Quotes of the Day:

"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus." 

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether or not it is the same problem you had last year." 

– John Foster Dulles

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed." 

–Anne Rice

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 26, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 26, 2024

3. Israel is ready to pause its war in Gaza during Ramadan if a hostage deal is reached, Biden says

4. Delays in promised Western military aid to Ukraine are costing lives, the defense minister says

5. Leaked Hacking Documents Show China’s Focus on Tracking Ethnic Minorities

6. Moscow Plans to Produce 2.7 Million Rounds of Ammunition, Ukrainian Intel Says

7. Opinion | This U.N. agency aiding Ukraine refugees is an unheralded success story

8. Can Iran and Its Surrogates Be Contained?

9. Putting Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not 'ruled out' in the future, French leader says

10. Does the American army’s future lie in Europe or Asia?

11. Maintaining the best thing the US built in Iraq: Continued support to the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service

12. 'The Unit': For first time a member of America's most secret military unit has penned a memoir

13. How everything became a ‘psyop’ for conservative media

14. After U.S. Strikes, Iran’s Proxies Scale Back Attacks on American Bases

15. How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

16. In Ukraine, Russia Is Inching Forward Death by Death

17. Dragons in the West: Chinese Communist Party Threats in Europe and the Imperative of a Strategic Pivot

18. Kissinger and the True Meaning of Détente

19. Confusion, lack of policy led to Austin’s hospitalization secret

20. Why Military Life Is Worth It

21. My Mother’s Secret

22. Department Releases Unclassified Review Summary Following Austin's Hospitalization

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 26, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-26-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Sweden will join NATO following Hungary’s formal approval of Sweden’s accession bid on February 26.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin signed two decrees on February 26 that officially re-establish the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts, codifying major Russian military restructuring and reform efforts.
• The formal transfer of regions previously under the responsibility of the Northern Fleet is likely part of a wider Russian effort to re-establish military district commands as the primary headquarters for the Russian ground forces while reassigning naval assets to the Russian Navy, as ISW previously reported.
• The re-creation of the MMD and LMD supports the parallel objectives of consolidating control over Russian operations in Ukraine in the short-to-medium term and preparing for a potential future large-scale conventional war against NATO in the long term.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on February 25 that Russia is preparing a new offensive that will start in late May or summer 2024, consistent with ISW’s assessment that Russian forces have regained the theater-wide initiative and will be able to pursue offensive operations when and where they choose as long as they hold the initiative.
• Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov is continuing a recent campaign to engage with Russian military personnel following the Russian capture of Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast and reportedly visited a command post of the 58th Combined Arms Army (CAA) in Ukraine.
• Over 20 heads of state, including 15 European Union (EU) leaders met in Paris on February 26 to discuss ramping up ammunition supplies to Ukraine.
• Germany announced a new military aid package to Ukraine on February 26.
• Transnistrian sources reportedly told Russian independent outlet Verstka that Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, is not planning to ask to join Russia during the Congress of Deputies in Tiraspol on February 28.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed gains near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka amid continued positional engagements along the entire frontline.
• Russia reportedly imported almost 450 million euros (about $488 million) worth of sanctioned “sensitive” European goods, including weapons technology, between January and September 2023.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 26, 2024

Feb 26, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 26, 2024

Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 26, 2024, 8pm ET 

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

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2:30pm ET on February 26. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the February 27 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Sweden will join NATO following Hungary’s formal approval of Sweden’s accession bid on February 26.[1] Hungary was the final NATO member that needed to approve Sweden’s bid, but Sweden’s accession to the alliance has been a major sticking point for the Hungarian Parliament and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.[2] Sweden will now become NATO’s 32nd member upon completing official accession procedures.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed two decrees on February 26 that officially re-establish the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts, codifying major Russian military restructuring and reform efforts. Putin signed one decree that deprives Russia’s Northern Fleet (NF) of its status as an “interservice strategic territorial organization” (a joint headquarters in Western military parlance) and transfers the land of the Northwestern Federal Okrug previously under the NF’s command to the newly formed Leningrad Military District (LMD).[3] Putin signed a second decree that formally re-establishes the LMD and the Moscow Military District (MMD) — with the LMD taking over most of the territory previously under the NF and the MMD taking over most of the territory previously under the Western Military District (WMD).[4] The second decree also incorporates occupied Ukraine into the Southern Military District (SMD), notably including all of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts (as well as Crimea, which has been part of the SMD since 2014), not just the parts currently under Russian occupation. The inclusion of both the occupied and un-occupied parts of Ukrainian territory further suggests that Russia maintains maximalist objectives in Ukraine and seeks to fully absorb all five of these Ukrainian territories into the Russian Federation.

The formal transfer of regions previously under the responsibility of the Northern Fleet is likely part of a wider Russian effort to re-establish military district commands as the primary headquarters for the Russian ground forces while reassigning naval assets to the Russian Navy, as ISW previously reported.[5] Russian state media reported in November 2023 that naval assets of all five of Russia’s fleets — the Northern, Pacific, Baltic, and Black Sea fleets and the Caspian Flotilla — may return to direct subordination to the Russian Navy, while the ground, aviation, and air defense assets of the fleets will be allocated to military district commands. This information is still unconfirmed, but it appears that the Russian military is trying to reconsolidate ground forces and assets under military districts while consolidating naval forces and assets under the Russian naval chain of command.[6]

The re-creation of the MMD and LMD supports the parallel objectives of consolidating control over Russian operations in Ukraine in the short-to-medium term and preparing for a potential future large-scale conventional war against NATO in the long term.[7] The February 26 decree officially disbands the WMD, which the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) formed in 2010 by merging the MMD and LMD.[8] The WMD previously covered the Russian border with northeastern Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States, which stretched the WMD’s strategic focus between overseeing Russian operations in Ukraine following the 2022 full-scale invasion and posturing against NATO.[9] The re-separation of the WMD into the MMD and LMD, therefore, is a direct remedy to this issue. The LMD will now run along NATO’s northeastern border, and the MMD will border northeastern Ukraine and Poland, which will allow Russia to simultaneously posture against NATO and streamline command and control (C2) for the war in Ukraine. Putin previously claimed that it was necessary to create the LMD after Finland joined NATO in 2023, signaling the Kremlin’s clear intent to use the LMD to posture against NATO.[10]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on February 25 that Russia is preparing a new offensive that will start in late May or summer 2024, consistent with ISW’s assessment that Russian forces have regained the theater-wide initiative and will be able to pursue offensive operations when and where they choose as long as they hold the initiative.[11] Zelensky also stated that the Ukrainian military has a clear plan to counter Russian forces. ISW continues to assess that Russian forces regained the initiative across the theater following Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive and that Russia will likely be able to determine the time, location, and scale of future offensive operations in Ukraine if Ukraine conducts an active defense throughout the theater in 2024, thereby ceding the strategic initiative to Russia. Russian forces will have the ability to maneuver reserve concentrations and determine how and where to allocate resources while forcing Ukraine to respond defensively as long as Russia maintains the strategic initiative. Ukrainian forces could deny Russia these opportunities if Ukrainian forces have enough means to challenge the Russian initiative and pursue their own offensive operations in 2024.

Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov is continuing a recent campaign to engage with Russian military personnel following the Russian capture of Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast and reportedly visited a command post of the 58th Combined Arms Army (CAA) in Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted footage on February 26 claiming to show Gerasimov visiting a 58th CAA command post in Ukraine, hearing reports about the operational situation, and presenting medals to Russian servicemen.[12] The 58th CAA is currently pursuing offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast, so the MoD video suggests that Gerasimov visited a command post somewhere in the Zaporizhia Oblast direction. The Russian MoD published footage showing Gerasimov awarding Russian soldiers after the capture of Avdiivka on February 21, which is notably the first public depiction of Gerasimov serving his command duties since December 29.[13] Gerasimov fired former 58th CAA Commander Major General Ivan Popov in July 2023 following reports that Popov bypassed Gerasimov’s command and directly appealed to the Kremlin to complain about Gerasimov’s refusal to rotate 58th CAA troops away from the frontline for rest and reconstitution while they were defending against Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive push in Zaporizhia Oblast.[14] Gerasimov likely visited the 58th CAA command post in part to rebuild his relationship with 58th CAA lower-level commanders and servicemembers following Popov’s firing and the criticism it generated of Gerasimov.[15] Gerasimov also appears to be engaged in a campaign to present himself as an effective and interested chief of the General Staff, and his recent public appearances on areas of the front where Russian forces are making tactical gains are likely part of this effort to bolster his public image.

Over 20 heads of state, including 15 European Union (EU) leaders met in Paris on February 26 to discuss ramping up ammunition supplies to Ukraine.[16] French President Emmanuel Macron organized the conference and announced the creation of a new coalition to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles and munitions.[17] Macron also stated that France “will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war” and that European states should prepare for possible Russian escalations in the coming years.[18] Estonian Prime Minister Kaya Kallas stated that Estonia is providing long-term military aid to Ukraine worth 0.25 percent of Estonia’s GDP through 2028 and called on Ukraine’s other supporters to make similar commitments.[19]

Germany announced a new military aid package to Ukraine on February 26. The new military aid package includes 14,000 155mm artillery shells, 10 Vector recon drones, four WISENT-1 mine-clearing machines, and other equipment.[20] German outlet Der Spiegel reported on February 26 that the Bundeswehr’s Ukraine Situation Center Head, Major General Christian Freuding, stated that Germany is looking “all over the world” for artillery ammunition to provide to Ukraine.[21] Unspecified insider sources told Der Spiegel that Germany is engaged in “discreet negotiations” to obtain Indian artillery rounds through intermediaries and that “similar negotiations” may be possible with Arab countries.

Transnistrian sources reportedly told Russian independent outlet Verstka that Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, is not planning to ask to join Russia during the Congress of Deputies in Tiraspol on February 28. Two unnamed sources close to Transnistrian authorities told Verstka that the Congress of Deputies will not discuss integration with Russia and instead focus on discussing economic pressure from Moldova, without taking any “sudden steps.”[22] A source involved in preparing for Russian presidential elections in Transnistria claimed that Transnistria did not receive any tasks from the Kremlin aside from preparations for presidential elections. Verstka observed that Transnistrian foreign policy department head Vitaly Ignatiev “cooled off” many speculations about Transnistria’s possible request to join Russia after claiming on a local TV broadcast that the purpose of the congress is to bring to attention Moldova’s latest “economic pressure” on Transnistria. The Moldovan Bureau for Reintegration stated on February 22 that “there is no reason to believe that the situation in [Transnistria] could deteriorate” in response to public discourse regarding the Congress of Deputies in Tiraspol.[23] Ukrainian officials similarly stated that the possibility of a Russian ground attack on Ukraine from Transnistria is low.[24] ISW issued a warning forecast on February 22 and assessed that Transnistrian officials may call for a referendum on annexation to Russia to support Russian hybrid operations intent on politically and socially destabilizing Moldova.[25] It remains noteworthy that Transnistrian authorities have suddenly ordered the convening of the Congress of Deputies for the first time since that body authorized referenda on joining Moldova (that failed) and on seeking Russian annexation (that passed) in 2006. ISW amends its warning in light of these reports, however, and will continue to monitor the situation in Transnistria closely.

Key Takeaways:

• Sweden will join NATO following Hungary’s formal approval of Sweden’s accession bid on February 26.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin signed two decrees on February 26 that officially re-establish the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts, codifying major Russian military restructuring and reform efforts.
• The formal transfer of regions previously under the responsibility of the Northern Fleet is likely part of a wider Russian effort to re-establish military district commands as the primary headquarters for the Russian ground forces while reassigning naval assets to the Russian Navy, as ISW previously reported.
• The re-creation of the MMD and LMD supports the parallel objectives of consolidating control over Russian operations in Ukraine in the short-to-medium term and preparing for a potential future large-scale conventional war against NATO in the long term.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on February 25 that Russia is preparing a new offensive that will start in late May or summer 2024, consistent with ISW’s assessment that Russian forces have regained the theater-wide initiative and will be able to pursue offensive operations when and where they choose as long as they hold the initiative.
• Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov is continuing a recent campaign to engage with Russian military personnel following the Russian capture of Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast and reportedly visited a command post of the 58th Combined Arms Army (CAA) in Ukraine.
• Over 20 heads of state, including 15 European Union (EU) leaders met in Paris on February 26 to discuss ramping up ammunition supplies to Ukraine.
• Germany announced a new military aid package to Ukraine on February 26.
• Transnistrian sources reportedly told Russian independent outlet Verstka that Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, is not planning to ask to join Russia during the Congress of Deputies in Tiraspol on February 28.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed gains near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka amid continued positional engagements along the entire frontline.
• Russia reportedly imported almost 450 million euros (about $488 million) worth of sanctioned “sensitive” European goods, including weapons technology, between January and September 2023.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces recently advanced south of Kreminna amid continued positional engagements along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on February 26. Geolocated footage published on February 26 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced east of Bilohorivka (south of Kreminna).[26] Positional engagements continued northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka and Ivanivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Tabaivka; west of Kreminna near Terny; and south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka.[27] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Artem Lysohor reported that Russian forces have had “over 10 times” more artillery ammunition than Ukrainian forces have had in the Kupyansk direction for the past month.[28] Elements of the Russian 16th Spetsnaz Brigade (Russian General Staff Main Directorate [GRU]) reportedly continue operating in the Kupyansk direction.[29]

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

Russian forces recently marginally advanced west of Bakhmut amid continued positional fighting in the area on February 26. Geolocated footage published on February 25 shows that Russian forces marginally advanced northeast of Ivanivske (west of Bakhmut).[30] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are advancing towards central Ivanivske from the east and continue fighting on the settlement’s northern outskirts.[31] A Russian milblogger also claimed that elements of the Russian 98th Airborne (VDV) Division pushed Ukrainian forces from their positions in a forest area northwest of Ivanivske.[32] Positional fighting also continued southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Andriivka and south of Bakhmut near Pivdenne.[33]

Russian forces captured Lastochkyne, a settlement west of Avdiivka, as of February 26 after Ukrainian troops withdrew from the area.[34] Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy stated on February 26 that Ukrainian forces withdrew from Lastochkyne and established defensive positions on the Orlivka-Tonenke-Berdychi line (northwest to southwest of Avdiivka).[35] Geolocated footage published on February 26 shows that Russian forces entered the southeastern part of Sieverne (west of Avdiivka).[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces completely captured Sieverne and Tonenke (northwest of Sieverne) and also entered the eastern outskirts of Orlivka, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[37] Positional fighting continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka, Stepove, and Berdychi, and southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske and Nevelske.[38] The Russian “Black Hussars” aerial reconnaissance detachment of the 15th Motorized Rifle Brigade’s (2nd Combined Arms Army [CAA], Central Military District [CMD]) and elements of the 114th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps) are operating northwest of Avdiivka, and elements of the Russian 1st “Slavic” Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR Army Corps) are operating near Stepove.[39]

Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets argued that Russian forces were able to concentrate a tactically decisive number of forces in the Avdiivka direction during offensive efforts to capture the settlement by gradually transferring elements of formations from the Lyman direction towards Avdiivka, using separate motorized rifle brigades and by reconstituting forces already operating near Avdiivka.[40] Avdiivka is within 10 kilometers of Donetsk City, a major city held by Russian forces since 2014, which likely helped Russian forces move manpower and materiel to Avdiivka via Donetsk City without offering attractive targets for Ukrainian strikes against logistics elements or force concentrations. Mashovets also noted that Russian forces ran a failed disinformation campaign aimed at hiding the Russian redeployments near Avdiivka by claiming that these forces were redeploying to southern Ukraine.[41] Mashovets stated that while Russian forces were able to eventually deploy enough forces and means to capture Avdiivka, Russian forces failed to achieve operational surprise, resulting in their initial failure to capture Avdiivka in October and November 2023.[42]

Positional fighting continued west and southwest of Donetsk City on February 26, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional fighting continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda and Novomykhailivka.[43] Elements of the Russian 255th Motorized Rifle Regiment (20th Guards Motorized Rifle Division, 8th CAA, Southern Military District [SMD]) are operating near Pobieda, and elements of the Russian 238th Artillery Brigade (8th CAA, SMD) are operating near Krasnohorivka.[44]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts on February 26 but did not result in any battlefield changes. Positional battles occurred near Zolota Nyva (southeast of Velyka Novosilka), Hulyaipole, and Marfopil (immediately southeast of Hulyaipole).[45] Elements of the Russian 34th Motorized Rifle Brigade (49th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly operating in the southern Donetsk Oblast direction.[46]

Positional engagements continued near Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast on February 26, but there were no changes on the frontline.[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that the situation near Verbove (east of Robotyne) is calm because the main fighting shifted to the Robotyne area, where Russian forces are struggling due to their lack of artillery and electronic warfare (EW) support.[48] Elements of the Russian 71st Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th CAA, SMD) continue to operate near Robotyne.[49]

Positional battles continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, particularly near Krynky, on February 26.[50] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces intensified their use of reconnaissance drones in southern Ukraine to compensate for their loss of reconnaissance capabilities due to Ukraine‘s downing of an A-50 long-range radar detection aircraft on February 23.[51] Humenyuk added that Russian forces are flying tactical aviation at a greater distance from the frontline over the Black Sea and used over 100 drones on February 25.

Ukrainian Navy Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk reported on February 26 that successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian Black Sea Fleet assets are inhibiting Russia’s use of Kalibr cruise missile carriers in the western Black Sea.[52] Pletenchuk reported that Russian on average has around 10 combat-ready cruise missile carriers, of which only one is in Sevastopol and the rest are in Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai. Pletenchuk added that Russian forces keep one cruise missile carrier in Sevastopol to defend Sevastopol Bay from Ukrainian air attacks. Pletenchuk observed that Russian forces have not launched missile strikes from submarines in nearly three months and only launched four Kalibrs in mid-February 2024.

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

Russian forces launched a mid-sized combined drone and missile strike against Ukraine on the night of February 25 to 26. Ukrainian military sources reported that Russian forces launched an Iskander-M ballistic missile from occupied Crimea, two S-300 surface-to-air missiles from Belgorod Oblast, three Kh-59 cruise missiles and a Kh-31P anti-radar missile from occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, and 14 Shahed-136/-131 drones from Kursk Oblast.[53] Ukrainian forces destroyed all three Kh-59s and nine Shahed drones.[54] Ukrainian sources noted that at least one S-300 missile struck and destroyed an agricultural enterprise in Pisochyn, Kharkiv Oblast.[55] Russian sources claimed that the strike targeted Ukrainian military assets deep in the Ukrainian rear for the third night in a row.[56]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on February 26 that Russian forces dropped 3,203 glide bombs against Ukrainian cities and frontline positions between January 1 and February 24, 2024.[57] ISW previously assessed that Russian forces have increased their use of glide bomb strikes and were able to do so particularly effectively at scale to provide close air support to ground troops in Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast, facilitating the Russian capture of the settlement.[58]

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

Russia reportedly imported almost 450 million euros (about $488 million) worth of sanctioned “sensitive” European goods, including weapons technology, between January and September 2023. Bloomberg reported on February 26 that Russia imported a quarter of the sanctioned goods directly from the European Union (EU) and imported the rest through intermediary countries such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Serbia, China, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia.[59] Ukraine-based open-source intelligence organization Frontelligence Insight reported that the Russian drone production company “Special Technology Center” acquires US- and Taiwanese-made dual-use technologies through international intermediaries and former representatives of Western companies in Russia.[60] Frontelligence Insight reported that the “Special Technology Center,” which is under US sanctions, specializes in producing Orlan-10 reconnaissance drones and Leer-3 drone-based electronic warfare (EW) systems for the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).

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

Russia has reportedly developed a comprehensive electronic warfare (EW) system intended to combat enemy drones. Russian drone manufacturer “Stupor” LLC Development Director Vladislav Kustarev stated on February 26 that the Stupor LLC has developed a drone detection and suppression system that includes a radar station, radio frequency scanner, optical drone recognition station, and jamming equipment to help protect certain objects from drone attacks.[61] Kustarev stated that its comprehensive system combines the “Storm” and “Shtil” systems, which both have a range of over five kilometers, as well as the “Pars” system which has a range of up to two kilometers, to better protect against drones operating on different frequencies.

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

Ukraine continues to innovate and expand domestic drone production. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Andriy Yusov reported that Ukrainian forces are using the Ukrainian-made “Sych” strike-reconnaissance drone, which had already damaged and destroyed $100 million worth of Russian military equipment.[62] Yusov specified that the “Sych” drone has a range of 50 kilometers and is resistant to Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems. Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin also stated on February 26 that Ukraine has caught up to Russia in one-way attack drone production.[63] Kamyshin added that Ukraine is already producing drones similar to Iranian Shahed-136/131 drones.

Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency of the Ministry of Defense (MoD) signed the first direct contract with a Swedish manufacturing enterprise on February 26, which will allow Ukraine to directly purchase materiel from the enterprise.[64] The Ukrainian MoD reported that Ukraine signed this contract within the framework of the cooperation agreement it signed with Swedish Defense Materials Administration (FMV) during the July 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius.

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

Nothing significant to report.

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian actors are pursuing information and cyber operations targeting Ukrainian military personnel. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on February 26 that unspecified Russian actors tried to spread false information about a supposed Russian hack of Ukraine’s “Delta” NATO-standard network-centric situational awareness system.[65] The Ukrainian MoD noted that unspecified individuals hacked Ukraine’s New Voice (NV) outlet and posted false information alleging that Russian hackers used Delta to track the movements of Ukrainians, particularly uniformed military and law enforcement personnel.[66] The Ukrainian State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection also issued a warning on February 26 that unspecified actors conducted a new cyber-attack against Ukrainian servicemembers using malware spread via the Signal messaging app.[67] The Ukrainian Government Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) identified and neutralized the cyber-attack and urged the Ukrainian defense forces to install protective software on all associated devices to protect against future attacks.[68] Such informational manipulations and cyber-attacks are likely meant to destabilize Ukrainian military systems, spread dissatisfaction amongst Ukrainian servicemembers, and foment discontent towards the Ukrainian military command.

Russian officials and propagandists used the Second Congress of the International Russophile Movement and the Forum on Multipolarity on February 26 to amplify several long-standing Russian information operations.[69] Russian Chairperson of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs Grigory Karasin claimed that the event demonstrates the world’s interest in joining a coalition with Russia meant to counter the hegemony of the collective West — reiterating a commonplace Kremlin narrative that poses the collective West as a destructive imperialistic hegemon that only a Russia-led multipolar world order can counterbalance.[70]

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

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is conducting an information operation falsely alleging that the US and West attempted to interfere in the February 25 Belarusian parliamentary election.[71] Russian officials will likely intensify and extend this information operation to the Belarusian presidential election in 2025.

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

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 26, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-february-26-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Northern and Central Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces announced that its 162nd Division uncovered a Hamas tunnel network connecting the Central Gaza Governorate to the northern Gaza Strip over the past several weeks.
• Southern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces continued to conduct clearing operations in western Khan Younis. Palestinian militias targeted Israeli forces operating in Abasan al Kabira, east of Khan Younis.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh met with the Qatari Emir to discuss ceasefire negotiations.
• West Bank: Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters at least three times in the West Bank. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh resigned.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least nine attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Iraq: Several Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have signaled that they will resume conducting attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East.
• Syria: Local Syrian sources reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is trying to rebuild its military infrastructure in Deir ez Zor Province, Syria.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM reported that it intercepted three Houthi one-way attack drones.
• Iran: The International Atomic Energy Organization disclosed to UN member states that Iran has reduced its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium since late October 2023.
• 
  

IRAN UPDATE, FEBRUARY 26, 2024

Feb 26, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, February 26, 2024

Andie Parry, Annika Ganzeveld, Peter Mills, Alexandra Braverman, Ahmad Omid Arman, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00pm ET

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

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

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

Key Takeaways:

• Northern and Central Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces announced that its 162nd Division uncovered a Hamas tunnel network connecting the Central Gaza Governorate to the northern Gaza Strip over the past several weeks.
• Southern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces continued to conduct clearing operations in western Khan Younis. Palestinian militias targeted Israeli forces operating in Abasan al Kabira, east of Khan Younis.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh met with the Qatari Emir to discuss ceasefire negotiations.
• West Bank: Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters at least three times in the West Bank. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh resigned.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least nine attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Iraq: Several Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have signaled that they will resume conducting attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East.
• Syria: Local Syrian sources reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is trying to rebuild its military infrastructure in Deir ez Zor Province, Syria.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM reported that it intercepted three Houthi one-way attack drones.
• Iran: The International Atomic Energy Organization disclosed to UN member states that Iran has reduced its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium since late October 2023.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that its 162nd Division uncovered a Hamas tunnel network connecting the Central Gaza Governorate to the northern Gaza Strip over the past several weeks.[1] The IDF Nahal Brigade and Yahalom combat engineering unit located at least 35 entrances to the 10-kilometer-long complex equipped with plumbing, storage rooms, bedrooms, and military equipment.[2] The tunnel passed under the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in the central Gaza Strip and extended to al Isra University in southern Gaza City.[3] The IDF said that Hamas used the tunnel system to transfer personnel between the Central Brigade and Gaza City Brigade, particularly between the Zaytoun Battalion, the Nuseirat Battalion, and Sabra Battalion.[4] CTP-ISW previously reported on the cross-governorate tunnel system on February 21 and assessed that Hamas battalions likely used the system to infiltrate previously cleared areas of the northern Gaza Strip.[5] The 162nd Division destroyed the tunnel complex after documenting the route.

The IDF 162nd Division continued clearing operations in Zaytoun neighborhood, southeastern Gaza City, on February 26. The IDF 401st Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) “intensified attacks” in Zaytoun and killed over 30 Palestinian fighters.[6] The IDF Nahal Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) targeted at least 10 Palestinian fighters as part of the division-wide clearing operations in the Gaza City and Central Gaza governorates.[7] 

Palestinian militias claimed at least seven attacks targeting Israeli forces in their continued defense of southern Zaytoun on February 26.[8] Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed several mortar attacks targeting Israeli forces south of Zaytoun.[9] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement targeted Israeli armor with rockets and anti-tank missiles in Zaytoun.[10] Hamas, PIJ, and the National Resistance Brigades mortared Israeli armor and dismounted infantry east of Zaytoun in a combined operation on February 25.[11]

The IDF continued to conduct clearing operations in western Khan Younis on February 26. The IDF 7th Armored Brigade and Unit 414 directed airstrikes on Palestinian fighters operating in Khan Younis.[12] The IDF Givati Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) ambushed and clashed with fighters in western Khan Younis.[13] Israeli forces seized grenades, ammunition, and other unspecified military equipment in clearing operations in Khan Younis.[14]

Palestinian militias targeted Israeli forces operating in Abasan al Kabira, east of Khan Younis, on February 26. Hamas targeted about 20 Israeli personnel in Abasan al Kabira with anti-personnel devices.[15] Hamas fighters targeted Israeli armor in the same area.[16] PIJ and the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which is the self-proclaimed military wing of Fatah and aligned with Hamas in the war, both claimed sniper attacks targeting Israeli infantry in eastern Khan Younis.[17]

Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh met with the Qatari Emir to discuss ceasefire negotiations on February 26.[18] US, Qatari, and Egyptian officials proposed a new hostage deal to Israeli negotiators during discussions in Paris on February 24.[19] Israel reportedly agreed to a framework that would release up to 400 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 40 Israeli hostages and a six-week truce under the new proposal.[20] Haniyeh claimed Hamas had shown great “flexibility and seriousness” in its contacts with mediators about the deal on February 26 but accused the Israeli government of stalling.[21] Haniyeh stated that Hamas’ most important goal is to “stop the humanitarian catastrophe” in the northern Gaza Strip and indicated that food aid for civilians in northern Gaza should not be tied to any other negotiation issues.[22] Senior Israeli officials believe Hamas will not agree to the proposed ceasefire deal based on reports from Qatari mediators that the proposal does “not correspond with Hamas demands.”[23] An Israeli intelligence and military delegation reportedly arrived in Qatar on February 26 to set up an operational center to support negotiations.[24]

The Israeli prime minister’s office said that the IDF presented the war cabinet with a plan for evacuating civilians from combat zones in the Gaza Strip on February 26.[25] The office did not specify the contents of the plan. An Israeli Army Radio correspondent reported that the IDF may allow women and children under the age of 14 to return to the northern Gaza Strip as part of Rafah evacuation plans.[26] The IDF would establish transit corridors and vet those returning to the northern Gaza Strip.[27] The same correspondent stated the IDF discussed establishing tent cities in the central Gaza Strip and Khan Younis for Gazans whose homes were destroyed.[28] Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the families of Israeli hostages on February 26 that Israel would not allow Gazans to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip until Hamas releases all the hostages to ”maintain pressure.”[29] Another member of the three-man war cabinet, Benny Gantz, said on February 18 that the IDF would enter Rafah on March 10 if Hamas did not release the hostages it holds.[30]

The Israeli war cabinet approved a “new” unspecified plan to distribute humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip.[31] The war cabinet said that the plan aims to ”prevent the looting that has occurred in the northern Strip” where Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid.[32] An unnamed Israeli official reported that the war cabinet is considering what organizations can take over the aid provision function from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip.[33] Humanitarian organizations have struggled to provide aid to civilians in the northern Gaza Strip over the past several weeks, citing security breakdowns.[34]

Palestinian militias conducted two rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on February 26. PIJ fired a rocket barrage at the Kissufim military site.[35] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement launched rockets at Reim.[36]

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters at least three times in the West Bank on February 26.[37]

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh resigned on February 26.[38] Shtayyeh had served as prime minister since 2019 and had participated in peace negotiations with Israel since 1991.[39] US and Palestinian officials stated that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will likely appoint a close confidante and chairman of the Palestinian Investment Fund, Mahammad Mustafa, as the next prime minister.[40]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least nine attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on February 25.[41] Hezbollah claimed that it intercepted an IDF Hermes 450 drone near Nabatiyeh, southern Lebanon, on February 26.[42] The IDF stated that its David’s Sling medium-range air defense system intercepted one of two surface-to-air missiles fired by Hezbollah targeting the drone.[43] The IDF conducted airstrikes targeting a Hezbollah air defense site that killed two Hezbollah fighters near Baalbek, Lebanon, following the incident.[44] This airstrike is the furthest airstrike inside Lebanon that Israel has conducted since October 7.[45] Hezbollah launched at least 60 rockets targeting an IDF site in the Golan Heights on February 26 in retaliation for the IDF airstrike near Baalbek.[46]

The IDF killed senior Hezbollah commander Hassan Hossein Salami in southern Lebanon on February 26. The IDF described Salami as “commander of the Hajir sector” under Hezbollah’s Nasser unit and stated that Salami had previously organized attacks targeting IDF bases near Kiryat Shmona.[47] Israeli journalists described Salami’s rank within Hezbollah as equivalent to a brigade commander.[48] Hezbollah’s Nasser unit is one of the primary Hezbollah military formations south of the Litani River in Lebanon.[49]

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Several Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have signaled that they will resume conducting attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—halted its attacks targeting US forces following a one-way drone attack that killed three US servicemembers in northeastern Jordan on January 28.[50] Ashab al Kahf—an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia close to Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba—released statements on February 23 and 25, respectively, vowing to continue conducting attacks targeting US forces in the Middle East as well as Israel.[51] Ashab al Kahf also recently hung posters in Baghdad with an image of Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba Secretary General Akram al Kaabi with the warning “the matter is settled, what is coming is greater.”[52]

Kaabi separately released a statement on February 25 emphasizing that the current pause in attacks is a “temporary tactic” and the “calm before the storm.”[53] Kaabi claimed that “traitors” provided the United States with information about Iranian-backed Iraqi militia positions and that the militias must therefore “reposition” and “change [their] methods and tactics.”[54] Kaabi stated that Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba does not oppose the ongoing negotiations between Washington and Baghdad about the status of the US-led international coalition in Iraq but described those who believe that the United States will leave Iraq via negotiations as “delusional.”[55] He claimed that the United States only understands “force and weapons.”[56]

Prominent Iraqi Shia cleric Ammar al Hakim discussed the ongoing negotiations between Washington and Baghdad about the status of US-led international coalition forces in Iraq during a meeting with US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski on February 26.[57] The United States and Iraq began these negotiations in late January 2024.[58] Hakim praised the Mohammad Shia al Sudani administration’s efforts to establish “bilateral relationships” with the United States and International Coalition countries.[59] Hakim separately praised the December 2023 provincial council elections for “strengthening” Iraqi democracy but condemned recent “attempts to destabilize [Iraq] by resorting to violence and the use of weapons.” Hakim may have been referring to the recent rise in intra-Shia assassinations across Iraq.[60]

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani met with Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Mohammad Kazem Al-e Sadegh on February 25.[61] Iraqi and Iranian media reported that Sudani and Sadegh discussed “bilateral relations” and Iraqi development projects but did not provide further details about what the two officials discussed.[62] Sadegh is a senior officer in the IRGC Quds Force, which is consistent with the long-standing trend of Iran appointing IRGC Quds Force members to simultaneously work as the ambassador to Iraq.[63]

The Iraqi federal government granted Russian state-owned oil company Gazprom a contract to develop the Nasiriyah oil field in Dhi Qar Province on February 7.[64] The Iraqi state-owned Dhi Qar Oil Company, which is headed by Ali Khudair Abbas al Aboudi, previously operated the Nasiriyah oil field.[65] Aboudi is a member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), a Shia political party formerly headed by prominent Shia cleric Ammar al Hakim.[66] The Iraqi National Security Service reportedly arrested Aboudi in March 2021 for accepting a $250,000 bribe.[67] Ammar al Hakim currently heads the National Wisdom Movement. The Dhi Qar provincial council elected a National Wisdom Movement member named Mortada al Ebrahimi as Dhi Qar governor on February 5, two days before the Iraqi government granted Russia the development contract.[68] Hakim previously discussed “attracting foreign investments” during a meeting with Russian Ambassador to Iraq Elbrus Kutrashev on January 31.[69]

Local Syrian sources reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is trying to rebuild its military infrastructure in Deir ez Zor Province, Syria, following the February 2 US airstrikes on Iranian and Iranian-backed positions. Four Iranian communications specialists entered Syria from Iraq and began installing advanced communications and surveillance systems on February 22.[70] The communications systems are used by IRGC-backed militias based near Deir ez Zor City. Syrian media reported these same communications systems were previously destroyed in US airstrikes.[71] Several IRGC officials returned to Deir ez Zor Province on February 23, according to other local reports.[72] The IRGC officials left Syria ahead of the February US airstrike. CTP-ISW cannot confirm the local Syrian reporting. 

Lebanese Hezbollah-affiliated al Mayadeen reported that the IDF conducted a drone strike around al Qusayr, Homs Province, on the Syria-Lebanon border on February 25.[73] The strike targeted two trucks suspected of transporting Hezbollah military cargo.[74] Hezbollah-affiliated al Manar network claimed the strike killed two members of Hezbollah.[75]

US CENTCOM reported that it intercepted three Houthi one-way attack drones on February 24.[76] The Houthi military spokesperson claimed that the group launched an unspecified number of drones targeting a US warship on February 24.[77]

Houthi-affiliated media outlets reported that the United States and United Kingdom conducted airstrikes targeting Houthi positions north of Hudaydah on February 26.[78] The United States and United Kingdom has not claimed responsibility for any airstrikes in Yemen at the time of this writing.

The International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) disclosed to UN member states on February 26 that Iran has reduced its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium since late October 2023.[79] The Iranian regime has, according to an IAEA report, diluted some of this stockpile to 20 percent enriched uranium, thereby reducing its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium by 6.8 kilograms to 121.5 kilograms.[80] The overall Iranian stockpile of enriched uranium has continued to expand since October 2023, however.[81] Iran has also refused the entry of several weapons inspectors into the country and the inspection of undeclared nuclear material, according to the IAEA.[82]

Iranian media claimed that Iranian security forces killed a Jaish al Adl commander inside Pakistani territory on February 23.[83] Jaish al Adl is a Baloch Salafi-jihadi group that operates along the Iranian border with Pakistan. Iranian media described the commander as “the main perpetrator of recent terrorist operations in southeastern Iran.”[84] There has been an uptick in anti-regime militant activity in southeastern Iran since December 2023. Jaish al Adl conducted a two-stage attack targeting a police station in Rask, Sistan and Baluchistan Province, in December 2023.[85] The Afghan branch of the Islamic State also conducted a terrorist attack in Kerman Province in January 2024, killing over 80 individuals.[86] Pakistani media denied on February 24 that Iranian forces killed the Jaish al Adl commander.[87]

The Iranian Law Enforcement Command (LEC) arrested two men accused of being part of Sipah Sahaba in Hormozgan Province on February 25.[88] LEC spokesperson Brigadier General Saeed Montazer al Mahdi stated that the two men arrested had completed ”bomb-making courses” outside of Iran and intended to travel to an unnamed southern city in Iran. Mahdi stated the two had previously been imprisoned in Pakistan from 2010-15 on charges of bombing a Pakistani city. Mahdi described Sipah Sahaba as an “anti-Shia” terrorist group.[89] Sipah Sahaba is a prominent Sunni militant organization that originated in Pakistan.[90]

Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas during separate meetings at the 55th Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on February 26. Abdollahian discussed the Israel-Hamas war with the UN secretary general, International Committee of Red Cross president, Jordanian foreign affairs minister, and Kuwaiti foreign affairs minister on the sidelines of the meeting.[91] Abdollahian separately blamed the United States and Israel for the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip in a speech at the UN Human Rights Council meeting.[92]

The 17th annual Joint Commission for Economic Cooperation between Iran and Russia began in Tehran on February 26.[93] Russian and Iranian experts will examine bilateral cooperation in various sectors including oil, nuclear energy, gas, finance and information technology. Iranian media reported the Russian delegation will consist of 160-170 experts from various government ministries and members of the Russian private sector.[94] The 17th Commission is headed by Iranian Oil Minister Javad Owji and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak. Iranian media reported that Owji and Novak will preside over the signing of cooperation agreements on oil, energy, and free economic zones between Iran and Russia.[95] The conference will run from February 26 to 28.

3. Israel is ready to pause its war in Gaza during Ramadan if a hostage deal is reached, Biden says

Israel is ready to pause its war in Gaza during Ramadan if a hostage deal is reached, Biden says

BY TIA GOLDENBERG, WAFAA SHURAFA AND SAMY MAGDY

Updated 5:35 AM EST, February 27, 2024

AP · February 27, 2024

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel would be willing to pause its war on Hamas in Gaza during the upcoming Muslim fasting month of Ramadan if a deal is reached to release some of the hostages held by the militants, President Joe Biden said in comments released on Tuesday.

There was no immediate Israeli reaction to Biden’s comments on an emerging framework deal, brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar, under which Hamas would free some of the dozens of hostages it holds, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners and a six-week halt in fighting. During the temporary pause, negotiations would continue over the release of the remaining hostages and additional Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

The start of Ramadan, which falls around March 10, is seen as an unofficial deadline for a cease-fire deal. The month is a time of heightened religious observance and dawn-to-dusk fasting for hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. Israeli-Palestinian tensions have flared in the past during the holy month.

Biden said on Monday that he hopes a cease-fire deal could take effect by next week.

“Ramadan’s coming up and there has been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during Ramadan as well, in order to give us time to get all the hostages out,” Biden said in an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”

At the same time, Biden did not call for an end to the war, which was triggered by the deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, when militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took captive roughly 250 people, according to Israeli authorities.

Biden, who has shown staunch support for Israel throughout the war, left open the door to an eventual Israeli ground offensive in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, on the border with Egypt, where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has fled under Israeli evacuation orders.

The prospect of an invasion of Rafah has prompted global alarm over the fate of Gaza civilians trapped there. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said a ground operation in Rafah is an inevitable component of Israel’s strategy for crushing Hamas. This week, the military submitted for Cabinet approval operational plans for the offensive, and as well as evacuation plans for civilians there.

Biden said he believes Israel has slowed its bombardment of Rafah.

“They have to and they have made a commitment to me that they’re going to see to it that there’s an ability to evacuate significant portions of Rafah before they go and take out the remainder Hamas,” he said. “But it’s a process.”

Israel’s devastating air, sea and ground campaign in Gaza has killed more than 29,700 people, most of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, which does not distinguish between fighters and noncombatants in its count.

The fighting has obliterated large swaths of the urban landscape, displaced 80% of the battered enclave’s population and triggered a humanitarian crisis that has left a quarter of the population starving, according to the United Nations, and sparked concerns of imminent famine.

The first and only deal in the war, in late November, brought about the release of about 100 hostages, mostly women, children and foreign nationals, in exchange for about 240 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, as well as a brief halt in the fighting.

Roughly 130 hostages remain in Gaza, but Israel says about a quarter of them are dead.

Negotiations were still underway in Qatar on Tuesday to hammer out the deal’s details. A senior official from Egypt has said the draft cease-fire deal includes the release of up to 40 women and older hostages in return for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners, mostly women, minors and older people.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said the proposed six-week pause in fighting would include allowing hundreds of trucks to bring desperately needed aid into Gaza every day, including the hard-hit north.

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Shurafa reported from Rafah, Gaza Strip, and Magdy from Cairo.

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Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

AP · February 27, 2024

4. Delays in promised Western military aid to Ukraine are costing lives, the defense minister says

Delays in promised Western military aid to Ukraine are costing lives, the defense minister says

BY SAMYA KULLAB

Updated 10:17 PM EST, February 25, 2024

AP · February 25, 2024

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Half of all Western military support promised to Ukraine fails to arrive on time, complicating the task of military planners and ultimately costing the lives of soldiers in Russia’s war, Ukraine’s defense minister said Sunday.

Rustan Umerov, speaking at the “Ukraine. Year 2024” forum in Kyiv, said each delayed aid shipment means Ukrainian troop losses and underscored Russia’s superior military might.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later told attendees at the event that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in action since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. It was the first time that Kyiv has confirmed the number of its losses.

Commemorations to mark the second anniversary of the war on Saturday brought expressions of continued support, new bilateral security agreements and new aid commitments from Ukraine’s Western allies. But Umerov said that they still needed to deliver on their commitments if Ukraine is to have any chance of holding out against Russia.

“We look to the enemy: their economy is almost $2 trillion,” he said, adding that they use up to 15% of official and nonofficial budget funds for the war, which constitutes more than $150 billion. He said that whenever a commitment doesn’t arrive on time, “we lose people, we lose territories.”

During a press conference after the forum Sunday, Zelenskyy said four brigades did not take part in the country’s counteroffensive against Russian forces because they hadn’t received the equipment they were expecting.

“Can you imagine the numbers of guys who would have fought, who couldn’t? The ones that had to sit and wait for the equipment they never received?”

The Ukrainian leader also confirmed plans for an international peace summit to tackle issues exacerbated by the war, such as nuclear or food security, in Switzerland in 2024. That would be followed by a potential invitation to Russian representatives to attend a second summit later in the year. However, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would not submit to a peace plan that did not serve its interests, and discarded the idea of direct negotiations.

“Is it possible to talk to a man who kills his opponents?” Zelenskyy said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We will offer a platform where he can agree that he has lost this war and that it was a mistake.”

Zelenskyy also spoke about ongoing fighting in northeastern Ukraine, where front-line conflict has intensified in recent months leading to the capture of the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka. He said that Moscow was using heavy artillery fire to put pressure on Ukrainian forces in the directions of Kharkiv and Kupiansk.

However, his speech remained defiant. “Will Ukraine lose in this war? I am sure that it won’t. Our most difficult moment was on Feb. 24 two years ago. We have no alternative but to win. (...) If Ukraine loses, then we will not exist. We do not want such an ending to this fight for our lives.”

Russian forces on Sunday appeared to be pressing on west of Avdiivka, the strategic city whose capture this month handed Moscow a major victory as fierce fighting rages on in eastern Ukraine.

Gen. Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, who leads Ukrainian forces fighting in the area, said Sunday that his troops had retreated from much of Lastochkyne, a western suburb of Avdiivka. Some Ukrainian media on Saturday reported that Russian troops had taken Lastochkyne, but there was no official confirmation from Kyiv and the battlefield situation appeared fluid.

Jake Sullivan, U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, on Sunday asserted that he believes Kyiv has a path to victory, as long as Western allies deliver “the tools that it needs.”

Speaking to NBC in Washington, Sullivan acknowledged that Ukrainian forces lost Avdiivka because of a shortage of ammunition, calling on U.S. Congress to “step up” and pass the additional $60 billion in security assistance requested by the Biden administration.

“I think it’s important to take a step back and remember that two years ago, everyone was predicting that Ukraine was going to fall,” Sullivan said, adding that Moscow has already “failed in its fundamental objective” to “subjugate” its neighbor.

“The reality is that Putin gains every day that Ukraine does not get the resources it needs, and Ukraine suffers,” Sullivan added.

Also on Sunday, Germany’s top diplomat announced during a visit to southern Ukraine that Berlin would send Kyiv an extra 100 million euros ($108 million) in humanitarian aid, according to Germany’s dpa agency.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock then had to abort a visit to a water supply station in the city of Mykolaiv after a Russian drone was spotted in the area, dpa reported. Baerbock and her delegation rushed back into their armored vehicles, and the drone briefly followed the convoy before veering off, the agency said.

Russian shelling and rocket strikes on Sunday continued to pummel Ukraine’s south and east, as local Ukrainian officials reported that at least two civilians were killed and eight others were wounded in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces.

A woman was wounded and a railway station turned into a smoldering ruin amid heavy shelling in the eastern city of Kostiantynivka, according to the head of the municipal military administration. Ukraine’s public broadcaster, Suspilne, cited local police as saying that the strikes also damaged an Orthodox church, more than a dozen residential buildings and dozens of shops, a post office, schools and local government offices.

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This story has been corrected to show that the monetary figure in the quote from Ukraine’s defense minister is $150 billion, not $100 billion.

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

AP · February 25, 2024

5. Leaked Hacking Documents Show China’s Focus on Tracking Ethnic Minorities

Excerpts:

Cybersecurity experts say China’s vast army of state-sponsored hackers is growing more ambitious and sophisticated, pointing to recent breaches of email accounts belonging to the U.S. commerce secretary and other senior officials. Christopher Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the Journal earlier this month that Beijing’s efforts to place malware in critical U.S. infrastructure was at “a scale greater than we’d seen before.”

I-Soon appears to represent just one aspect of China’s hacking capabilities. In the past, Chinese hacking operations have broadly focused mostly on military and industrial espionage.

The recent leak “shows explicitly how government targeting requirements drive a competitive marketplace of independent contractor hackers-for-hire,” SentinelLabs, a cybersecurity firm, said in a report.

I-Soon offered clients a range of tools that it said could infiltrate 

Microsoft, Apple and Google’s operating systems, by tricking a target into clicking on a phishing link or downloading malware. Using the strategy, the company said it could access the inbox of an Outlook email account, acquiring GPS location data of an iPhone and activating the microphone on an Android device.

Another tool, with an advertised price tag of $55,600 a year, is designed for “public opinion guidance and control” on X. The company claimed to be able to take over accounts without requiring passwords—again by using phishing—as well as process no less than 100 million pieces of raw data daily to allow for “prompt detection” of “negative” and “illegal” public opinion.

Leaked Hacking Documents Show China’s Focus on Tracking Ethnic Minorities

Files from a cybersecurity firm opens a window into how Beijing uses surveillance to impose political controls inside and outside its borders

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-hacking-documents-target-ethnic-minorities-1c582813?mod=hp_lead_pos6

By Liza Lin

Follow in Singapore and Austin Ramzy

Follow in Hong Kong

Updated Feb. 27, 2024 12:05 am ET

A security surveillance camera in Beijing. PHOTO: CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS

A man living in New York got a call in 2020 from police in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, who wanted to know if he knew anything about an account on Twitter, the social media site now known as X.

The man had immigrated to the U.S. after being born in China’s western region of Xinjiang, where the ethnic minority Uyghurs and other groups have faced mass detentions and other rights abuses. After arriving in the U.S., he began speaking out about the plight faced by Uyghurs.

He didn’t know at the time he got the call that he had been targeted for a hack. A trove of documents that were purportedly leaked from a cybersecurity firm in China this month includes a chat log dated March 2020—weeks before he got the call—in which a representative of the company discusses digging up information on a number of people behind social-media accounts.

The man, who asked not to be identified, said his account was among those identified in the chat log. “I have reasons to believe that I was targeted in a campaign to collect information about Uyghurs,” he said.

I-Soon appears to be one of a group of private surveillance firms that supplement China’s spying. PHOTO: DAKE KANG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The documents, which appeared to come from a Chinese cybersecurity firm called I-Soon, have opened a new window into how China’s government uses surveillance to impose political controls inside and outside of its borders. A Wall Street Journal analysis of the documents indicates a strong focus on people from the country’s periphery, including ethnic minority groups that Beijing sees as a potential source of political instability.

The documents, which were originally uploaded to GitHub, an online platform for developers, before being removed, suggest I-Soon was part of a group of private firms that supplement China’s spying. The Journal couldn’t independently verify the authenticity of the files—including hundreds of pages of chat logs, client lists and product manuals—but cybersecurity experts say the documents appear to be legitimate because they align with activities previously associated with Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups.

The trove of documents suggest I-Soon had a range of targets, but a number of examples point to a focus on ethnic minorities. The files show I-Soon was pitching its hacking capabilities to local security officials in Xinjiang. Chat logs also indicate the firm was offering to monitor Tibetan exiles in India.

I-Soon didn’t respond to a request for comment. China’s Ministry of Public Security didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“The hackers were focused on domestic threats that migrated abroad,” said Drew Thompson, a senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. “Their clients were keen on data from government bureaus, telecommunication providers, airlines, so they could monitor and access individual emails, phones and keep track of dissidents abroad,” added Thompson, a former senior official at the U.S. Defense Department who was stationed in Beijing.

China’s government sends Turkic minorities to indoctrination camps in Xinjiang to force their assimilation. PHOTO: PEDRO PARDO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, national security has become a larger focus, with the Communist Party going to great lengths to crush efforts at political organizing outside of its control. China has been particularly focused on the threat posed by regions on the country’s margins such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, where large numbers of people see themselves as something other than Chinese.

For years, China’s government sent Turkic minorities to indoctrination camps in Xinjiang as part of a campaign of forced assimilation that some rights groups and Western governments described as a “crime against humanity.” The Chinese government describes its policies in Xinjiang as job training designed to curb terrorism and religious extremism.

Beijing has expanded its campaign to target Uyghurs and other minority groups outside China, telling people to spy on their communities abroad or risk retaliation against their family members in Xinjiang, overseas activists say.

“China wants to intimidate Uyghurs by showing their hands can even reach American soil,” said Ilshat Kokbore, a Uyghur activist in the U.S.

In the leaked files, I-Soon claimed to have hacked into dozens of government targets, including ministries in Malaysia, Thailand and Mongolia. The company claimed to have penetrated universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and France.

The documents show some of its biggest customers include local and provincial-level bureaus of China’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Public Security and People’s Liberation Army.

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, a pro-democracy labor organization, was a surveillance target. PHOTO: LOUISE DELMOTTE/GETTY IMAGES

The data trove contains an unsigned copy of a feasibility cooperation contract with a local government in Xinjiang’s southeastern Bayingolin region, home to more than half a million Uyghur Muslims and other minorities. In the contract, I-Soon dangled access to what it termed “antiterrorist” data it had purportedly stolen from governments in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Thailand and Mongolia.

Another of the targets listed was the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, a pro-democracy labor organization that came under intense government scrutiny during the 2019 protest movement. It was eventually forced to disband in 2021, and some of its leaders are now in jail facing national-security charges.

The organization did experience cyberattacks during and after the 2019 protests, said Mung Siu-tat, its former chief executive who now lives in the U.K. “Our websites were shut down or could not function properly,” he said. “Sometimes we received warnings from Google that our emails were under the threat of state-level attacks.”

I-Soon was founded in Shanghai in 2010 by Wu Haibo, its chairman and general manager. One Chinese media report described Wu as a patriotic hacker who goes by the moniker “shutdown.” Chinese cybersecurity giant 

Qi An Xin Technology is among the biggest shareholders in the firm. I-Soon had also been vetted and shortlisted as one of three vendors selected to build a safety defense system for the public security bureau in Xinjiang’s Akusu region, according to an official Xinjiang procurement notice posted in July 2021.

The office building of I-Soon, which claims to have hacked into ministries in Malaysia, Thailand and Mongolia. PHOTO: DAKE KANG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cybersecurity experts say China’s vast army of state-sponsored hackers is growing more ambitious and sophisticated, pointing to recent breaches of email accounts belonging to the U.S. commerce secretary and other senior officials. Christopher Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the Journal earlier this month that Beijing’s efforts to place malware in critical U.S. infrastructure was at “a scale greater than we’d seen before.”

I-Soon appears to represent just one aspect of China’s hacking capabilities. In the past, Chinese hacking operations have broadly focused mostly on military and industrial espionage.

The recent leak “shows explicitly how government targeting requirements drive a competitive marketplace of independent contractor hackers-for-hire,” SentinelLabs, a cybersecurity firm, said in a report.

I-Soon offered clients a range of tools that it said could infiltrate 

Microsoft, Apple and Google’s operating systems, by tricking a target into clicking on a phishing link or downloading malware. Using the strategy, the company said it could access the inbox of an Outlook email account, acquiring GPS location data of an iPhone and activating the microphone on an Android device.Another tool, with an advertised price tag of $55,600 a year, is designed for “public opinion guidance and control” on X. The company claimed to be able to take over accounts without requiring passwords—again by using phishing—as well as process no less than 100 million pieces of raw data daily to allow for “prompt detection” of “negative” and “illegal” public opinion.

Clarence Leong contributed to this article.

Write to Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com and Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

6. Moscow Plans to Produce 2.7 Million Rounds of Ammunition, Ukrainian Intel Says

Excerpts:

The Kremlin has already received 1.5 million 122-mm and 152-mm shells from North Korea.

“This is 70-80 years old ammunition, half of it doesn’t work,” Skibitsky said.

“This proves once again that Russia lacks its own production capacity for a rapid and powerful increase in missile production. If it did not, why would it ask North Korea,” he said.

“The Kremlin is very afraid that powerful Western equipment will come to Ukraine, so the aggressor has given itself the task of destroying both our aviation and infrastructure.”

Moscow Plans to Produce 2.7 Million Rounds of Ammunition, Ukrainian Intel Says

A center has been set up in Russia to replace foreign components, especially electronics, with Russian-made elements that are of inferior quality but allow for weapons production.

by Kyiv Post | February 27, 2024, 8:06 am

kyivpost.com · by Kyiv Post · February 27, 2024

A center has been set up in Russia to replace foreign components, especially electronics, with Russian-made elements that are of inferior quality but allow for weapons production.

by Kyiv Post | February 27, 2024, 8:06 am

Photo:Kyiv Post

Russians are trying to increase both quantity and quality of weapons it has been exhausting, after acquiring old munitions from Belarus and North Korea, but is hampered by Western sanctions and foiled by Western air defense systems, according to a recent interview with Ukrainian intelligence.

Russia plans to produce 2.7 million units of ammunition this year. According to Ukrainian intelligence, last year, Russia produced 2 million rounds of 122-mm and 152-mm ammunition.

“These are plans. We’ll see whether they will be implemented. But this requires, first of all, modernization of production, decommissioning or creation of new lines,” Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine (HUR), said in an interview with Interfax Ukraine.

In February, the Kremlin planned to launch 130 Iskander, Kalibr, X-101, X-32, and Kinzhal class missiles, but came up short of its goal.

Skibitsky said that Western sanctions should target machine tools, and materials used to make electronic chips and microcircuits.

Russia has now set up a center to replace foreign components, especially electronics, with inferior Russian-made components.

“They are worse in quality, not as perfect, but they allow weapons production,” Skibitsky said.

According to the HUR, the Russian military has already taken all the ammunition out of Belarus, so “there is nothing to take from there.”

The Kremlin has already received 1.5 million 122-mm and 152-mm shells from North Korea.

“This is 70-80 years old ammunition, half of it doesn’t work,” Skibitsky said.

“This proves once again that Russia lacks its own production capacity for a rapid and powerful increase in missile production. If it did not, why would it ask North Korea,” he said.

“The Kremlin is very afraid that powerful Western equipment will come to Ukraine, so the aggressor has given itself the task of destroying both our aviation and infrastructure.”

“In addition, the Russians are now trying to use more technological, more effective weapons, because the effectiveness of our air defense system against such missiles is very high…” said Skibitsky.

“But the enemy understands that it is difficult to shoot down ballistic missiles, and for this we need high-tech Western weapons, like the Patriot, and we depend here on the supplies of our partners.”

kyivpost.com · by Kyiv Post · February 27, 2024

7. Opinion | This U.N. agency aiding Ukraine refugees is an unheralded success story

Opinion | This U.N. agency aiding Ukraine refugees is an unheralded success story

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · February 27, 2024

Public opinion surveys suggest that, while nearly 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the United Nations, they are less supportive than the citizens of many other countries. Forty percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the global body compared with 25 percent of Britons and Germans.

Some criticism is definitely warranted. For example, the Biden administration has suspended funding for the United Nations’ Palestinian-aid group, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), after some of its employees were alleged to have participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Council is a sick joke: Its members include notorious human-rights abusers such as Russia, Venezuela and China. And U.N. peacekeeping troops have become notorious for abusing the very people they were supposed to protect.

But the United Nations also does a lot of important work for which it receives scant credit in the United States. I recently spent a week traveling across Moldova and Ukraine with a delegation of American experts assembled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, as the U.N. refugee agency is known, and I came away greatly impressed by UNHCR’s efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis created by the Russian invasion. Its work — which is helping Ukraine and its neighbors to weather the onslaught — deserves continuing U.S. support.

The scale of the refugee crisis is mind-boggling: Two years after the Russian invasion, nearly 6.5 million people have fled Ukraine and another 3.7 million are internally displaced. That’s roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population. And, in front-line communities, even many of those who remain in their homes are struggling to survive. In all, some 14.6 million Ukrainians require humanitarian assistance. Those needs are far beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian government or those of its neighbors to cope with on their own; Kyiv can only fund half its own state budget and requires foreign aid for the rest.

Filling the vacuum have been myriad governmental and private relief agencies, including organizations funded by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. The United Nations is often in the lead. In 2023, UNHCR provided 2.63 million people in Ukraine with assistance of various kinds. That includes repairing damaged houses, sending winter blankets and generators to front-line communities, helping displaced Ukrainians restore legal documents lost in the war, and offering psychological and social services to people traumatized by Vladimir Putin’s incessant bombing.

UNHCR sometimes delivers relief supplies; we saw a warehouse full of food, winter clothes, hygiene kits and kitchen sets in Odessa. But the agency prefers, wherever possible, to provide cash assistance via an ATM card utilizing Ukraine’s existing banks. Those grants went to nearly 900,000 Ukrainians last year. Though the average stipend is only about $120 a month, that pittance helps displaced Ukrainians get whatever they need the most, whether it’s housing, health care, transportation, food or clothing. It also boosts the local economy rather than creating a parallel “aid economy.”

Our group visited a Kyiv apartment building two days after it was hit by a Russian missile to see how quickly and effectively UNHCR and its local and international partners can swing into action. Four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds forced out of their homes. By the time we arrived, laborers were already repairing the damage while, in a nearby school gymnasium, UNHCR and other aid agencies had set up shop to help the affected families. The gym was emptying out because most of the people had already received what they needed, whether food or medicine or a place to sleep. Such rapid response operations occur all the time across Ukraine, and they are helping that country to survive the Russian onslaught.

UNHCR also has been an indispensable lifeline in European countries struggling to cope with a massive refugee influx. We visited Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova (population 2.5 million), which has been inundated by more than 1 million Ukrainians since the start of the war in 2022. Yet there are no tent cities for Ukrainian refugees in Moldova or anywhere else in Europe; all the newcomers either move on or get absorbed by the local population. That’s one of the hidden success stories of the past two years. In part, that speaks to the generosity of European nations in dealing with the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since 1945. But it is also a reflection of the international aid effort spearheaded by UNHCR.

UNHCR is far from perfect; it is subject to some of the same problems as other U.N. agencies. Its Uganda operation was rocked by a corruption scandal in 2018, and in Ukraine it was initially criticized by government officials for being slow to respond to the Russian invasion.

But I was impressed by the UNHCR employees I met in Ukraine, a combination of local and foreign hires who appear intensely committed to the mission and work long hours under grueling and often dangerous conditions. The UNHCR country director, Karolina Lindholm Billing, is a no-nonsense Swede who has been in Ukraine since 2021. She manages 370 staff in 10 different locations, employing a combination of firmness and compassion.

Lindholm Billing had to evacuate her husband and three teenage children from Kyiv when the Russians invaded and sees them only on occasional home visits to Stockholm. “If I didn’t believe that the work my colleagues and I do, often seven days a week and in risky situations, was meaningful to the people we serve, then I would never sacrifice these years with my teenagers,” she told me. “Because we are on the ground where the brutal war hits people every day, we see the positive impact that humanitarian support has on people’s lives.”

I saw it, too, as we visited the refugee-assistance sites that UNHCR operates for grateful Ukrainians who are eager not only for material aid but a sign that the world cares about their plight.

UNHCR spent nearly $1 billion in 2023 responding to the Ukrainian refugee and displacement crisis. The U.S. government was the single biggest donor, giving $200 million, but European nations gave more in aggregate, while also incurring substantial costs in handling millions of refugees in their own countries. This year, UNHCR is asking for a similar contribution from the United States to continue its lifesaving work.

But that money may not be forthcoming. It is part of the $95 billion foreign aid bill — which includes $60 billion for Ukraine — that passed the Senate but is stalled in the House by Republican isolationists. Even some House members who support military aid for Ukraine are talking about removing humanitarian aid and budgetary support for Ukraine.

That would be foolish and heartless. Humanitarian and budgetary aid allows Ukraine to keep functioning in the face of continuing Russian aggression, and makes it possible for refugees to return to their own country — as roughly 2 million Ukrainians have already done. Without that international support, Ukraine could become a failed state no longer able to defend itself and millions more refugees could flee the country, destabilizing its neighbors.

Congress needs to provide both military and budgetary aid to Ukraine as that country battles not only for its own survival but also the security of the entire West. And it needs to keep supporting UNHCR as part of the U.S. response to refugee crises not only in Ukraine but also as far afield as Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The United Nations makes its share of mistakes, but UNHCR is an unheralded success story.

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · February 27, 2024

8. Can Iran and Its Surrogates Be Contained?

Is north Korea being "contained?"

Excerpts:

A nuclear-armed Iran still could be contained, as is North Korea. To do so, however, requires determination across both our political parties, and a firm stance by not one, but a succession of American presidents. It also requires agreement and conforming behavior by the European Union and faith by Saudi Arabia and a dozen other Middle East nations.

However, believing that such unified determination will materialize requires a leap of faith. The strikes against our bases are, to borrow from William Blake, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” In themselves, the attacks are small. But they illustrate our failure to stand up to Iran’s aggression. That augurs ill for the future. It is discomfiting in 2024 that Iran with impunity directs strikes against our bases. It will be a severe defeat for our global credibility and for regional stability when Iran leaks that it has nuclear weapons. We can only hope for the caprice of the fates to smite Iran, since we won’t do so. What an epitaph.

But this is really a key point. Are deterring ourselves and ceding the initiative to our adversaries?

More disturbing is its repetition by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General C. Q. Brown. “We don’t want,” he said, “to go down a path of greater escalation that drives to a much broader conflict, within the region.” That fear of an Iranian response has conceded the offensive to Iran and its surrogates.

Can Iran and Its Surrogates Be Contained?

Iran’s theocrats retain power by projecting America as the devil [Satan usually] determined to kill all Muslims. The Islamist regime cannot survive without branding America as the implacable enemy.

Monday, February 26, 2024  2 min read

By: Bing West

Research Team: Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group

https://www.hoover.org/research/can-iran-and-its-surrogates-be-contained?utm

Strategika

Issue 90

Iran’s theocrats retain power by projecting America as the devil [Satan usually] determined to kill all Muslims. The Islamist regime cannot survive without branding America as the implacable enemy. The Biden administration—with a top staff carried over from the Obama administration—believes that Iran can be assuaged by diplomacy, good will, moderate sanctions, and a restrained response to attacks upon U.S. forces and other targets in the region.

Since October, Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria have launched successive missile and drone strikes at our few small bases in those two countries. After 160 tries, three American soldiers were killed. U.S. retaliation was fairly strong, including a drone strike that killed a terrorist leader in Baghdad. However, the sharply added costs for defense at those bases does raise the prospect that some bases may be closed, since they can now devote less time to the anti-ISIS mission that justifies their presence.

Iran has also provided the Houthis, a 9th-century tribe, with missiles and drones to attack commercial ships in the Red Sea. From January through mid-February, the Houthis have launched more than seventy attempted strikes. This piracy has forced the diversion of $200 billion of trade, sharply increasing costs, and adding to supply chain pressures.

As commander-in-chief, President Biden could strike back fiercely. The British ended the 18th Century Golden Age of Piracy by hangings, a lot of them. In one afternoon, our navy could destroy all Houthi radars, electronics, and especially, its command centers and leadership.

Instead, our navy has been restricted to tit-for-tat retaliatory strikes. These restrictions are determined by a few officials in the West Wing, chaired by Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan. He has said, “We have to guard against and be vigilant against the possibility that, in fact, rather than heading towards de-escalation, we are in a path of escalation that we have to manage.” That recursive mélange of words is devoid of resolve.

More disturbing is its repetition by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General C. Q. Brown. “We don’t want,” he said, “to go down a path of greater escalation that drives to a much broader conflict, within the region.” That fear of an Iranian response has conceded the offensive to Iran and its surrogates.

Biden has also chosen not to enforce oil export sanctions upon Iran, permitting annual sales in excess of $40 billion, or 70% of Iran's revenues. Iran’s present-day ghost fleet of 383 tankers has been expanded from 70 tankers in 2020. As a policy, the administration has chosen to allow the oil sanctions to be mocked. It’s no secret about where these vessels are. Their transits could quickly be foiled, curtailing Iran’s oil exports in accord with existing sanctions. What we have here is a failure of resolve by our policymakers, not a failure in our intelligence and military capabilities.

Iran has seized the strategic geopolitical momentum. As the destruction in Gaza continues, with images posted daily on the global internet, anger in the Middle East and elsewhere about U.S. support for Israel grows. Iran capitalizes on this by encouraging its surrogates to attack U.S. bases. Iran is clear on its goal: drive American forces out of the Middle East by small, violent attacks and by undermining our standing with Arab nations.

The odds are high that Iran will deploy nuclear weapons. The time has passed when Israel can successfully bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Iran is biding the time when it will suggest, without confirming, that it has developed nuclear weapons. That portentous ambiguity will present Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey with Hobson’s choice: acquire their own nuclear weapons—despite U.S. opposition—or accept that the balance of power in the Middle East has tilted sharply in Iran’s favor.

A nuclear-armed Iran still could be contained, as is North Korea. To do so, however, requires determination across both our political parties, and a firm stance by not one, but a succession of American presidents. It also requires agreement and conforming behavior by the European Union and faith by Saudi Arabia and a dozen other Middle East nations.

However, believing that such unified determination will materialize requires a leap of faith. The strikes against our bases are, to borrow from William Blake, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” In themselves, the attacks are small. But they illustrate our failure to stand up to Iran’s aggression. That augurs ill for the future. It is discomfiting in 2024 that Iran with impunity directs strikes against our bases. It will be a severe defeat for our global credibility and for regional stability when Iran leaks that it has nuclear weapons. We can only hope for the caprice of the fates to smite Iran, since we won’t do so. What an epitaph.

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hoover.org · by Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group

9. Putting Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not 'ruled out' in the future, French leader says

Is Macron demonstrating western leadership? I wonder if he cleared these comments with NATO and the US?

Excerpts:

“There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out,” Macron said in a news conference at the Elysee presidential palace.

Macron declined to provide details about which nations were considering sending troops, saying he prefers to maintain some “strategic ambiguity.”

Putting Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not 'ruled out' in the future, French leader says

BY SYLVIE CORBET

Updated 10:47 PM EST, February 26, 2024

AP · February 26, 2024

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that sending Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not “ruled out” in the future after the issue was debated at a gathering of European leaders in Paris, as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds into a third year.

The French leader said that “we will do everything needed so Russia cannot win the war” after the meeting of over 20 European heads of state and government and other Western officials.

“There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out,” Macron said in a news conference at the Elysee presidential palace.

Macron declined to provide details about which nations were considering sending troops, saying he prefers to maintain some “strategic ambiguity.”

The meeting included German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Poland’s President Andrzej Duda as well as leaders from the Baltic nations. The United States was represented by its top diplomat for Europe, James O’Brien, and the U.K. by Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

Duda said the most heated discussion was about whether to send troops to Ukraine and “there was no agreement on the matter. Opinions differ here, but there are no such decisions.”

Poland’s president said he hopes that “in the nearest future, we will jointly be able to prepare substantial shipments of ammunition to Ukraine. This is most important now. This is something that Ukraine really needs.”

Macron earlier called on European leaders to ensure the continent’s “collective security” by providing unwavering support to Ukraine in the face of tougher Russian offensives on the battlefield in recent months.

“In recent months particularly, we have seen Russia getting tougher,” Macron said.

Macron cited the need to solidify security to head off any Russian attacks on additional countries in the future. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia as well as much larger Poland have been considered among possible targets of future Russian expansionism. All four countries are staunch supporters of Ukraine.

Estonia’s foreign minister said earlier this month that NATO has about three or four years to strengthen its defenses.

In video speech, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on the leaders gathered in Paris to “ensure that Putin cannot destroy our achievements and cannot expand his aggression to other nations.”

Several European countries, including France, expressed their support for an initiative launched by the Czech Republic to buy ammunition and shells outside the EU, participants to the meeting said.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his country decided to provide over 100 million euros for that purpose.

In addition, a new coalition is to be launched to further “mobilize” nations with capabilities to deliver medium and long-range missiles, Macron said, as France announced last month the delivery of 40 additional long-range Scalp cruise missiles.

European nations are worried that the U.S. will dial back support as aid for Kyiv is teetering in Congress. They also have concerns that former U.S. President Donald Trump might return to the White House and change the course of U.S. policy on the continent.

The Paris conference comes after France, Germany and the U.K. recently signed 10-year bilateral agreements with Ukraine to send a strong signal of long-term backing as Kyiv works to shore up Western support.

___

Associated Press journalists John Leicester and Jeffrey Schaeffer in Paris Monika Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.

___

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

SYLVIE CORBET

Corbet is an Associated Press reporter based in Paris. She covers French politics, diplomacy and defense as well as gender issues and breaking news.

twitter

AP · February 26, 2024

10. Does the American army’s future lie in Europe or Asia?

Excerpts:

Among army civilian and military leaders there are three big unsettled questions, according to people familiar with those debates. One is whether profound shifts in the character of war, some evident in Ukraine, might render ground forces less important, if not irrelevant.

A second is how to balance resources between Asia and Europe (Asia being the Pentagon’s priority, and Europe where Russia is rearming fast). The army can prepare for conflicts in both places, but it cannot actually wage those wars at the same time—and it is no longer asked to do so. The 2018 National Defence Strategy ended the “two war” standard, a change accepted by the Biden administration.

That leads to a third question, and the most existential for the army. What, beyond the provision of logistics and air defence, would be the role of a ground force in a future war in the Pacific?

When General Randy George, the army’s chief of staff, was recently asked for book recommendations, he cited “The Arms of the Future” by Jack Watling, a young British analyst. The book describes how in recent rounds of Warfighter, a big annual exercise led by America, combat brigades facing increasingly good sensors and longer-range and deadlier munitions took huge losses, emerging with 20% combat effectiveness. Artillery devastates infantry and armour well before they can get within sight of the enemy.

Does the American army’s future lie in Europe or Asia?

It could not wage wars in both at the same time

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/02/19/does-the-american-armys-future-lie-in-europe-or-asia?

The Economist

THE YEAR 1973 was pivotal for America’s army. The force was battered and broken from Vietnam. In January the defence secretary announced the end of conscription; two months later the last combat troops left Vietnam. But the Arab-Israeli war which broke out on Yom Kippur in October planted the seeds of renewal. The lessons of that war, absorbed by American officers sent to Israel, helped reshape America’s army into the modern and professional force which would vanquish Iraq in 1991.

Today’s generals, who came of age during that transformation, are keenly aware of the resonance. “There’s a loose analogy between the early 1970s and the army of Desert Storm,” says General James Rainey, who leads the army’s Future Command, “and the army which invaded Iraq in the early 2000s and where we need to be in 2040.” Two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq wore out troops, equipment and ideas. A recruitment shortage remains unresolved. Now the rise of China and the lessons from the war in Ukraine have prompted introspection, renewal and reform.

Among army civilian and military leaders there are three big unsettled questions, according to people familiar with those debates. One is whether profound shifts in the character of war, some evident in Ukraine, might render ground forces less important, if not irrelevant.

A second is how to balance resources between Asia and Europe (Asia being the Pentagon’s priority, and Europe where Russia is rearming fast). The army can prepare for conflicts in both places, but it cannot actually wage those wars at the same time—and it is no longer asked to do so. The 2018 National Defence Strategy ended the “two war” standard, a change accepted by the Biden administration.

That leads to a third question, and the most existential for the army. What, beyond the provision of logistics and air defence, would be the role of a ground force in a future war in the Pacific?

When General Randy George, the army’s chief of staff, was recently asked for book recommendations, he cited “The Arms of the Future” by Jack Watling, a young British analyst. The book describes how in recent rounds of Warfighter, a big annual exercise led by America, combat brigades facing increasingly good sensors and longer-range and deadlier munitions took huge losses, emerging with 20% combat effectiveness. Artillery devastates infantry and armour well before they can get within sight of the enemy.

The war in Ukraine has reinforced those findings. Some argue that America’s army, better trained and armed than Ukraine’s, and with air cover, would fare better. General Rainey assumes the worst. “We’re going to fight under constant observation,” he says, “and in constant contact of some form. There is no break. There is no sanctuary.” He says American “lessons learned” teams were in place three days before the invasion to collect observations. They will have had some nasty surprises. American-made GPS-guided shells and rockets at first worked well; more recently, they have struggled against Russian jamming.

The army recognises that whereas it could once patiently muster its forces before launching a large offensive—as it did against Iraq in 1991 and 2003—it now has to prioritise dispersal, mobility and concealment. The drone attack which killed three soldiers in Jordan on January 28th was the first successful attack on American troops by aircraft since the Korean war. Katie Crombe, an army officer, and John Nagl, of the US Army War College in Pennsylvania, note in a recent paper that Ukraine’s battalion command posts comprise seven soldiers who dig into the ground and move twice daily. “That standard”, they warn, pointing to stubborn habits of more static command posts, “will be hard for the US Army to achieve.”

The commanders of battalions (about 1,000 soldiers) and brigades (a few thousand), the core units of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, would be consumed by this intense fighting in a way they were not during counterinsurgency missions. The army is thus reorganising so that more of the burden of planning, logistics, command and control, and long-range firepower falls on divisions—larger formations typically led by two-star generals which stand farther back from the front lines and have more time and space to orchestrate the frenetic battles of the future.

What remains unsettled, says Billy Fabian, a former infantry officer and Pentagon planner, is how, precisely, the army’s combat forces should be organised for future wars: the balance between firepower on the one hand, dominant in Ukraine, and so-called manoeuvre elements, such as infantry and armour, on the other. “Fighting land wars is the army’s raison d’être,” he says, “and Ukraine raises tough questions that challenge deeply ingrained elements core to the army’s self-conception.”

Army dreamers

Hanging over these reforms is the larger question of where the army will be asked to fight. National defence strategies published by the Trump and Biden administrations instruct the Pentagon to focus on China. Yet the army increased its footprint in Europe after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. It has since reinforced the continent with a corps and division headquarters, an infantry and armour brigade, a rocket artillery battalion and numerous other support forces. In contrast, relatively few new forces have flowed into Asia.

For years the army’s principal role in the Pacific was to guard bases, provide air defence and handle logistics. To the extent it was a “manoeuvre” force, in military parlance, it was focused on North Korea. Other services have looked down their noses at it. “The navy has a stranglehold on the leadership of Indo-Pacific Command,” says Stacie Pettyjohn of the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank in Washington. “They see the army only in a supporting role in a maritime theatre.”

image: The Economist

General Charles Flynn, the commander of the US Army Pacific, vigorously rebuts such ideas. “Humans have this unique tendency to live on land,” he says. “At the end of the day, decisions are going to be made by the pointy end of a gun.” The primacy of land is as true in Asia as it is in Europe, he argues, not least because the region’s largest countries, like India and Indonesia, have military forces dominated by armies. By building ties to them in peacetime, the army can position itself to project military power westward.

The growing pace of exercises (more than 40 take place annually) is a core part of that. General Flynn points to the examples of Talisman Sabre in Australia and Garuda Shield in Indonesia. Both were once relatively modest army-to-army exercises. They have grown and now involve the navy and air force. Both also involved the army’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Centre, in essence physical and virtual training equipment that can be deployed around the region to do things which could only have been done at a large base in Louisiana. Such drills are morphing into a near-permanent presence: the army is deployed in the region for eight months of the year.

Alongside that is a reimagining of how the army would fight. The premise is that China has optimised its forces to attack American satellites, ships and air bases. “What it’s not designed against”, says General Bernard Harrington, “is to find, fix and finish land formations that are distributed, mobile and networked.” That has prompted the creation of three experimental “multi-domain task forces”, or MDTFs, the first of which is focused on Asia and commanded by General Harrington.

Each MDTF has four battalions which can deploy small units along the first island chain which runs from Japan to the Philippines. The idea is that these can fight not just on land—soldier v soldier, tank v tank—but across domains. Imagine that America needs to target a Chinese ship. The MDTF’s “effects” battalion might jam the vessel’s radar and hack its networks; if that does not neutralise the ship, it makes it more likely that anti-ship missiles launched by a “fires” battalion will get through. The force’s long-range hypersonic missiles, which arrived last year, have a range of nearly 3,000km—enough to reach from Japan to Taiwan, or from the Philippines to the South China Sea.

Initial experiments with the MDTFs have shown promise, though some are sceptical that this high-tech vision of war would survive contact with reality. Two MDTFs are currently devoted to Asia, with a third for Europe. The original plan envisioned a total of five, with an additional one in the Arctic and one for global tasks.

All this would seem to offer a definitive answer to the army’s identity crisis: Asia first. Inside the Department of the Army, nestled within the Pentagon, there are doubts, though. One question is whether its own plans mesh with those of the armed services as a whole. “The army still feels marginalised in the Pacific,” says Ms Pettyjohn. Another is whether the army itself has pivoted ruthlessly enough. Its fleet of water craft has shrunk dramatically in recent years, for instance. “Water craft are an absolute indicator of true commitment to the Pacific,” says J.P. Clark, another Army War College professor. “They are quite expensive, only really useful for that theatre, and absolutely essential.”

Hard choices ahead

The MDTFs themselves remain “niche” formations, argues Mr Fabian. The largest allocated to the region is the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, he points out, a light-infantry division. “It seems like the army is trying to have it both ways,” he says. “Talk about fires and air defence for the Pacific, but stay a combined-arms force organised for close combat like it’s always been.” The army hedges its bets, says an insider, because it rarely wages the war it expects.

Trade-offs abound. Short-range artillery is vital for Europe; less so in Asia. “I just don’t know what you’d fire a 155-round at out in the Pacific other than the water,” quipped a top Pentagon official recently. The army will have to make firm choices in the next year or two, say officials. In part that is because it is creating more units than it can reliably man. The army expected to finish last year short of 10,000 recruits, a 15% shortfall and the second consecutive year of under-enlistment. Much of that is the result of America’s tight labour market, but it also reflects waning enthusiasm for military service, and for combat arms in particular.

The fall in the size of the “individual ready reserve”—reservists not allocated to a unit—from 450,000 in 1994 to 76,000 in 2018 worsens the problem. Ukraine shows how intense wars tend to chew up regular armies, requiring an infusion of citizens with military experience. Today’s shortage of combat soldiers is tomorrow’s shortage of reservists. Ms Crombe and Mr Nagl are among those who have floated the notion of “partial conscription”, an idea backed by just 20% of Americans. Now, as in the pivotal moments of the mid-1970s, the army finds itself wrestling with profound questions over its size, shape and purpose: questions that will eventually touch, as they did back then, its relationship to American society. ■

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The Economist

11. Maintaining the best thing the US built in Iraq: Continued support to the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service

Excerpts:

What, then, should we do to support this critical partner?

First, maintaining the CTS/USSOF relationship should be foundational to US and Iraqi government bilateral engagements and the ongoing HMC. While a single partnership is a seemingly minor point in such significant geopolitical discussions, the strategic implications of degradation in a USSOF relationship with the CTS are immense. The CTS must be supported and enabled to wage an operational campaign against the Islamic State. Put simply, if Western-backed counterterrorism pressure recedes, a resurgent Islamic State is inevitable. A CTS marginalized by Iranian-aligned actors would have the same harmful effect. In the worst case, a CTS infiltrated by those same actors would be a malign vehicle for training Iranian-affiliated militia groups, possibly exported throughout the region. On the other hand, a CTS partnered with the US and supported by USSOF prevents these outcomes and serves as a strategic advantage in an unsettled and volatile region.

Second, the US must deliberately plan for multiple mechanisms to support the CTS in the future. With the future outcome of bilateral engagement with Iraq and the HMC unclear, we should devise plans for USSOF support to come under Title 10 authorities through a named military operation such as Operation Inherent Resolve or under Title 22 authorities through security force assistance efforts with the Office of Security Cooperation – Iraq (OSC-I). In 2011, the USSOF community planned to remain in Iraq, supporting partners like the CTS. While then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wanted US troops to stay in an advisory capacity, political differences ultimately prevented an agreement from being reached, and US troops withdrew by the end of 2011. USSOF planners, believing a complete withdrawal was a "throw-away course of action," were caught off guard, and the hasty transition to OSC-I-led training support degraded the US partnership with the CTS.30 While US military leaders may feel confident that US troops can remain in Iraq, another unplanned hasty withdrawal is conceivable should the government of Iraq give in to growing internal political pressures building from US retaliatory strikes in Iraq.31

Third, USSOF must learn from past mistakes. As mentioned above, we must learn lessons from the USSOF experience of leaving Iraq in 2011. Coming full circle, we cannot afford to abandon this strategic partner again. We must also learn from the USSOF advisory experiences in Afghanistan. A detailed Special Inspector General for Afghanistan report released last year captures many critical failures of our advisory missions in Afghanistan. Issues such as prioritizing short-term security assistance over long-term security cooperation and ineffective civilian-military coordination stymied the development mission in Afghanistan, as did a lack of focused advisory training for incoming ministerial advisors. The report notes that a lack of continuity across deployments was "one of the great failures" in the advisory effort.32 USSOF must learn from these past failures to prevent future strategic setbacks.

In 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in Foreign Affairs that the "strategic reality demands that the US get better at … building partner capacity."33 Those words are as accurate today as they were when they were written. The strategic reality remains the same: The US faces multidimensional global threats to a stable political order, and many priorities are competing for the attention of policymakers and military leaders. In this strategic reality, we require strong partnerships. A robust and enduring partnership with the CTS can help mitigate risks and be a stabilizing force for a sovereign Iraq. An enduring partnership between USSOF and the CTS is in best interests of both the US and Iraq. Ensuring this should be a priority in discussions of future relationships, and the US must find ways to learn from its past mistakes and establish an effective long-term partnership with the CTS.

Maintaining the best thing the US built in Iraq: Continued support to the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service

https://www.mei.edu/publications/maintaining-best-thing-us-built-iraq-continued-support-iraqi-counterterrorism-service?utm

Analysis

February 26, 2024

Joseph L. Votel, Christopher P. Costa

For the past several years, US interests have drifted away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to focus on national security issues in the Pacific and — now — Europe. Unfortunately, the security situation in the Middle East and events like Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, strikes by Iranian-linked groups on US troops, and Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea continue to pull US attention back to the region.1

Iraq has once again reemerged as a central battleground in the turmoil in the Middle East. Iranian-supported militia groups target US troops in the country in response to US government actions, with the US responding in kind.2 The threat of the Islamic State remains.3 Iranian influence in Iraq has expanded through Iranian-backed militias within the country.4 The Higher Military Commission (HMC), a joint dialogue with the Iraqi government to discuss the future of the coalition forces combating the Islamic State, is intermittently ongoing. At the same time, bilateral discussions between the US and Iraq's government are likely occurring as well.5

Of the many issues discussed during these talks, we should not overlook ensuring a continued relationship between the US Special Operations Forces (USSOF) and the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS). The CTS, an organization built and supported by the US and with a strong partnership with USSOF, is a critical, enduring strategic partner in the region. It is the most significant and capable counterterrorism force in the Middle East. While it faces challenges, as outlined in the latest Lead Inspector General report on Operation Inherent Resolve, including reliance on coalition forces for some intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and varying levels of effectiveness across the country,6 the CTS will be essential in maintaining pressure on the Islamic State and can prevent, or at least limit, the US from further strategic distraction in the Middle East. The CTS has long been a strong US partner, and the force's capability strengthens a sovereign Iraq beset with challenges from militias acting outside the Iraqi government's control. The US must prioritize a continued USSOF relationship with the CTS, deliberately plan to maintain the relationship, and learn from our past experiences to create a genuinely effective long-term counterterrorism partnership.

The CTS is a strategic hedge against violent extremist organizations in the Middle East

Continued partnership with the CTS is critical to maintain adequate pressure on the Islamic State. While degraded since the loss of its territorial caliphate in 2019,7 the threat of the Islamic State's reconstitution remains. In January of this year, the Islamic State claimed an attack in Iran that killed almost 100 people and wounded more than twice that number8 — the deadliest terrorist attack in Iran in decades.9 The group's Afghanistan-based offshoot, Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP), has been assessed as responsible for the attack,10 indicating ISIS affiliates are still capable of executing some form of external operations.

US senior leaders also assess that the Islamic State's core group in Iraq and Syria "desire to strike beyond the Middle East."11 Last April, the US military killed two Islamic State leaders in Syria, one reportedly planning attacks in Europe and Turkey with the other plotting to kidnap government officials abroad to gain leverage.12 The CTS reportedly disrupted a planned attack against the United Kingdom last summer by conducting a raid that killed five senior Islamic State leaders, discovering connections between the leaders and British nationals, and passing the information to British intelligence agencies.13 The Islamic State claimed credit for an attack on a Roman Catholic church in Turkey at the end of January.14

Within Iraq and Syria, the risk of the Islamic State's potential resurgence remains. Some believe the organization has already gained ground, taking advantage of a region in turmoil.15 Others have expressed concerns about the repercussions of ending Western counterterrorism pressure. Charles Lister, a regional expert at the Middle East Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy last month that a US withdrawal "would trigger chaos and a swift surge in terror threats."16

A resurgent Islamic State is in no one's interest. For Iraq and other countries in the region, it would add additional threats to an already fragile security landscape. Arguably, an emboldened Islamic State allowed to resume external attacks against the West would again become a strategic distraction for the US and its Western allies trying to rebalance Middle East regional threats while focusing on other pressing geostrategic interests.

The key to maintaining pressure on the Islamic State in Iraq will be the CTS. It was the only Iraqi security force not to collapse in the face of Islamic State's rise in 2014 and was vital in liberating Iraqi cities like Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul, overrun by the group. But the unit's success took its toll. Rather than being employed as a precision counterterrorism instrument, the reliable soldiers of the CTS fought as light infantry shock troops in the streets of Iraq's Islamic State-occupied cities.17 Many CTS soldiers were lost or injured in the brutal fighting, and today's CTS is still recovering.18 It is slowly regenerating combat power, recruiting new members, and strengthening its capabilities. Maintaining a USSOF relationship with the organization, advisory efforts, and US government support is an economy of force effort, a small cost to offset a far more negative outcome.

The US has a Strong Partnership with the CTS

Not only is the CTS a capable force, but it is also one of the most vital US partnerships in the region. The Iraqi forces that make up the CTS have had a 20-year relationship with the US. When created in May 2004, the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) was a merger of two multi-ethnic units built by USSOF to conduct operations on a "non-sectarian and non-political" basis.19 During the fight against al-Qa'eda in Iraq, USSOF and ISOF soldiers lived, trained, and fought together, developing strong bonds on the battlefield. We used the same practice during combat operations to dislodge the Islamic State from Iraq. When we responded to the threat of ISIS in 2014 — we built the eventual Iraqi response around the CTS — they were the core force that held things together to buy time for the rebuilding of the Iraqi Army. Generations of CTS and USSOF leaders have built personal relationships, working together for common goals across these different conflicts.

That close relationship means that ISOF soldiers and leaders inculcated USSOF standards of professionalism and proficiency in conducting precision counterterrorism operations. Concepts like empowering junior officers and non-commissioned officers and foundational ideas that make USSOF such a capable force were also adopted by CTS soldiers, as was the idea of a non-sectarian force working in the best interests of a sovereign Iraq.

The CTS is also arguably one of the most successful counterterrorism partnership efforts undertaken by the US. While the US has provided approximately $800 million in equipment through programs like the Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund – Iraq (CTEF-I) and Iraqi Security Forces Fund (ISSF) over the past 21 years, that accounts for just under 3% of the $28.4 billion requested or appropriated through the same programs for training and equipping security forces in Iraq.20 Additionally, the total funding the US has provided the CTS over 20 years amounts to less than 2% of the $44.2 billion in military assistance provided to Ukraine in the past two years.21

With this relatively small investment, the US has helped build the most potent counterterrorism force and the most trusted, non-sectarian security force in Iraq. In a region still wracked with turmoil, where US national interests are at stake, we would be shortsighted not to prioritize continued support for this critical, enduring, strategic partner.

A Strong CTS Strengthens a Sovereign Iraq

Iranian-backed militias within Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces have strengthened Iranian influence within the country and, to some degree, within its security institutions. Since October 2022, individuals associated with Iranian-supported militias have occupied key positions within the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) and the National Security Service (NSS), among other entities.22 This placement has not been the case with the CTS. The CTS's professional ethic and non-sectarian nature, forged alongside USSOF counterparts, have held. The Service's close relationship and partnership with USSOF and its successes in defeating the Islamic State have given the organization stature and helped insulate it from this influence,23 although it may come under increasing pressure if tensions with the U.S. continue to rise inside Iraq.

Additionally, Iraq’s outlaw militia groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah (KH), Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba (HAN) have degraded Iraq’s sovereignty by acting outside the control of the Iraqi government. With the US urging the Iraqi government to rein in these groups, the CTS represents the only viable security force the Iraqi government would have to attempt to control the militias.

This situation has a historical precedent. In 2008, as the government of Iraq struggled with Jaysh al-Mahdi and Iranian-supported Special Groups, CTS forces responded. They conducted operations in Sadr City and Basra and targeted Special Group leaders.24 In 2020, in a precursor to today, outlaw militia groups in Iraq targeted US bases in the country in response to the January 2020 killing of then-Quds Force Commander Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. In March 2020, after a then-unprecedented 22 strikes and the deaths of two American and one British soldiers, the US launched retaliatory airstrikes against the militias in Iraq.25 In May 2020, Iraq's then-newly appointed prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhim, who signaled his intent to bring armed groups under control, faced the same challenges the current Iraqi government faces.26 After a spate of attacks in May and June, two of which targeted the US Embassy,27 Prime Minister Kadhim directed the only force available to act against the groups operating outside government control. On June 26, the CTS arrested 14 members of KH preparing rocket attacks against the US Embassy, a move cited by some as extraordinary given the impunity with which KH had operated.28

While KH’s political power secured the release of its members, the episode highlights the importance of the CTS as the only force within Iraq capable of supporting the Iraqi government in bringing outlaw militia groups under government authority.29 If the current Iraqi government summons the political will to rein in these groups, the CTS will be the action arm. Continued US partnership with the CTS is not just in the US national interest but also in the interest of a sovereign Iraq.

What, then, should we do to support this critical partner?

First, maintaining the CTS/USSOF relationship should be foundational to US and Iraqi government bilateral engagements and the ongoing HMC. While a single partnership is a seemingly minor point in such significant geopolitical discussions, the strategic implications of degradation in a USSOF relationship with the CTS are immense. The CTS must be supported and enabled to wage an operational campaign against the Islamic State. Put simply, if Western-backed counterterrorism pressure recedes, a resurgent Islamic State is inevitable. A CTS marginalized by Iranian-aligned actors would have the same harmful effect. In the worst case, a CTS infiltrated by those same actors would be a malign vehicle for training Iranian-affiliated militia groups, possibly exported throughout the region. On the other hand, a CTS partnered with the US and supported by USSOF prevents these outcomes and serves as a strategic advantage in an unsettled and volatile region.

Second, the US must deliberately plan for multiple mechanisms to support the CTS in the future. With the future outcome of bilateral engagement with Iraq and the HMC unclear, we should devise plans for USSOF support to come under Title 10 authorities through a named military operation such as Operation Inherent Resolve or under Title 22 authorities through security force assistance efforts with the Office of Security Cooperation – Iraq (OSC-I). In 2011, the USSOF community planned to remain in Iraq, supporting partners like the CTS. While then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wanted US troops to stay in an advisory capacity, political differences ultimately prevented an agreement from being reached, and US troops withdrew by the end of 2011. USSOF planners, believing a complete withdrawal was a "throw-away course of action," were caught off guard, and the hasty transition to OSC-I-led training support degraded the US partnership with the CTS.30 While US military leaders may feel confident that US troops can remain in Iraq, another unplanned hasty withdrawal is conceivable should the government of Iraq give in to growing internal political pressures building from US retaliatory strikes in Iraq.31

Third, USSOF must learn from past mistakes. As mentioned above, we must learn lessons from the USSOF experience of leaving Iraq in 2011. Coming full circle, we cannot afford to abandon this strategic partner again. We must also learn from the USSOF advisory experiences in Afghanistan. A detailed Special Inspector General for Afghanistan report released last year captures many critical failures of our advisory missions in Afghanistan. Issues such as prioritizing short-term security assistance over long-term security cooperation and ineffective civilian-military coordination stymied the development mission in Afghanistan, as did a lack of focused advisory training for incoming ministerial advisors. The report notes that a lack of continuity across deployments was "one of the great failures" in the advisory effort.32 USSOF must learn from these past failures to prevent future strategic setbacks.

In 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote in Foreign Affairs that the "strategic reality demands that the US get better at … building partner capacity."33 Those words are as accurate today as they were when they were written. The strategic reality remains the same: The US faces multidimensional global threats to a stable political order, and many priorities are competing for the attention of policymakers and military leaders. In this strategic reality, we require strong partnerships. A robust and enduring partnership with the CTS can help mitigate risks and be a stabilizing force for a sovereign Iraq. An enduring partnership between USSOF and the CTS is in best interests of both the US and Iraq. Ensuring this should be a priority in discussions of future relationships, and the US must find ways to learn from its past mistakes and establish an effective long-term partnership with the CTS.

Gen. (ret.) Joseph Votel is the Distinguished Chair of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and a non-resident Distinguished Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He is a retired US Army Four-Star officer and the former Commander of the US Central Command – responsible for US and coalition military operations in the Middle East, Levant, and Central and South Asia. During his 39 years in the military, he commanded special operations and conventional military forces at every level.

Col. (ret.) Christopher P. Costa is an adjunct associate professor with Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a retired US Army Colonel – and a former career intelligence officer who served with Special Operations Forces. He was a special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.

Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP via Getty Images

Endnotes

1 Christopher Costa, “A regional war in the Middle East is already here,” The Hill,” January 14, 2024. https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4405070-a-regional-war-in-the-middle-east-is-already-here/

2 Ahmed Rasheed and Timour Azhari, “Kataib Hezbollah commander killed in Baghdad strike,” Reuters, February 8, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/sound-loud-blasts-heard-iraqs-baghdad-reuters-witness-2024-02-07/

3 Robert Tollast and Mina Aldroubi, “Withdrawal of US forces puts Iraq’s security at risk, warn analysts,” The National, January 26, 2024. https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/iraq/2024/01/26/us-withdrawal-iraq-security-risks/

4 Ranj Alaaldin, “The Popular Mobilization Force is turning Iraq into an Iranian client state,” Brookings Institution, February 2, 2024. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-popular-mobilization-force-is-turning-iraq-into-an-iranian-client-state/

5 Sinan Mahmoud, “Iraq urges US to resume dialogue over future of international coalition forces,” The National, February 7, 2024. https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/2024/02/07/iraq-urges-us-to-resume-dialogue-over-future-of-international-coalition-forces/ ; Lara Seligman and Erin Banco, “Iraqi officials privately signal they want US forces to stay,” Politico, January 9, 2024. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/09/iraq-us-troops-removal-00134564

6 “Lead IG Report to the United States Congress: October 1, 2023-December 31, 2023,” Special Inspector General for Operation Inherent Resolve and Other U.S. Government Activities Related To Iraq & Syria, February 9, 2024, https://media.defense.gov/2024/Feb/09/2003391885/-1/-1/1/OIR_Q1_DEC2023_GOLD_508.PDF

7 Ben Wedeman and Lauren Said-Moorhouse, “ISIS has lost its final stronghold in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Force says,” CNN, March 23, 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/23/middleeast/isis-caliphate-end-intl/index.html

8 Parisa Hafezi, Elwelly Elwelly, Clauda Tanios, “Islamic State claims responsibility for deadly Iran attack, Tehran vows revenge,” Reuters, January 5, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-vows-revenge-after-biggest-attack-since-1979-revolution-2024-01-04/

9 Eyad Kourdi and Jennifer Deaton, “ISIS claims responsibility for deadliest attack in Iran since 1979 revolution,” CNN, January 5, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/04/middleeast/iran-islamic-state-attack-kerman-intl/index.html

10 Jonathan Landay and Steve Holland, “Exclusive: US intelligence confirms Islamic State's Afghanistan branch behind Iran blasts,” Reuters, January 5, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-intelligence-confirms-islamic-states-afghanistan-branch-behind-iran-blasts-2024-01-05/

11 “US confirms it killed senior Islamic State leader in Syria raid,” Reuters, April 17, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-centcom-says-senior-islamic-state-leader-targeted-syria-raid-likely-killed-2023-04-17/

12 “US confirms it killed senior Islamic State leader in Syria raid,” Reuters, April 17, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-operation-kills-islamic-state-leader-syria-officials-2023-04-04/ ; “CENTCOM Confirms ISIS Senior Leader killed in a Helicopter Raid in Northern Syria,” US Central Command, April 17, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-operation-kills-islamic-state-leader-syria-officials-2023-04-04/

13 Chris Hughes, “Exclusive: British ISIS terrorists plan major attack on UK as shocking plot uncovered,” Mirror, June, 28, 2023. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/british-isis-terrorists-plan-major-30345343

14 Aaron Y. Zelin, “The Islamic State Hits Turkey After Years of Plotting,” Washington Institute, January 30, 2024. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/islamic-state-hits-turkey-after-years-plotting

15 Jeff Seldin, “Islamic State Trying to Rise Under the Radar,” Voice of America, January 31, 2024. https://www.voanews.com/a/islamic-state-trying-to-rise-under-the-radar/7465654.html

16 Charles Lister, “America Is Planning to Withdraw From Syria – and Create a Disaster,” Foreign Policy, January 24, 2024. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/24/america-is-planning-to-withdraw-from-syria-and-create-a-disaster/

17 Mike Giglio, “The ISIS Killer: The Men Leading the Battle For Mosul Might Be Wiped Out Along the Way,” BuzzFeed, June 3, 2017. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikegiglio/on-the-front-lines-of-the-fight-with-isis#.raRgykx3k

18 Shawn Snow, “Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism force looks to rebuild after Mosul,” Military Times, August 11, 2017. https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2017/08/11/iraqs-elite-counter-terrorism-force-looks-to-rebuild-after-mosul/

19 David Witty, The Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2015). https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-iraqi-counter-terrorism-service

20 Funding reported from FY 2005 – FY 2011 is generally based on obligated and executed funding, made available in reviews of DoD’s train and equip activities by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and the Congressional Research Service. See: Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, “Iraqi Security Forces: Special Operations Force Program is Achieving Goals, but Iraqi Support Remains Critical to Success,” October 25, 2010, p.8. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA545722.pdf ; Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, “The US Has Reduced Its Funding for the Iraqi Security Forces, But Continued Support Will Likely be Necessary,” January 26. 2009, p4. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA493377.pdf ; Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, “Status of Fiscal Years 2011-2012 Iraq Security Forces Fund,” July 27, 2012, pp 6-8. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA591674.pdf. "Iraq: Reconstruction Assistance," Congressional Research Service, August 7, 2009, p3. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20090807_RL31833_0c893915ba9f329d26c9cb5263acfd3e84b60fc3.pdf ITEF and CTEF funding numbers (FY 2015 – 2024), in contrast, are generally based on funding levels within the ITEF and CTEF Budget Request Justification Books. See for example: Office of the Secretary of Defense, "Justification for FY 2024 Overseas Contingency Operations - Counter-Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Train and Equip Fund," March 2023. https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2024/FY2024_CTEF_J-Book.pdf

21 Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, “US Security Cooperation with Ukraine,” US Department of State, December 27, 2023. https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-ukraine/

22 Michael Knights, Hamdi Malik, and Crispin Smith, “Iraq’s New Regime Change: How Tehran-Backed Terrorist Organizations and Militias Captured the Iraqi State,” CTC Sentinel (2023) 16:11, pp.10-11. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/iraqs-new-regime-change-how-tehran-backed-terrorist-organizations-and-militias-captured-the-iraqi-state/

23 Muhannad al-Ghazi, “Iraqi special forces stand to gain stature with victory over IS,” Al-Monitor, February 20, 2017. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2017/02/counterterrorism-bureau-iraq-us-mosul.html

24 Jeanne F. Godfroy, James S. Powell, Matthew D. Morton, and Matthew M. Zais, US Army in the Iraq War: Volume 2, Surge and Withdrawal (US Army War College Press, 2019), p 378. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/940 ; Bill Roggio, “Iraqi Special Forces capture Special Groups commander in Baghdad,” Long War Journal, May 27, 2008. https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/05/iraqi_special_forces.php

25 Nakissa Jahanbani, Caleb Benjamin, Robert Fisher, Muhammad Najjar, Muhammad al-'Ubaydi, Benjamin Johnson, “How Iranian-Backed Militias Do Political Signaling,” Lawfare, December 18, 2023, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-iranian-backed-militias-do-political-signaling ; “UK soldier and two Americans killed in rocket attack in Iraq,” BBC, March 12, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51842744 ; “US launches air raids in Iraq after deadly rocket attack,” Al Jazeera, March 13, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/3/13/us-launches-air-raids-in-iraq-after-deadly-rocket-attack ;

26 Hamdi Malik, “Iraq Can Now Wrest Its Sovereignty From Iran,” Foreign Affairs, May 25, 2020. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2020-05-25/iraq-can-now-wrest-its-sovereignty-iran ; Dan Lamothe, “After US Strikes, White House Urges Iraq to stop militia threats,” Washington Post, February 4, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/04/iraq-iran-militias-white-house-strikes/

27 “Rocket lands near US Embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone in Iraq,” Alarabiya News, May 19, 2020. https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2020/05/19/Rocket-lands-close-to-US-Embassy-in-Baghdad-s-Green-Zone-in-Iraq

28 Arwa Ibrahim, “Iraq: 14 militia members under investigation after base raid,” Al Jazeera, June 26, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/26/iraq-14-militia-members-under-investigation-after-base-raid ; Michael Knights and Alex Mello, “The Best Thing America Built in Iraq: Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service and the Long War Against Militancy,” War on the Rocks, July 19, 2017. https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/the-best-thing-america-built-in-iraq-iraqs-counter-terrorism-service-and-the-long-war-against-militancy/

29 Namo Abdulla, “Release of Pro-Iran Militants Signals Governance Challenge in Iraq, Experts Say,” Voice of America, July 1, 2020. https://www.voanews.com/a/extremism-watch_release-pro-iran-militants-signals-governance-challenge-iraq-experts-say/6192097.html ; Michael Knights, “Testing Iraq’s Ability to Crack Down on Anti-US Terrorism,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, June 26, 2020. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/testing-iraqs-ability-crack-down-anti-us-terrorism

30 Jeanne F. Godfroy, James S. Powell, Matthew D. Morton, and Matthew M. Zais, US Army in the Iraq War: Volume 2, Surge and Withdrawal (US Army War College Press, 2019), p 378. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/940 ; “Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, April 30, 2013. https://cybercemetery.unt.edu/archive/sigir/20131001091934/http:/www.sigir.mil/files/quarterlyreports/April2013/Report_-_April_2013.pdf

31 Alissa J. Rubin, “Iraq Hosts Both US and Iranian Backed Forces. It’s Getting Tense,” New York Times, February 7, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/07/world/middleeast/iraq-iran-us-strikes.html

32 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, “Why the Afghan Security Force Collapsed,” February 2023, https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-16-IP.pdf

33 Robert Gates, “Helping Others Defend Themselves: The Future of US Security Assistance,” Foreign Affairs (2010) 89:3, p2. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2010-05-01/helping-others-defend-themselves

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12. 'The Unit': For first time a member of America's most secret military unit has penned a memoir

Excerpts:

This was why a new book, simply titled "The Unit" written by a member of another secretive JSOC unit, sometimes known as Intelligence Support Activity, Task Force Orange, the Army of Northern Virginia, or more recently Titan Zeus was the cause of some concern.

However, the book is neither an explosive tell-all nor a dry sanitized history lesson.

The manuscript was submitted through a Department of Defense review to ensure that classified information was not published, however, "The Unit" does provide a taste of what it is like to serve in the organization, some of the types of personalities found there, and what some of their missions were in Africa and the Middle East.

Here are a few interesting vignettes pulled from the book:

'The Unit': For first time a member of America's most secret military unit has penned a memoir

audacy.com · by Jack Murphy · February 26, 2024

America's secretive Joint Special Operations Command has always been leery of former members writing books to put it charitably. The hesitation, and sometimes social shaming the command does to former members can be kind of silly, especially considering that the founding member of Delta Force, Col. Charlie Beckwith, penned a memoir just three years after the unit was fully activated.

This was why a new book, simply titled "The Unit" written by a member of another secretive JSOC unit, sometimes known as Intelligence Support Activity, Task Force Orange, the Army of Northern Virginia, or more recently Titan Zeus was the cause of some concern.

However, the book is neither an explosive tell-all nor a dry sanitized history lesson.

The manuscript was submitted through a Department of Defense review to ensure that classified information was not published, however, "The Unit" does provide a taste of what it is like to serve in the organization, some of the types of personalities found there, and what some of their missions were in Africa and the Middle East.

Here are a few interesting vignettes pulled from the book:

The author is an Egyptian immigrant. A first-generation immigrant from Egypt, a practicing Muslim, and standing all of 5 foot 1 inches tall "Adam Gamal" (a pseudonym) is not exactly the type of guy you see on Special Ops recruiting posters. However, his cultural and linguistic abilities were clearly value added to his unit which was charged with gathering intelligence on Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East.

The selection process is grueling. Getting into the unit is no cakewalk, and the selection course includes both a rural and urban portion where students are graded on their decision-making abilities while placed under stress. Seasoned Special Forces soldiers quit the course in frustration. The author was so worn out and exhausted during his urban selection that a local civilian woman mistook him for a homeless person and offered him some money.

The Unit conducted dangerous undercover missions. Working under an alias and disguised as a local, the author conducted dangerous intelligence gathering missions in war zones like Iraq. In some cases he would take female soldiers with him to further camouflage what he was really doing. "There was a Hawaiian soldier who could be like a chameleon," the author writes. "I took her out a lot with me in a local car. She'd cover up, and no one could tell what nationality she was."

The Unit ran a lot of missions in Africa. During the 2000s JSOC was witnessing foreign fighters from all over the Middle East pour into Iraq to fight American troops. Realizing that the source of many of these recruitments was in African nations, "the unit" began sending operators to these countries with at-risk populations to begin identifying terrorist agitators and smuggling networks.

The author was shot on one such mission. During an undercover mission in Africa, the author was shot in the stomach after being ambushed outside his beddown site, implying that his security was seriously compromised somehow. He nearly bled to death before he could be transported to a hospital where everything from the gurney to the X-ray machine was broken. Eventually, JSOC sent a military doctor to take care of him until he could be evacuated back to the United States.

"The Unit" is an enjoyable read, which gives a small peak behind the curtain into the very secretive world of intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism operations. Recommended for members of the American public who have read many books about Navy SEALs and Green Berets conducting combat operations and asked themselves questions like, "How do these soldiers know where the terrorists even are?"

In at least some cases, it was because Adam Gemal told them where.

audacy.com · by Jack Murphy · February 26, 2024

13. How everything became a ‘psyop’ for conservative media

Another reason why our professional Psychological Operations forces are denigrated, mistrusted and rarely allowed to be effectively employed.

Excerpts:

The fact that none of these personalities seems particularly committed to any firm definition of the word may be the point.

“It has connotations of malign influence, and so it’s a scary word they can use to negatively brand the things they want to negatively brand,” said Todd C. Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND.

...

The cynical genius of calling something a “psyop” is that such accusations “don’t really need to have any evidence, because there’s not going to be any evidence: It’s a secret operation.”

A poll released by Monmouth University last week suggests that at least one so-called “psyop” claim is catching on, with 18 percent of Americans saying that they believe in the existence of “a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election.”

Helmus said he expects the term to continue being used widely in conservative media, even though it does not align with the actual meaning of the term.

“The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they sound crazy to begin with, but they gain legs, and people will continue with them, and there will be people that believe it because there are always believers for these conspiracy theories.”

But, he added: “It would be good for Taylor Swift, and for truth in general, if they died out.”

How everything became a ‘psyop’ for conservative media

The Washington Post · by Jeremy Barr · February 22, 2024

Lately, it’s become popular in conservative media circles to brand certain things as a psychological operation, or “psyop.”

Climate change, for example. Or covid. Or the media coverage of Donald Trump. Or even the prosecution of Hunter Biden.

Technically, “psyop” is a U.S. military term, referring to various kinds of campaigns to get inside the heads of adversaries. In a classic psychological operation during the Vietnam War, the U.S. government blasted messages over loudspeakers that were meant to urge Viet Cong soldiers to defect. Ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was millions of leaflets dropped on cities to undermine support for then-President Saddam Hussein. “Who needs you more? Your family or the regime?” one flier asked.

But conservative media personalities have begun using the term in vaguer and wilder ways, seemingly to allege government conspiracies targeted at American citizens — something that would be illegal, even if any of these theories were remotely plausible.

Actual experts in real-life psyops are unconvinced by this latest wave of claims.

“Most people realize it’s just baloney,” said Herbert A. Friedman, a retired sergeant major who worked in psychological operations for the Army.

Fox News host Jesse Watters is perhaps the most influential superspreader of the term. In January, Watters used a just-asking-questions formula to suggest that Taylor Swift is a psyop asset of the Defense Department. How so? He didn’t exactly connect the dots for viewers, but he did note that Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, had urged her fans to vote.

The Pentagon shot it down with a punny statement: “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”

Watters acknowledged that his show “obviously has no evidence” for the claim, but he tied it tangentially to a comment made at a 2019 NATO cybersecurity conference, where a speaker mentioned Swift’s social media influence. However, the speaker never claimed that the pop star was a government asset, and the event was not held by the U.S. government.

On other occasions, Watters has seemed to repurpose the word into a fancy way to call something a myth or a falsehood or simply a sinister PR campaign he happens to disagree with. Last summer, he claimed that climate change is “a psyop against the American people by big business and the Democratic Party to worry you into giving you more of their money,” and separately referred to a “decades-long liberal media social psyop that marriage is a broken and dated institution.”

In November, though, it was an even murkier argument about how “control freaks” in the FBI and liberal-leaning Twitter employees constituted an anti-Trump psyop of some kind — though he not only presented no evidence, but he also failed to explain what any of that meant.

Watters’s Fox News colleague Greg Gutfeld has also expressed concern about psyops. In November, he asked panelists on his nightly show whether media coverage of Trump’s potential second term is a “psyop,” though he acknowledged, “I hate using that word, because it puts you in a conspiracy realm.” Nonetheless, a month later, he declared on the panel show “The Five” that social media is a “psyop.”

In appearances in late December, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy spoke of both “the trans psyop” and “the covid psyop” but without any context or explanation of what these things are supposed to mean.

The fact that none of these personalities seems particularly committed to any firm definition of the word may be the point.

“It has connotations of malign influence, and so it’s a scary word they can use to negatively brand the things they want to negatively brand,” said Todd C. Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND.

The term is also popular on two conservative cable-news channels that have tried to outflank Fox. Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt recently referred to the federal indictments against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Hunter Biden and a federal investigation into Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) as a “psyop” to “dupe everybody” into thinking that the criminal charges against Trump are “somehow normal and credible and not strange.” In late January, a host on One America News said that sexually explicit artificial-intelligence-generated images of Swift that circulated online are “another psyop.” A few days earlier, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who hosts a show on Salem Radio, said he doesn’t really watch movies “because they’re all CIA psychological operation programming.”

Mike Rothschild, an expert in conspiracy theories who wrote a book on QAnon, sees a profit motive in conservative media’s use of the term, which he said is on the rise.

“There’s a desperate need to get people churning through content and terrified of things they don’t understand or don’t know much about it,” he said.

The cynical genius of calling something a “psyop” is that such accusations “don’t really need to have any evidence, because there’s not going to be any evidence: It’s a secret operation.”

A poll released by Monmouth University last week suggests that at least one so-called “psyop” claim is catching on, with 18 percent of Americans saying that they believe in the existence of “a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election.”

Helmus said he expects the term to continue being used widely in conservative media, even though it does not align with the actual meaning of the term.

“The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they sound crazy to begin with, but they gain legs, and people will continue with them, and there will be people that believe it because there are always believers for these conspiracy theories.”

But, he added: “It would be good for Taylor Swift, and for truth in general, if they died out.”

The Washington Post · by Jeremy Barr · February 22, 2024

14. After U.S. Strikes, Iran’s Proxies Scale Back Attacks on American Bases

Funny how that works. Can we learn anything from this?

After U.S. Strikes, Iran’s Proxies Scale Back Attacks on American Bases

Tehran, wary of igniting open warfare with Washington, has told militia groups it backs to curtail assaults on targets such as military installations, Iranian and American officials say.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/world/middleeast/us-iran-militias.html

Houthi supporters during a protest on Friday in Sana, Yemen, against the United States and Israel.Credit...Yahya Arhab/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Farnaz Fassihi, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes

Feb. 27, 2024, 12:03 a.m. ET

Iran has made a concerted effort to rein in militias in Iraq and Syria after the United States retaliated with a series of airstrikes for the killing of three U.S. Army reservists this month.

Initially, there were regional concerns that the tit-for-tat violence would lead to an escalation of the Middle East conflict. But since the Feb. 2 U.S. strikes, American officials say, there have been no attacks by Iran-backed militias on American bases in Iraq and only two minor ones in Syria.

Before then, the U.S. military logged at least 170 attacks against American troops in four months, Pentagon officials said.

The relative quiet reflects decisions by both sides and suggests that Iran does have some level of control over the militias.

The Biden administration has made clear that Tehran would be held accountable for miscalculations and operations by proxy forces, but it has avoided any direct attack on Iran. The U.S. response “may be having some effect,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said in an interview.

“The question is are the militias attacking or not,” he added, “and at least for now, they are not.”

The lull also marks a sharp turnaround by Iran. Tehran had for months directed its regional proxies in Iraq and Syria to attack American bases in the Middle East as part of a wider battle against Israel, which is fighting Hamas in Gaza.

The American and Iranian officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

As the proxies’ attacks intensified, culminating in the deaths of three American soldiers, Iranian leaders worried that the level of autonomy provided to the militias was starting to backfire and might drive them into war, according to Iranian and American officials.

“They are scared of direct confrontation with the U.S., they know that if Americans are killed again it would mean war,” said Sina Azodi, a lecturer at George Washington University and an expert on Iran’s national security. “They had to put the brakes on the militia and convince them that a war with the U.S. could harm Tehran first and then by extension the entire axis.”

Iran finances, arms and provides technical support and training for a network of militant groups in the region that it calls the Axis of Resistance.

Image

A vehicle that was hit by a drone strike in Baghdad this month.Credit...Murtaja Lateef/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The groups include Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; militias in Iraq, such as Kataib Hezbollah and Hashd al-Shaabi; Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza; and militias in Syria. While Iran directs an overall strategy to the axis, the level of day-to-day control and coordination runs a spectrum. Tehran has most influence over Hezbollah, with the Syrian and Iraqi militia falling in the middle and the Houthis being the most autonomous.

The Iranian effort to rein in the forces began soon after the killing of the three American soldiers in a drone attack in Jordan on Jan. 28, as Washington vowed a forceful response.

Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the high-level Iranian general killed by an American drone strike in 2020, kept the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria on a tight leash. That was largely because, for most of his tenure, war was raging in both countries, and he commanded the militia to fight Americans and then Islamic State terrorist groups. But when Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani succeeded him, most of those conflicts had settled, and General Ghaani assumed a hands-off leadership style, setting only broad directions, according to analysts.

General Ghaani, commander in chief of the Quds Forces, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps tasked with overseeing the proxies, has nonetheless been involved in coordinating the strategy toward Israel and the United States for the various militias during the current war in Gaza.

He led a series of emergency meetings in late January in Tehran and Baghdad with strategists, senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards and senior commanders of the militia to redraw plans and avert war with the United States, according to two Iranians affiliated with the Guards, one of them a military strategist. Reuters first reported on the general’s visit to Baghdad.

In Baghdad, General Ghaani held a long meeting with representatives of all the Shia militant groups who operate under the umbrella of a collective they call Islamic Resistance in Iraq. The collective had been carrying out and then claiming responsibility for dozens of attacks on American bases, and Washington blamed the group for the drone attack that killed the Americans.

General Ghaani told them that Iran and the various militia groups had made enough gains in pressuring the United States because President Biden was facing intense criticism for his staunch support of Israel and fissures had emerged between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the two Iranians affiliated with the Guards said. A war between Tehran and Washington could also jeopardize the long-term goal of rooting out the United States from the region, he told the group, the two Iranians said.

Two of the larger Iraqi militias, Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba, at first fiercely resisted General Ghaani’s demand that they pause attacks on Americans, arguing that fighting U.S. troops was integral to their ideology and identity, the two Iranians said.

Image

Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, center, is commander in chief of the Quds Forces, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that is tasked with overseeing Iran’s proxies.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Influential politicians in Iraq, including senior clerics known as the marjaiah who are based in Najaf, a Shiite holy city, joined the efforts to persuade the militias to pause attacks. The Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, also played a role, telling the commanders of the Iraqi militia and General Ghaani that continued attacks on U.S. forces complicated negotiations between Baghdad and Washington for an American troop withdrawal from his country, according to Iranian and Iraqi officials.

The commanders conceded. Kataib Hezbollah announced that it was halting attacks on American bases and that its decisions were independent from Iran.

The outcome of General Ghaani’s consultations was a new strategy that called for Iraqi militias to stop all attacks on American bases in Iraq, including in the Kurdistan region in the north, and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. In Syria, militia groups have been asked to lower the intensity of attacks on American bases to avoid fatalities, according to Iranian officials and American intelligence assessments. But the groups active against Israel in Lebanon and Yemen would continue at pace, the Iranians familiar with the strategy said.

Once the attacks on Americans subsided, the United States withheld striking at least one senior militia leader after Feb. 2 to avoid disrupting the pause and stoking more hostilities, according to a Defense Department official.

Another U.S. official said the Pentagon was prepared to hit more militia targets if necessary but had determined that carrying out more strikes now would be counterproductive.

The military strategist with the Guards said that Iran believed a direct war with the United States would work in favor of Israel at a time when world opinion had turned against it because of the heavy toll in civilian deaths and suffering in Gaza. After more than a decade, the strategist said, Iran believes that it is enjoying a surge of popularity among Arabs, who are angry that their own countries’ leaders are not doing enough to support Palestinians.

Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said last week, “Our assessment is that Iran doesn’t seek a wider regional conflict.”

“But they do support these militia groups that attack our forces,” she added.

Iran’s overall policy is to keep multiple fronts against Israel boiling through proxies as long as the war in Gaza rages, even if the Tehran-linked militias are avoiding striking U.S. bases.

Image

The coffins of three Army soldiers who were killed in a drone attack in Jordan in January arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware this month.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Hezbollah in Lebanon exchanges almost daily fire with Israel’s military, and the Houthis in Yemen attack ships in the Red Sea and try to block commercial vessels from reaching Israeli ports.

The attacks by Hezbollah and the Houthis will intensify if Israel launches an offensive against Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million civilians are trapped, according to the two members of the Guards familiar with Iran’s new strategy. Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas leader, said at a news conference in Iran this past week that “any attack on Rafah will be met with a fierce response from the resistance.”

American officials acknowledged that they faced a particular challenge with the Houthis. U.S. strategy on the Houthis is to whittle away at the group’s formidable arsenal, prevent weapons transfers from Iran and press for a cease-fire in Gaza.

While a key part of the Washington-Tehran confrontation is on a hiatus, other destabilizing dynamics in the region remain active and unpredictable. Iran and Israel are engaged in an continuing shadow war, including a recent covert assault by Israel on two main gas pipelines in Iran and strikes on residential compounds linked to Iran in Damascus, the Syrian capital. Iran has not yet openly retaliated against Israel after those attacks.

Colin P. Clarke, director of policy and research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy, said: “Iran has this uncanny ability to walk up right to the line and not cross it.”

But, he added, “It doesn’t feel stable, and it doesn’t feel like we are over the hump, and things could really change at any moment.”

Farnaz Fassihi is a reporter for The New York Times based in New York. Previously she was a senior writer and war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years based in the Middle East. More about Farnaz Fassihi

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes

15. How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

There Is so much danger and opportunity within these capabilities.

The majority of this story should be a warning to us and how our data is highly vulnerable to exploitation. But toward the end of the story is how it can be used against adversaries, including Putin and his entourage.

BACKCHANNELFEB 27, 2024 6:00 AM

How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find its Targets—and Vladimir Putin

Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man."

https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/

Wired · by Condé Nast · February 27, 2024

In 2019, a government contractor and technologist named Mike Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country’s national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem.

A popular dating and hookup app, Grindr relied on the GPS capabilities of modern smartphones to connect potential partners in the same city, neighborhood, or even building. The app can show how far away a potential partner is in real time, down to the foot.

In its 10 years of operation, Grindr had amassed millions of users and become a central cog in gay culture around the globe.

But to Yeagley, Grindr was something else: one of the tens of thousands of carelessly designed mobile phone apps that leaked massive amounts of data into the opaque world of online advertisers. That data, Yeagley knew, was easily accessible by anyone with a little technical know-how. So Yeagley—a technology consultant then in his late forties who had worked in and around government projects nearly his entire career—made a PowerPoint presentation and went out to demonstrate precisely how that data was a serious national security risk.

As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, Yeagley was able to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It’s tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it’s making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies.

Working with Grindr data, Yeagley began drawing geofences—creating virtual boundaries in geographical data sets—around buildings belonging to government agencies that do national security work. That allowed Yeagley to see what phones were in certain buildings at certain times, and where they went afterwards. He was looking for phones belonging to Grindr users who spent their daytime hours at government office buildings. If the device spent most workdays at the Pentagon, the FBI headquarters, or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency building at Fort Belvoir, for example, there was a good chance its owner worked for one of those agencies. Then he started looking at the movement of those phones through the Grindr data. When they weren’t at their offices, where did they go? A small number of them had lingered at highway rest stops in the DC area at the same time and in proximity to other Grindr users—sometimes during the workday and sometimes while in transit between government facilities. For other Grindr users, he could infer where they lived, see where they traveled, even guess at whom they were dating.

Intelligence agencies have a long and unfortunate history of trying to root out LGBTQ Americans from their workforce, but this wasn’t Yeagley’s intent. He didn’t want anyone to get in trouble. No disciplinary actions were taken against any employee of the federal government based on Yeagley’s presentation. His aim was to show that buried in the seemingly innocuous technical data that comes off every cell phone in the world is a rich story—one that people might prefer to keep quiet. Or at the very least, not broadcast to the whole world. And that each of these intelligence and national security agencies had employees who were recklessly, if obliviously, broadcasting intimate details of their lives to anyone who knew where to look.

As Yeagley showed, all that information was available for sale, for cheap. And it wasn’t just Grindr, but rather any app that had access to a user’s precise location—other dating apps, weather apps, games. Yeagley chose Grindr because it happened to generate a particularly rich set of data and its user base might be uniquely vulnerable. A Chinese company had obtained a majority stake in Grindr beginning in 2016—amping up fears among Yeagley and others in Washington that the data could be misused by a geopolitical foe. (Until 1995, gay men and women were banned from having security clearances owing in part to a belief among government counterintelligence agents that their identities might make them vulnerable to being leveraged by an adversary—a belief that persists today.)

But Yeagley’s point in these sessions wasn’t just to argue that advertising data presented a threat to the security of the United States and the privacy of its citizens. It was to demonstrate that these sources also presented an enormous opportunity in the right hands, used for the right purpose. When speaking to a bunch of intelligence agencies, there’s no way to get their attention quite like showing them a tool capable of revealing when their agents are visiting highway rest stops.

Mike Yeagley saw both the promise and the pitfalls of advertising data because he’d played a key role in bringing advertising data into government in the first place. His 2019 road show was an attempt to spread awareness across the diverse and often siloed workforces in US intelligence. But by then, a few select corners of the intel world were already very familiar with his work, and were actively making use of it.

Yeagley had spent years working as a technology “scout”—looking for capabilities or data sets that existed in the private sector and helping to bring them into government. He’d helped pioneer a technique that some of its practitioners would jokingly come to call “ADINT”—a play on the intelligence community’s jargon for different sources of intelligence, like the SIGINT (signals intelligence) that became synonymous with the rise of codebreaking and tapped phone lines in the 20th century, and the OSINT (open source intelligence) of the internet era, of which ADINT was a form. More often, though, ADINT was known in government circles as adtech data.

Adtech uses the basic lifeblood of digital commerce—the trail of data that comes off nearly all mobile phones—to deliver valuable intelligence information. Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks showed that, for a time, spy agencies could get data from digital advertisers by tapping fiber optic cables or internet chokepoints. But in the post-Snowden world, more and more traffic like that was being encrypted; no longer could the National Security Agency pull data from advertisers by eavesdropping. So it was a revelation—especially given the public outcry over Snowden’s leaks—that agencies could just buy some of the data they needed straight from commercial entities. One technology consultant who works on projects for the US government explained it this way to me: “The advertising technology ecosystem is the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man. And it wasn’t built by the government.”

Everyone who possesses an iPhone or Android phone has been given an “anonymized” advertising ID by Apple and Google. That number is used to track our real-world movement, our internet browsing behavior, the apps we put on our phone, and much more. Billions of dollars have been poured into this system by America’s largest corporations. Faced with a commercially available repository of data this rich and detailed, the world’s governments have increasingly opened up their wallets to buy up this information on everyone, rather than hacking it or getting it through secret court orders.

Here’s how it works. Imagine a woman named Marcela. She has a Google Pixel phone with the Weather Channel app installed. As she heads out the door to go on a jog, she sees overcast skies. So Marcela opens the app to check if the forecast calls for rain.

By clicking on the Weather Channel’s blue icon, Marcela triggers a frenzy of digital activity aimed at serving her a personalized ad. It begins with an entity called an advertising exchange, basically a massive marketplace where billions of mobile devices and computers notify a centralized server whenever they have an open ad space.

In less than the blink of an eye, the Weather Channel app shares a ream of data with this ad exchange: including the IP address of Marcela’s phone, the version of Android it's running, her carrier, plus an array of technical data about how the phone is configured, down to what resolution the screen resolution is set to. Most valuable of all, the app shares the precise GPS coordinates of Marcela’s phone and the pseudonymized advertising ID number that Google has assigned to her, called an AAID. (On Apple devices, it’s called an IDFA.)

To the layperson, an advertising ID is a string of gibberish, something like bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912. To advertisers, it’s a gold mine. They know that bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 owns a Google Pixel device with the Nike Run Club app. They know that bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 often frequents runnersworld.com. And they know that bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 has been lusting after a pair of new Vaporfly racing shoes. They know this because Nike, runnersworld.com, and Google are all plugged into the same advertising ecosystem, all aimed at understanding what consumers are interested in.

Advertisers use that information as they shape and deploy their ads. Say both Nike and Brooks, another running shoe brand, are trying to reach female running aficionados in a certain income bracket or in certain zip codes. Based on the huge amounts of data they can pull from the ether, they might build an “audience”—essentially a huge list of ad IDs of customers known or suspected to be in the market for running shoes. Then in an instantaneous, automated, real-time auction, advertisers tell a digital ad exchange how much they’re willing to pay to reach those consumers every time they load an app or a web page.

There are some limits and safeguards on all this data. Technically, a user can reset their assigned advertising ID number (though few people do so—or even know they have one). And users do have some control over what they share, via their app settings. If consumers don’t allow the app they’re using to access GPS, the ad exchange can’t pull the phone’s GPS location, for example. (Or at least they aren’t supposed to. Not all apps follow the rules, and they are sometimes not properly vetted once they are in app stores.)

Moreover, ad exchange bidding platforms do minimal due diligence on the hundreds or even thousands of entities that have a presence on their servers. So even the losing bidders still have access to all the consumer data that came off the phone during the bid request. An entire business model has been built on this: siphoning data off the real-time bidding networks, packaging it up, and reselling it to help businesses understand consumer behavior.

Geolocation is the single most valuable piece of commercial data to come off those devices. Understanding the movement of phones is now a multibillion-dollar industry. It can be used to deliver targeted advertising based on location for, say, a restaurant chain that wants to deliver targeted ads to people nearby. It can be used to measure consumer behavior and the effectiveness of advertising. How many people saw an ad and later visited a store? And the analytics can be used for planning and investment decisions. Where is the best location to put a new store? Will there be enough foot traffic to sustain such a business? Is the number of people visiting a certain retailer going up or down this month, and what does that mean for the retailer’s stock price?

But this kind of data is good for something else. It has remarkable surveillance potential. Why? Because what we do in the world with our devices cannot truly be anonymized. The fact that advertisers know Marcela as bdca712j-fb3c-33ad-2324-0794d394m912 as they’re watching her move around the online and offline worlds offers her almost no privacy protection. Taken together, her habits and routines are unique to her. Our real-world movement is highly specific and personal to all of us. For many years, I lived in a small 13-unit walk-up in Washington, DC. I was the only person waking up every morning at that address and going to The Wall Street Journal’s offices. Even if I was just an anonymized number, my behavior was as unique as a fingerprint even in a sea of hundreds of millions of others. There was no way to anonymize my identity in a data set like geolocation. Where a phone spends most of its evenings is a good proxy for where its owner lives. Advertisers know this.

Governments know this too. And Yeagley was part of a team that would try to find out how they could exploit it.

In 2015, a company called PlaceIQ hired Yeagley. PlaceIQ was an early mover in the location data market. Back in the mid-2000s, its founder, Duncan McCall, had participated in an overland driving race from London to Gambia across the land-mine-strewn Western Sahara. He had eschewed the usual practice of hiring an expensive Bedouin guide to help ensure safe passage through the area. Instead, he found online a GPS route that someone else had posted from a few days earlier on a message board. McCall was able to download the route, load it into his own GPS device, and follow the same safe path. On that drive through the Western Sahara, McCall recalled dreaming up the idea for what would become PlaceIQ to capture all of the geospatial data that consumers were emitting and generate insights. At first the company used data from the photo-sharing website Flickr, but eventually PlaceIQ started tapping mobile ad exchanges. It would be the start of a new business model—one that would prove highly successful.

Yeagley was hired after PlaceIQ got an investment from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Just as it had poured money into numerous social media monitoring services, geospatial data had also attracted In-Q-Tel’s interest. The CIA was interested in software that could analyze and understand the geographic movement of people and things. It wanted to be able to decipher when, say, two people were trying to conceal that they were traveling together. The CIA had planned to use the software with its own proprietary data, but government agencies of all kinds eventually became interested in the kind of raw data that commercial entities like PlaceIQ had—it was available through a straightforward commercial transaction and came with fewer restrictions on use inside government than secret intercepts.

After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did.

While working there, Yeagley realized that the data itself might be valuable to the government, too. PlaceIQ was fine selling software to the government but was not prepared to sell its data to the feds. So Yeagley approached a different company called PlanetRisk—one of the hundreds and hundreds of tiny startups with ties to the US government dotted around office parks in Northern Virginia. In theory, a government defense contractor offered a more secure environment than a civilian company like PlaceIQ to do the kind of work he had in mind.

PlanetRisk straddled the corporate world and the government contracting space—building products that were aimed at helping customers understand the relative dangers of various spots around the world. For example, a company that wanted to establish a store or an office somewhere in the world might turn to PlanetRisk to analyze data on crime, civil unrest, and extreme weather as they vary geographically.

PlanetRisk hired Yeagley in 2016 as vice president of global defense—essentially a sales and business development job. The aim was for him to develop his adtech technology inside the contractor, which might try to sell it to various government agencies. Yeagley brought with him some government funding from his relationships around town in the defense and intelligence research communities.

PlanetRisk’s earliest sales demo was about Syria: quantifying the crush of refugees flowing out of Syria after years of civil war and the advancing ISIS forces. From a commercial data broker called UberMedia, PlanetRisk had obtained location data on Aleppo—the besieged Syrian city that had been at the center of some of the fiercest fighting between government forces and US-backed rebels. It was an experiment in understanding what was possible. Could you even obtain location information on mobile phones in Syria? Surely a war zone was no hot spot for mobile advertising.

But to the company’s surprise, the answer was yes. There were 168,786 mobile devices present in the city of Aleppo in UberMedia’s data set, which measured mobile phone movements during the month of December 2015. And from that data, they could see the movement of refugees around the world.

The discovery that there was extensive data in Syria was a watershed. No longer was advertising merely a way to sell products; it was a way to peer into the habits and routines of billions. “Mobile devices are the lifeline for everyone, even refugees,” Yeagley said.

PlanetRisk had sampled data from a range of location brokers—Cuebiq, X-Mode, SafeGraph, PlaceIQ, and Gravy Analytics—before settling on UberMedia. (The company has no relation to the rideshare app Uber.) UberMedia was started by the veteran advertising and technology executive Bill Gross, who had helped invent keyword-targeted ads—the kinds of ads that appear on Google when you search a specific term. UberMedia had started out as an advertising company that helped brands reach customers on Twitter. But over time, like many other companies in this space, UberMedia realized that it could do more than just target consumers with advertising. With access to several ad exchanges, it could save bid requests that contained geolocation information, and then it could sell that data. Now, this was technically against the rules of most ad exchanges, but there was little way to police the practice. At its peak, UberMedia was collecting about 200,000 bid requests per second on mobile devices around the world.*

Just as UberMedia was operating in a bit of a gray zone, PlanetRisk had likewise not been entirely forthright with UberMedia. To get the Aleppo data, Yeagley told UberMedia that he needed the data as part of PlanetRisk’s work with a humanitarian organization—when in fact the client was a defense contractor doing research work funded by the Pentagon. (UberMedia’s CEO would later learn the truth about what Mike Yeagley wanted the data for. And others in the company had their own suspicions. “Humanitarian purposes” was a line met with a wink and nod around the company among employees who knew or suspected what was going on with Yeagley’s data contracts.) Either way, UberMedia wasn’t vetting its customers closely. It appeared to be more eager to make a sale than it was concerned about the privacy implications of selling the movement patterns of millions of people.

When it came time to produce a demo of PlanetRisk’s commercial phone tracking product, Yeagley’s 10-year-old daughter helped him come up with a name. They called the program Locomotive—a portmanteau of “location” and “motive.” The total cost to build out a small demo was about $600,000, put up entirely by a couple of Pentagon research funding arms. As the PlanetRisk team put Locomotive through the paces and dug into the data, they found one interesting story after another.

In one instance they could see a device moving back and forth between Syria and the West—a potential concern given ISIS’s interest in recruiting westerners, training them, and sending them back to carry out terrorist attacks. But as the PlanetRisk team took a closer look, the pattern of the device’s behavior indicated that it likely belonged to a humanitarian aid worker. They could track that person’s device to UN facilities and a refugee camp, unlikely locales for Islamic State fighters to hang out.

They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.

There were other oddities. In one data set, they found one phone kept transiting between the United States and North Korea. The device would attend a Korean church in the United States on Sundays. Its owner appeared to work at a GE factory, a prominent American corporation with significant intellectual property and technology that a regime like Pyongyang would be interested in. Why was it traveling back and forth between the United States and North Korea, not exactly known as a tourist destination? PlanetRisk considered raising the issue with either the US intelligence agencies or the company but ultimately decided there wasn’t much they could do. And they didn’t necessarily want their phone tracking tool to be widely known. They never got to the bottom of it.

Most alarmingly, PlanetRisk began seeing evidence of the US military’s own missions in the Locomotive data. Phones would appear at American military installations such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—home of some of the most skilled US special operators with the Joint Special Operations Command and other US Special Operations Command units. They would then transit through third-party countries like Turkey and Canada before eventually arriving in northern Syria, where they were clustering at the abandoned Lafarge cement factory outside the town of Kobane.

It dawned on the PlanetRisk team that these were US special operators converging at an unannounced military facility. Months later, their suspicions would be publicly confirmed; eventually the US government would acknowledge the facility was a forward operating base for personnel deployed in the anti-ISIS campaign.

Even worse, through Locomotive, they were getting data in pretty close to real time. UberMedia’s data was usually updated every 24 hours or so. But sometimes, they saw movement that had occurred as recently as 15 or 30 minutes earlier. Here were some of the best trained special operations units in the world, operating at an unannounced base. Yet their precise, shifting coordinates were showing up in UberMedia’s advertising data. While Locomotive was a closely held project meant for government use, UberMedia’s data was available for purchase by anyone who could come up with a plausible excuse. It wouldn’t be difficult for the Chinese or Russian government to get this kind of data by setting up a shell company with a cover story, just as Mike Yeagley had done.

If you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are, there is a good chance a log of your precise movements has been saved in some data bank that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies.

Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error—in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.

Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?

Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.

And the same executive remembered leaving another meeting with a different government official. They were on the elevator together when one official asked, could you figure out who is cheating on their spouse?

Yeah, I guess you could, the PlanetRisk executive answered.

But Mike Yeagley wouldn’t last at PlanetRisk.

As the company looked to turn Locomotive from a demo into a live product, Yeagley started to believe that his employer was taking the wrong approach. It was looking to build a data visualization platform for the government. Yet again, Yeagley thought it would be better to provide the raw data to the government and let them visualize it in any way they choose. Rather than make money off of the number of users inside government that buy a software license, Mike Yeagley wanted to just sell the government the data for a flat fee.

So Yeagley and PlanetRisk parted ways. He took his business relationship with UberMedia with him. PlanetRisk moved on to other lines of work and was eventually sold off in pieces to other defense contractors. Yeagley would land at a company called Aelius Exploitation Technologies, where he would go about trying to turn Locomotive into an actual government program for the Joint Special Operations Command—the terrorist-hunting elite special operations force that killed Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zarqawi and spent the past few years dismantling ISIS.

Locomotive was renamed VISR, which stood for Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. It would be used as part of an interagency program and would be shared widely inside the US intelligence community as a tool to generate leads.

By the time Yeagley went out to warn various security agencies about Grindr in 2019, VISR had been used domestically, too—at least for a short period of time when the FBI wanted to test its usefulness in domestic criminal cases. (In 2018, the FBI backed out of the program.) The Defense Intelligence Agency, another agency that had access to the VISR data, has also acknowledged that it used the tool on five separate occasions to look inside the United States as part of intelligence-related investigations.

But VISR, by now, is only one product among others that sell adtech data to intelligence agencies. The Department of Homeland Security has been a particularly enthusiastic adopter of this kind of data. Three of its components—US Customs and Border Protection, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the US Secret Service —have bought more than 200 licenses from commercial ad tech vendors since 2019. They would use this data for finding border tunnels, tracking down unauthorized immigrants, and trying to solve domestic crimes. In 2023, a government inspector general chastised DHS over the use of adtech, saying that the department did not have adequate privacy safeguards in place and recommending that the data stop being used until policies were drawn. The DHS told the inspector general that they would continue to use the data. Adtech “is an important mission contributor to the ICE investigative process as, in combination with other information and investigative methods, it can fill knowledge gaps and produce investigative leads that might otherwise remain hidden,” the agency wrote in response.

Other governments’ intelligence agencies have access to this data as well. Several Israeli companies—Insanet, Patternz and Rayzone—have built similar tools to VISR and sell it to national security and public safety entities around the world, according to reports. Rayzone has even developed the capability to deliver malware through targeted ads, according to Haaretz.

Which is to say, none of this is an abstract concern—even if you’re just a private citizen. I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there is a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies. It includes foreign governments. It includes private investigators. It even includes nosy journalists. (In 2021, a small conservative Catholic blog named The Pillar reported that Jeffrey Burrill, the secretary general of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was a regular user of Grindr. The publication reported that Burrill “visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app” and described its source as “commercially available records of app signal data obtained by The Pillar.”)

If you cheated on your spouse in the past few years and you were careless about your location data settings, there is a good chance there is evidence of that in data that is available for purchase. If you checked yourself into an inpatient drug rehab, that data is probably sitting in a data bank somewhere. If you told your boss you took a sick day and interviewed at a rival company, that could be in there. If you threw a brick through a storefront window during the George Floyd protests, well, your cell phone might link you to that bit of vandalism. And if you once had a few pints before causing a car crash and drove off without calling the police, data telling that story likely still exists somewhere.

We all have a vague sense that our cell phone carriers have this data about us. But law enforcement generally needs to go get a court order to get that. And it takes evidence of a crime to get such an order. This is a different kind of privacy nightmare.

I once met a disgruntled former employee of a company that competed against UberMedia and PlaceIQ. He had absconded with several gigabytes of data from his former company. It was only a small sampling of data, but it represented the comprehensive movements of tens of thousands of people for a few weeks. Lots of those people could be traced back to a residential address with a great deal of confidence. He offered me the data so I could see how invasive and powerful it was.

What can I do with this—hypothetically? I asked. In theory, could you help me draw geofences around mental hospitals? Abortion clinics? Could you look at phones that checked into a motel midday and stayed for less than two hours?

Easily, he answered.

I never went down that road.

Adapted from Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State by Byron Tau, to be published February 27, 2024 by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC; Copyright © 2024 by Panopticon Project LLC.

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Wired · by Condé Nast · February 27, 2024

16. In Ukraine, Russia Is Inching Forward Death by Death

Excerpts:

Despite their losses in Avdiivka, U.S. officials predict that Russia will continue to put pressure on Ukrainian forces across multiple parts of the front line, hoping Kyiv’s units are degraded. The battlefield defeat, along with declining morale — exacerbated by the United States’s failure to continue supplying ammunition — might give the Kremlin’s formations an opportunity to exploit the situation on the ground.

The Russian military does not, however, have the kind of reserve forces that could immediately exploit the weakened defenses created by the retreat from Avdiivka, those officials said. American intelligence agencies have assessed that the Russian military command had hoped to create a force capable of quick frontline breakthroughs, but that the plan was dashed by the need to reinforce their defenses during last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Attacking well-entrenched positions means the assaulting force is at far greater risk: Those troops are exposed, and retrieving battlefield wounded and dead is exponentially more difficult than for those troops in a trench. Ukrainian troops have often been astounded by the amount of dead and wounded Russian soldiers they see strewed across the battlefield.

Still, the Russian troops keep coming. And with artillery ammunition critically low, the Ukrainians are being much more selective about when to use it. One unit commander said he had asked for fire support on a group of Russian soldiers only to be denied: There weren’t enough Russian troops to warrant a strike.

“You can’t really stop them,” said the commander, insisting on anonymity for security reasons. “While the front ones are moving, they’re bringing others up from the rear.”

In Ukraine, Russia Is Inching Forward Death by Death

Russian forces have an unorthodox view of acceptable levels of military losses, with a willingness to expend troops and equipment to make even small gains on the battlefield.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/world/europe/russia-deaths-avdiivka-strategy.html

Damaged buildings in Avdiivka, Ukraine, in October. The Russian army took control of the city this month after months of intense fighting and heavy losses.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Anatoly Kurmanaev

Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Anatoly Kurmanaev from Vilnius, Lithuania.

Feb. 27, 2024, 

5:30 a.m. ET

As the Russian military launched its offensive on the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka last fall, Ukrainian troops noticed a change in their tactics as column after column of Russian forces were ravaged by artillery fire.

Russian forces divided their infantry formations into smaller units to avoid being shelled, while the amount of Russian airstrikes increased to hammer the city’s defenses.

It was one of several adjustments the Russians made to help reverse their fortunes after a disastrous first year. But these changes were obscured by one glaring fact: The Russian military was still far more willing to absorb big losses in troops and equipment, even to make small gains.

Russian forces have a different threshold of pain, one senior Western official said this month, as well as an unorthodox view of what is considered an acceptable level of military losses.

Hundreds of thousands of both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been wounded or killed since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, including tens of thousands last year in the battle for the eastern city of Bakhmut. Another town to the south, Marinka, fell to Russia in January, after heavy fighting and more losses.

Avdiivka was among the most costly. The various Russian casualty estimates circulating among military analysts, pro-Russian bloggers and Ukrainian officials suggest that Moscow lost more troops taking Avdiivka than it did in 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Image

Ukrainian soldiers in a village outside of Avdiivka in October.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

But casualty numbers are difficult to verify — inflated by the side inflicting casualties and downplayed by the side suffering them — leaving the true cost unknown. The official figure of Soviet dead in Afghanistan, around 15,000, is considered to be significantly understated.

One prominent military blogger wrote that the Russians had lost 16,000 troops at Avdiivka, a number that for now remains impossible to confirm.

“Despite Russia’s heavy losses in Avdiivka, they still have a manpower advantage along the front and can continue assaults in multiple directions,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which is based in Philadelphia.

Russia’s slow grind forward comes as European nations move to bolster support for Ukraine and strengthen their own protections against potential Russian aggression. On Monday, NATO cleared the final hurdle for approving Sweden’s membership, less than a year after Finland joined, an expansion of the military alliance that defies the hopes of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of fracturing the unity of his adversaries.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Sunday that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died fighting Russia. His comments drew notice for how rare they were; participants in war hardly ever reveal casualty numbers. But most Western analysts and officials say the toll is far higher.

Since the start of the invasion, Russia has been willing to pay a particularly high cost to advance in the area of eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas, where Avdiivka is. Parts of this traditionally Russian-speaking region have been occupied by Russia’s proxies since 2014, and in justifying the full-scale invasion, the Kremlin has spuriously claimed to be defending its Russian speakers, saying they want to be part of Russia.

Some military analysts say taking full control of the Donbas is the bare minimum the Russian government needs to present the invasion of Ukraine as a victory at home. That perhaps explains Moscow’s willingness to absorb huge losses to make marginal advances.

Image

Members of a humanitarian group that collects the remains of deceased soldiers carrying the body of a Russian serviceman near Koroviy Yar, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, last year.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Avdiivka has been strategic as well as symbolic for Russian war propaganda because of its proximity to Donetsk, the Donbas’s largest city, which has been under the Russian-backed occupation since 2014. Securing Avdiivka would move Ukrainian artillery away from the city, reducing civilian casualties and pressure on rear supply lines.

The Kremlin’s propensity to fire more shells, mass more people and lean on a much larger and capable air force in this war allowed it to gradually turn the tide against Ukraine’s deep defenses in Avdiivka. The huge cost in wounded and dead, some analysts say, was just the byproduct of a strategy that largely achieved its goal, despite the loss of men and matériel, especially as Western military aid and Ukrainian ammunition subsequently dwindled.

At least for now.

A Russian military analyst close to the defense industry, Ruslan Pukhov, wrote last week that the assault on Avdiivka was part of a wider Russian strategy of pressuring Ukrainian forces along the entire 600-mile front line with thrusts and probes to exhaust the enemy “by a thousand cuts.”

“Such a strategy, however, is quite costly for the Russian Armed Forces in terms of losses, which could lead to depletion of its forces,” Mr. Pukhov wrote in a Russian current affairs magazine. “This, in turn, could give the Ukrainian side the initiative once again.”

Most analysts, however, are issuing sobering assessments of Ukraine’s prospects for 2024 if it does not receive American aid. As the war enters its third year, both sides are struggling to find enough men to continue fighting at the same level of intensity. Russia’s much larger population, about 144 million, which is three times that of Ukraine, gives it a significant edge in manpower.

The scale of Russia’s losses has partly negated the impact of this arithmetic.

The Kremlin’s decision to call up 300,000 men in September 2022 — for the first time since World War II — has shocked and unnerved the nation, according to polls. Hundreds of thousands of men had already fled the country when the war began, threatening to shatter the image of normalcy cultivated by Mr. Putin.

Image

A recruitment advertisement for the Russian army on a billboard in Moscow last year.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

Since then, the government has tried to postpone another round of mobilization for as long as possible. Instead, it has boosted financial and legal incentives to attract convicts, debtors, migrants and other vulnerable social groups to the front as volunteers. It has also begun to strictly enforce the country’s previously lax mandatory military service for young men.

In a post published on the Telegram messaging app on Feb. 18, a pro-war Russian military blogger cited an anonymous military source claiming that since October, Russian forces had sustained 16,000 “irreplaceable” human losses as well as that of 300 armored vehicles in the assault on Avdiivka. The Ukrainian forces had sustained 5,000 to 7,000 irreplaceable human losses in the battle, the blogger, Andrei Morozov, wrote.

These claims could not be independently verified.

Mr. Morozov wrote that he had decided to publish the Avdiivka losses to hold Russian commanders accountable for what he portrayed as a needlessly bloody campaign. He deleted his post two days later, claiming in a series of subsequent posts that he had been pressured to do so by Russian military commanders and Kremlin propagandists.

In those posts, Mr. Morozov — who was considered among bloggers to be fairly accurate in his reports but also emotionally volatile — talked about ending his own life. He was found dead hours later, last Wednesday, according to his lawyer.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has broken down into a relatively predictable rhythm: Neither side has the capacity to launch massive attacks that breach enemy lines and that allow for rapid gains on the battlefield. Instead, smaller units push ahead, relying heavily on artillery and drones to gain each scrap of ground.

Image

A funeral for a Ukrainian soldier killed near Avdiivka, in Bucha, Ukraine, on Saturday.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Despite their losses in Avdiivka, U.S. officials predict that Russia will continue to put pressure on Ukrainian forces across multiple parts of the front line, hoping Kyiv’s units are degraded. The battlefield defeat, along with declining morale — exacerbated by the United States’s failure to continue supplying ammunition — might give the Kremlin’s formations an opportunity to exploit the situation on the ground.

The Russian military does not, however, have the kind of reserve forces that could immediately exploit the weakened defenses created by the retreat from Avdiivka, those officials said. American intelligence agencies have assessed that the Russian military command had hoped to create a force capable of quick frontline breakthroughs, but that the plan was dashed by the need to reinforce their defenses during last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Attacking well-entrenched positions means the assaulting force is at far greater risk: Those troops are exposed, and retrieving battlefield wounded and dead is exponentially more difficult than for those troops in a trench. Ukrainian troops have often been astounded by the amount of dead and wounded Russian soldiers they see strewed across the battlefield.

Still, the Russian troops keep coming. And with artillery ammunition critically low, the Ukrainians are being much more selective about when to use it. One unit commander said he had asked for fire support on a group of Russian soldiers only to be denied: There weren’t enough Russian troops to warrant a strike.

“You can’t really stop them,” said the commander, insisting on anonymity for security reasons. “While the front ones are moving, they’re bringing others up from the rear.”

Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. More about Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine. More about Anatoly Kurmanaev

17. Dragons in the West: Chinese Communist Party Threats in Europe and the Imperative of a Strategic Pivot

Excerpts:

Solutions to counter Chinese threats are not simple as the threats encompass the economic, legal, and political domains. European security cannot exist in a vacuum and relies on an American umbrella. American presence along Europe’s eastern flank, primarily in Poland, given its continuous position as a strategic ally for the United States, is one of the needed examples of mutual connections.

The United States and the EU should work on aligned solutions in the domains of the economy, public policy, and technology. The EU and the United States have the largest bilateral trade and investment relationship and enjoy the most integrated economic relationship in the world. Although overtaken by the PRC in 2020 as the largest trading partner specifically for goods, the United States remains the EU’s largest trading partner by far when services and investment are considered. The EU and the United States launched the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) in 2021. The TTC serves as a forum for the EU and the United States to coordinate approaches to key global trade and corresponding economic and technology issues, primarily designed to strengthen semiconductor supply chains, curb non-market trade practices, and adopt a more unified approach to regulating global technology firms. The two sides agreed to exchange information on investment trends affecting security, including industry-specific trends, origin of investments, and types of transactions focusing on sensitive technologies and data.

CEE countries, organized in the Three Seas Initiative, have chosen the Euro-Atlantic partnership. Now, it is imperative for Western Europe to reexamine the security implications of the ties it has with the PRC and enhance transatlantic cooperation to ensure the continuation of the rules-based order that Europe and the United States have collaboratively buttressed.

Dragons in the West: Chinese Communist Party Threats in Europe and the Imperative of a Strategic Pivot - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Joanna Siekiera · February 27, 2024

The Polish Hussars, with their winged lances and unwavering courage, are celebrated as the saviors of Vienna, halting the Ottoman siege in 1683. Their resolute defense marked a turning point for Europe, guarding the continent from eastern threats. Fast forward to the present day, and once again, Poland and the rest of Central Europe find themselves at a crossroads. This time, it’s not the Ottoman Empire knocking at the gates, but a new, subtle force from the East – the dragon of the 21st century, China. As Poland navigates a complex dance with a modern-day behemoth, we delve into the intriguing tale of the past and present, where history rhymes and the Hussars’ spirit echoes in the corridors of diplomacy and trade.

The Gathering Storm

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitutes a formidable challenge, not solely confined to the Indo-Pacific region, but also to Europe. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an existing and immediate concern for the security, political, and economic stability of the European Union (EU). Within the European context, the PRC presents substantial non-military threats by actively pursuing economic, diplomatic, and informational strategies aimed at influencing the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time) in alignment with its objectives. A more detailed examination of how Chinese enterprises operating in Europe contribute to various aspects of the CCP’s political apparatus can highlight effective countermeasures against state-sponsored intrusions with the potential to destabilize the European continent.

Weaponizing Capital in Europe

In numerous European states, the PRC is perceived not primarily as a diplomatic collaborator, but rather as a key economic ally, emphasizing financial influence over fostering mutually beneficial relationships. Chinese enterprises, spanning various sectors such as harbors, airports, electronics, telecommunications, and higher education, have strategically invested and established mechanisms of influence over the past decade. Notably, this influence diverges in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), specifically encompassing Poland, Czechia, and the Baltic states, consisting of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. This region, having endured profound hardships from communism during and after the Second World War, exhibits a distinct perspective.

The countries of CEE understand that both the Soviet empire and the PRC share doctrinal roots in Marxist and Leninist ideology and employ analogous tactics, thereby instigating a heightened wariness towards communism and the ideology embodied by the PRC, in contrast to the approach observed in Western Europe, with less direct historical interaction with communism. In CEE, there exists a recognition that while Russia may pose a preliminary threat, the enduring and more pronounced menace emanates from the PRC. The Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, a possible candidate for the next NATO Secretary General, stated the general sentiment of the CEE: “with China, it’s the same as with Russia”.

National and Subnational Subversive Investments

The case of European ports demonstrates Chinese economic encroachment, in line with their global infrastructure development strategy, known in the West as the One Belt, One Road Initiative, which also aligns key global infrastructure under the PRC. The Piraeus Port of Greece’s capital city, Athens, is Europe’s biggest passenger port and second largest in the world—built and owned by the Chinese government-owned China Ocean Shipping Company, Limited (COSCO) Group. Hamburg Port is the third-busiest port in Europe and is now also owned by COSCO Group. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz backed the latter sale, despite concerns from other EU member states and his country’s own intelligence services. An analogous situation unfolded with the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Gas Pipelines from Russia to Germany over the protests of Poland and other European nations. CEE nations encouraged Berlin to halt the investment as it breached European solidarity while doing business with Russia—constantly trying to rebuild “Great Russia” (Ru: Великая Россия)—served as an imperialistic maneuver against European security and stability.

Beyond investments in wealthier European countries, the PRC is also making in-roads in states strapped for liquidity, such as the Balkans. Throughout much of Europe, when there is no national provider able to make an investment, the second round allows foreign companies to make offers. In this underdeveloped region, the entity willing to pay the most while charging the least wins, and PRC state-owned enterprises tend to win state contracts across the Balkans. For example, in North Macedonia, Chinese investors have been managing enormous road and tunnel investment projects. Similar to Africa, South America, and Oceania, Chinese giants have no parallel competition in many places in Europe, enabling PRC state-owned enterprises to be sole source bidders on projects or underbid any other international investors.

A New Influence Front: Academia

Academia has similarly become an area of concern in Europe as an arena of CCP influence. This is most pronounced in the enormous movement around education where, at various Confucius Institutes and Sinology faculties across Europe, the next generation of researchers are financed by the PRC through grants, scholarships, fellowships, and book publications. But there is always a price—writing and lecturing in strict alignment with the CCP’s expectations, contorting how the PRC really functions and how it operates in other countries.

Ultimately, the PRC’s undermining of the legal-political stability of the European Union lies also in adjusting current European policy towards Beijing. While political language is typically driven towards the mean, the statements against Russia, the United States, and even each other, show politicians can be abrasive when they want to unleash verbal barbs. By comparison, soft language of EU politicians referring to the CCP—such as “We have to work together in order to avoid a confrontation in the region” by Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, or “a very clear will to avoid being naive, but neither did we want to embark into a logic of systematic confrontation” from Charles Michel, European Council President—drive the point on how the EU tends to view the PRC.

Turning out the Lights on Capitalism

EU leaders have long been complicit in the PRC’s efforts to leverage Chinese firms to infiltrate European critical infrastructure. Between 2010 and the end of 2012, the volume of Chinese investments in the EU quadrupled, from 6 to 27 billion euros. This rise accompanied the long-standing dual phenomenon of de-industrialization in the West and the PRC’s ambition to pursue an active investment policy in Europe. Between 2015 and 2016 alone, Chinese investment in the EU grew by 77%; including telecommunications, real estate, and the automotive industry. In 2019, the transport, energy, utilities, and infrastructure sectors were the four largest sectors of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the EU, with 800 million euros.

Chinese-fronted investments in European energy infrastructure provide insight into the CCP’s recurring methods and means. First, Chinese companies acquired majority stakes through initial minority stakes. These investments focus on specific segments of the energy value chain and strategic influence. Whether in electricity transmission or distribution networks, the 2010s saw substantial Chinese investments, first in southern European countries, which were undergoing privatizations, and later in northern Europe.

Chinese companies have stakes in European electric grids, such as the state-owned company China Three Gorges buying Energias de Portugal for 2.7 billion euros in 2011, while State Grid Corporation of China bought 35% of the Italian public holding CDP Reti for 2.4 billion euros in 2014. Similar investments have occurred in renewable energy fields where once again, China Three Gorges bought 49% shares of Energias de Portugal Renewables, while Germany, having registered the world’s highest output of solar energy, became the Chinese preferable recipient. In 2015, there were 900 Chinese companies in Germany, among which 135 were in the renewable sector, automotive (specifically Volvo Cars and the tire maker Pirelli), and telecommunications systems wherein Germany and Italy continue to rely on Chinese 5G, with Huawei building 59% and 51% of their respective networks amid general European hesitation.

Letting the PRC enter so many critical infrastructure sectors allows the PRC to collect critical intelligence about who is involved in key decision-making and how such decisions are made. Due to Chinese investments and encroachments into the energy sector, the PRC has gained potential leverage against Europe. The PRC has been accused by both the United States and the EU of promoting corruptive behavior as well as frequent use of debt traps—a mechanism that forces some countries into political submission in exchange for reducing unpayable loans.

Poland: Self-Reliance is Independence

The Republic of Poland is a good example to illustrate how to build independence from Chinese economic and military power. Poland understands that economic dependence on an external actor, including energy dependence (Russia for many decades), means de facto losing its own independence and puts pressure on its energy security. Poland, exhibiting the most rapid economic growth in Europe and ranking as the 19th largest economy globally, is engaged in an accelerated process of enhancing and modernizing its armed forces. This endeavor involves a substantial financial commitment, with defense expenditures amounting to 4% of the gross domestic product (GDP), presently standing as the highest within the NATO alliance. Concurrently, there is a proportional investment directed towards the development of critical infrastructure, underscoring Poland’s strategic objective of attaining both security and energy independence.

Based on those actions by Warsaw and the country’s rapid development, Poland is being cited and praised for its consistent economic and military augmentation and ensuing resilience against authoritarian regimes. The latest example was a strong and unapologetic stance of the Polish government to support and finalize the controversial exhibition by the Chinese dissident Badiucao, who portrayed the CCP negatively through his art. The Chinese Embassy in Warsaw tried to cancel the exhibition, without any success.

Additionally, Poland is working on a parliamentary bill to ban both Chinese telecom equipment company Huawei from their 5G networks and the social media platform TikTok. The newly elected Polish Minister of Digitization said, “We must do everything to prevent particular infrastructure from appearing in Poland, which is not fully controlled, and through which Poland could be attacked online.” This aligns with the political recommendations called the Prague Proposals, where European states, most actively represented by Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Czechia, and Bulgaria, pledged to restrict 5G suppliers subject to foreign government influence.

Illustrating Poland’s stance as a bastion against Chinese engagements and, more broadly, authoritarian regimes, it is noteworthy that the pivotal nations of western Europe, namely France and Germany, continue to rely on cost-effective natural resources from Russia. This dependence positions the aforementioned countries as economic allies of Moscow within the European context and Beijing through the newly minted ‘No Limits Partnership’ of Russia and the China. Chinese companies that predominantly follow the CCP’s priorities own or have major stakes in a wide range of European critical infrastructure, including ports, airports, electricity companies, wind, and solar farms, as well as telecommunications. Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France present the gravest examples of this type of influence by the CCP.

The part of the European Union known as the Three Seas (3S) region—countries between the Baltic Sea in the North, the Adriatic Sea in the West, and the Black Sea in the East—attracts both the US and the PRC in terms of geopolitics, defense, and economic investment. Committed to technological and infrastructure development, this region currently offers significant investment potential. Poland proudly represents the 3S Initiative and is a long-standing American ally, advocating for the American umbrella and strongly prioritizing digital security—a dimension that could undermine both Russia and the PRC’s One Belt, One Road Initiative.

Fears on the Plains and the Strength to Resist

The current greatest anecdotal fear of the CCP in the central European plain is that critical infrastructure can be targeted by the PRC either during a major conflict, or even below the threshold of armed conflict, taking advantage of events such as a natural disaster, a large sporting event, or a pandemic to better realize CCP aims. The real concern is over digital security and Europe’s dependency on Chinese technology. The United States does not want to allow the PRC—which currently offers infrastructure with the best price and quality ratio, making it an attractive 5G provider—to control networks in Europe, especially in the Three Seas region, which is crucial to the security of the West, and which strategically relies on American companies.

Solutions to counter Chinese threats are not simple as the threats encompass the economic, legal, and political domains. European security cannot exist in a vacuum and relies on an American umbrella. American presence along Europe’s eastern flank, primarily in Poland, given its continuous position as a strategic ally for the United States, is one of the needed examples of mutual connections.

The United States and the EU should work on aligned solutions in the domains of the economy, public policy, and technology. The EU and the United States have the largest bilateral trade and investment relationship and enjoy the most integrated economic relationship in the world. Although overtaken by the PRC in 2020 as the largest trading partner specifically for goods, the United States remains the EU’s largest trading partner by far when services and investment are considered. The EU and the United States launched the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) in 2021. The TTC serves as a forum for the EU and the United States to coordinate approaches to key global trade and corresponding economic and technology issues, primarily designed to strengthen semiconductor supply chains, curb non-market trade practices, and adopt a more unified approach to regulating global technology firms. The two sides agreed to exchange information on investment trends affecting security, including industry-specific trends, origin of investments, and types of transactions focusing on sensitive technologies and data.

CEE countries, organized in the Three Seas Initiative, have chosen the Euro-Atlantic partnership. Now, it is imperative for Western Europe to reexamine the security implications of the ties it has with the PRC and enhance transatlantic cooperation to ensure the continuation of the rules-based order that Europe and the United States have collaboratively buttressed.

Dr. Joanna Siekiera is an international lawyer, legal advisor, consultant at NATO, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare at the Marine Corps University.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, the United States Marine Corps, or the United States Government.

Main Image: Chinese New Year Celebration, Paris France 2013 (12019 via Pixabay)

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18. Kissinger and the True Meaning of Détente

Excerpts:

Détente, of course, does not work miracles. In the 1970s, it was both oversold and overbought. The policy unquestionably provided the United States with time, but it was a chess strategy that perhaps required too many callous sacrifices of lesser pieces on the board. As one Soviet analyst, puzzled by U.S. opposition to his country’s intervention in Angola, remarked, “You Americans tried to sell détente like detergent and claimed that it would do everything a detergent could do.”

Critics ultimately succeeded in poisoning the term. In March 1976, Ford banned its use in his reelection campaign. But there was never a workable replacement. Asked then if he had an alternative term, Kissinger gave a characteristically wry response. “I’ve been dancing around myself to find one,” he said. “Easing of tensions, relaxation of tensions. We may well wind up with the old word again.”

Today, the Biden administration has settled for its own word: “de-risking.” It is not French, but it is also barely English. Although the starting point of this cold war is different because of the much greater economic interdependence between today’s superpowers, the optimal strategy may turn out to be essentially the same as before. If the new détente is to be criticized, then the critics should not misrepresent it the way Kissinger’s détente was so often misrepresented by his many foes—lest they find themselves, like Reagan before, doing essentially the same when they are in the Situation Room.

Kissinger and the True Meaning of Détente

Reinventing a Cold War Strategy for the Contest With China

By Niall Ferguson

March/April 2024

Published on February 20, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Kissinger: 1923–1968; The Idealist · February 20, 2024

Few words are more closely associated with the late Henry Kissinger than “détente.” The term was first used in diplomacy in the early 1900s, when the French ambassador to Germany tried—and failed—to better his country’s deteriorating relationship with Berlin, and in 1912, when British diplomats attempted the same thing. But détente became internationally famous only in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Kissinger, first as U.S. national security adviser and then also as U.S. secretary of state, pioneered what would become his signature policy: the easing of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Détente should not be confused with amitié. It was not about striking up a friendship with Moscow but about reducing the risks that a cold war would become a hot one. “The United States and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals,” Kissinger explained in his memoirs. “Détente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that, either.” For Kissinger, détente was a middle way between the aggression that had led to World War I, “when Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted,” and the appeasement that he believed had led to World War II, “when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor.”

To pursue détente, Kissinger sought to engage the Soviets on a variety of issues, including arms control and trade. He strove to establish “linkage,” another keyword of the era, between things the Soviets appeared to want (for example, better access to American technology) and things the United States knew it wanted (for example, assistance in extricating itself from Vietnam). At the same time, Kissinger was prepared to be combative whenever he discerned that the Soviets were working to expand their sphere of influence, from the Middle East to southern Africa. In other words, and as Kissinger himself put it, détente meant embracing “both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.”

If that pragmatic sentiment resonates five decades later, it is because policymakers in Washington appear to have reached a similar conclusion about China, the country with which U.S. President Joe Biden and his national security team seem ready to attempt their own version of détente. “We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict,” Biden told the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in California in November. “We also have a responsibility to our people and the world to work together when we see it in our interest to do so.” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, made a similar point in his essay in these pages last year. “The contest is truly global, but not zero-sum,” he wrote. “The shared challenges the two sides face are unprecedented.” To paraphrase Kissinger, the United States and China are major rivals. But the nuclear age and climate change, not to mention artificial intelligence, compel them to coexist.

If détente is making a comeback in all but name, then why did it go out of fashion? In the wake of Kissinger’s death, in November 2023, his critics on the left have not been slow to repeat their old list of indictments, ranging from the bombing of civilians in Cambodia to supporting dictators in Chile, Pakistan, and elsewhere. For the left, Kissinger personified a cold-blooded realpolitik that subordinated human rights in the Third World to containment. This was the aspect of détente to which U.S. President Jimmy Carter objected. But much less has been heard lately of the conservative critique of Kissinger, which claimed that Kissinger’s policy was tantamount to appeasement. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan spent the 1970s blasting détente as a “one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims.” He taunted Kissinger for acquiescing as the Soviets cynically exploited détente, such as when they and their Cuban allies gained the upper hand in postcolonial Angola. During his first run for president, in 1976, Reagan repeatedly pledged to scrap the policy if elected. “Under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford,” he declared in March of that year, “this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.”

Reagan was hardly an outlier. By the time he spoke, hawks across the government were fed up with Kissinger’s approach. Republicans commonly complained that, in the words of New Jersey Senator Clifford Case, “the gains made in détente have accrued to the Soviet side.” Across the aisle, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia enraged Kissinger by accusing him of having “put great trust in Communist Russia” and, through détente, “embracing” Moscow. The American military, meanwhile, suggested that to pursue détente was to admit defeat. In 1976, Elmo Zumwalt, who had recently retired as head of the U.S. Navy, argued that Kissinger believed the United States had “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations.” Just as appeasement, which had started out as a respectable term, fell into disrepute in 1938, détente became a dirty word—and it did so even before Kissinger left office.

Détente should not be confused with amitié.

Yet 1970s détente was unlike 1930s appeasement, both in the way it functioned and in the results it produced. Unlike the British and French attempt to buy off Adolf Hitler with territorial concessions, Kissinger and his presidents strove to contain their adversary’s expansion. And unlike appeasement, détente successfully avoided a world war. Writing in the mid-1980s, the political scientist Harvey Starr counted a marked increase in the ratio of cooperative to conflictual acts in U.S.-Soviet relations during the Nixon administration. The number of state-based conflicts was lower in the Kissinger years (1969 to 1977) than in the years after and right before.

Half a century later, as Washington adjusts to the realities of a new cold war, détente could again be derailed by hawks. Republican politicians love to portray their opponents as soft on China, just as their predecessors portrayed their opponents as soft on the Soviets in the 1970s. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, has claimed that Biden is “coddling and appeasing the Chinese communists.” Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has accused Biden of “weakness” that “continues to invite aggression” against Taiwan.

These charges are not surprising; it is always tempting for Republicans to summon the spirit of Reagan and rerun his critique of détente. But there is a danger that both parties are misunderstanding the lessons of the 1970s. In advocating an uncompromising containment of China, Republicans may be overestimating the United States’ ability to prevail in the event of a confrontation. In shying away from escalation, the Biden administration may be underestimating the importance of deterrence as a component of détente. The essence of Kissinger’s strategy was that it combined engagement and containment in a way that was well advised given the state of the American economy and American public opinion in the 1970s, or what the Soviets liked to call the “correlation of forces.” A similar combination is needed today, especially when the correlation of forces is a good deal more favorable for Beijing than it ever was for Moscow.

ON THE BRINK

These days, the more sophisticated of Kissinger’s academic critics don’t complain that the Soviets got more out of détente than the United States did. Instead, they argue that Kissinger repeatedly made the mistake of seeing every issue through the lens of the Cold War and treating every crisis as if it were decisive to the struggle against Moscow. As the historian Jussi Hanhimaki has written in a book-length broadside, Kissinger took it “as a given that containing Soviet power—if not communist ideology—should be the central goal of American foreign policy.”

This critique reflects the efforts historians have made in recent years to focus on the sufferings of people who lived in the countries caught in the Cold War crossfire. But it underestimates just how threatening the Soviet Union was to the United States in the Third World. Whatever the crafty Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin might have said to Kissinger, the Kremlin did not regard détente as anything other than cover for its strategy to gain the advantage over Washington. As a 1971 report to the Politburo made clear, the Soviet Union wanted the United States to “conduct its international affairs in a way that did not create a danger of direct confrontation,” but only because doing so could make Washington “recognize the need for the West to realize the interests of the USSR.” To achieve this objective, the report called on the Politburo “to continue to use the U.S. government’s objective interest in maintaining contacts and holding negotiations with the USSR.”

Kissinger was not privy to this document, but it would not have surprised him. He had no illusions about the game being played by Dobrynin’s masters. After all, the Soviets also stated publicly in 1975 that détente did not preclude their continued “support of the national liberation struggle” against “the social-political status quo.” As Kissinger told the columnist Joe Alsop in 1970, “If the Soviets think an agreement on nuclear parity will serve their interests, they are perfectly capable of reaching for such an agreement with one hand, while trying to cut our gizzards out with the other hand.”

Kissinger and Ford negotiating arms control with General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev and others near Vladivostok, Russia, November 1974

Gerald R. Ford Library / Reuters

Nevertheless, although Kissinger knew that the Kremlin had ulterior motives, he still advanced détente for one simple reason: the conservative alternative, a return to the brinkmanship of the 1950s and 1960s, risked nuclear Armageddon. There was “no alternative to coexistence,” Kissinger told an audience in Minneapolis in 1975. Both the Soviet Union and the United States “have the capacity to destroy civilized life.” Détente was, therefore, a moral imperative. “We have an historic obligation,” Kissinger argued the following year, “to engage the Soviet Union and to push back the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.”

These concerns did not make Kissinger an advocate of nuclear disarmament. Having risen to prominence as a public intellectual with a book titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, he remained as interested in the possibility of a limited nuclear war as he was horrified by the prospect of an all-out one. In the spring of 1974, Kissinger even requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff formulate a limited nuclear response to a hypothetical Soviet invasion of Iran.

But when he was briefed on the draft plan a few weeks later, he was appalled. The Pentagon proposed firing some 200 nuclear weapons at Soviet military installations near the Iranian border. “Are you out of your minds?” Kissinger shouted. “This is a limited option?” When the generals returned with a plan to use only an atomic mine and two nuclear weapons to blow up the two roads from Soviet territory into Iran, he was incredulous. “What kind of nuclear attack is this?” he asked. A U.S. president who used so few weapons would be regarded in the Kremlin as “chicken.” The problem, as he well knew, was that there could never be certainty that the Soviets would respond in a limited way to any kind of American nuclear strike.

There was “no alternative to coexistence,” Kissinger said in 1975.

Kissinger’s views on nuclear arms rankled his conservative critics, particularly those in the Pentagon. They were especially infuriated by how Kissinger approached the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which began in November 1969 and paved the way for the first major U.S.-Soviet arms control agreement. In September 1975, the Defense Intelligence Agency circulated a ten-page intelligence estimate asserting that the Soviet Union was cynically cheating on its SALT commitments to gain nuclear dominance. The debate flared again in the last days of the Ford administration, when reports by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency suggested that Moscow was seeking superiority, not parity, when it came to nuclear weapons. Government officials claimed that Kissinger knew this but had chosen to ignore it.

These criticisms were not entirely wrong. The Soviets had already achieved parity in the raw numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the late 1960s and had a huge lead in megatonnage by 1970. Some of these ICBMs carried large, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, which could fire a cluster of warheads at more than one target. But the United States retained a five-to-one advantage in submarine-launched ballistic missiles in 1977. The U.S. advantage in bomber-carried nuclear weapons was even greater: 11 to one. And Moscow never came anywhere close to acquiring enough ballistic missiles to carry out a strike against U.S. nuclear assets that would have made it impossible for Washington to respond with its own nuclear attack. In fact, interviews with senior Soviet officers after the Cold War revealed that by the early 1970s, the military leadership had dismissed the notion that the Soviet Union could win a nuclear war. The subsequent growth of the country’s nuclear arsenal was mainly the result of inertia on the part of the military-industrial complex.

To a degree, Kissinger shared his Soviet counterparts’ perspective. His view since the 1950s had been that an all-out nuclear world war was too catastrophic for anyone to win. The details of the size and quality of the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals therefore interested him much less than the ways in which the diplomacy of détente could reduce the risk of Armageddon. He also believed that Soviet nuclear parity would ultimately prove unsustainable, given that the Soviet Union’s economy was much smaller than that of the United States. “The economic and technological base which underlies Western military strength remains overwhelmingly superior in size and capacity for innovation,” Kissinger said in a 1976 speech. He added, “We have nothing to fear from competition: If there is a military competition, we have the strength to defend our interests. If there is an economic competition, we won it long ago.”

LOSE THE BATTLE, WIN THE WAR

Conservatives objected to Kissinger for reasons beyond his seeming tolerance of Soviet nuclear parity. Hawks also argued that Kissinger was too ready to accept the unjust character of the Soviet system—the obverse of liberals’ complaint that he was too ready to tolerate the unjust character of right-wing dictatorships. This issue came to the fore over Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration and the treatment of Soviet political dissidents, such as the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When Solzhenitsyn visited the United States in the 1970s (having been kicked out of the Soviet Union), Kissinger infuriated conservatives by advising President Gerald Ford not to meet with him.

Solzhenitsyn became one of Kissinger’s most implacable opponents. “A peace that tolerates any ferocious forms of violence and any massive doses of it against millions of people,” the novelist thundered in 1975, “has no moral loftiness even in the nuclear age.” He and other conservative critics argued that through détente, Kissinger had merely enabled the expansion of Soviet communism. The fall of Saigon in 1975, the descent of Cambodia into the hell of Pol Pot’s communist dictatorship, the Cuban-Soviet intervention in Angola’s postcolonial conflict—these and other geopolitical setbacks seemed to vindicate their claim. “I believe in the peace of which Mr. Ford speaks, as much as any man,” Reagan declared in 1976, as he campaigned against Ford in the Republican presidential primary. “But in places such as Angola, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the peace they have come to know is the peace of the grave. All I can see is what other nations the world over see: collapse of the American will and the retreat of American power.”

Unlike the allegation of Soviet nuclear superiority, Kissinger never denied that Soviet expansionism in the Third World posed a threat to détente and U.S. power. “Time is running out; continuation of an interventionist policy must inevitably threaten other relationships,” he said in a speech in November 1975. “We will be flexible and cooperative in settling conflicts. . . . But we will never permit détente to turn into a subterfuge of unilateral advantage.” Yet the reality was that in the absence of congressional support—whether for the defense of South Vietnam or the defense of Angola—the Ford administration had little choice but to accept Soviet military expansion, or at least the victories of Soviet proxies. “Our domestic disputes,” Kissinger said in December 1975, “are depriving us of both the ability to provide incentives for [Soviet] moderation such as in the restrictions on the trade act, as well as of the ability to resist military moves by the Soviet Union as in Angola.”

It can, of course, be debated to what extent Kissinger was right to claim that with continued congressional support for U.S. aid, South Vietnam and even Angola might have been saved from communist control. But there is no doubt Kissinger cared about stopping the spread of Soviet systems. “The necessity for détente as we conceive it does not reflect approbation of the Soviet domestic structure,” he said in 1974. “The United States has always looked with sympathy, with great appreciation, at the expression of freedom of thought in all societies.” If Kissinger declined to embrace Solzhenitsyn, it was not because Kissinger was tolerant of (much less secretly sympathetic to) the Soviet model. It was because he believed that Washington could accomplish more by maintaining working relations with Moscow.

Ford and Kissinger conferring before a summit in Vladivostok, Russia, November 1974

Gerald R. Ford Library / Reuters

And in this, he was surely right. By easing tensions both in Europe and across the rest of the world, détente helped improve the lives of at least some people under communist rule. Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union rose in the period when Kissinger was firmly in charge of détente. After Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and other congressional hawks sought to publicly pressure Moscow into releasing more Jews by holding up a U.S.-Soviet trade deal, emigration went down. Kissinger’s conservative critics were vehemently opposed to the United States’ signing the Helsinki Accords in the summer of 1975, arguing that they represented a ratification of Soviet postwar conquests in Europe. But by getting the Soviet Union’s leaders to commit to respect certain basic civil rights of their citizens as part of the accords—a commitment they had no intention of honoring—the deal ultimately eroded the legitimacy of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.

None of these facts could save Kissinger’s governmental career. As soon as Ford was out, so was his secretary of state, never to return to high office. But Kissinger’s core strategic concept continued to bear fruit for years to come, including under the principal critics of détente: Carter and Reagan. Carter had criticized Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger for being insufficiently compassionate in their realism, but his own national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, persuaded him to get tough with Moscow. By the end of 1979, Carter was compelled to warn the Soviets to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan or face “serious consequences.” Reagan, for his part, ended up adopting détente as his own policy in all but name—and indeed went beyond what Kissinger did to ease tensions. In his pursuit of rapprochement, Reagan agreed to reduce Washington’s nuclear arsenal by a far larger amount than even Kissinger thought prudent. The “Kissinger era” did not end when he left the government in January 1977.

Although since forgotten, this truth was recognized by Kissinger’s more observant contemporaries. The conservative commentator William Safire, for example, noted how quickly the Reagan administration was penetrated by “Kissingerians” and “détenteniks,” even if Kissinger himself was kept at bay. In fact, the Reagan administration became so accommodating that it was now Kissinger’s turn to accuse Reagan of being overly soft, such as in his response to the imposition of martial law in Poland. Kissinger opposed plans for a pipeline to transport natural gas from the Soviet Union to Western Europe on the grounds that it would make the West “much more subject to political manipulation than it is even today.” (This warning, it turned out, was prescient.) And in 1987, Nixon and Kissinger took to the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times to warn that Reagan’s readiness to make a deal with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in which both states would get rid of all their intermediate-range nuclear weapons, was going too far. To such criticisms, Secretary of State George Shultz gave a revealing response: “We’re beyond détente now.”

DÉTENTE 2.0

Considering the troubles the United States was facing by the start of 1969, détente as Kissinger conceived of it made sense. Unable to defeat North Vietnam, afflicted by stagflation, and deeply divided over everything from race relations to women’s rights, Washington could not play hardball with Moscow. Indeed, the U.S. economy in the 1970s was in no condition to sustain increased defense spending overall. (Détente had a fiscal rationale, too, although Kissinger seldom mentioned it.) Détente did not mean—as Kissinger’s critics alleged—embracing, trusting, or appeasing the Soviets. Nor did it mean allowing them to attain nuclear superiority, permanent control over Eastern Europe, or an empire in the Third World. What it meant was recognizing the limits of U.S. power, reducing the risk of thermonuclear war by employing a combination of carrots and sticks, and buying time for the United States to recover.

It worked. True, Kissinger did not secure the “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam and the South’s conquest by the North, an interlude he had hoped would be long enough to limit the damage to Washington’s credibility and reputation. But détente allowed the United States to regroup domestically and to stabilize its Cold War strategy. The U.S. economy soon innovated in ways that the Soviet Union never could, creating economic and technological assets that enabled Washington’s Cold War victory. Détente also gave the Soviets the rope with which to hang themselves. Emboldened by their successes in Southeast Asia and southern Africa, they mounted a series of mistaken and costly interventions in the less developed world, culminating in their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Given détente’s rarely acknowledged success in these terms, it is worth asking if there are lessons the United States can learn today that are relevant to its competition with China. Kissinger certainly believed so. While speaking in Beijing in 2019, he declared that the United States and China were already “in the foothills of a cold war.” In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he upgraded that to “the mountain passes.” And a year before his death, he warned that the new cold war would be more dangerous than the first one because of advances in technology, such as artificial intelligence, that threaten to make weapons not only faster and more accurate but also potentially autonomous. He called on both superpowers to cooperate whenever possible to limit the existential dangers of this new cold war—and, in particular, to avoid a potentially cataclysmic showdown over the contested status of Taiwan.

A new détente would not mean appeasing China.

As during the 1970s, plenty of experts criticize this approach in the current debate over U.S. policy toward China. Elbridge Colby, the most thoughtful of the new generation of conservative strategists, has exhorted the Biden administration to adopt a “strategy of denial” to deter China from militarily challenging a status quo in which Taiwan enjoys de facto autonomy and a thriving democracy. At times, the Biden administration has itself seemed to call into question the half-century Taiwan policy of strategic ambiguity, in which the United States leaves unclear whether it will use military force to defend the island. And there is almost a bipartisan consensus that the previous era of engagement with Beijing was a mistake, predicated on the erroneous assumption that increased trade with China would magically liberalize its political system.

Yet there is no good reason why the superpowers of our time, like their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s, should endure 20 years of brinkmanship before having the détente phase of their cold war. Détente 2.0 would surely be preferable to running a new version of the Cuban missile crisis over Taiwan, but with the roles reversed: the communist state blockading the nearby contested island and the United States having to run the blockade, with all the attendant risks. That is certainly what Kissinger believed in the last year of his long life. It was the main motivation for his final visit to Beijing shortly after his 100th birthday.

Like détente 1.0, a new détente would not mean appeasing China, much less expecting the country to change. It would mean, once again, engaging in myriad negotiations: on arms control (urgently needed as China frantically builds up its forces in every domain); on trade; on technology transfers, climate change, and artificial intelligence; and on space. Like SALT, these negotiations would be protracted and tedious—and perhaps even inconclusive. But they would be the “meeting jaw to jaw” that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill generally preferred to war. As for Taiwan, the superpowers could do worse than to dust off their old promise, hammered out by Kissinger, to agree to disagree.

Xi and Biden in Woodside, California, November 2023

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Détente, of course, does not work miracles. In the 1970s, it was both oversold and overbought. The policy unquestionably provided the United States with time, but it was a chess strategy that perhaps required too many callous sacrifices of lesser pieces on the board. As one Soviet analyst, puzzled by U.S. opposition to his country’s intervention in Angola, remarked, “You Americans tried to sell détente like detergent and claimed that it would do everything a detergent could do.”

Critics ultimately succeeded in poisoning the term. In March 1976, Ford banned its use in his reelection campaign. But there was never a workable replacement. Asked then if he had an alternative term, Kissinger gave a characteristically wry response. “I’ve been dancing around myself to find one,” he said. “Easing of tensions, relaxation of tensions. We may well wind up with the old word again.”

Today, the Biden administration has settled for its own word: “de-risking.” It is not French, but it is also barely English. Although the starting point of this cold war is different because of the much greater economic interdependence between today’s superpowers, the optimal strategy may turn out to be essentially the same as before. If the new détente is to be criticized, then the critics should not misrepresent it the way Kissinger’s détente was so often misrepresented by his many foes—lest they find themselves, like Reagan before, doing essentially the same when they are in the Situation Room.

• NIALL FERGUSON is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Kissinger: 1923–1968; The Idealist.

Foreign Affairs · by Kissinger: 1923–1968; The Idealist · February 20, 2024

19. Confusion, lack of policy led to Austin’s hospitalization secret

Still, you can never go wrong with a Ranger 5 point contingency plan.

Confusion, lack of policy led to Austin’s hospitalization secret

militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · February 26, 2024

The Defense Department found no wrongdoing in the events that led to the secrecy surrounding Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization last month, according to details of a review ordered by his chief of staff into how days passed without the president or Congress being notified that the Pentagon boss was incapacitated.

A mixture of concerns about protecting Austin’s privacy — and a lack of written policy for emergency hospitalizations — caused staff to balk when it came to informing the White House or Congress of the secretary’s absence, while at the same time not informing the deputy defense secretary of why she was taking over authorities, according to an executive summary of the largely classified review released Monday.

“As this unclassified summary highlights, the secretary’s team was faced with an unprecedented situation and so they executed a transfer of authority in the same way that they had previously done,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, told reporters during a briefing.

Austin’s emergency hospitalization for a urinary tract infection that developed following a late December procedure to treat his prostate cancer wasn’t unprecedented, however.

Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was rushed to the hospital in 2008 when he broke his shoulder slipping on his icy front steps. The Pentagon confirmed the following day that he’d had an accident.

What was unprecedented was that following Austin’s ambulance ride on Jan. 1, it took his staff until Jan. 4 to notify the White House and Congress of his absence, and until the following day to put out a public statement.

Austin has taken the blame for the situation overall, saying that he did not want to “burden” the president with his early December cancer diagnosis, he told reporters during a Feb. 13 briefing.

“What I’ve learned from this experience, taking this kind of job means losing some of the privacy that most of us expect,” he said. “The American people have a right to know when their leaders are facing health challenges that might affect their ability to perform their duties, even temporarily.”

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Austin admits he wanted to keep his cancer diagnosis secret

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday that his "first instinct" was to keep his cancer diagnosis private.

Austin said at the time that he did not direct his staff to withhold any information from the chain of command, adding that he doesn’t believe that he has created a culture of secrecy that would have conditioned his staff to hide information on his behalf.

The review found that concerns over “medical privacy laws” precluded staff from sharing what they knew or asking for more information.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is the main law governing health information in the U.S., but it only dictates that health care workers and health insurance administrators, for example, not share patient medical records with unauthorized people.

Ryder acknowledged that there may have been some confusion about privacy laws. Austin’s chief of staff, on the other hand, learned of his hospitalization from a military aide, which was not a violation of any privacy laws.

Ryder did not answer a question from Military Times as to what changed between Jan. 2, when members of Austin’s staff were informed of his hospitalization and concerned about his privacy, and Jan. 4, when notifications began.

In his Feb. 13 briefing, Austin did not address why he didn’t request that a member of his staff notify the president that he wouldn’t be going into work on Jan. 2.

The review released Monday adds that it was not Austin’s decision to transfer authority to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks on Jan. 2, but that members of his staff made the call when he was moved into the intensive care unit and would not have access to secured communications to carry out his job.

“Look, I’m not gonna speak for why any individuals did or did not take certain specific actions. I think we can all agree, you know, it is not uncommon for a natural human response when it comes to things like things like medical care, to default to a privacy setting,” Ryder said. “But the secretary also made clear in that press briefing that he acknowledges we can do better, that we will do better.”

In that spirit, when Austin returned to Walter Reed on Feb. 11 to address a bladder issue stemming from his initial UTI, the Pentagon immediately notified the relevant authorities and made a public statement, keeping information flowing about the secretary’s condition and plans to return to work.

The review released Monday includes eight recommendations to improve the notification process when a defense secretary is incapacitated, including articulating to staff the expectations for information-sharing and writing down guidelines for how to handle such events. There will also be new protocols for determining when authorities should be transferred to a deputy defense secretary and how to notify authorities about it.

All recommendations have 90 days to be implemented, Austin wrote a memo signed Monday,

About Meghann Myers

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

20. Why Military Life Is Worth It

Why Military Life Is Worth It

military.com · by Military.com | By Jennifer Barnhill Published February 26, 2024 at 11:32am ET · February 26, 2024

Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.

"9/11 happened, and all of a sudden everything changed," said Erin Whitehead, who spent decades as a military spouse while her husband pursued a career in the Marine Corps. "It became a much different life, much harder."

The surge of military activity that followed the attack on New York and Washington, D.C., leading to years of conflict in the Middle East would strain families as deployments and casualties mounted. But this national tragedy also sparked a sense of purpose for those in the military community.

"We'd all go to different people's houses for dinner every night because we needed to be together. It made it survivable," said Whitehead. "We became family."

Before marrying my husband, I imagined the military was what I saw in movies -- soldiers clutching rifles, ready to storm a beachhead, terrified but in it together. I knew the lifestyle was hard, but I had no idea that as a military spouse, I too would undergo a parallel bonding experience on the home front. And in speaking to others, it seemed my experience was not unique. Our shared suffering bonds military spouses to each other and the military lifestyle, if we let it.

Research shows that military spouses who feel a sense of belonging within the military community have a greater sense of overall well-being. However, building these sustaining relationships is challenging for military families who have to move away from relatives and friends and leave new connections every two to three years.

While basic training and deployments help service members develop strong, new ties and feelings of connectedness, military spouses are left on their own to find a sense of belonging.

"None of this stuff had been scripted," said Kathleen Palmer, an Army spouse who was living in Germany after 9/11.

Although there was a push to support families in the years following Sept. 11, the existing infrastructure was not prepared to deal with the post-9/11 operations tempo that saw troops away from home for extended periods. Palmer was lucky that a more senior Army spouse took it upon herself to build a community at the German base.

"There was nothing," she recalled. "And so, she actually reached out and … brought in every spouse no matter what, and that, to me, set the tone."

Palmer, who has moved 15 times over the 27 years she has been an Army spouse, said that often only other military spouses understand the pressures.

"At the end of the day, very few people are walking in our shoes, and I think that we have to really embrace everybody who's in the shoes," she said.

When that community isn't easily accessible to military families, it can severely increase the burden of service.

Jenny Lynne Stroup, deputy director of Hiring Our Heroes and a Navy spouse of 15 years, had a welcoming first experience, witnessing senior military spouses form a tight-knit community when her husband served on the USS George H.W. Bush. But when he was assigned to duty in New York City in 2013 after a tour in Afghanistan, none of the same resources and support were available, thrusting their family into a particularly trying adjustment period.

"That really set us up very poorly to function as a family," Stroup said. "It was the first time all four of us had lived together under one roof for more than like a week at a time. … We fell through the cracks."

It would have been easy for Stroup to turn this perceived abandonment into resentment, but instead, she chose to try to recreate her first positive experience. When she made civilian friends, she seized the opportunity to educate them about military life.

But not everyone has the same positive first impressions to rely on.

"The reserve is totally different; you don't have that family community," said Natalie Ealy, a Marine Corps spouse of 23 years whose husband now serves on active duty.

Part-time service means that troops are drawn from a wide range of communities, augmenting the fighting force. It also means that reserve families often aren't embedded within a military community. Ealy didn't know what she had been missing until her husband was on active duty.

"I remember when we were stationed in Hawaii, and he went to Afghanistan, it was just a bad day. I walked in, and my neighbor right away was like, 'So, I ordered pizza and you're gonna come over for a glass of wine.' … [Military spouses] just get it without you even needing to say anything."

But what helped spouses whose partners entered service before or shortly after 9/11 feel a sense of belonging may no longer resonate with younger military spouses.

"It used to be when spouses were low, we would hear things like 'bloom where you're planted,' and 'it's all an adventure'," said Corie Weathers, an Army spouse and author of "Military Culture Shift: The Impact of War, Money, and Generational Perspective on Morale, Retention, and Leadership."

According to Weathers, when Boomers and Gen-Xers share those comments, it is because they likely found friends and community support that made otherwise negative experiences more tolerable. They reinforce the idea that military life is worth it because for them it was.

"Then you've got millennials that are like, 'Hey, guys, you said this was gonna be great, but this is really hard,'" said Weathers.

When Sarah Curtis, an Air Force spouse of four years, shared her worries about having her first child without her husband around with senior spouses, she was shut down.

"I feel like I can't talk about my negative experiences because someone's always had it worse," she said. Instead of immediately rejecting the military community, she turned inward, writing a book of poems on the topic. She also focused on improving communication within her marriage.

"If we are not, like, fully in sync on the same page about things, it's a lot easier for me to be mad and resentful," she said.

According to Weathers, millennials value spending time with family more than previous generations, making time apart from service members more impactful. However, the financial stability the military provides new recruits in the current economic climate may offset some negative impacts.

"I get to stay home because of the benefits that the military has offered us," said Faith Morales, whose husband enlisted in the Army National Guard in 2018 and went on active duty in 2022. Early in her military experience, Morales struggled to find child care for their two-year-old and decided to stay home. "It's so nice to have a choice. Because I feel like, before this, I didn't have a choice."

Military spouses are diverse, as are their experiences and what makes this life worth it. However, what was true of all generations of spouses I spoke to was an eventual acceptance of the lifestyle, the good with the bad.

"I think coming to terms with the Army, and its mistress-like presence, actually has helped me," said Palmer. "You have to stop fighting it at some point and embrace it. And it's not for everybody."

What made military life "worth it" was more often than not a byproduct of military life -- friendships and personal growth vs. a direct benefit provided by the military such as health care.

"You're always going to be waiting for the next thing. Waiting for your next move. Waiting for them to come home. Or just waiting until you get out," said Curtis. "Finding happiness and finding joy has to be a choice. You're asking me on a good day. So, definitely, this life is worth it."

-- In addition to her reporting, Jennifer Barnhill is the host of Military Dinner Table Conversations, a monthly reverse town hall with military families. She is a 2023 Bush Institute StandTo Veteran Leadership Program Scholar, the editor-in-chief of the National Military Spouse Network's Career Connections Magazine, and the military spouse liaison on The League of Wives Memorial Project.

military.com · by Military.com | By Jennifer Barnhill Published February 26, 2024 at 11:32am ET · February 26, 2024

21. My Mother’s Secret

Certainly a thought provoking read.

My Mother’s Secret

My mother was a top Middle East analyst for the CIA. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. To find out why, I asked her former colleagues. I’m still reeling from their answers.

My Mother Begged Me Not to Raise My Children Jewish

BY

JUSTINE EL-KHAZEN

FEBRUARY 25, 2024

Tablet · by Justine el-Khazen · February 26, 2024

My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.

We were watching footage of hostages being paraded around Gaza when she said it. “I worry about them,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the TV. “It’s too dangerous a religion,” she told me. “I don’t want that target on their backs.” I couldn’t tell what she was asking of me: Did she want me to skip the few traditions my family has held onto? Hanukkah candles and meager Seders? Or was she saying I shouldn’t tell my kids that they were Jewish at all? I didn’t ask. I was too afraid of what she would say.

“I told Dad I didn’t want to raise you Jewish,” she said a few days later. The Gaza war had begun in earnest by then. Moonscapes of leveled buildings and dust: images of military prowess that colored her view and, until Oct. 7, my perception of Israel. “He wanted to, but I was afraid of what might happen to you if you identified that way.”

I was stunned. I’d always thought my secular upbringing had evolved organically, a combination of busy parents, a mixed marriage, and waning traditions. It wasn’t so much that my mother, a 6-foot-tall blonde from the Midwest, was anxious about my dad’s religion. No one felt strongly enough to carve out a space for their faith, so we embraced a smattering of rituals. Christmas trees and Hanukkah prayers, fasting on Yom Kippur and dyeing eggs on Easter. I thought it was a noncommittal melange, not an active choice.

As a choice, it didn’t exactly line up with my mother’s perception of Jews. Sure my dad had had to contend with Jewish quotas back in the day. Come to think of it, there was an anti-Jewish covenant on the deed to our house; and I was only asked to join the big cotillion in D.C. after bad press forced it to invite Jewish and Black kids. But that was ancient history. Jews possessed power now, too much of it to be victimized as they once were, a view that basically worked for my dad, who had no interest in the poverty or bigotry of his youth.

Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious—but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon.

My father died not long before my mother—like her, of a cancer that had spread to his lungs. Aligned almost perfectly in death, they mostly weren’t in life, especially when it came to Israel. My dad flip-flopped: Had Israel mistreated the Palestinians, or was it the victim of their aggression? My mother hardened in her views as the prospects for peace dimmed. But the conversation always centered on power: Was Israel powerful beyond its size? Were Jews powerful beyond their numbers? Or were they vulnerable, exposed in a hostile world?

The deathbed scene was a cosmic insult: same hospice nurses, same case manager—“Oh, I remember you!”—same oxygen machine, whirring cyclically in the background. Oct. 7 receded from view. How could I devote even an iota of brainpower to anything other than standing idly by while my mother slipped away?

And then, after she died, I became obsessed: Had she really believed that antisemitism was so radioactive a force, not only in America, but in the Middle East, that my children’s Jewishness should be hidden from them? After the Holocaust, the family my paternal grandmother left behind, the ones who survived, all moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, and converted to Lutheranism. Was America in 2023 really as bad as Europe in 1945?

To understand where my mother came out on these questions, I spoke to her former CIA colleagues. Their answers only added to my shock. After enough of these interviews, I began to question everything I thought I knew about an institution I’d been close to my whole life.

My mother took her duty to remain impartial seriously. Her job was to analyze intelligence so lawmakers could make informed decisions. She once told Ronald Reagan she thought “we might lose Sadat,” who was then a partner in negotiating peace with Israel.

“Lose him?” Reagan asked, stunned. Not long after that, Anwar Sadat was assassinated.

In her words, she was “paid to intuit things.” Passing along her biases would not only have been a violation of her professional ethics, it would’ve been a poor way to go about her job, since assassins in Egypt don’t care what analysts in Langley think. And yet, she always carried a strain of sympathy for the Palestinians. She told me once she was considered by her colleagues to be an “Arabist,” someone who overly identified with the Arab players in the region and was, at some level, hostile to Israel. “Checks out,” I thought to myself.

At the funeral, her colleagues extolled her career: She could read the late Syrian dictator Hafez Assad’s mind, she’d been instrumental in the Madrid and Oslo peace talks. She always said that shedding light on the interests of the Arab players in the region was her contribution to the peace process. I spoke to John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, a few days after the funeral. When I asked him whether my mother was an Arabist, he quickly shot that idea down. He acknowledged there was a need for “greater evenhandedness towards the region among some in the CIA,” but, he said, she was not among them. And anyway, that was more of an issue on the political side than it was with analysts, the lion’s share of whom remained unbiased.

I asked Brennan about my mother’s mentor, Bob Ames, who had an infamously close relationship with Ali Hasan Salameh, the leader of the “Black September” PLO terrorist command and architect of the Munich Olympics massacre. He laughed. Ames was, he admitted, “very close to the Palestinians” and “played it very close to the edge.” But after his death in the Beirut embassy bombing of 1983, Brennan said, the culture within the CIA changed from being operationally driven to being driven by the analysts. Spies who cultivated terrorist assets no longer set the tone. The baton had passed to the wonks in Langley.

Bob Ames’ biographer, Kai Bird, had a different view of whether Bob Ames was an Arabist. Unequivocally, yes, he told me, but there were “true reasons for it.” As with journalists, Ames and his colleagues were “merely reporting what they saw.” When I asked what he meant, he told me that Israel is the only reason for antisemitism in the Arab world. Before 1948, the antisemitism in Cairo and Beirut was “on a par with what you would see in New York and Los Angeles.”

I didn’t mention the scores of pogroms across the Arab world before 1948, nor the absence of similar pogroms in New York and Los Angeles. Bird went on to say that antisemitism does exist “globally in its European and German forms,” but that it has never played much of a role in the politics of the Middle East. He sees Oct. 7, as so many of the former intelligence officers I spoke to do, as nothing more than another round in a geopolitical tit for tat. The savagery Hamas showed that day came, in their view, from a political place rather than a cultural one.

When I pressed him, Brennan pointed out that Hamas is a movement that encompasses a ‘range of attitudes, and includes teachers, hospital workers, and other professionals.’

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I assumed that Bird would be the only person I spoke to with these views. He’s not an intelligence officer, merely a biographer. He’s free to hold whatever views he likes. But as it turned out, my faith in the impartiality of the CIA was misplaced.

When I spoke to my mother’s former colleagues, I consistently encountered a tendency to attribute every event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the conflict itself. It’s not that Palestinian textbooks have, since the 1990s, contained material that is “openly antisemitic and encourages violence, jihad and martyrdom,” or that “peace itself is not taught as preferable or even possible.” Nor is it, as a 2019 review discovered, the “complete removal of all pre-existing content discussing peace agreements, summits, negotiations, and proposals supporting a two-state solution, acknowledgment of historical Jewish presence in the land of Israel and labeling the name ‘Israel’ on a map” from those textbooks. To retired intelligence officers with long and distinguished careers, these facts are incidental. If children were actually set on fire on Oct. 7, that was a guerrilla tactic, not the result of a culture of murderous hatred. Some expressed these views with dispassion and others, with a disturbing degree of passion, but they all expressed them.

When I asked Brennan about the most sordid details to come out of Oct. 7—the terrorist who bragged on the phone to his parents about killing Jews, the head of an IDF soldier sold as a trophy in Gaza—he told me that day reminded him of what he’d seen with ISIS, “how many of those individuals were high on drugs,” making them that much more “frenzied and murderous.”

The terrorists were on drugs, to be sure, and yet. It may be that facing the role that long-standing and unreasoning racial animus played on Oct. 7 is too much of a stretch for someone like John Brennan, who has spent his life immersed in the hard facts of power. Undercurrents of hatred percolate around dinner tables. They don’t rise to the level of a presidential brief.

When I pressed him, Brennan pointed out that Hamas is a movement that encompasses a “range of attitudes, and includes teachers, hospital workers and other professionals.” I tried to imagine an American political movement with a covenant that advocated genocide. Would a call to murder be overlooked because the grievances the movement was pursuing were en vogue, or because it’s simply “rhetoric?” How about if they killed hundreds and then thousands of people, thereby demonstrating that the rhetoric is real? Does Hamas get a free pass because they’re Palestinian, or because it’s Jews specifically that they want to kill?

When I asked Brennan why he thinks my mother begged me not to raise my kids Jewish, he shifted the conversation northward: There’s been a global uptick in right-wing extremism and white supremacy, he said. Orban, Putin, Modi. Anti-democratic forces are on the rise, making Jews a target.

Every intelligence officer I spoke with performed this sleight of hand. Yes, antisemitism exists, and is serious—but only as a right-wing problem, and as a Western phenomenon. The Hamas-loving kids on American college campuses? Overblown, irrelevant. The Palestinian children being given military training by terrorists? Not the issue.

If my mother worried about my safety as a Jew, it never came up on the trips we took to the Middle East. I tagged along while she worked and did tourist stuff. The pyramids. Masada. “If something happens,” she said once, “throw away your bag and don’t speak. And if they talk to you, make sounds like the Swedish chef. They won’t know the difference, and you could be Swedish.” Being American was a liability she prepared me for.

Being Jewish was not.

We didn’t know it then, but we were catching a last, halcyon glimpse of the Middle East my mother studied. The war on terror was about to transform the region—though there were inklings of Islamist violence roiling beneath the surface. The Luxor massacre followed one of our trips. On a visit in 1996, we changed our plans and left Cairo early, after Islamists shot up a hotel full of Greek tourists not far from where we were staying, at the Semiramis Hotel. My mother didn’t say what had happened. When I woke, our bags were packed, and we were booked on an Air Sinai flight to Tel Aviv.

Courtesy the author

Not long after that, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst was stabbed to death in the lobby of the Semiramis. Her attacker was said to be “mentally ill.” Two Americans and a Frenchman had been murdered at the Semiramis by a “deranged assailant” a few years earlier. “There are a lot of attacks by ‘deranged’ and ‘mentally ill’ people in Egypt these days,” my mother observed in telling me about her colleague at the DIA.

The flavor of these attacks was anti-Western, not anti-Jewish, and they were about to get worse. My mother and I had dinner one night in April 1996 at the CIA station chief’s house in Israel, north of Tel Aviv. There was some kind of minor war underway. Fighter jets kept skidding above us as we ate. The IDF and Hezbollah were trading fire again, which was not that remarkable in itself. This time, the IDF bombed a U.N. compound, killing 106 civilians.

This event might not have made news here, but it rocked the Arab world. Mohamed Atta committed his life to jihad that very day. Osama bin Laden was none too pleased, either. “You supported the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon,” he explained in his “letter to America,” which, since Oct. 7, has gone viral in the TikTok feeds of America’s youth. Anti-Westernism has always been closely entwined with antisemitism in the Arab world; these days it’s closely entwined here, too.

Al-Qaida wasn’t the only one to take issue with the American-Israeli alliance. There was a feeling in the intelligence community in the 1990s that we’d “signed on as Israel’s protector,” as one of my mother’s colleagues put it. The Arabists were just trying to compensate for what they felt was the overrepresentation of Israel’s interests. To me it seems human, the type of accommodation a person might make with the ethics of their job out of a sense of correcting a wrong. It doesn’t have the air of fanaticism about it that colors the intelligence community’s biases these days.

I asked one former intelligence officer, a veteran of the Near East Southern Asia Division, about the antisemitic protests on college campuses, the ones that had been making headlines for weeks. She deflected me with the familiar Karine Jean-Pierre two-step: “I think both ‘antis’ are unseemly.” And so it went every time I asked my mother’s former colleagues whether antisemitism is a major cultural force at work here in America, and in Palestine too.

When I asked another former CIA analyst about the protests on campus, I was told there’s been a “marked rise in antisemitism due to Israel’s attack on Gazan civilians and the number of casualties,” which is true. Then again, the number of antisemitic attacks in 2022 (the last year for which data is available) is double the number in 2017 and triple the number in 2016. The rate of increase has been exponential for some time.

There was a ready response to that one, too: We’ve seen an uptick in antisemitism “with the rise of the far right, including the antisemite of the whole world, Trump,” a connection I found perplexing. The Abraham Accords seem nothing if not good for Israel. In response, I was told that Trump said that our blood is being “polluted” by Jews and that the U.S. is a Christian country. I couldn’t corroborate any of this, though when I tried, I discovered a campaign speech in which Trump said: “if you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion, if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country.”

It was almost as if these veteran analysts, whose careers were devoted to impartiality and, above all, neutrality, were reading from a crib sheet supplied by the DNC.

“Is antisemitism a problem in America?”

Well, there’s “also a lot of anti-Islamic stuff” and “white nationalism stuff in Europe too.” So many European countries are “tilting right.”

“Is antisemitism a problem in the Middle East?”

There’s a “variegated set of attitudes.” It’s “not antisemitism, just a lot of “anti-Israel feeling.” 1,200 Jews died on Oct. 7 not because they were Jewish, but because they were Israeli.

I actually was not prepared for any of this. Even at the peak of her Arabist tendencies, I don’t think my mother would have denied the well-documented existence of antisemitism in the Middle East. I found myself needing to seek out other perspectives, if only as at sanity check. After talking to all these intelligence analysts, my trust in an institution I’ve been close to my whole life was shaken, and not just by the certainty with which my questions were shot down, but by the ferocity with which they were shot down. Do the people who slaughtered my people also … hate them? I felt I’d committed a major political faux pas just by asking.

I asked someone who has come at these issues not from the political side of things, but from the academic side, and from the inside too. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s brother became an imam whose aspiration it was to inspire young jihadists; Hussein has led a different life. He’s written about the one he left behind: “as a teenager in Egypt, I recall nearly all the adults around me celebrating the murder of Israelis after news of a suicide bombing during the Second Intifada. Egypt’s most prominent religious authorities declared the perpetrators to be martyrs and saints.” Hussein hails from a banking family in Cairo; it’s not as if he grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. So why would middle-class people in another country with a robust economy, firm borders, a different history and tradition, the pyramids protruding in the distance, not to mention a dialect so different that it’s mutually unintelligible to the dialect that most Palestinians speak, cheer the death of Jews 300 miles away?

Because Jewish death is linked to the Arab concept of self-determination on a world stage. If Israel exists, the Arab states don’t, not in their fullest expression.

“Islamists articulate the fantasy of Jewish eradication in the language of jihad, framed in eschatological terms, and imbued with a sense of divine justice and cosmic warfare—what Westerners would ordinarily recognize as a type of religious fascism,” Hussein wrote. “But while the Islamist version of this idea is potent for the purposes of mobilizing the impoverished and uneducated masses, the ‘left-wing’ or secular version—couched in the language of Fanon and Karl Marx, of human emancipation, equality, anti-capitalism, and social justice—is the more effective means of mobilizing opinion among the Western intelligentsia. The point is that they are two sides of the same coin, the value of which is set in Jewish blood.”

The fantasy that Jews stand in the way of Arab self-realization touches atavistic nerves: It’s the same death-as-salvation paradigm that led early Christians to martyr themselves, the same liberatory concept of class struggle that led 20th-century Russians to murder czarists. Blood sacrifice, a practice that humans have been engaging in since time immemorial.

But why would these crazy ideas take hold in America? Because Marxism has slowly but surely crept inward from the far left in this country, most recently in the form of the social justice movement, and Marxism is an elaborate form of Jew-hatred.

It used to be that Marxism’s division of the universe into a dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed was common only on college campuses. The Marxists were such downers when I was in grad school, playing at solidarity, dumpster-diving, decrying things. But their ideas have percolated upwards via a grassroots osmosis such that now even the Biden administration traffics in them: Jews are bad, bad, bad, Netanyahu’s an asshole, Israel’s military actions are over the top, and the whole country is bent on a genocide of babies. There’s no yin and yang here. It’s ideology as theology: a matrix of good and evil that paints Jews as murderers and Palestinians as martyrs.

We hear all the time in America about how bad whiteness is. The whites are fragile. They center themselves. They marginalize others. They think punctuality is good. But with Jews, it’s a little more complicated: The activist set complains about how white they are, what brutal colonizers. Never mind that the majority of Israeli Jews are indigenous to the region, and that the rest were refugees. And please don’t bring up the discrimination and violence that Mizrahi Jews experienced at the hands of their Muslim neighbors. Arguing over these facts is pointless because activist hatred of Israel is really just a dog whistle.

The problem with Jews is that they’re Jews. Marx hated them, and his hatred of them is baked into his ideology. “Emancipation from Judaism would be the emancipation of our time,” he wrote in an essay he published 20 years before Capital. “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” Ilhan Omar was a lot more succinct. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby, and always has been, though even she knows better than to call for the “emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Inject a little racial ideology in there, and you’re well on your way to genocide. Antisemitism lurks in the groundwater of the left. Any Jew who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.

My mother may have seen these things. She predicted the banlieues, studying urban European demographics in the 1990s, seeing in them the tinder that would light the fires to come. Not a single European leader would listen to her.

Maybe for her, that was just about identifying the violent anti-Western strain that was simmering to a boil in those communities. Antisemitism was merely incidental. Her duty was to America, and she did it with pride. She was a second-generation CIA analyst with an aunt in the OSS and a long family tradition of public service. She was also the model for the blond bombshell analyst in the pulp thriller The Fifth Horseman.

And, as I found out at the end, she worried about antisemitism, too. It was a fact that she chose to keep to herself, at least until there was no point in hiding it any longer. She would have called that a “need to know,” a thought that almost makes me laugh.

My mother took one last trip to Israel the year before she died. It was her last trip anywhere. She didn’t know she was dying, though she was well on her way. The cold that never went away, the fatigue. We all chalked it up to stress, grief. My father had just died, so she made this pilgrimage for him, to the place she had devoted her life to. Never mind that my father hated visiting Israel. The story he told me was that he’d talked to a woman in a bar when he was there in his 20s, a “working girl.” When he found out she was Jewish, that was it. The dream of a Jewish homeland was done. He never wanted to go back, not that he wasn’t an ardent Zionist, capable of alienating entire dinner parties with his flourishes of fanaticism. “At least I can say of your strategy that it’s subnuclear,” my mother’s friend, a military strategist, said to my father once, during a heated discussion of the Second Intifada. She went to Israel, paradoxically, for him and to see Jerusalem one last time.

When the undertakers come, one of them pulls me aside: “wasn’t I just here?” “Yeah, for my dad,” I tell him. “That doesn’t seem fair,” he says.

It’s true. In the last two years I’ve watched the only people who can answer any lingering questions I might have about myself be carried feet first down the staircase I’ve been bounding up for years. “Writing has not yet helped me to see what it means,” Joan Didion wrote. It hasn’t helped me much either.

It’s sunny on the day my mother makes her final journey. Heavy oblongs of light fall from the skylights. I know that this is the moment. The body leaves, and it’s over. The person is gone. The conversation, the one you’ve been having your entire life, is over. I still don’t know why my mother left me with this burden: Don’t raise your kids Jewish, don’t honor the past, don’t remember your great-grandparents, don’t tell their stories, don’t, don’t, don’t ...

One thing I do know, as I watch her carried down on the stretcher, sunlight hitting her face: Now there’s no way of knowing what she thought about Israel, about antisemitism, about us. I can interview every last colleague, every friend, and no one will have the answer, least of all me.

Tablet · by Justine el-Khazen · February 26, 2024

22. Department Releases Unclassified Review Summary Following Austin's Hospitalization

The three page summary can be downloaded here: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Feb/26/2003400135/-1/-1/1/UNCLASSIFIED-SUMMARY-OF-30-DAY-REVIEW.PDF

Department Releases Unclassified Review Summary Following Austin's Hospitalization

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

The unclassified summary of a 30-day review into circumstances surrounding the hospitalization last month of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III were released to the public today.

In addition to the summary is a memorandum detailing actions to be taken that will ensure that Defense Department officials more clearly understand and are better prepared to handle an unexpected transfer of authority from the secretary to the deputy secretary or other official.

Press Briefing

Members of the media address Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder during a briefing at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Feb. 26, 2024.

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Last month, Austin was unexpectedly admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, for complications related to surgery in December to treat prostate cancer.

During that hospitalization, the authorities of the secretary were transferred to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. At the same time, the department failed to properly notify others, including President Joe Biden and Congress, about the secretary's condition or the transfer of authority.

Following that oversight, Austin's chief of staff directed the DOD's director of administration and management to conduct a 30-day review of the department's notification process for assumption of functions and duties of the secretary of defense. An unclassified summary of that review was released today.

"The review found that the deputy secretary was at all times positioned to perform all the functions and duties of the secretary of defense during the period of transfer from January 2-5, 2024," said Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder during a briefing today. "It also identified several processes and procedural improvements that could be made."

The review included eight specific recommendations that were forwarded to Austin for review. As of today, two of those recommendations have been implemented.

Recommendations already in place include a reaffirmation of expectations around information sharing, staffing support, team relationships and understanding changes in process or staff support when the deputy secretary or other designated official assumes the functions and duties of the secretary.

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Additionally, the secretary's chief of staff and the deputy secretary's chief of staff, have jointly issued guidelines which standardize how information provided to the secretary could be shared with the deputy secretary so that the deputy secretary will be prepared and aware of the most important department issues in the event of an unforeseen transfer of authority.

The other six recommendations, Austin wrote in today's memorandum, will be implemented within 90 days.

"All of these actions demonstrate our deep commitment to strengthening our internal processes without delay," Austin wrote in the memorandum. "As I have repeatedly stated, we are a learning organization, and we will continue to strengthen our processes as we identify ways to improve upon our existing procedures."

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com