have a variety of generally platform-centric missions that, by and large, directly support the tactical actions of the other special operations components as a primary objective. In a recent interview, the commander of US Air Force Special Operations Command talked about a need to serve as both the Air Force contingent of USSOCOM and the special operations contingent within the Air Force. Ensuring a connection to the parent service is laudable, especially if component leaders believe that this has frayed in recent years, but the component’s core purpose is to serve as part of the special operations force.
Marine Special Operations Command faces the toughest battle. Of the four special operations components, the Marines are the newest and lack the sort of natural, distinct mandate of the land, sea, and air special operations components. But necessity is the mother of invention and Marine special operators, embracing the Marine Corps’s fixation on existential threats to the broader service, are likely to define a mission set that is both inventive and functionally distinctive. As a component strategist recently proposed, Marine special operations forces might focus on the capability to conduct reconnaissance in littoral areas, supporting the imposition of sea control or sea denial.
The Hazards of Specialization
The “special” in special operations forces refers to a group of servicemembers who are specially selected, specially trained, specially equipped, specially organized, and—most critically—specially employed. Though conventional forces, the vast majority of the military, are sometimes referred to as general purpose forces, over nearly twenty years of counterterrorism-focused operations, the special operators were often called to perform missions for a general purpose, while conventional forces became more specialized. Because special operations forces are scalable and inexpensive, relative to conventional forces, to deploy and to employ, these forces became the primary tool for any mission, anywhere. If anything this contrast has sharpened in recent years, as conventional forces such as the Army’s sought a greater emphasis on large-scale combat operations. This creates a situation where conventional forces are only meaningfully employed on a “break glass in case of war” basis while special operations forces, who already possess an almost pathological inability to refuse opportunities for employment, conduct operations that simply do not warrant their involvement. This should be reversed, to an extent, a sentiment shared by at least one former secretary of defense.
It’s true—USSOCOM embracing greater degrees of specialization by its components does limit the overall flexibility of special operators to respond to any and every crisis. Reducing the number of core special operations missions for each component may also decrease USSOCOM’s overall budget. However, this greater specialization enables special operations forces to increase their capability to accomplish the missions that the command sees as most important—those that most directly support the overall objectives of the joint force.
The Future
If USSOCOM can jettison some cultural norms and expectations from two decades of war in the Middle East, embrace its service-like responsibilities, and be judicious about the missions that it takes on, the command can craft an operating concept that supports the joint force. By providing purpose and realistic constraints to the special operations forces, USSOCOM will empower the components to build the right capabilities that can guide special operations force design for the next decade.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Spec. Patrik Orcutt
12. US attack helos, F-35s and infantry heading to Baltics amid Ukraine invasion
US attack helos, F-35s and infantry heading to Baltics amid Ukraine invasion
Another round of U.S. troops has been mobilized in support of Eastern European countries as Russia further invades Ukraine.
Joining 6,000 troops already activated in Germany, Poland and Hungary, the Defense Department announced Tuesday that a spate of combat aircraft and infantry troops will head to the Baltics and Poland.
They include:
- 800 soldiers from an Italy-based infantry battalion task force to the Baltic states
- Up to eight Air Force F-35 strike fighters from Germany to the Baltics, as well as an unspecified location on NATO’s southeastern flank
- An attack aviation battalion with 20 AH-64 Apache helicopters, from Germany to the Baltics
- An attack aviation task force with 12 Apaches from Greece to Poland
“These additional personnel are being repositioned to reassure our NATO allies, deter any potential aggression against NATO member states, and train with host-nation forces,” according to a senior defense official.
The announcement came after President Joe Biden detailed new economic sanctions on Russia in reaction to Russian Vladimir Putin’s decision to move new military forces into separatist-held parts of Ukraine.
“Who in the Lord’s name is Putin to think it gives him the right to declare new so-called borders on territory that belong to his neighbors?” Biden said. “This a flagrant violation of international law and demands a firm response from the international community.”
Biden said the United States “will continue to provide defensive assistance to Ukraine” as Russian forces advance, but reiterated that “we have no intention of fighting Russia.”
However, he said that American military forces will continue to work with NATO allies on how to diffuse the situation and defend their borders.
“We want to send an unmistakable message that the United States together with our allies will defend every inch of NATO territory and abide by the commitments we made into NATO,” he said. “We still believe that Russia is poised to go much further in launching a massive military attack against Ukraine. I hope we’re wrong about that.”
NATO forces are on heightened alert as Russia sends troops into parts of eastern Ukraine, but the response force hasn’t been activated, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Tuesday.
“So far we have increased the readiness of the NATO Response Force, but we’re not deployed,” Stoltenberg said during a press conference.
Instead, individual countries have activated their own troops on an ad-hoc basis. That includes 5,000 troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who headed to Germany and Poland earlier this month, and another 1,000 mobilized from Germany to Romania.
At the same time, Stoltenberg said, Germany has sent troops to Lithuania, the United Kingdom has doubled its troops in Estonia.
“And other allies ― including Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and many others ― have decided to send in troops ships and planes to reinforce our presence,” he added.
RELATED
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says the United States will do its due diligence to protect American troops should Russia invade Ukraine.
By Jessica Edwards
Leaders from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia met with Vice President Kamala Harris in Munich on Friday, calling for more support to the Baltic countries.
And while visiting a small number of U.S. troops deployed to Lithuania on Saturday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declined to say whether he was considering sending more troops to the Baltic state.
“I don’t have any ... announcements to make today in terms of troop presence,” Austin told reporters during a press conference in Vilnius. “But as I said, I’ve been saying all long, we will continue to assess situations and consult with our allies.”
Stoltenberg said the risk of a “full-scale” assault on Ukraine remained high as Russian troops surrounding the country appeared “out of the camps and in attack positions.” That assessment expands the scope of a potential conflict beyond the Russia-supported breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the eastern Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government recognized the regions’ affiliation with Moscow on Monday, drawing the ire of the international community.
Shortly after Stoltenberg’s press conference on Tuesday, Russian news reports began trickling in that Putin’s independence proclamation would cover the entirety of the respective provinces, parts of which are still under Ukrainian control, setting up the prospect of intensified combat along the contact line splitting the region.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members. Follow on Twitter @Meghann_MT
13. Don’t Trust the Process: Moving from Words to Actions on the Indo-Pacific Posture
Excerpts:
Just as there is no easy solution to the challenges China’s rise poses to U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific, there is no easy way to surmount the obstacles to strengthening U.S. Indo-Pacific posture. Clearly, senior leaders ought to assess difficult tradeoffs, make clear decisions, and enforce those decisions. But that only works if the processes and organizations that translate senior leaders’ intentions into actions support the desired outcome, rather than obstruct it. After 20 years spent failing to address Chinese threats to U.S. bases and forces in the Indo-Pacific, it is time for senior Pentagon leadership and Congress to stop trusting the process and start reforming it. Only then will we be able turn rhetoric into reinforced concrete.
Don’t Trust the Process: Moving from Words to Actions on the Indo-Pacific Posture - War on the Rocks
Few defense analysts focused on the Indo-Pacific would quibble with these statements, yet these problems continue, and solutions remain unclear. Two recent War on the Rocks articles by my colleagues Stacie Pettyjohn and Dustin Walker aptly describe the Pentagon’s failure to improve U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific. Pettyjohn cites a Cold War-era Air Force chief of staff who emphatically argued for airbase resiliency in Europe as a model for today’s senior leaders to advocate for passive defenses. Walker prods the secretary and deputy secretary of defense to take a more aggressive role on force posture. Both argue that these problems cannot be solved absent senior leader engagement.
I agree with both authors that senior leader engagement is necessary, but I believe the Pentagon also needs to reform the processes and organizations responsible for overseeing posture. Secretaries and service chiefs should prioritize posture, but they can’t fix this issue without help. Moving from words to poured concrete requires subordinate organizations and processes to execute guidance and policies. Fixing the Indo-Pacific posture will require targeted policies to incentivize the implementation of posture initiatives in the near term in addition to long-term reforms to ensure that posture considerations have a more prominent role in the defense budgeting process.
It may be helpful to clarify what posture means in this context. Generally, the Pentagon defines posture — or force posture — as forces, places, and agreements. Forces are self-explanatory — they’re military forces stationed in or operating from overseas locations. Places can include everything from big bases like Andersen Air Force Base on Guam to small forward operating locations to prepositioned stocks. Agreements define what U.S. forces can do in locations under certain conditions, to include things like overflight access for U.S. aircraft.
Like Pettyjohn and Walker, I focus here on places and their vulnerability. For reasons explained above, airbases are a primary concern, but they aren’t the only vulnerable locations. Ports, shipyards, prepositioned equipment, and forward command centers are also potential targets for enemy attacks. Making these locations more resilient through a mix of passive defenses (like aircraft shelters), dispersal, redundancy, rapid repair, and, in some cases, active defenses, is key. Resiliency requires the reallocation of money to build new facilities and harden existing locations, buy equipment, pay for personnel and training, and move forces to new locations. Inserting such investments into defense budgets has proven difficult.
Senior leaders can’t demand these investments unilaterally because their authority is negotiated. Unlike orders in the field, guidance from a secretary or chief is akin to a request: it can be interpreted, relitigated, or ignored. Senior leaders can try forcing compliance or creating their own processes, but this approach relies on the leader’s attention, and can generate bureaucratic “antibodies,” as those people and organizations opposed to change find ways to delay and resist.
Bureaucratic inertia influencing posture has a long history. As Pettyjohn’s 1960s-era anecdote illustrates, underinvestment in basing isn’t new. More recently, China’s threats to the Indo-Pacific basin have been brewing for 20 years. It’s been a decade since President Barack Obama announced the Pacific pivot — or rebalance — and the Pentagon codified it in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance. Since then, six defense secretaries have been unable to roll the posture boulder up the hill. Barring major changes, Secretary Lloyd Austin will be yet another Sisyphus. Solving the posture problem therefore requires understanding why Pentagon processes bias toward underinvesting in posture and targeting new policies to reform those processes.
Posture has long fallen into cracks in bureaucratic responsibility dating back at least as far as the National Security Act of 1947. However, the Goldwater-Nichols reforms exacerbated its status as a latchkey kid by finally and completely removing the armed services and their chiefs from the operational chain of command. The geographic combatant commands got custody of posture, since they would be most impacted by deficiencies in overseas forces, basing, or access agreements. Unfortunately, they don’t have the money or the authority to invest in posture. The armed services have the money and the authority, but they don’t want to pay for something they view as outside their responsibility to train, organize, and equip forces.
This situation forces the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff to serve as mediators, cajoling the armed services to pay their due, adjudicating disputes, and covering emergency costs. Unfortunately, these organizations and their processes cannot perform this role. Instead, they often inhibit long-term posture investments.
The Goldwater-Nichols divorce between force providers and force employers reflects a broader schism in the Pentagon processes between near- and long-term planning. The near-term faction includes the combatant commands and the civilian and Joint Staff offices that oversee contingency planning and the allocation of forces overseas, or “Global Force Management” in Pentagon-ese. This group “owns” posture through bodies like the Global Posture Executive Council. This council is purely advisory, however, and sees its role as managing Combatant Commands’ requests and blocking outlandish or analytically unsupported ideas. The long-term faction includes the armed services and the civilian and joint staff offices that oversee the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process. This group “owns” the budget. The staffs running these processes should coordinate their efforts to manage resources and risks across timelines. Instead, they operate in parallel, only converging in the person of a handful of senior leaders.
This staff schism has many negative consequences, but it’s particularly bad for building a more resilient Indo-Pacific posture. The near-term organizations and processes responsible for posture don’t focus on enduring investments, don’t have direct access to the budget, and lack the detailed cost analyses needed to effectively argue for a greater share of the budget. Long-term programming and budgeting organizations, like the office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, need these analyses to fit posture investments into a budget that prioritizes massive, multi-decade acquisition programs backed by the services and Capitol Hill. Every budget cycle, long-term investments needed to make Indo-Pacific posture more resilient fall into this process Catch-22.
Even if the Air Force and Indo-Pacific Command were to submit a detailed budget proposal for improving airbase resilience in the Indo-Pacific that included missile defenses, they’d have to get the Army’s approval. The Key West Agreement of 1948 paved the way for the creation of an independent Air Force and the establishment of the Department of Defense. It also gave the Army responsibility for defending airbases, which it retains today. The Air Force can invest in passive defenses unilaterally, but these work better in concert with active defenses, which the Army controls and has historically been reticent to commit to airbase defense. To make matters even more complicated, the executive agency for construction in Indo-Pacific Command is Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command. Building more resilient Air Force posture in the Indo-Pacific therefore requires both Army and Navy buy-in.
Beyond these procedural and organizational mismatches between responsibilities and budgetary authorities, the way the Pentagon considers force-planning and military power tends to de-emphasize posture. The “capability-capacity-readiness” framework Pentagon force planners use to describe tradeoffs is a good example. Capability means upgrading or buying new equipment — like buying a new radar or replacing an old ship with a new one. Capacity describes the quantity of equipment, people, and units the department has. Readiness can mean many things, but it principally means the ability of units to perform their missions and comprises the condition of materiel and personnel as well as unit training.
Posture — particularly passive measures to increase resilience — doesn’t fit neatly into these categories. Upgrading missile defenses could be a capability investment, but what about expanding runways or building aircraft shelters? These investments don’t increase capability or capacity. They might fit under readiness, but adding a runway doesn’t increase the mission-capable rates of aircraft at that base. That is, unless an adversary attacks the base with missiles, in which case these investments would be quite helpful. But that’s not how the Pentagon analyzes or measures readiness.
Instead, the benefits of posture investments are highly contingent and scenario- and concept-specific. Hardening Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is critical to keep it running during prospective future conflicts with China, for example, but not useful for conflicts outside the Indo-Pacific. Given long-term Chinese threats to bases like Andersen, some argue for concepts that largely eschew concentrated forward bases in favor of standoff strikes from a distributed posture. The value of posture investments are therefore highly continent on who the Pentagon plans to fight, how it plans to fight, and where it plans to fight. By contrast, larger, more capable, or more ready forces can contribute across a range of scenarios and concepts. This flexibility gives investments in forces a key advantage over investments in posture during final budget deliberations.
Even within specific scenarios, analytic arguments for posture investments aren’t always compelling. Additional runways, aircraft shelters, and hardened fuel storage aren’t silver-bullet solutions to Chinese missile threats. To paraphrase Dave Ochmanek, a leading defense analyst and longtime advocate of airbase defense, they reduce the degree to which U.S. forces get their “rear-ends” handed to them. Analysts steeped in these issues know the value of reduced rear-end-handing, but this argument often loses in budget debates to the allure of new ships, aircraft, or vehicles, all of which can take the fight to the enemy in ways passive defenses cannot.
Given these obstacles, underinvesting in posture seems inevitable. But there are solutions to this problem: one immediate, and one more lasting. First, the short-term fix. Ideally, the Pentagon would have time to revamp its processes and invest in Indo-Pacific posture through proper channels. Sadly, it’s 2022, not 2002. There isn’t time to wait for process reforms. Instead, Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense are going to have to throw money at the problem.
This approach has had success recently. Since 2015, the Pentagon has made strides to restore its force posture in Europe. The European Deterrence Initiative and its predecessor, the European Reassurance Initiative haven’t been perfect, but they’ve shored up U.S. posture for deterring Russian aggression against NATO or defending allies near Russia if deterrence fails. The vast majority of the funding has gone toward additional forces, prepositioned equipment and materiel, or infrastructure improvements. These initiatives’ clearest lesson was using funding outside the base defense budget. The bulk of the money came from the overseas contingency operations “slush fund.” This meant posture spending wouldn’t crowd out other priorities. It was “free money” for the services and European Command. Rather than a latchkey kid, posture became a cash cow.
Along these lines, Walker’s proposal for an Indo-Pacific posture “bishop’s fund” is a good start, but it should be outside the base budget to avoid displacing other investments. Rather than a cost to be borne, it should be a reward to be won. The fact that Congress responded to the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2022 Pacific Deterrence Initiative Proposals with incredulity and ultimately approved a $2.1b increase in the final National Defense Authorization Act for 2022 suggests political support exists for such extra-budgetary approaches. The FY2023 budget should expand and deepen the investments.
Ensuring the sustainable management of U.S. Indo-Pacific basing posture will require more than an injection of cash. The processes and organizational structures that got the Defense Department into this mess need substantial reforms. These reforms must achieve two critical outcomes. First, they must result in organizations and processes focused solely on long-term posture investments. Existing near-term processes like the Global Posture Executive Council can remain, but they must divest responsibility for long-term investments resolved through the budget process. Second, these long-term posture organizations need sufficient authority, resources, and access to the budget process to ensure that they don’t get crowded out by service priorities. Such organizations could ensure posture investments get sufficient analytic support, attention, and a place at the budget table.
The real question is where these organizations and processes should reside. Placing them inside the armed services ensures that they’ll have access, authority, and analytic resources. But it could encourage them to push service priorities, rather than solutions to problems that future Indo-Pacific commanders might face. Placing them inside the combatant commands would help ensure that they’ll reflect regional, vice service concerns. However, this approach raises the possibility that these organizations will remain spectators, rather than full participants in the budget process.
On balance, the armed services appear a better home, provided combatant commands get significant input on their proposals. Joint Staff responsibility for posture investments should shift from the J-5 Strategy directorate to the J-8 Resources directorate. In the Office of the Secretary of Defense, long-term posture issues should shift from the Plans office to the Strategy and Force Development office. These shifts would create Joint Staff and civilian offices responsible for tradeoffs between capability, capacity, readiness, and posture that possess the ability and authority to ensure that posture investments get a proper hearing throughout the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process.
The reforms proposed here will demand substantial engagement in the Pentagon and Congress. Luckily, there are two upcoming Congressionally mandated commissions that could provide venues for this engagement. The Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution commission should examine why the Pentagon’s budget process consistently underinvests in posture and other closely related issues like logistics and make recommendations to fix these issues. The National Defense Strategy Commission should likewise examine why posture is a consistent weakness in defense strategy — especially regarding China — and make recommendations to strengthen it.
Just as there is no easy solution to the challenges China’s rise poses to U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific, there is no easy way to surmount the obstacles to strengthening U.S. Indo-Pacific posture. Clearly, senior leaders ought to assess difficult tradeoffs, make clear decisions, and enforce those decisions. But that only works if the processes and organizations that translate senior leaders’ intentions into actions support the desired outcome, rather than obstruct it. After 20 years spent failing to address Chinese threats to U.S. bases and forces in the Indo-Pacific, it is time for senior Pentagon leadership and Congress to stop trusting the process and start reforming it. Only then will we be able turn rhetoric into reinforced concrete.
Chris Dougherty is a senior fellow in the Defense Program and co-lead of the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Prior to joining CNAS, Dougherty served as senior adviser to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development at the Department of Defense.
14. #Reviewing Three Dangerous Men (Three Dangerous Men: Russia, Iran, China, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare. Seth G. Jones)
I concur. I enjoyed this book. It is worth reading.
My main critique is that he should have made it three men and a woman and included Kim Yo jong in north Korea.
Conclusion:
Despite these minor issues, Seth Jones’ Three Dangerous Men should be read by anyone seeking a better understanding of the competitive nature of today’s international system. He does a superb job of showing how America’s competitors exploit asymmetric advantages to degrade America’s position in the world order. He provides clear and actionable recommendations for how America’s national security community should adjust its strategy to this environment and argues strongly for improving domestic understanding of America’s competitors. Without question, Jones provides a model for strategic empathy in his reliance on foreign and primary sources to inform this work. Such intercultural approaches are pivotal towards improving strategy and policy in today’s, and any era’s, global system.
#Reviewing Three Dangerous Men
The American national security community tends to focus on American capabilities, training, and objectives while not developing an adequate understanding of the competitor’s perspective. H.R. McMaster describes this focus as “strategic narcissism.” In contrast, McMaster advocates “strategic empathy,” which encourages viewing challenges and opportunities from the perspective of adversaries.[1] Sun Tzu, in a similar vein, wrote in The Art of War that “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”[2] Seth Jones seeks to capture McMaster’s concept of strategic empathy and Sun Tzu’s “knowing the enemy” in his recent book Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare.
Three Dangerous Men is a fast read that is also full of details and insights into the lives of Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, the late Iranian Quds Force Commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, and Vice Chair Zhang Youxia of China’s Central Military Commission. Jones presents the reader with formative experiences in the life and professional development of the three military leaders and how they each contributed to shaping the 21st century military and foreign policies of their respective countries. Jones relies largely on foreign primary sources, which is demonstrated both in the nuance of his writing and in endnotes filled with Russian, Persian, and Chinese references. In addition to providing insights into the interlacing of these three men’s lives and careers and the foreign policies they represent, Jones provides a thoughtful account not only of how warfare has changed in the 21st century but also how American foreign policy must adapt to these changes.
Jones argues that these military leaders view America as the main source of instability within the international system and as a direct threat to their countries’ national interests.
Zhang Youxia (Wikimedia)
Each military leader featured by Jones highlights a specific aspect of modern irregular warfare that American national security strategy must grapple with; increasingly sophisticated Russian information operations, low-attributable Iranian proxy warfare, and calculated Chinese influence operations, as means for not only their respective nations’ security, but for their strategic competition with America. Of note, Jones argues that these military leaders view America as the main source of instability within the international system and as a direct threat to their countries’ national interests. Based on this threat, and a recognition that they cannot compete with America in a conventional war, these leaders have helped developed irregular responses: asimmetrichnym (“asymmetrical”) in Russia, jang-e gheir-e kelasik (“nonclassic war”) in Iran, and san zhong zhanfa (“three warfares”) in China.
While these three strategies are distinct to the capabilities and geopolitical realities of each country, Jones observes many commonalities. The Russian asymmetric approach views and even pursues war as a continual, nondeclared struggle that seeks to use information campaigns to disorient and divide Russian opposition and then to conduct limited operations through non-attributional forces to expand Russian influence and power. Iran exploits the region’s unstable political environment to grow its own influence. Jones describes how their Quds Force has used proxies to achieve Iranian objectives in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen over the last twenty-five years, was largely responsible for Hezbollah’s success in the 2006 Lebanon War, and inflamed the insurgency in Iraq. Lastly, Jones shows how China uses political, psychological, and legal tools to coerce and influence other states to comply with Chinese interests. Jones emphasizes China’s use of espionage, intellectual theft, economic coercion, and infrastructure assistance programs to expand capabilities and undermine foreign institutions while indebting developing countries.
America is focused too exclusively on a potential conventional war and is not adequately acknowledging the irregular approaches of its competitors.
Valery Gerasimov (Wikimedia)
Given the growing nonconventional threat from these men’s militaries and the countries they serve, does America have the right foreign policy strategy? If not, how should it be reorganized? According to Jones, America is focused too exclusively on a potential conventional war and is not adequately acknowledging the irregular approaches of its competitors. Jones does not argue for disregarding the risks of a conventional war, but that American foreign policy needs a better equilibrium of investment and prioritization across conventional and irregular capabilities. To achieve this, Jones believes America should look back to its own irregular practices during the Cold War to rethink its approach to the 21st century environment.
Jones argues that there are four key components that need to be included in America’s strategy for countering these irregular challenges. First, America must center any strategy on the values of democracy, individual dignity and freedom, free press, trade, and enterprise. For Jones, this means American foreign policy must be grounded in “protecting the freedom of Americans from external enemies, advancing American prosperity, and setting an example for governments and populations overseas.”[3] Second, America needs a better cultural understanding of its near peer adversaries. China has a $18 billion market for English language training while America’s market for all language training is only $1.6 billion.[4] America needs to invest in developing leaders with robust understanding of the cultures of American competitors. Access to foreign press, speeches, and academic works should also be expanded by using translation tools. Third, Jones believes America needs a strategy to counter influence campaigns. During the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency broadcast radio programs into the Soviet Union. Today, however, there are insufficient resources for providing alternative media to the curated online environments within Russia, Iran, and China. Lastly, the US must continue to work by, with, and through its partners and must remain globally engaged. If not, America’s competitors will fill the global gaps—as they have already started to do.
Jones’ Three Dangerous Men is an excellent primer for anyone seeking to develop an understanding of Great Power Competition within the 21st century. However, at times it reads more as Three Dangerous Countries by discussing the foreign policy approaches of Russia, Iran, and China far more than connecting the origins of these polices back to the three military leaders. The shortage of insights into the influence of these military leaders may be due to the authoritarian and restrictive nature of the countries these men serve within.
A better definition for irregular warfare should include some aspect of violence…
Another shortcoming of Three Dangerous Men is the broad definition Jones uses for irregular war, which he defines as, “activities short of conventional and nuclear warfare that are designed to expand a country’s influence and legitimacy, as well as to weaken its adversaries.”[5] While this definition is useful for understanding the competitive nature of the international system, it allows almost any state action to be considered an act of war. Jones uses this broad definition to include economic tools, such as the Belt-and-Road Initiative, and political allegiances, like Russia and Iran’s partnership with Syria, as irregular warfare. While these acts present challenges within the international system, and necessitate responses in line with Jones’ recommendations, they should be defined more clearly as diplomatic and economic competition than as elements of warfare. A better definition for irregular warfare should include some aspect of violence, such as the DOD’s Joint Operating Concept definition of “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over relevant populations. Irregular warfare favors indirect and asymmetric approaches…to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.”[6]
Despite these minor issues, Seth Jones’ Three Dangerous Men should be read by anyone seeking a better understanding of the competitive nature of today’s international system. He does a superb job of showing how America’s competitors exploit asymmetric advantages to degrade America’s position in the world order. He provides clear and actionable recommendations for how America’s national security community should adjust its strategy to this environment and argues strongly for improving domestic understanding of America’s competitors. Without question, Jones provides a model for strategic empathy in his reliance on foreign and primary sources to inform this work. Such intercultural approaches are pivotal towards improving strategy and policy in today’s, and any era’s, global system.
Andrew Webster is an active-duty Army officer pursuing a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Qasem Soleimani, Former commander of Quds Force of Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, ND (Sayyed Shahab-o- din Vajedi).
Notes:
[1] H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: Harper Large Print, 2020).
[2] Sun Tzu and Samuel Griffith, The Art of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) #18.
[3] Seth Jones, Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021), 185.
[4] Jones, Three Dangerous Men, 187-188.
[5] Jones, Three Dangerous Men, 11
[6] Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare (IW) Joint Operating Concept (JOC). Version 1.0 (2007), 1.
15. The Russian Incursion No One Is Talking About
Excerpts:
Insofar as Western leaders and commentators have focused on Belarus, they have largely centered on the threat that Russia’s presence in the country poses to Ukraine. But the threat extends to Belarusian sovereignty too. The problem for Belarus is that unlike Ukraine, its leadership has welcomed Moscow’s presence. Even if the West wanted to take a stand in defense of Belarusian sovereignty, it wouldn’t have many levers to do so. Belarus’s opposition leaders have been either jailed or exiled. The Belarusian people remain under the tight control of the country’s security forces, which have already demonstrated their tolerance for peaceful protest. “There is no space for action,” Viačorka said. “We feel abandoned.”
But the West ignores Belarus at its own peril. So long as Russian troops remain on Belarusian soil, Putin will have the means to menace Kyiv—as well as NATO—from close by, all the while wrecking Ukraine’s economy and destabilizing its government. And what starts in Belarus may not necessarily end there.
The Russian Incursion No One Is Talking About
While the world watches Ukraine, Moscow is making moves in neighboring Belarus, too.
In the space of a month, Vladimir Putin has effectively managed to transform a former Soviet state into an extension of Russian territory, in full view of the United States and Europe, without firing a single shot in the country. This isn’t unfolding in Ukraine but neighboring Belarus, which has served as a home for Russian troops and military hardware since the start of the year, ostensibly because of planned drills between the two countries’ militaries. Over the weekend, the Belarusian government announced that the 30,000 Russian troops on its soil—Moscow’s largest deployment on Minsk’s territory since the end of the Cold War—could be there to stay.
Regardless of what happens in Ukraine, this is a major victory in Putin’s war with the West. The move not only represents a violation of Belarusian sovereignty, but poses a significant challenge to NATO as a security guarantor in the Baltics: Belarus shares a border with two NATO members. Still, few leaders outside the Baltic region have said anything about the announcement or how they plan to respond. The cost of doing nothing could be enormous.
Belarus wasn’t always so easy to ignore. In 2020, the country captured the world’s attention after a rigged presidential election ensuring the continued reign of its longtime leader, Alexander Lukashenko, sparked some of the largest prodemocracy protests in Belarusian history. He survived with the help of the Russian government, which provided him with the police forces to quash the demonstrations and the financing to overcome the West’s sanctions. Suddenly, a nation that purported to be neutral (military neutrality is built into the Belarusian constitution) and whose leader often complains of Russian overreach came to be seen around the world as a vassal state.
Nearly two years on, Russia’s investment has largely paid off. Not only can Putin claim a strategic outpost in his escalating conflict with Ukraine (Kyiv is just 140 miles away from the Belarusian border), but he has also managed to cement Belarus’s position within Moscow’s sphere of influence. In recent months, Lukashenko has opted to recognize Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and pledged to support Moscow in any military conflict involving Ukraine. A forthcoming constitutional referendum is expected to formally scrap the clauses guaranteeing Belarus’s neutrality, as well as its obligation to remain free from nuclear weapons.
For the Belarusian opposition exiled in Lithuania, the deteriorating situation in Belarus has happened faster than even they could have anticipated, and the shift carries with it a warning. “In Belarus, we are seeing the soft version of what could happen to Ukraine,” Franak Viačorka, a senior adviser to the Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, told me. “The only difference is that in Ukraine, the state is opposing the occupation; in Belarus, it embraces it.”
This shift won’t go unnoticed in places such as Poland and the Baltic states, which have long viewed Belarus as a bulwark between themselves and Russia. By ceding its territory to Moscow, Belarus has effectively invited Russian troops onto these countries’ doorsteps. One area in particular gives military leaders and experts pause: a 65-mile strip of land along the Polish-Lithuanian border known as the Suwałki Corridor, which connects Belarus to Russia’s far-western enclave of Kaliningrad. It is also what connects the Baltic states with the rest of NATO in Europe. If Russian forces were to seize control of this corridor from either side, not only would they have a quick route to Poland or Lithuania; they would also be able to cut off NATO’s Baltic members from the rest of the alliance.
The threat posed by the Suwałki Corridor is no longer an academic exercise. “This is now a significant vulnerability,” Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, told me. The way Hodges sees it, even if Russian provocations in Ukraine were to end, Moscow’s control of Belarus would likely remain permanent, and could even be formalized further. This would not only destroy Belarusian autonomy, which Lukashenko has all but forfeited, but it would also pose a permanent threat to NATO.
It’s no wonder that leaders in Lithuania and Latvia have echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s calls for the West to impose immediate sanctions on Russia—a move that the U.S. and the European Union were initially reluctant to take prior to an invasion of Ukraine, in the hopes that the threat of sanctions alone could deter further Russian provocation. But Moscow’s military takeover of Belarus and the subsequent deployment of Russian troops in Ukraine’s eastern separatist regions have shown the limits of this kind of optimism.
“In 2008 [in Georgia], in 2014 [in Crimea], and again this time, Russia has demonstrated its willingness to use military threats against its neighbors,” a spokesperson from the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry told me in an email. “Although Belarus is already de facto integrated into [the] Russian military structure … Russia’s forces build-up in Belarus increases Russia’s military advantage over NATO in the region. These developments require stronger NATO defense and deterrence posture in the Baltic region.”
Insofar as Western leaders and commentators have focused on Belarus, they have largely centered on the threat that Russia’s presence in the country poses to Ukraine. But the threat extends to Belarusian sovereignty too. The problem for Belarus is that unlike Ukraine, its leadership has welcomed Moscow’s presence. Even if the West wanted to take a stand in defense of Belarusian sovereignty, it wouldn’t have many levers to do so. Belarus’s opposition leaders have been either jailed or exiled. The Belarusian people remain under the tight control of the country’s security forces, which have already demonstrated their tolerance for peaceful protest. “There is no space for action,” Viačorka said. “We feel abandoned.”
But the West ignores Belarus at its own peril. So long as Russian troops remain on Belarusian soil, Putin will have the means to menace Kyiv—as well as NATO—from close by, all the while wrecking Ukraine’s economy and destabilizing its government. And what starts in Belarus may not necessarily end there.
16. Opinion | Putin Is Making a Historic Mistake
Excerpts:
If Mr. Putin feels backed into a corner, he has only himself to blame. As Mr. Biden has noted, the United States has no desire to destabilize or deprive Russia of its legitimate aspirations. That’s why the administration and its allies have offered to engage in talks with Moscow on an open-ended range of security issues. But America must insist that Russia act in accordance with international standards applicable to all nations.
Mr. Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, like to claim that we now live in a multipolar world. While that is self-evident, it does not mean that the major powers have a right to chop the globe into spheres of influence as colonial empires did centuries ago.
Ukraine is entitled to its sovereignty, no matter who its neighbors happen to be. In the modern era, great countries accept that, and so must Mr. Putin. That is the message undergirding recent Western diplomacy. It defines the difference between a world governed by the rule of law and one answerable to no rules at all.
Opinion | Putin Is Making a Historic Mistake
Guest Essay
Feb. 23, 2022, 1:00 a.m. ET
By
Dr. Albright served as the U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.
In early 2000, I became the first senior U.S. official to meet with Vladimir Putin in his new capacity as acting president of Russia. We in the Clinton administration did not know much about him at the time — just that he had started his career in the K.G.B. I hoped the meeting would help me take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations, which had deteriorated amid the war in Chechnya. Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”
I have been reminded in recent months of that nearly three-hour session with Mr. Putin as he has massed troops on the border with neighboring Ukraine. After calling Ukrainian statehood a fiction in a bizarre televised address, he issued a decree recognizing the independence of two separatist-held regions in Ukraine and sending troops there.
Mr. Putin’s revisionist and absurd assertion that Ukraine was “entirely created by Russia” and effectively robbed from the Russian empire is fully in keeping with his warped worldview. Most disturbing to me: It was his attempt to establish the pretext for a full-scale invasion.
Should he do so, it will be a historic error.
In the 20-odd years since we met, Mr. Putin has charted his course by ditching democratic development for Stalin’s playbook. He has collected political and economic power for himself — co-opting or crushing potential competition — while pushing to re-establish a sphere of Russian dominance through parts of the former Soviet Union. Like other authoritarians, he equates his own well-being with that of the nation and opposition with treason. He is sure that Americans mirror both his cynicism and his lust for power and that in a world where everyone lies, he is under no obligation to tell the truth. Because he believes that the United States dominates its own region by force, he thinks Russia has the same right.
Instead of paving Russia’s path to greatness, invading Ukraine would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.
Such an act of aggression would almost certainly drive NATO to significantly reinforce its eastern flank and to consider permanently stationing forces in the Baltic States, Poland and Romania. (President Biden said Tuesday he was moving more troops to the Baltics.) And it would generate fierce Ukrainian armed resistance, with strong support from the West. A bipartisan effort is already underway to craft a legislative response that would include intensifying lethal aid to Ukraine. It would be far from a repeat of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014; it would be a scenario reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Mr. Biden and other Western leaders have made this much clear in round after round of furious diplomacy. But even if the West is somehow able to deter Mr. Putin from all-out war — which is far from assured right now — it’s important to remember that his competition of choice is not chess, as some assume, but rather judo. We can expect him to persist in looking for a chance to increase his leverage and strike in the future. It will be up to the United States and its friends to deny him that opportunity by sustaining forceful diplomatic pushback and increasing economic and military support for Ukraine.
Although Mr. Putin will, in my experience, never admit to making a mistake, he has shown that he can be both patient and pragmatic. He also is surely conscious that the current confrontation has left him even more dependent on China; he knows that Russia cannot prosper without some ties to the West. “Sure, I like Chinese food. It’s fun to use chopsticks,” he told me in our first meeting. “But this is just trivial stuff. It’s not our mentality, which is European. Russia has to be firmly part of the West.”
Mr. Putin must know that a second Cold War would not necessarily go well for Russia — even with its nuclear weapons. Strong U.S. allies can be found on nearly every continent. Mr. Putin’s friends, meanwhile, include the likes of Bashar al-Assad, Alexander Lukashenko and Kim Jong-un.
If Mr. Putin feels backed into a corner, he has only himself to blame. As Mr. Biden has noted, the United States has no desire to destabilize or deprive Russia of its legitimate aspirations. That’s why the administration and its allies have offered to engage in talks with Moscow on an open-ended range of security issues. But America must insist that Russia act in accordance with international standards applicable to all nations.
Mr. Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, like to claim that we now live in a multipolar world. While that is self-evident, it does not mean that the major powers have a right to chop the globe into spheres of influence as colonial empires did centuries ago.
Ukraine is entitled to its sovereignty, no matter who its neighbors happen to be. In the modern era, great countries accept that, and so must Mr. Putin. That is the message undergirding recent Western diplomacy. It defines the difference between a world governed by the rule of law and one answerable to no rules at all.
Madeleine Albright (@madeleine) is the author of “Fascism: A Warning” and “Hell and Other Destinations.” She served as the U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.
17. It's time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia
I wonder if today's Republican party agrees with then-candidate Romney?
Unfortunately "I told you so" does not make a positive contribution to today's crisis.
It's time to admit it: Mitt Romney was right about Russia | CNN Politics
CNN · by Chris Cillizza · February 22, 2022
CNN —
A decade ago, Mitt Romney went on CNN and made a statement that was widely perceived as a major mistake.
“Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney, who would be the Republican presidential nominee in the 2012 race against President Barack Obama, told Wolf Blitzer in March of that year. “They — they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.”
Obama and his team pounced on the comment, insisting that it showed Romney was hopelessly out of touch when it came to the threats facing the US.
In the third presidential debate between the two candidates in October 2012, Obama went directly after Romney for that remark. “When you were asked, ‘What’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America,’ you said ‘Russia.’ Not al Qaeda; you said Russia,” Obama said. “And, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
At the time, the attack worked. Obama cast himself as the candidate who understood the current threats – led by al Qaeda. Romney was the candidate still stuck in the Cold War age, a black-and-white figure in a colorful – and complex – world.
But today, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into eastern Ukraine, Romney’s comments look very, very different. And by “different,” I mean “right,” as even some Democrats are now acknowledging.
“This action by Putin further confirms that Mitt Romney was right when he called Russia the number one geopolitical foe,” California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu said on CNN Monday night.
Given that, it’s worth revisiting the context around what Romney said and why.
He was reacting to a hot-mic moment between Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev earlier in 2012. In that exchange, Obama told Medvedev: “This is my last election. And after my election, I have more flexibility.”
Republicans were up in arms, insisting that Obama was taking a hard line with Russia publicly while, apparently, making clear to the country’s leader that he was open to compromise.
In his original interview, Blitzer was asking Romney about Russia in the context of that Obama hot-mic moment. And while his comment about Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe” is what drew the most attention and derision, it was far from the only comment Romney made about that subject in his interview with Blitzer.
“Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage,” Romney said at one point. “And for this President to be looking for greater flexibility, where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia, is very, very troubling, very alarming.”
Pressed by Blitzer on his assertion about the threat posed by Russia, Romney added this:
“Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors. Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran. A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.
“But when these – these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when – when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go – we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors?
“It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.”
What looked like a major flub during the 2012 campaign – and was used as a political cudgel by Obama – now looks very, very different. It should serve as a reminder that history is not written in the moment – and that what something looks like in that moment is not a guarantee of what it will always look like.
CNN · by Chris Cillizza · February 22, 2022
18. A prototype spy plane is tracking Russian force movements for the US Army
Operational security seems nearly impossible in today's information environment. As the Economist wrote this week, this is the era of "transparent warfare."
A prototype spy plane is tracking Russian force movements for the US Army - Breaking Defense
The Airborne Reconnaissance Targeting & Exploitation Multi-Mission Intelligence System aircraft, known as ARTEMIS. (US Army)
WASHINGTON: As the world waits on Russia’s next move in its slow-rolling invasion of Ukraine, US military aircraft continue flights over Eastern Europe, searching for changes in Russia’s posture along Ukraine’s border that could give clues about its next moves.
Flying in the region among the US military’s submarine hunting planes and surveillance drones is a novel intelligence-gathering aircraft prototype known as ARTEMIS — a Bombardier Challenger 650 that’s been souped up with military-grade sensors for tracking ground troops, flown on behalf of the US Army by defense contractor Leidos.
ARTEMIS, which stands for Airborne Reconnaissance and Target Exploitation Multi-Mission System, has been conducting operations over Eastern Europe since the beginning of the month, logging 14 sorties between Feb. 1 until Feb. 21, according to Amelia Smith, a hobbyist plane-spotter who has been using flight data to track ISR missions over Europe.
And although the crisis in Ukraine appears to be worsening, it doesn’t seem like ARTEMIS flights will be slowing down anytime soon, as open-source flight tracking sources showed the aircraft flying near Poland’s eastern border earlier today, just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russian forces would be moving into Ukrainian territory claimed by two would-be independent republics.
Update:
Flight data shows that ARTEMIS tends to make the same flight path every day, first taking off from Romania and flying through Slovakia and Hungary, where it can get a quick glimpse of Ukraine. From there, it moves along Poland’s eastern and northern borders — a route that allows ARTEMIS to project its sensors into Belarus, where Russia has staged troops, as well as Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.
-US Army CL60 ARTEMIS BRIO68
-US Army RC-12X Guardrail YANK01
-US Army RC-12X Guardrail YANK02
ARTEMIS “has both electronic collection and ground scanning radar so it could for example see the movement of tanks in real time, and collect RF [radio frequency] signals emitted by adversaries,” said Tom Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s center for national defense.
“Its sensors can go hundreds of miles out, so with the route it is flying it can see well into Belarus, Kaliningrad, and perhaps even into the Donbas region. The route is probably the closest that the US would want to take this plane to Russia and Belarus, while keeping the plane safely in NATO airspace.”
In a statement to Breaking Defense that did not specifically reference ARTEMIS, US European Command acknowledged that it routinely operates aircraft in the region in support of US intelligence objectives.
“We conduct these types of flights with allies and partners routinely, and only with prior approval from and full coordination with respective host nations. These missions demonstrate our continued commitment to safety and security in the region,” a EUCOM spokesperson said. “In accordance with longstanding DOD policy, we will not comment on capabilities, further operational details or possible future operations.”
The US Army also declined to comment on ARTEMIS operations in Eastern Europe.
ARTEMIS Takes To The Skies, But Its ‘Ultimate Enemy’ Still Awaits
ARTEMIS is a high-speed, ISR-gathering demonstrator built by Leidos in response to a nascent US Army requirement to replace its aging RC-12X Guardrail planes used to provide signals intelligence. The service is evaluating a number of fixed-wing ISR prototypes, and could announce a program of record further in the future.
Currently, the sole ARTEMIS aircraft in existence is owned and operated by Leidos, with contractors both flying the aircraft and managing the sensor suite, with data transferred in real time to the Army.
ARTEMIS was first deployed in July 2020, just 18 months after Leidos pitched the concept to the Army. It was sent to Europe in summer 2021 ahead of the Army’s Defender exercise and was supposed to head back stateside for a Project Convergence demonstration that fall, Defense News reported last year.
However, ARTEMIS ended up staying in Europe to monitor Russian troop movements near the border, reported National Defense Magazine in November.
One major advantage of ARTEMIS compared to the turboprop RC-12X is added range and endurance at high altitudes. It can fly 4,000 nautical miles or loiter for more than 10 hours with an operational altitude of 41,000 feet, giving it time for its sensors to penetrate into enemy territory over a significant amount of time.
Depending on what kind of mission the Army wants to fly, it can be configured with different sensors, including payloads for electronic intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence or radar.
According to previous press reports, the ARTEMIS aircraft carries a potential future sensor payload called the High-Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES), which is a research and development program under the service’s Multi-Domain Sensing System program. Fiscal 2022 Army budget books show HADES sensors include signals intelligence capabilities, including electronic intelligence and communications intelligence, as well as synthetic aperture radar (SAR)/moving target indicator in its first increment. Future plans include cyber/electronic warfare (EW) systems as well as air-launched effects (ALE) to extend sensing ranges, enabling ground commanders to detect, locate and target enemy assets on the ground, with an eye toward enabling long-range fires.
Experts were mixed on whether ARTEMIS’s operations in Eastern Europe could pave the way for a program of record.
“The Army has what I call this ‘primordial soup’ of potential technologies across the board, including ISR, and they are trying to figure out which of those technologies to pull forward as programs of record,” said Mark Cancian, a defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is one of those technologies that they’re looking at.”
Although ARTEMIS is not yet a program of record, Cancian said that it’s a positive sign that the Army is operating it on a near-daily basis in Eastern Europe. And with the Pentagon’s FY23 budget topline expected to be more than $770 billion, Cancian said it’s possible that the service could have the funds necessary to invest in ISR aircraft procurement this upcoming budget cycle.
But Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace expert with AeroDynamic Advisory, joked that the Army would have to beat out “the ultimate enemy, which of course is the US Air Force” before it gets the chance to buy ARTEMIS or any other fixed-wing, jet-powered ISR aircraft.
Historically, the Army has flown propeller driven aircraft — such as the Beechcraft RC-12 Guardrail — to conduct ISR and pick up signals intelligence. Meanwhile, the Air Force has dominated the realm of jet-powered ISR, operating a suite of special mission aircraft like the E-8C JSTARS aircraft that collects information about ground targets or the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint signals intelligence plane.
In the past, the Air Force has rebuffed Army attempts to field jet-powered ISR platforms, arguing that collecting tactical intelligence from the air is the job of the Air Force, and the Army could face similar pushback during this go-around, Aboulafia said.
“No service has ever voluntarily relinquished a mission,” Aboulafia said. But if the Army gets serious about buying jet-powered ISR aircraft, it could force the Air Force to get serious about replacing aging platforms like JSTARS, he added.
Other ISR planes still flying
Over the past two months, the United States ramped up ISR flights over Eastern Europe, seeking answers to questions about Russia’s intentions as it gathered forces around Ukraine’s border.
From Feb. 9 to Feb. 16, the US, NATO and key partner countries such as Ukraine and Sweden flew ISR sorties in the double digits, according to Smith’s data. So far, operations peaked on Feb. 10, when at least 22 NATO and Swedish ISR assets took to the skies, according to Smith’s data.
Today, at least 22 NATO and Swedish ISR aircraft flew sorties over Europe: USN P-8As (5 PS10x, 4 PK10x, 2 PL10x); US Army RC-12X (YANK01, YANK02, YANK03), ARTEMIS (BRIO68); USAF RQ-4 (FORTE12); RAF P-8As (STGRY01, GURNY01), RC-135W (RRR7212); 1/10 pic.twitter.com/YK65YL8DAs
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine reached a high on Monday, when Putin announced that Russia would recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk — two territories in Ukraine’s Donbas region, which have been under control by Russian-backed separatists. This morning, Russia’s upper house of parliament granted Putin the permission to use military force outside of Russia — increasing fears that a wholesale invasion of Ukraine could be imminent.
Despite worries about an escalating conflict, the US military has carried on with surveillance flights in Eastern Europe, and ARTEMIS isn’t the only US military ISR plane continuing to patrol the skies.
In recent days, the Air Force has often tasked its RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drones to fly over Ukraine for long periods of time, sometimes upwards of 20 hours, allowing the US military a view of developments on the ground in Ukraine’s disputed territories. This appeared to be the case even this morning, when a Global Hawk circled just west of Donetsk.
Another plane has that been frequently dispatched to the region over the past several months, the Air Force RC-135W Rivet Joint, was sighted over the skies of Poland this morning. The Rivet Joint is used to locate and identify electromagnetic signals, which could provide information about how Russia is positioning equipment like air defense systems.
Rivet Joint out from RAF Mildenhall. 33,000ft over Poland soaking up signals from Belarus.
US Air Force
RC135 Rivet Joint
Meanwhile, a WC-135 Constant Phoenix “sniffer” plane, which collects radioactive particles and debris from the atmosphere, flew a path over the Baltic Sea this morning.
Although not yet spotted over Eastern Europe today, Navy P-8s have flown daily missions this month, with the exception of Feb. 19. Depending on the day, they can be found over the North Sea, Norwegian Sea or Black Sea searching for submarines and tracking other activity. The Army’s RC-12X has also been active in recent weeks, collecting signals intelligence during flights over Lithuania and Latvia.
19. The Ukraine Cyber Crisis: We Should Prepare but not Panic
Excerpts:
Within the context of this crisis, we will have to be careful consumers of information; suspicious to the possibility of active measures designed to fool us. The media will also be especially challenged – they will be asked to shed light on active measures while adversaries simultaneously attempt to leverage them to launder their narratives and content.
Russia, seeking to maintain the illusion of parity with others, will lean on asymmetric tools like their cyber capabilities in this crisis. Unfortunately, these tools are already being utilized, and this is likely to continue. Fortunately, they are unlikely to seriously escalate the situation because they are limited. With this in mind, we should prepare without succumbing to paranoia, and remain mindful that, when it comes to cyberattacks, the bang is often worse than the blast.
The Ukraine Cyber Crisis: We Should Prepare but not Panic
Sandra Joyce is EVP and Head of Global Intelligence at Mandiant, where she oversees intelligence collection, research, analysis and support services for threat intelligence customers. Sandra has held positions in product management, business development and intelligence research over the course of over 23 years in both national security and commercial industry.
OPINION — As the situation in Ukraine unfolds, the prospect of serious cyberattacks has captured the attention of cyber intelligence professionals like myself and the many organizations we work with in both the public and private sectors. Concerns are reasonable and valid; Russia has a well-established history of aggressively using their considerable cyber capabilities in Ukraine and abroad. We are concerned that as the situation escalates, serious cyber events will not merely affect Ukraine. But while we are warning our customers to prepare themselves and their operations, we are confident that we can weather these cyberattacks. We should prepare, but not panic because our perceptions are also the target.
Russia has twice turned off power to Kiev in the middle of winter, they have carried out a global destructive attack that froze global shipping and vaccine production, and they have even fielded tools to target critical infrastructure technology that could have fatal consequences. The U.S. and Europe have seen wave after wave of attempts to burrow into our sensitive critical infrastructure – attempts we believe were designed to prepare for a scenario such as the crisis that is unfolding in Ukraine today Without a doubt, the threat they pose is serious, especially for the defenders tasked with defending their networks from some of the most formidable intelligence services on the planet.
This isn’t just a Ukraine problem. In fact, we believe that after attacking U.S. and French elections, Western media, the Olympics, and many other targets with limited repercussions, Russia is emboldened to use their most aggressive cyber capabilities throughout the West. While they are unlikely to engage the West in combat, these tools give Russia the means to aggressively compete with others without risking open armed conflict. Should U.S. and allies deploy sanctions in the event of a full invasion, the risk of this only increases.
We are imploring our customers and community to prepare for disruptive and destructive attacks, similar to those that have recently transpired in Ukraine. We are concerned about scenarios like a destructive attack that leverages broad access from the software supply chain or other means to gain access to multiple networks simultaneously. Even an automated, simplistic data wiping attack at this scale could have serious consequences for public and private networks; but those consequences are not a foregone conclusion. Many of the same steps defenders might take to harden their networks against ransomware crime will serve to prepare them from a determined state actor, if they take them now.
The Cyber Initiatives Group is hosting its second quarter summit of the year, co-hosted by Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly and former NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett on Wednesday, May 25.
Cyberattacks can be costly for individual organizations and may even seem frightening to some, but their real target is our perceptions. The purpose of these cyberattacks is not simply to wipe hard drives or turn out the lights, but to frighten those who cannot help but notice. The audience of these attacks is broad, but it is also empowered to determine how effective they are. While these incidents can be quite serious for many, we must remain mindful of their limitations. We only do the adversary a service by overestimating their reach.
Destructive and disruptive attacks are adjacent to other tools of influence. Some of the very same actors who carry out these cyberattacks also carry out hack and leak activity or promote false narratives. All of these operations have the same effect; they corrode and undermine institutions by spreading doubt and uncertainty.
Within the context of this crisis, we will have to be careful consumers of information; suspicious to the possibility of active measures designed to fool us. The media will also be especially challenged – they will be asked to shed light on active measures while adversaries simultaneously attempt to leverage them to launder their narratives and content.
Russia, seeking to maintain the illusion of parity with others, will lean on asymmetric tools like their cyber capabilities in this crisis. Unfortunately, these tools are already being utilized, and this is likely to continue. Fortunately, they are unlikely to seriously escalate the situation because they are limited. With this in mind, we should prepare without succumbing to paranoia, and remain mindful that, when it comes to cyberattacks, the bang is often worse than the blast.
Read more expert-driven national security insight, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
20. Facing the Inevitable: Preparing for the Next War Requires Changing Paradigms
The six shifts:
Paradigm Shift 1: The CCP is an existential threat, not simply an economic competitor
Paradigm Shift 2: Emphasis on the obligations, not the entitlements of citizenship
Paradigm Shift 3: Strategic competition requires a competitive resourcing strategy
Paradigm Shift 4: Space is a global commons that demands defense
Paradigm Shift 5: Nuclear non-proliferation is not an absolute good
Paradigm Shift 6: There are two Chinas; the diplomatic recognition of Taiwan
Facing the Inevitable: Preparing for the Next War Requires Changing Paradigms
February 23, 2022
Last week’s remarks by Speaker Pelosi, encouraging American athletes to avoid "angering" the "ruthless" Chinese government, and subsequent lackluster ratings for the Beijing Olympics, suggest an increasing public awareness of the problematic nature of the rise of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Whether there will be a realization of what the ascendance of such a brutal and powerful adversary requires of the American public and leaders remains to be seen.
Expressly making the point last June, Cai Xia, the dissident former professor of Ideology at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School, released a paper giving her insider's perspective on the failure of engagement by the United States with the PRC. She argues the PRC and the United States have been and will continue to be strategic adversaries. She calls for an acceptance by U.S. leadership that engagement has failed and the adoption of "hard-headed defensive measures" and "offensive pressure" to stress a "fragile" Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Professor Cai is one among several voices asserting the world's two preeminent powers are on a collision course. Whether the analytical framework predicting this inevitable fight is geographic, diplomatic, or economic, the United States is faced with its own geo-strategic version of Pascal's wager. Given revelations of recent PRC weapons development, preparing for the next war would seem to be the winning bet.
Preparing for such a conflict against a peer competitor is no simple task. The CCP is a formidable adversary with an active and integrated government approach to fighting and defeating the United States. To counter this, the United States must mobilize itself more broadly than has been seen in 80 years. It will need to undergo intellectual and emotional phase shifts and adopt changes to six key paradigms. This will enable the United States to compete and win against a daunting and coordinated opponent, intent on reshaping the world to its benefit at the expense of the freedom and prosperity of others.
Presently, the U.S. government (USG) and its people have only partially embraced the perspectives necessary to drive social, economic, political, or military preparations for this potential war. To harness the strengths of U.S. society, enhance deterrence, and properly posture for a potential fight, the USG and the American citizenry must adopt the following new paradigms.
Paradigm Shift 1: The CCP is an existential threat, not simply an economic competitor
The essential paradigm shift for America is to accept that the CCP is an existential threat to the United States and its present way of life. The world economic system, the broad acceptance of the rule of law, liberal democracy (its inherent value of the individual), all of these are under deliberate attack from the current rulers of the PRC. Left unchecked, they will use their power to enact political warfare and to institute oppressive governance wherever they identify the CCP has interests, incrementally rewriting the standards for global affairs just as it did for domestic matters in Hong Kong and its genocidal policies toward the Uyghurs. The future of American freedom and prosperity will depend on the ability to confront and contain the PRC in matters both foreign and domestic.
This demands a concerted plan to prepare the population for war, a campaign to inform and educate U.S. citizens about the threat posed by the CCP and the malign acts the neo-totalitarian regime is perpetrating against its own people and across the globe. Particularly, emphasizing those acts directed specifically at the United States. It will be imperative to link the aggressive behaviors of the CCP to a need for American action, justifying those costs (and reduced economic interaction) as the price of freedom.
Paradigm Shift 2: Emphasis on the obligations, not the entitlements of citizenship
More critical than information campaigns clearly identifying Chinese misdeeds and public service announcements contrasting CCP despotism with the benefits of the liberal order will be building public awareness of civic responsibilities through a revamped and widespread push for effective civics education. The effort must highlight the soundness of the American experiment, the exceptionalism of that system, and the responsibility of the citizen to participate in and defend the American democracy.
This "attitude adjustment" is a vital part of U.S. preparation. The final report of the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service, Inspired to Serve, provides a roadmap for beginning this conditioning. Its recommendations encompass methods that provide diverse opportunities to contribute meaningfully to national service, educate and encourage patriotism and bolster the dedication required across governments (federal/state/local) and throughout industry.
Ultimately, the contest with the CCP requires a whole of nation solution with greater sacrifice and service than U.S. citizenry are currently accustomed to. The All-Volunteer Force, for example, will not be enough to meet the needs of the services. The United States should begin now to modernize and update the draft, commencing routine rehearsals to exercise the Selective Service System. These rehearsals should include processing representative portions of the draftee pool all the way through the Medical Entrance Processing Stations. Similarly, The United States should begin mobilizing key industries to demonstrate and improve important industrial capacities. Such practice will prepare the nation, the economy, the services, and the draft system for the future. Importantly, these steps provide deterrent effects, articulating the severity of the threat to the U.S. population and signaling the adversary the United States is serious about protecting the nation and its interests.
Paradigm Shift 3: Strategic competition requires a competitive resourcing strategy
In 1960, the U.S. defense budget accounted for 9% of GDP. In 2021 it was 3.3%. The Chinese are outproducing the United States in their efforts to modernize the People's Liberation Army and U.S. leaders have expressed concern that this trajectory is leading to an impending loss of military advantage for the United States. It is unreasonable to expect the U.S. defense industry and the Department of Defense (DOD) to effectively provide for the nation's security if the resources provided are not in accordance with the challenge. Since the last Cold War ended, there has been a tremendous peace dividend, but after 30 years, the strategic environment has changed, and so too must U.S. resourcing strategy. Tax, fiscal and monetary policies must all change to support a rebalancing of spending; sacred cows of entitlements, tax rates, and federal debt burdens will all require reconsideration.
When America invests its treasure in this manner, it carries with it an obligation to improve DOD stewardship. It will not be sufficient to triple the expenditure and do more of the same. Instead, the future force should come through more agile procurement. Systems will need to be modular, less exquisite, more numerous, more affordable, and more attritable. If the United States begins this process promptly, it will also reinvigorate key sectors in the nation's industrial base and those of allies.
Paradigm Shift 4: Space is a global commons that demands defense
As the United States invests its resources to prepare, it must move past the question of whether to militarize space and onto the question of how to use military force to keep space free and accessible to all. Space and the high seas have much in common. Our telecommunications and the "network of things" are already deeply dependent upon space. As commercial applications from resource extraction to travel become more prevalent in space, the already significant impact of actions beyond the atmosphere on the lives and lifestyles of Americans will only increase. No longer a place for occasional and inspirational scientific adventures in research, rather the modern equivalent of Mahan's venue for Sea Power, the critical need for a military presence to regulate and secure U.S. interests across the space domain will only grow.
Americans should expect that the nascent space force will increasingly resemble the other services, with growing requirements for forces and platforms that the service leverages to protect against the malign intent of the PRC, which has already demonstrated the ability to take offensive actions in space and is moving aggressively to expand its position within the domain. As General Dickinson, the Commander of U.S. Space Command, recently noted, successful deterrence and strategic victory in future conflicts will depend upon a robust U.S. warfighting capability in space.
Paradigm Shift 5: Nuclear non-proliferation is not an absolute good
U.S. security guarantees and advocacy against the proliferation of nuclear weapons have been tightly linked since the beginning of the atomic age. In the NATO-Warsaw Pact stand-off, parity in nuclear capabilities and symmetrical risks to each bloc leant to a tense balance. Everyone shared the burden of risking their homeland in the march up the escalation ladder. This is less true for the rough alignment of parties in the Indo-Pacific. There are neither strong alliance structures nor linkages between key nations (Japan, Taiwan, Australia, India) and the United States to elicit shared symmetrical risk or absolute confidence in the United States' willingness to act in allies' defense.
The unconnected bi-lateral nature of the U.S. security arrangements in the Pacific suggests that given the CCP's nuclear capability and ability to hold the United States and allied forces in the region at risk, allowing other nations to develop their own survivable nuclear strike capability could be a significant deterrent. A nuclear-armed Japan, for example, would present a dilemma for the CCP's decision to strike U.S. bases and facilities in Japan. This allied domestic nuclear capability prevents CCP leadership from boxing U.S. leadership into choosing nuclear exchange in order to defend its ally's homeland, changing the calculus fundamentally by dramatically increasing the speculative cost of striking Japan.
Paradigm Shift 6: There are two Chinas; the diplomatic recognition of Taiwan
Perhaps the most important change of perspective relates to how the United States (and resultantly the world community) sees and incorporates the Republic of China into the global community. It would cost the United States and other like-minded allies relatively little to recognize Taiwan formally; to bring it fully into the diplomatic and economic structures the United States and allies are intent on defending. Significantly, such steps would make the cost to the CCP of forcing reunification tremendous.
Doing away with the ambiguity surrounding the status of Taiwan and making it clear that CCP ambitions to settle any "internal" matters must reckon with a global response could serve as a significant deterrent step. The political, military, and economic linkages between Taiwan, the United States and others that will stem from formal recognition create further additive cost and corresponding risk to any CCP effort to subdue the Republic of China. There are a number of specific steps the United States could take in this vein, including replacing the Taiwan Relations Act with a bi-lateral treaty extending collective security protections; increasing military cooperation through foreign military sales; and committing to either an enduring presence of United States forces in Taiwan or at key times of the year.
“It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.” John F. Kennedy – Speech at Civic Auditorium, Seattle, Washington. September 06, 1960.
The world has changed dramatically since 1960, but the role of the United States has not. Lulled by the long period without such villains, the rise of the PRC serves to remind what is required of the United States and her people to secure the peace the world desires.
The United States and the world would not seek conflict out, but like the Soviets before them, President Xi and the CCP seem intent on offering a choice between their brand of neo-totalitarianism or a fight. Peace is achieved through strength; to have it on favorable terms, the United States must prepare for war.
Mustering the wherewithal to meet this challenge demands a change of perspective. Shifting paradigms as described above will ensure that the United States sees and acts clearly to preserve the system that birthed unprecedented freedom and security across the globe. They enable the United States to posture, prepare and produce the combination of societal strengths and international alliances that make for effective deterrence and, barring that, win wars.
LtCol Matthew R. Crouch, United States Marine Corps, is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, he holds master’s degrees in Political Science and International Business Administration and is an Olmsted Scholar.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the U.S. government or other organization.
21. A CIA Cold Warrior on the Intelligence War Over Ukraine
One of our unsung American heroes. Burton is a national treasure.
His human intelligence class at Georgetown is one of the most sought after.
Excerpts:
I ask Gerber what he thinks Putin is doing, consuming the attention of the rest of us. “He may not know himself at this stage because I think that what he’s trying to do, his tactics, are heavily influenced by what he sees on our side. He fundamentally believes, as many Russians do, that Ukraine is Russia and therefore the separation is unnatural.”
Putin sees NATO, according to Gerber, as an “anti-Russian organization” and Ukraine’s tropism toward Europe and the U.S. as intolerable. Though he may have underestimated his adversary.
“When Putin went into it,” Gerber tells me, “he may have calculated that we have a dysfunctional country and dysfunctional Congress and a weak president. Has every reason to believe, like [former CIA director and defense secretary Robert] Gates said, that Biden has been on the wrong side of every national security decision for the last 40 years. He may have thought that with Biden as president he could bamboozle him. But Biden has done certainly better than I expected him to, and probably better than Putin expected. He’s rallied NATO.”
A CIA Cold Warrior on the Intelligence War Over Ukraine
Burton Gerber, former chief of the CIA’s Soviet section, worries America has publicized too much of what it knows – or thinks it knows – about Russia’s war plans
Yesterday, at a prerecorded meeting of Russia’s Security Council, President Vladimir Putin sat listless and slumped in his chair, far away from his gallery of boyars, pretending to weigh their counsel before launching a pre-scripted war against Ukraine. He was not impressed when Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, stammered and flubbed his lines, confusing the present and future tenses. “Speak clearly, Sergei!” Putin admonished him.
Then Naryshkin got ahead of himself, and everyone else, by saying he supported incorporating the Russian-occupied territories of Donbas, east Ukraine, into the Russian Federation. “That’s not what we’re discussing!” Putin snarled. “We’re talking about whether to recognize their independence or not.”
Naryshkin is meant to be an integral member of Putin’s war party, one of the trusted siloviki, or security strongmen, who believe the West is in terminal decline, Russia is once more a great-power-in-the-making, and sanctions are a badge of honor. But here he was, quivering before the tsar on international television.
It was a strange spectacle in its own right. Imagine the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev publicly humiliating KGB chair Yuri Andropov in front of the Politburo on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a war Andropov was quietly against but dared not tell the boss. The spectacle was made even stranger by the fact that the current crisis unfolding in Eastern Europe is one that has largely been shaped and prefigured by spymasters like Naryshkin.
The United States and United Kingdom claim to have detailed intelligence of Putin’s war plans, right down to a rough timetable for when he intends to attack his neighbor with the apparent goal of regime change. In the “worst-case scenario,” now thought by U.S. officials to be the likeliest, Russia will rain rockets down on Kyiv and a full-scale military occupation will take hold in Ukraine’s major cities, turning them into Madrid in 1936 or Stalingrad in 1942, with street to street (and house to house) fighting. Lists are said to have been drawn up of patriotic Ukrainians marked for assassination, disappearance or deportation to camps. Washington has encouraged Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to relocate his government westward, to Lviv, near the Polish border, even as the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv has already crossed over that border into safe NATO territory.
The strategy of forecasting an apocalyptic war with the aim of preventing it or, at the very least, rallying allies to support the maximum of nonmilitary responses to it, is unprecedented. So is seeing one the architects of a looming confrontation — possibly a massive land war in Europe — made to look like a dog who’s just gone through a carwash with the top down.
To try to make sense of this surreal psychodrama, I rang up an old spymaster.
Burton Gerber is a former CIA case officer, former station chief in Moscow and the former head of Langley’s Soviet section. He is widely credited with overhauling the philosophy and mechanisms by which the U.S. recruited Soviet agents during the end of the Cold War, an ethos encapsulated by Gerber Rules. Any offer to spy for the West coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain, these stipulated, should be chased up in earnest — the antithesis of the ouroboros of paranoia that hollowed out the Agency when Jesus James Angleton ran his obsessive mole-hunts.
“He was an institution,” recalls John Sipher, himself the former head of Russia operations at the Agency. “We really weren’t 100% professional in working in denied areas. Gerber brought rigor and professionalism.”
Now retired, Gerber, in his late 80s, lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches human intelligence operations at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. The last time we spoke, he reminds me with an old case officer’s attention to detail, I was living in Los Angeles. He waits for me to offer my opinion of the city that convinced me I’m an inveterate New Yorker before venturing his own. “When we were last there,” he says, referring to his late wife Rosalie, “we came away thinking L.A. has a civilization all its own. Not really American.” He congratulates me (again) on my choice of a spouse, a fellow Midwesterner — Gerber grew up in Ohio — and Michigan State alum.
Our hourlong conversation, which began with the Russia-Ukraine crisis, veered pleasantly at times into ancient history. “The worst thing Whittaker Chambers ever did,” Gerber says, “was translate that god-awful book ‘Bambi’ from German into English. Now look. We’re overrun with deer at the expense of my beloved wolves.”
Gerber developed a legendary fascination with wolves when he was a case officer stationed overseas. Was it the predatory nature of intelligence work that drew him to the lupine? No, actually. “For balance, I had to have an interest that consumed me when I wasn’t doing intelligence work. Well, I’d always liked and had dogs. But everyone studies dogs. So I hit upon the idea: What about wolves? I began to formally study them, belong to wolf organizations, and create a library. You always have to have something that takes your mind off your work in this trade.”
He had another hobby, similar to Matt Damon’s ship-in-a-bottle tinkering in “The Good Shepherd”: He built scale models. “I’d build houses and put curtains in with tweezers. When you’re doing that, you’re not thinking about what you’re going to do with an agent tomorrow — you’re thinking about putting curtains into a tiny house with tweezers. I had a brothel, a railway station, the whole shebang. You have to have something that consumes you.”
I ask Gerber what he thinks Putin is doing, consuming the attention of the rest of us. “He may not know himself at this stage because I think that what he’s trying to do, his tactics, are heavily influenced by what he sees on our side. He fundamentally believes, as many Russians do, that Ukraine is Russia and therefore the separation is unnatural.”
Putin sees NATO, according to Gerber, as an “anti-Russian organization” and Ukraine’s tropism toward Europe and the U.S. as intolerable. Though he may have underestimated his adversary.
“When Putin went into it,” Gerber tells me, “he may have calculated that we have a dysfunctional country and dysfunctional Congress and a weak president. Has every reason to believe, like [former CIA director and defense secretary Robert] Gates said, that Biden has been on the wrong side of every national security decision for the last 40 years. He may have thought that with Biden as president he could bamboozle him. But Biden has done certainly better than I expected him to, and probably better than Putin expected. He’s rallied NATO.”
Well, up to a point.
Gerber is still unsure where the Germans will fall should Russia press ahead with a “full-scale” invasion as opposed to a “limited incursion.” Today, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Nord Stream 2, Russia’s prized natural gas pipeline in Europe, will not be “certified” as a result of Moscow’s recognition of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics.” Scholz further stated that he is ordering a complete reassessment of Germany’s energy security.
All well and good, but Gerber believes the Germans, whom he knows well, “have an almost mythical approach toward Russia that goes back to the late Middle Ages.” Economic ties with Russia, he fears, may be too entrenched to fundamentally alter German foreign policy. “Nord Stream 2 is not an incidental thing. It means a lot to the Germans, and Biden’s problem with NATO is not over because Putin is sort of playing this, ‘Will I, won’t I?’ game with respect to war. Biden and his gang are constantly taking public positions that the Russian are getting ready to invade today, tomorrow, the next day. But if Putin doesn’t — then what?”
Gerber sees the former KGB officer using an old-school playbook of strategic ambiguity combined with what the Germans would call Zersetzungsdienst, or decomposition, the depletion of morale of your enemy. A prolonged, slow-boil conflict that never quite boils over but keeps everyone guessing will eventually make them grow tired of doing so.
“What I see is that Putin wants to keep the world, particularly the Europeans, on edge. He likes it that way. He’s the center of everything, his preferred state. And they are wholly reactive. By leaving the threat of war lingering, he waits until people get fed up with waiting and their avowed support for Ukraine begins to flag. This is how he creates seams within NATO. Maybe it leads to another stab at diplomacy, eating away at the resolve we’ve seen so far. If this sentiment becomes strong enough, Putin wins because he can outlast NATO in negotiations. Maybe the alliance doesn’t have 30 different viewpoints, but it has at least four or five. He will exploit them.”
Gerber is skeptical that Putin really wants a big war at all, despite the enormous buildup of forces all around Ukraine’s border — 190,000, at the last U.S. estimate, including troops from Rosgvardia, the Russian National Guard, which could certainly play a major role in occupying a hostile foreign nation.
“Putin wants success and that is not necessarily the same thing as war and occupation,” Gerber says. “Success can come in pieces without invading Ukraine all the way to the Polish border. Once he’s formally taken over the Donetsk and Luhansk republics and sent in his so-called peacekeepers, he’s got a really good foothold to chip away at more of the country. There are sympathizers throughout Ukraine. Russia has plenty of experience as an intelligence collector recruiting people, and it’s not hard for Russia to recruit Ukrainians. Then he uses covert action and guerilla warfare to advance his agenda. How did they take over Czechoslovakia — not in ’68 but in ’48? They did it with a coup.”
What Putin and his general staff really have to worry about is partisan warfare, which the Americans are said to be training up Ukrainians for and will underwrite. “Suppose they had a coup and took over tomorrow. What happened after World War II in Ukraine? There was a resistance movement by Ukrainian nationalists, supported by a certain organization I know, and it lasted for years. In the ’50s, what were the Soviets doing? They were killing Ukrainian resistance leaders in West Germany, the ‘wet affairs.’ During my time there they killed two. One was Stepan Bandera.”
And what of the Biden administration’s bold information strategy of leaking everything it gets its hands on from the Russian side, including, according to The New York Times, the Russian military’s plan of attack?
“From where I’m sitting, this looks more like the White House’s policy than the intelligence community’s policy. And Putin may not care because he could be the author of some of these leaks himself. If he knows where his regime is compromised, he may be planting these threats for our side to pick up. I don’t know what the Americans’ capabilities are. I’m sure they have assets in Russia. But they may not be as good as they appear to be if Putin is, in effect, cooperating with them and churning out disinformation. Again, what’s the result of these leaks? The world is at peak anxiety and that is a benefit to Putin, because that’s a world he can more skillfully manipulate. I think our side has said too much.”
Do Gerber Rules still apply to Russia after the collapse of communism, when a Popov or Penkovsky could be recruited in large part because they needed money or resented a system with ideological fetters on their career advancement? Now Russian elites freely travel abroad, park their children in expensive boarding schools and breezily spend in the West what they steal at home. “Absolutely, they do,” Gerber says. “Our job was always to find bodies who can be turned and manipulate them. There are always those who realize what their country is, and if they’re working for the government, how evil it is.”
Would Naryshkin, given his visible mortal terror yesterday, be a good target for CIA cultivation and recruitment? Gerber laughs. “There are a number of Russians, certainly not a majority, who believe Russia was going to take a different course once the Soviet Union collapsed, and they’re not happy with what Putin and his gang have done. I think there may be even more opportunities to recruit in Russia today than there were in my time. Because a society that has loosened for a certain extent and then doesn’t progress in that loosening creates more disappointment.”
22.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
