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Quotes of the Day:
“Without some sense of historical continuity, Americans are likely to relearn the lessons of history each time they are faced with a low intensity conflict.
But what is more dangerous is the fact that during the relearning process Americans may suffer casualties and develop policy directions that can only lead to defeat.”
- Sam C. Sarkesian 1984
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
- Isaac Asimov
The democratic way is harder than the authoritarian way because, in seeking to protect and fulfill the individual, it demands of him understanding, judgment, and positive participation in the increasingly complex and exacting problems of the modern world. It demands that he exercise discrimination: that while pursuing through free inquiry the search for truth he knows when he should commit an act of faith; that he distinguish between the necessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression. A free society is vulnerable in that it is easy for people to lapse into excesses--the excesses of a permanently open mind wishfully waiting for evidence that evil design may become noble purpose, the excess of faith becoming prejudice, the excess of tolerance degenerating into indulgence of conspiracy and the excess of resorting to suppression when more moderate measures are not only more appropriate but more effective.
- NSC 68, April 7. 1950, https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm
1. The Combating Terrorism Center Turns 20: Reflections from its Directors – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
2. NEW: SIGAR's Collapse of the ANDSF Report
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19. The Divided Diplomat - Ralph Bunche and the Contradictions of Liberal Order
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23. Winning the Air Battle for Taiwan: Lessons from Ukraine’s Drone Operations
1. The Combating Terrorism Center Turns 20: Reflections from its Directors – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
Below is the Directors intro and then an article with interviews of all the Directors of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. As you can see from the stories told this was an incredible organization that provided tremendous analysis and support to war fighters. We learned as much as we did about AQ and global terrorism because of the work of CTC. It is amazing how this organization was conceived and developed and how it evolved solely based on the visions and leadership of a handful of visionary people.
Now we need a comparable organization to support the Joint Concept of Competing. https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/joint-concept-competing
February 2023 – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
ctc.westpoint.edu · by Kristina Hummel · February 27, 2023
From the Director
Thanks to Editor-in-Chief Paul Cruickshank for allowing me to take over this space this month as we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Combating Terrorism Center, established at West Point in February 2003. Originally the vision of Mr. Vinnie Viola, Brigadier General (Retired) Russ Howard, and General Wayne Downing, the CTC has evolved into a trusted global hub for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. At the heart of what we do are the Cadets of West Point, who have made the Terrorism Studies Minor the number-one choice of minors at West Point over the last 10 years and who graduate to lead our nation’s Soldiers in complex times. This mission is empowered by 20 years of teammates, donors, partners, and stakeholders around the world who ensure the CTC is delivering cutting-edge research and insight in the fight against terrorism. While the CTC has been a mainstay of the CT fight for the last two decades, I posit that the most important time for this team is now. As national security priorities and resources rebalance toward strategic competition, the CTC will maintain its focus on understanding current and future terrorism threats to our nation and to the world, ready to assist our nation and our allies wherever we are called. To all who have made this possible, thank you.
In this issue, the directors of the Combating Terrorism Center over the past 20 years—Brigadier General (Retired) Russell Howard, Colonel (Retired) Kip McCormick, Colonel (Retired) Joseph H. Felter, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Reid L. Sawyer, Colonel (Retired) Liam Collins, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Bryan C. Price, Brian Dodwell and myself—provide our reflections on the contribution the Center has made to the counterterrorism enterprise.
In our interview Col. (Res.) Omer Bar Lev, the former Minister of Public Security of Israel, discusses recent security challenges in Israel and warns that a potential third intifada is “getting closer and closer.” Aaron Zelin examines Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s ‘counterterrorism’ campaign against the Islamic State in northwestern Syria. As concern rises over the threat posed by older far-right terrorists, David Wells examines relevant data in the United Kingdom.
Colonel Sean Morrow, Director, Combating Terrorism Center
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Over 20 years, the CTC has had more teammates, partners, Cadets, and donors than we could ever hope to thank in one space. However, there is one teammate who has been doing the work with the CTC for the entire 20 years. Congratulations and thank you to Dr. Bruce Hoffman on two decades of service with the Center. Dr. Hoffman is the CTC’s only Senior Fellow who has been in the trenches with the Center since day one and continues to this day. From all of us at the CTC, thank you for your leadership, insight, wisdom, partnership, and friendship.
ctc.westpoint.edu · by Kristina Hummel · February 27, 2023
The Combating Terrorism Center Turns 20: Reflections from its Directors – Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
ctc.westpoint.edu · by Kristina Hummel · February 27, 2023
Brigadier General (Retired) Russell Howard served as the director of the CTC between 2003 and 2005. He also served as the Head of the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. He later served as the director of the Jebsen Center for Counter Terrorism Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and directed the terrorism research program of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is currently the President of Howard Consulting Services and a distinguished senior fellow at Joint Special Operations University.
Colonel (Retired) Kip McCormick served as the director of the CTC from 2005 till the beginning of 2006. He subsequently served as Defense Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. His prior service in the U.S. Army included working as Chief of Staff, United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission in Seoul. He is currently the Associate Pastor of Cornwall Church and the Chaplain for Whatcom County’s Sheriff Office in Bellingham in Washington State.
Colonel (Retired) Joseph H. Felter, PhD served as the director of the CTC from the end of 2005 till 2008. He later served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia between July 2017 and September 2019. He is currently the Director of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University. His prior roles at Stanford included serving as Co-Director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and Director of the Hacking for Defense Project.
Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Reid L. Sawyer served as executive director of the CTC between 2003 and 2008 and director between 2008 and 2012. Between 2013 and 2015, he served at U.S. Central Command, including as the Chief of the Operational Assessments Group. He previously served as a senior advisor to the FDNY from 2003 to 2015 and as an Advisory Board Member at University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats. He is currently a Managing Director at Marsh McLennan, where he heads the Emerging Risks Group, and leads U.S. Cyber Risk Consulting.
Colonel (Retired) Liam Collins, PhD served in leadership roles at CTC between 2009 and 2012, first as executive director then director. He is currently the executive director of the Viola Foundation and the Madison Policy Forum. Between 2015 and 2019, he served as Director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. Among his previous roles, between 2016 and 2018 he served as executive officer for the then U.S. Senior Defense Advisor to Ukraine for Defense Reform, General (Retired) John Abizaid.
Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Bryan C. Price, PhD served as the director of the CTC between 2012 and 2018. He previously served as an Apache helicopter pilot, with combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and as an Academy Professor at West Point. He was Founding Executive Director of the Buccino Leadership Institute at Seton Hall University from 2018 to 2022. Today, he is the founder of Top Mental Game.
Brian Dodwell served as the director of the CTC between 2018 and January 2021, and has served as executive director since January 2021. Previously, he served as deputy director between 2014 and 2018. Prior to that, he served as Operations Branch Chief at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security National Exercise Division.
Colonel Sean Morrow has served as the CTC’s director since January 2021. He has served in a variety of roles in the U.S. military including as Battalion Commander in the United Nations Command in Korea and a Battalion Operations officer and a Brigade Executive Officer for the 10th Mountain Division in southeastern Afghanistan.
CTC: What in your view has been the overall contribution of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) to the CT enterprise?
Howard: Educating cadets for what they will encounter in their future careers has been the Combating Terrorism Center’s most important contribution. Providing newly minted counterterrorism specialists an opportunity to teach, learn, and conduct research while beginning their careers is a close second. Enabling the CT community a publication platform to share research has also been an important CTC contribution.
Brigadier General (Retired) Russell Howard
McCormick: I agree with Russ. One of the things I love most about the contribution of the CTC to the CT enterprise is how it plants seeds about CT in the lives of the cadets. We have no idea how those seeds will be nurtured over the years. However, we can be sure that there will be a group of young women and men who become experts in this field because of what they learned through the CTC. We tend to focus on the big muscle movement projects that move forward the CTC vision and mission. But in reality, it’s those day-to-day actions with the cadets that have the long-term impact on the CT enterprise.
Colonel (Retired) Kip McCormick
Felter: I believe one of the most significant contributions of the Combating Terrorism Center to the CT enterprise is a fundamental appreciation of the importance of understanding the hostile ideology driving violent terrorist attacks against the U.S. and her allies and partners, and that the best way to discredit and delegitimize this ideology is through the words and discourse of individuals (e.g., scholars and thought leaders) whose opinion and ideas resonate with these extremists. In my first Senate testimony as CTC Director, for example, I argued that “You can’t capture, kill, or incarcerate an idea” to underscore the importance the CTC placed on effectively addressing the root causes—not only the symptoms—of terrorist attacks.
A second important contribution of the CTC is the role it has and continues to play in identifying and making important information on terrorist threats available to the broader scholarly and policy community given its unique position and trusted relationships.
Colonel (Retired) Joseph Felter
Sawyer: The Combating Terrorism Center’s contribution to the overall CT enterprise was and remains significant in three ways, starting, as has already been pointed out, with the first part of the mission we designed: educating cadets. For a generation, the CTC has educated future leaders on the complexities of the evolving threat environment, challenging their thinking about critical issues relating to CT, homeland security, and more broadly understanding the world around them.
The second dimension, equally tied to the original vision of the Center, speaks to the intrinsic value of the CTC and that is its ability to remain focused on the longer-term issues, its rigorous research, and its willingness to challenge convention. Prior to 9/11, there was a dearth of institutional CT knowledge, let alone an independent institution, that was focused on the deeper currents rather than the surface turbulence. Finally, the CTC occupies a unique position sitting at the intersection of academia, policy, and operations, which enables it to inform and shape thinking for each of these audiences.
Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Reid Sawyer
Collins: I became the director towards the end of the Center’s first decade. By this time, my predecessors had already built the CTC into a powerhouse that was well integrated across the CT enterprise. They had created a Terrorism Studies Program for the cadets at West Point that include a minor, and the CTC was teaching counterterrorism to the FBI and other government agencies around the United States. The CTC Sentinel had been around for three years and was a “must read” for CTC professionals around the world.
In 2009, we established the General Wayne A. Downing Scholarship Program to provide U.S. Army officers with graduate school education. We felt it was important to invest in the intellectual capital of our very best, and often our most deployed, officers. We started with only two the first year, but it has been so successful that we now select up to eight each year. As a testament to the program’s success, 100 percent of Downing alumni have been selected for battalion command, and JD Keirsey, the current commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, was a Downing scholar.
Colonel (Retired) Liam Collins
Price: I’m not sure there’s another entity as unique as the CTC. First, I don’t know of another organization that has the CTC’s three-pronged mission of teaching cadets and CT practitioners, publishing original research, and briefing CT professionals both at the tip of the spear and at the most senior levels of our government.
Some think-tanks in the CT world would call it a successful year if they hosted a 4-star general, an ambassador, and a SEAL Team commander. That’s a regular week at the CTC. That access provides a comprehensive insight into the threat that no other organization has in the CT space.
Additionally, most of the CTC’s faculty have top secret clearance, which provides researchers the ability to engage with material, operators, and policymakers on the classified side. Finally, you have the fact that the CTC is financially independent from DoD and privately funded through donations via the Academy’s 501(c)(3). It doesn’t have the constraints placed on other DoD think-tanks that limit their creativity and their research agenda.
This special combination creates the conditions for an unparalleled understanding of the terrorism threat. In my opinion, that’s the CTC’s special sauce.
Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Bryan Price
Dodwell: It’s difficult to add to the excellent comments from my friends and colleagues above, and I wholeheartedly agree, especially with the emphasis on the mission of training and inspiring the next generation of CT leaders, a mission that continues to be the beating heart of the CTC. Without the grounding experience of walking into a classroom of this nation’s best and brightest every day, we would not be as effective in all the other things we do.
In terms of the CTC’s research mission, the genius of Russ [Howard] and his team was that, from its foundation, they structured the CTC in such a way that we could maintain our focus on those larger, strategic questions that continue to challenge the terrorism studies field—the kind of deep research that Reid [Sawyer] discusses above. Over the past several years, the U.S. national security architecture has undergone a shift away from what was likely an over-emphasis on the counterterrorism mission. While a rebalancing across a wider range of missions is healthy, we as a community tend to struggle with doing multiple things at once. And so, if history is any guide, we now run the risk of over-correcting, and turning a blind eye to the very significant threat that remains from terrorism and violent extremism.
The CTC has experienced pressure during this period to deviate from its original CT-focused mission. Thankfully, given the structure created by our founders and the generosity of our donors and partners (providing the independence that BP [Bryan Price] described), the CTC has remained committed to maintaining an unblinking eye on the terrorism problem set, while also demonstrating an ability to adapt and explain how this problem set is inextricably linked to broader strategic competition.
Our core operational partners, those who never deviated from the CT mission, have consistently expressed to us how much they value our persistent focus. So, in addition to helping to prepare future Army leaders to think critically about terrorism and counterterrorism, the CTC’s enduring contribution to the CT enterprise is going to continue to be original research that meets the needs of the operational community.
Brian Dodwell
Morrow: CTC continues to make three key contributions to the CT enterprise. First are the cadets and Downing Scholars we educate every year and the impact they have at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of our national security enterprise. Second, CTC is the people who have served here and who have built a global reputation as independent, rigorous, and trusted partners. Not only do CTC teammates make a lasting impact while at West Point, but they continue on to even more impactful roles in government, business, and academia. Last, CTC serves as a crucial bridge across stakeholders in the CT enterprise. CTC never takes for granted the tremendous access we have, and CTC understands the responsibility to judiciously share that access and the insights that it holds so that the counterterrorism enterprise can maintain and increase pressure on the threats.
Colonel Sean Morrow
CTC: Looking back, what was the key work done by the Combating Terrorism Center during your tenure as director? What are you most proud of? What are your favorite anecdotes?
Howard: Imagining the early design and securing the funding for the Center from Vincent Viola were the two most important things I did as the first CTC director. Vinnie’s original financial contribution gave the CTC the “capitalization” required to make an early and sustained impact on combating terrorism. Hiring General Wayne Downing and Bruce Hoffman was a close second. Having General Downing on the CTC letterhead gave the CTC instant access to the halls of Congress and the White House. Having Bruce’s name on the letterhead gave the CTC instant credibility in the halls of academia, think-tanks, and the research establishment.
Key work during my tenure included publishing the “West Point” series of CT-related textbooks (seven altogether) and providing CT policy guidance to DoD, DoS, and other government agencies.
With regards to policy guidance, most people don’t know but the CTC’s early, personal discussions with Governor Tom Ridge had some influence on what was to become the Department of Homeland Security.
Reid Sawyer deserves credit for the early “West Point” series of “Terrorism/Counterterrorism” textbooks published by McGraw Hill. He oversaw the publication efforts, which entailed a lot of work. However, the efforts were valuable not just to students and the general public but also the CTC. The books were edited volumes featuring articles by the best terrorism and counterterrorism experts of the time. We, Reid and I, had to read all of the submitted articles for publication, which made both of us better informed subject matter experts and also acquainted us with the authors, many of whom became important friends and contacts for the CTC.
McCormick: My tenure at the CTC was short but a total blast (2005-2006). Department Head Colonel Russ Howard asked me to lead it after my good friend Reid Sawyer was selected for the PhD program at Columbia. I could barely spell “terrorism,” being a Northeast Asia/Russia/Balkans Foreign Area Officer. The good news is that Reid had formed a solid team with a firm foundation that was ready to expand the CTC’s footprint.
Jarret Bachman was a CTC employee and, at that time, a PhD candidate with an entrepreneurial spirit and a sharp mind to go with it. He introduced me to William McCants, a brilliant scholar with that same entrepreneurial spirit. He had done some work with us in the past. Jarret and Will had this bizarre idea to look at, in their eyes, what really fueled al-Qa`ida. Without going into details, we got the green light to go to SOCOM and brief the project to get some funding for it.
During that SOCOM briefing, things were a little testy (read, “not favorable”) in the room until, midway through the presentation, Will pointed out a hole in the al-Qa`ida link analysis diagram the SOCOM folks had hanging on a wall in the room. It was a stroke of genius. He and Jarret spoke their magic of how we could help fix holes like that in their analysis and the rest was history. We received a significant funding grant that would give us the means to shift gears at the CTC. With that, we were able to lay down the roots for what would become the Harmony Project.
We brought on Clint Watts, poured into the then recent hires Lianne Kennedy-Boudali and Thalia Tzanetti, and made Will McCants a fellow at the CTC. We leveraged other SOSH [West Point Department of Social Sciences] faculty to help us do the work. We started doing some projects we felt would move the needle forward in the war. Colonel Joe Felter would step into the fray (he could spell “terrorism”) and after I’d leave, he’d lead the CTC to the next level. These guys would remind me of that great leadership lesson: Surround yourself with people of character who have the expertise, give them right and left limits, and then let them do their job. I was so fortunate to be surrounded by such heroes.
Felter: I came to SOSH from a Stanford PhD program in summer of 2005. Brigadier General Russ Howard was transitioning out with Mike Meese as SOSH Head. Russ was my former SF Group Commander, and I will be forever indebted to him for his support as an SF company commander in Okinawa through my selection for SOSH and tenure as CTC Director. Kip McCormick followed Russ Howard as CTC Director that summer, and I had the privilege of taking the reins from Kip in December 2005 when he was promoted to Colonel and PCS’d [permanent change of station] from USMA. I stayed on as Director from December 2005 until PCS’ing to my War College Fellowship at Stanford in August 2008.
I felt like my tenure spanned the transition of the CTC from a “startup” that was somewhat internally focused on our priority mission to educate cadets (James Forest, [our] Director of Education, was doing an extraordinary job) to a more established center with an expanded emphasis on its research and policy outreach. My farewell plaque presented by General Abizaid and the team at the time remarked that we had finally “come out of the garage” as a nod to the center moving beyond its startup phase at last!
To be clear, everything we accomplished during my tenure is a tribute to the extraordinary drive, selflessness, and commitment to excellence of our center members, Distinguished Chairs, and SOSH/USMA leadership. It was a privilege to work with and lean in with this amazing team.
The things I am most proud to be associated with during my time as director include two broad areas:
1) Helping build and empower an amazing team of “insurgents” as our Chair General Wayne Downing described us (to list a few would mean leaving out many others; they know who they are!) and
2) Leveraging this team and the unique position and access we enjoyed as a quasi-independent center at West Point to (a) prepare cadets for the extraordinary challenges that they would face when commissioned at the height of the GWOT [Global War on Terror] and (b) supporting practitioners engaged in the CT fight with insights gleaned from our research that helped them understand and address real terrorist threats.
When it comes to specifics, I’m proud of the work we did on CTC’s Harmony project. Taking a hand-off from Russ Howard and Kip McCormick and ensuring that we further established, operationalized, and exploited the Harmony Project with SOCOM—e.g., taking the first limited tranche of cleared documents and making them publicly available via the CTC through our first publication using Harmony (Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa`ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities1) as well as completing and publishing the Militant Ideology Atlas, an intensive project led by Will McCants and coordinated by Jarret Brachman to map ideological influence using a citation analysis. Follow on Harmony reports included Al-Qa’ida’s (Mis)adventures in the Horn of Africa.2 CTC XO [executive officer] Clint Watts led that effort.
I’m also proud of our launch of CTC’s flagship publication CTC Sentinel in late 2007. The CTC was hitting hard with its education mission, and we believed we could expand the impact of the center and develop a regularized “battle rhythm” if we published a periodic journal that would help position the center as a thought leader in the field that we knew we could be. We dedicated the Sentinel to our recently passed Chair General Wayne Downing in the lead article of that first issue. Jarret Brachman and Director of Research Brian Fishman were on point for this, but all leaned in to get this off the ground.
During my time as director, the work the CTC did on the Sinjar Records3 was another standout contribution. We were provided a trove of information from recently captured documents from the Iraqi border town of Sinjar describing the background and experiences of foreign fighters entering Iraq from abroad. I set up an “in house” data coding effort where we coded key fields of information from the foreign fighter dossiers into a database and used statistical analysis tools to paint a picture of where these foreign fighters were coming from, why they joined, how they joined.
CTC also did important work on Iranian influence in Iraq during my time at the helm. Brian Fishman and I deployed to Iraq with the 75th Ranger Regiment and then RCO Colonel Richard Clark to support a JSOC task force charged with addressing malign Iranian influence in Iraq. I can’t go into much more detail than that, but the experience provided extraordinary access to information on the activities of Iraqi Shi`a militia members that trained in Iran and returned to Iraq to conduct deadly attacks on U.S. and coalition forces—e.g., employing the devastating milled shaped-charged IEDs known as EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) —and IRAM [Improvised Rocket Assisted Munition] rockets. Drawing on primary sources and declassified Harmony documents, we authored a report4 that revealed for the first time the depth and degree of Iranian penetration into the Iraqi government and the details of how the Shi`a militias were recruited, moved to Iran for training, and supported when they returned to Iraq to attack U.S. and coalition forces.
There are so many good anecdotes. Hours after publishing Harmony and Disharmony, I received calls from multiple USG sources telling me that we had violated classification rules. Fortunately, our SOCOM sponsors backed us up. I naively put my email address as a POC for the report and got well over 1,000 emails!
Then there was the time Ayman al-Zawahiri put out a tape that featured the CTC—with its crest!—and specifically the work of Jarret Brachman and Will McCants claiming that the CTC publications were misguided and should not be believed!a
We liked to aim for the skies at CTC, sometimes literally. I remember when CTC’s then Executive Officer Clint Watts and I met with Ross Perot on his private jet to update him on CTC progress and secure his continued support on a flight from D.C. to Chicago. He loved the CTC, and it was well worth the trip to join him—it was the only window free he had.
Then there was the time Brian Fishman and I pulled an all-nighter to complete the Sinjar Records report. I was the data guy crunching the numbers and sending Brian findings and Brian putting all into context. It was like Elton John and Bernie Taupin in “Between 2 Rooms”! At another time, Brian and I deployed to Iraq to support JSOC. The helicopter we were flying from Balad to Baghdad unexpectedly “tested” its machine guns over the Euphrates River. Needless to say, this more than got Brian’s attention!
Sawyer: I am most proud of the relationship we developed with the New York City Fire Department. The Center was barely established when FDNY leadership approached West Point to assist with its rebuilding efforts and the development of its post-9/11 strategy. What started with a simple meeting in Lincoln Hall at West Point led to a 20-year relationship, beginning with the development of a graduate course taught first to the most senior leaders of the [Fire] Department and over time now includes company grade officers accelerating the learning opportunity afforded by the partnership.
First conceived by Ms. Kate Frucher, then Special Assistant to the Fire Commissioner; First Deputy Commission (then Chief) Joseph Pfeifer; Chief Peter Hayden; Chief (and later Commissioner) Salvatore Cassano; Chief John Norman; and Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, the Counterterrorism Leadership Program proved transformational, impacting a generation of officers and assisted the Department in defining its strategy. Moreover, the CTC assisted the FDNY in establishing its own center, the FDNY Center for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness, which has made immeasurable contributions to the Department, New York City, and the broader Fire Service.
The hallmark of a great partnership is the investment made by each party, and the FDNY has done a great deal for West Point and the Army, including hosting the CTC’s Homeland Security Course (first established by Alex Gallo) teaching the cadets about crisis management, providing internships for the likes of now Congressman Pat Ryan (NY-19th), CTC alum such as LTC Adam Scher (White House Fellow), and Mr. Kyle Brengel (former 10th SFG(A)). It is hard to overstate the impact these two storied institutions have had on one another and will continue to do so into the future.
Collins: We released many great reports during my time as director, but two stand out. On May 3, 2012, we released Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?5 This was the first report to analyze some of the documents that were captured during the Abbottabad raid in which bin Ladin was killed. We worked extremely hard to complete the report after receiving the first batch of declassified documents. I did not anticipate the demand for the report nor the inability for our server to handle it, so our website crashed when we released it. People had to go to other news media outlets, who had posted our report before our system crashed, to read and download the report. The report was the lead news story around the world on the day we released it.
We also released Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.6 While the violent far-right has featured much more prominently in the media in recent years, back in 2013, it was not getting the attention it deserved and our understanding of these groups was not where it needed to be given the threat these groups posed to the United States. The report generated a lot of pushback, but it was clear that many of those who criticized the report had not read the executive summary, let alone the report. Ultimately, it was an important contribution to the literature that helped practitioners better understand the threat.
Price: Without hesitation, I’m most proud of our people. Being an Army officer, it was the first time in my career that I had the opportunity to hire people and build a team, and that team was special.
We made the deputy director a civilian post and created the director of research position. We revamped the CTC Sentinel and created the “A View from the CT Foxhole” series. We also revamped our website, making it easier than ever to search, sort, and display the vast research the CTC has done over the years.
For the first time in our history, we created a special course called Combating Terrorism and hired subject matter experts in Africa and South Asia. On the research side, we established the CTC Perspectives line. I was also proud of our work on ISIS, foreign fighters, hostages, terror group designations, and the prescient work done on extremist right-wing terrorism.
We quadrupled the number of internships for our cadets, including new placements on the National Security Council, JSOC, and the State Department. We bolstered the Downing Scholar program and executed Senior Conference in 2015 for the Department of Social Sciences, which was focused on innovative approaches to the CT threat.
Finally, testifying in front of Congress in 2016 on the CT lessons learned since 9/11 remains one of my most cherished personal and professional highlights.
Dodwell: I think I probably had a bit of a different experience than my predecessors. I came into the Director role as the first civilian to hold the position, having been asked to take on this role during a two-and-a-half-year gap between military leadership. It’s important to emphasize how grateful I am that Colonel Suzanne Nielsen (SOSH Head) told me I was the Director, not the Interim Director, and gave me her full support to lead our amazing team accordingly (something I couldn’t have done, by the way, without Rachel Yon, the CTC XO and my deputy in all but name). In addition, I came into the position having served in the Center for eight years prior to taking on the role (and continue to serve today). So in terms of discussing the things I’m most proud of from my tenure as Director, it’s difficult for me to disaggregate all the amazing things that happened over the full 13 years that the CTC has been my home. I feel an attachment to all of it.
Having served as BP’s deputy for four years, I was extremely lucky to have learned from one of the best leaders out there (and someone who’s now made a whole second career out of leadership education!), so my goal when I took the job was to not only maintain the amazing momentum we had built up, but also to live up to BP’s mantra of relentless improvement. As he mentioned earlier, it’s all about the people and the team, so one of the things I’m most proud of is how we were able to expand an already amazing group of researchers by adding expertise in some areas of critical importance for the future of the CTC, to include the Iran Threat Network and terrorist innovation and use of technology.
Also in the category of relentless improvement was the work we did to reinvigorate our research with the special operations community on captured material. After the early successes of the Harmony Program, there had been a lull in the release of this material. It took a persistent effort by our team, in cooperation with a core group of innovative thinkers on the operational side, but we gradually got the spigot reopened. We started this effort during my time as deputy, and by the time I was director, the CTC was again producing innovative research using primary source materials to better understand our adversaries. Importantly, these projects were directly tied to requests from our operational partners, who were generous with their time and resources, to include supporting multiple deployments of CTC team members overseas to collect data and better understand the needs of the force. This high level of engagement helped to ensure the relevance and impact of our work. None of this happens without the brilliance and hard work of my partners in crime on this effort: Daniel Milton, Don Rassler, and Muhammad al-`Ubaydi.
The ultimate demonstration of the CTC’s impact at the nexus of academia and operations was the so-called al-Mawla Project. This effort, which resulted in the publication in 2020 of several articles and the release of 56 Tactical Interrogation Reports7 of the then-leader of ISIS from his time in custody a decade earlier, was the perfect marriage between operators, academics, and journalists. Each group brought their unique skills to bear, resulting in an end product that had demonstrable impact.
Morrow: I inherited an organization that was extremely well led by Brian Dodwell and stands on the shoulders of giants before him. In just two short years, I already have a book full of favorite anecdotes. Last fall while briefing foreign military attachés, one raised his hand to let us know that in his attaché training, they are explicitly told to read the CTC Sentinel. I asked the room if any other attaches read CTC Sentinel. Of the 40 senior officers in the room, all but a few said they do. On another occasion, Brian Dodwell and I were overseas at a major CT conference. The director of a foreign national counterterrorism center said hello and made small talk. She only seemed mildly interested in what we did until she heard we publish CTC reports and the Sentinel. She then made the connection and enthusiastically said that they read everything that CTC publishes. In late December 2022, as-Sahab, the media wing of al-Qa`ida, referred to “research by the Combating terrorism center issued by the US military academy in West Point which is considered the most advanced in America.”8 When your adversaries are reading your output, you know it must be valuable.
At this stage of my tenure, however, it’s not the research and accomplishments of the team that I am most proud of, but rather how the team is evolving in the face of change. The nation placed many demands on the Combating Terrorism Center during what CTC senior fellow and former Acting Director of the CIA Michael Morell called “the great war of our time,”9 and CTC exceeded those expectations.
As attention, priorities, and resources turn away from the CT fight, I offer that the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point might be more valuable to America in the next 20 years than it was in the previous 20 years. As others turn attention elsewhere, we will continue to educate cadets, officers, scholars, and practitioners to think through the complex challenges posed by terrorism. CTC will never succumb to the zeitgeist. We won’t yield to the pressure to be everything to everyone. I borrow something Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted in her description of the law through the eyes of the Supreme Court, because it applies perfectly to the current study of terrorism and counterterrorism: “the Court should never be influenced by the weather of the day but inevitably they will be influenced by the climate of the era.”b
Our nation’s national security priorities must ebb and flow to meet the world where it is, and where it will be. Terrorism might not present the same existential threat that other actors pose. However, terrorism will also never go away. CTC’s value to the nation is that we will continuously prepare cadets, scholars, and practitioners with the tools to face the threat now and in whatever form or shape it may re-emerge. To summarize it, although I am early in my tenure, I am most proud to be on a team that somehow evolves constantly without ever forgetting our enduring purpose.
CTC: How do you see the evolution of the terror threat landscape and counterterrorism challenges? How do you see the evolution of efforts by the scholarly and practitioner community to understand the problem set? What needs to guide our scholarship over the next 20 years?
Howard: I worry that present-day emphasis on Great Power Competition will take our collective eyes off the terrorist/counterterrorism ball. The United States is not in an either-or situation. Instead, it is all of the above. The CTC will make sure we (nationally and internationally) keep our eyes on the ball.
McCormick: We tend to discount the precise nuts and bolts of religion in this CT landscape. Our fear of offending, especially when it comes to religious ideologies and naming the specific issue, can be the issue. All religions have specific areas that can be exploited and twisted by people bent on doing damage and wreaking havoc. Those exploited areas don’t necessarily represent the complete ideology of that given religion. We have to be able to step into those areas and not sugarcoat what is happening and how these bad actors are using their twisted interpretation of a given religion to achieve their ends.
Felter: America must maintain a disciplined commitment to understanding the nature of the prevailing terrorist threats and investing in sufficient CT capabilities despite competing threats and budget priorities. Counterterrorism scholarship, including by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, should help us to remain vigilant in this commitment to continuously strive to identify, understand, and provide insights and recommendations to help practitioners interdict these threats.
Difficult decisions and compromises lie ahead for policymakers in determining the appropriate allocation of resources to defend against terrorist threats concurrent with prevailing in the competition with strategic rivals and addressing other threats to U.S. vital and important interests. Counterterrorism scholarship, including by the CTC, can help us make appropriate compromises and tradeoffs based on the real and enduring nature of the threat of terrorism.
No president or political leader can unilaterally declare that our war against terrorist threats like those responsible for catastrophic events like the 9/11 attacks is over—our enemies get a vote!
Sawyer: While terrorism will continue to evolve and be centered in the physical dimensions, the evolving technological dimensions of the threat will certainly manifest in ways we have not seen to date. Whether from further exploitation of commercial UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] platforms or leveraging dimensions of the forthcoming metaverse, we will face new challenges. This is the strength of the Center—that it is an enduring institution, committed to focusing on near-term and over-the-horizon challenges.
Collins: History has shown that terrorism constantly evolves. Therefore, we must constantly study it so that we do not underreact or overreact to terrorist threats, because when we do, we often exacerbate the challenge and the threat. Thus, what guides our scholarship over the next 20 years should be the same thing that has guided our scholarship over the past 20 years: rigorous academic research that is designed to inform good policy decisions.
Price: Not surprisingly, one of the few constants in the field of terrorism is change. Who could’ve predicted the pace and scope of ascendance of ISIS?
Our national security strategy documents provide one interesting medium from which to observe the evolution of the threat landscape. Almost two years after 9/11, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism stated that the enemy was not one person or a single regime, nor a religion. Instead, it stated “the enemy is terrorism,”10 which in hindsight seems a very broad and unrealistic mandate given that terrorism is a tactic. In 2006, an updated CT strategy declared the new focus was a “transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks, and individuals.”11 In 2011, the focus changed yet again, this time on “al-Qa’ida and the defeat of its affiliates, adherents, and ideology.”12 The 2018 version declared our principal threat was radical Islamist terrorist groups.13
What should be the CT focus in the next couple of years? For me, three topics come to mind. First, how will the combination of technology, AI, and misinformation contribute to political radicalization? Second, how will climate change and the resulting energy, water, and food shortages accelerate terrorist threats? Third, how will transnational groups use drone technology to conduct terrorist attacks against the U.S. and our allies?
Dodwell: Again, my predecessors have done an excellent job covering the key challenges we will face moving forward. Keeping pace with the change and evolution highlighted by Liam [Collins] and BP [Bryan Price] will be one of our prime challenges, especially in an era of reduced funding for CT activities. One of the key evolutions is the continued diversification of the terrorism threat. It’s not as simple as highlighting, as many have, the increased threat posed by domestic terrorism. Many of the new threat actors we face (and even some of the old ones) do not neatly fit into one of the traditional buckets the terrorism studies field has historically used to categorize threats. Our research efforts must grapple with this nuance to help inform tailored CT policies to combat specific threats.
I would also double-down on BP’s mention of the impact of technology on violent extremism. I agree that we need to tackle the important questions he raised regarding AI, misinformation/disinformation, and Unmanned Aircraft Systems. To those, I would add the challenges posed by developments in the chemistry and biology fields that impact the availability and potential use of chemical and biological weapons by a wider range of actors. The CTC tackled this topic in a recent pair of special issues14 that we hope added value to the field and will prompt further scholarship and policy discussion.
Morrow: The challenges of countering terrorism over the next 20 years will likely be characterized by speed, the intersections and alliances of states and non-state actors, and the challenges of information and disinformation. A concern I have is that studying terrorism is no longer in vogue. Those in the field across academia and in policy and practice continue to do critical work at the cutting edge of scholarship, technology, and practice. While I don’t have data at hand to support this, it seems that it is harder and harder to find young people choosing to focus their studies and their life’s work on terrorism. However, the good news is that the challenges I listed in the first sentence above lend themselves to attract brilliant minds. Those who study the complexities of political violence, international relations, technology, and disinformation will be well suited to quickly adapt those skills to the challenges imposed by the threats of terrorism. Much like terrorism is a tactic, so are the skills which can detect, deter, disrupt, and in some cases defeat those who use terrorism to challenge our nation and the world. It is up to practitioners, scholars, and policymakers to leverage assets and organizations like the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to ensure a small cadre of professionals and future officers maintain the knowledge and networks to integrate historical CT experts with the up-and-coming talent to face the future challenges posed by terrorism. The CTC will serve as a trusted global hub inside and outside of government, continuously monitoring and understanding current and evolving VEO [violent extremist organization] threats, and ready to bring our knowledge and network to scale as threats emerge. CTC
Substantive Notes
[a] Editor’s Note: At another point, Usama bin Ladin wrote, “Please send all that is issued from the combating terrorism center of the American military.” See “Request for Documents from CTC,” Declassified Material – May 20, 2015, Bin Laden’s Bookshelf, Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
[b] Editor’s Note: Justice Ginsburg stated: “A great constitutional scholar Paul Freund once said, ‘the Court should never be influenced by the weather of the day but inevitably they will be influenced by the climate of the era.’” “Transcript: Interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” New York Public Radio, September 16, 2013.
[7] Editor’s Note: The TIRs are available on the CTC’s Harmony Program webpage. For the articles, see Daniel Milton and Muhammad al-`Ubaydi, “Stepping Out from the Shadows: The Interrogation of the Islamic State’s Future Caliph,” CTC Sentinel 13:9 (2020) and Daniel Milton, “The al-Mawla TIRs: An Analytical Discussion with Cole Bunzel, Haroro Ingram, Gina Ligon, and Craig Whiteside,” CTC Sentinel 13:9 (2020).
[8] Editor’s Note: Media release by al-Qa`ida Central’s as-Sahab, late December 2022.
[9] Editor’s Note: See Michael Morell, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism from al-Qa‘ida to ISIS (Twelve Books, 2015).
[10] Editor’s Note: See “The National Strategy of the United States of America,” The White House, February 2003.
[11] Editor’s Note: “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,” The White House, September 2006.
[12] Editor’s Note: “National Strategy For Counterterrorism 2011,” The White House, June 2011.
[13] Editor’s Note: “National Strategy for Counterterrorism of the United States of America,” The White House, October 2018.
[14] Editor’s Note: See the April 2022 and May 2022 issues of CTC Sentinel, available on its website.
ctc.westpoint.edu · by Kristina Hummel · February 27, 2023
2. NEW: SIGAR's Collapse of the ANDSF Report
The 148 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-16-IP.pdf
As an aside there is no other organization that seems to be doing such in depth analysis on Afghanistan. The amount of reports and depth of report done by the SIGAR is really quite astonishing. Now a study needs ot be done to ask "what if" some of the analysis had been needed and used? Would it have made a difference? Counterfactual of course. The study should look at how accurate and useful the reporting was (and still is)?
And we should ask why don't we have a SIGAR like organization for Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine (and perhaps other places as well, such as in Africa. Obviously the SIGAR has been quite controversial and there is likely a lot of negative views of the reporting. But it is one way to bring daylight to complex operations.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Cusick, Shelby D CIV (USA)
Date: Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 2:14 PM
Subject: NEW: SIGAR's Collapse of the ANDSF Report
SIGAR released its latest report, Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to Its Demise.
Full Report: https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-23-16-IP.pdf
SIGAR’s interim report on this topic, released in May 2022, was the first U.S. government account on how and why the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) collapsed abruptly in August 2021. SIGAR’s new report updates that evaluation with compelling on-the-ground perspectives from witnesses to the ANDSF collapse. An “In Their Own Words” section provides quotes from over 40 interviewees, including former Afghan and U.S. officials who gave SIGAR perspectives about the ANDSF’s final two years. This section includes first-person accounts of the disintegration of the Afghan government and security forces as the Taliban closed in on Kabul, and the aftermath of the fall of the Ghani government.
SIGAR Findings and Commentary (Final Report):
-- The last-minute wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s security institutions between March and June 2021, in particular, undermined ANDSF cohesion, morale, and ultimately, its ability to counter the Taliban offensive. In 2021, amid rapidly deteriorating security, President Ghani reshuffled most of his security officials, often replacing them with fellow ethnic Pashtuns, especially Ghilzai Pashtuns from eastern Afghanistan. These leadership changes were part of a broader pattern of politicization and ethnicization (in favor of Pashtuns) of the security sector in the final years of the Ghani administration.
(Page 23-24)
-- Analyst Timor Sharan told SIGAR, “Districts collapsed not because of the army, but because of that restructuring that happened and the fact that none of [the replacement police chiefs] had connections” at the district level. He claimed that it was the police that did most of the fighting in the final 18 months, not the army. By undermining the morale and political legitimacy of the police, this restructuring directly contributed to the collapse in August 2021.
(Page 25-26)
-- Ethnic competition between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns (Tajiks, in particular)—enflamed by the Ghani-Abdullah rivalry—was likely the single biggest source of dysfunction within the ANDSF. But some former Afghan officials described other types of friction. One former MOD official described competition between the younger and older generation of officers, between the jihadis and the professional officers, and between ethnicities. All these issues distracted from the fight, he said.
(Page 26)
-- General James Mattis, who served as head of Central Command from 2010 to 2013 and as Secretary of Defense from 2017 to 2018, told SIGAR, “The lack of political clarity on ends, ways, and means meant we were always wondering if we were still going to be here next year. Were we going to be funded next year? We weren’t sure whether to attack, retreat or go sideways.”
(Page 41)
-- “In Their Own Words” (Appendix III) provides quotes from former ANDSF, Afghan and U.S. officials. It is broken down into six sections.
- The U.S.-Taliban Agreement and Withdrawal (Begins on Page 95)
- Withdrawing U.S. Contractors (Begins on Page 98)
- The ANDSF Disintegrates (Begins on Page 99)
- Exodus (Begins on Page 106)
- Evacuation from Kabul Airport (Begins on Page 107)
- Aftermath (Begins on Page 109)
-- “Overnight…98 percent of U.S. air strikes had ceased…the Doha agreement’s psychological implication was so great that the average Afghan soldier felt this idea of abandonment…U.S. soldiers were confused [about] what to engage and what to not. On an hourly basis, the U.S. military had to coordinate with the Doha office of Ambassador Khalilzad and others from the State Department to get clarification on what they could do.”
– Gen. Sami Sadat, former Afghan Army corps commander
-- “They [U.S. partners] said it was not right, but they have to follow orders. They would see the Taliban attacking our checkpoints. They would have videos of the Taliban doing it. But they would say we are not able to engage, because we have limitations. There was also so much concern about civilians, which gave the Taliban an advantage.”
– Former Afghan Army Gen. Habatullah Alizai
-- “Before June…all the Black Hawks had maintenance contractors who could repair them in 24 hours. After June, Black Hawks had to be fixed in Dubai, which took weeks to months…My [special operations forces] were running out of supplies.”
– Gen. Alizai
-- “Ghani was more interested in the tactical daily engagements on small minor issues rather than the big strategic issues that the country was facing…for God's sake, we had provinces falling and he would still bloody hold National Procurement Council meetings for four hours. He would hold urban planning meetings while we had districts falling…”
– Former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Hekmat Karzai
-- “Nobody wanted to die for Ghani…die for people who were here to rob the country.”
– Former Interior Minister Gen. Masoud Andarabi
-- The interviewee determined…they had 12 MD 530s ready to fly and 17 MD 530 pilots. He told his commander they were able to provide 360-degree protection of Kabul and asked for his orders... The commander said that the Taliban were not able to enter Kabul, and forbade anyone from leaving the area. The commander then left to speak to the media, stating that no one can enter Kabul, when in fact, the Taliban were already near the Palace.
– Former Afghan Air Force pilot, paraphrased interview
-- “The Taliban are going after former ANDSF on a daily basis. They search their homes and if they cannot find the individual they will go after their family members…Since the collapse I have relocated four times…If they find out anything I will be executed.”
– Former Afghan military intelligence officer
-- “…you’ve got guys who certainly do deserve to come to the U.S. who aren’t able to, and they’ve got a target on their back. The Taliban knows where they are and how to find them. It’s like we gave this guy a rope and noose around his neck and then kicked the chair out from under him.”
– U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer
Below are the interim report findings SIGAR previously sent in May 2022.
SIGAR Findings:
(Page numbers refer to those on the bottom right of the report pages.)
-- SIGAR found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two U.S. presidents to withdraw U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves.
(Page 6)
-- One former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR, “We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. Game over…when the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up.”
(Page 15)
-- Former Afghan generals told SIGAR that the majority of the U.S.-made UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were grounded shortly after U.S. contractors withdrew in the spring of 2021 [including those who performed maintenance on those helicopters]. “In a matter of months, 60 percent of the Black Hawks were grounded, with no Afghan or U.S. government plan to bring them back to life,” one Afghan general told SIGAR. As a result, Afghan soldiers in isolated bases were running out of ammunition or dying for lack of medical evacuation capabilities.
(Page 16)
-- According to an senior Afghan official, it was not until President Biden’s April 14, 2021, announcement of the final troop and contractor withdrawal date that…President Ghani’s inner circle said they realized that the ANDSF had no supply and logistics capability. Although the Afghan government had operated in this way for nearly 20 years, their realization came only 4 months before its collapse.
(Page 31)
-- The U.S.-Taliban agreement and subsequent withdrawal announcement degraded ANDSF morale. According to ANDSF officials, the U.S.-Taliban agreement was a catalyst for the collapse. A former Afghan commander told SIGAR that the agreement’s psychological impact was so great that the average Afghan soldier switched to survival mode and became susceptible to accepting other offers and deals. Another senior ANDSF official told us that after the Doha agreement was signed, Afghan soldiers knew they were not the winner.
(Page 6)
-- After the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement, the U.S. military changed its level of military support to the ANDSF overnight, leaving the ANDSF without a critically important force multiplier: U.S. airstrikes. In 2019, the United States conducted 7,423 airstrikes, the most since at least 2009. In 2020, the U.S. conducted only 1,631 airstrikes, with almost half occurring in the two months prior to the U.S.-Taliban agreement.
(Page 12)
-- Many factors affected the ANDSF’s determination to keep fighting: low salaries; poor logistics that led to food, water, and ammunition shortages; and corrupt commanders who colluded with contractors to skim off food and fuel contracts. But the root cause of the morale crisis may have been the lack of ANDSF buy-in with the Afghan central government.
(Page 10)
-- One former Afghan government official told SIGAR that following the U.S.-Taliban agreement, President Ghani began to suspect that the United States wanted to remove him from power. That official and a former Afghan general believed Ghani feared a military coup. According to the general, Ghani became a “paranoid president…afraid of his own countrymen” and of U.S.-trained Afghan officers.
(Page 26)
-- According to a former Afghan general, in the week before Kabul fell, President Ghani replaced the new generation of young U.S.-trained Afghan officers with an old guard of Communist generals in almost all of the army corps. Ghani, that general said, was “changing commanders constantly [to] bring back some of the old-school Communist generals who [he] saw as loyal to him, instead of these American-trained young officers who he [mostly] feared.”
(Page 26)
-- According to a former Afghan Interior Minister, Afghan security officials briefed President Ghani about the impending U.S. withdrawal – five days before the April 14 announcement – but Afghanistan’s then-vice president told President Ghani that this was a U.S. plot, and the briefing was ignored.
(Page 21)
-- The U.S.-Taliban agreement introduced tremendous uncertainty into the U.S.-Afghan relationship. Many of its provisions were not public, but are believed to be contained in secret written and verbal agreements between U.S. and Taliban envoys. Some U.S. analysts believe that one classified annex detailed the Taliban’s counterterrorism commitments, while a second classified annex detailed U.S. and Taliban restrictions on fighting. SIGAR was not able to obtain copies of these annexes, despite official requests made to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State.
(Page 12)
-- Afghan officials, largely removed from the negotiations, struggled most of all to understand what the United States had agreed to with the Taliban. According to Afghan government officials, the U.S. military never clearly communicated the specifics of its policy changes to the Ghani administration or ANDSF leadership. The Taliban’s operations and tactics, however, suggested that they may have had a better understanding of new U.S. levels of support the United States was willing to provide to the ANDSF following the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement.
(Page 13)
-- According to a former Afghan general, in a broad sense, the U.S. military took on the role of a referee and watched the Afghan government and Taliban fight, something the general referred to as “a sick game.” According to that general, Afghan troops had not only lost U.S. support for offensive operations, they no longer knew if or when U.S. forces would come to their defense. U.S. inaction fueled mistrust among the ANDSF toward the United States and their own government.
(Page 13)
-- Under the U.S.-Taliban agreement’s rules, U.S. aircraft could not target the Taliban groups that were waiting more than 500 meters away—the groups “beyond the contact” that would engage in the second, third, or fourth wave to defeat the last ANDSF units. A senior Afghan official said this was a loophole that the Taliban used in their targeting to their advantage.
(Page 13)
-- While ANDSF forces were limited to a defensive posture, the Taliban took advantage of its freedom of movement to launch an undeclared offensive targeting vulnerable ANDSF supply lines. According to an Afghan general, an Afghan military assessment found that in 2020 the Taliban caused $600 million in damages to roads, electricity lines, schools, canals, and bridges in Helmand Province alone. “It was the same story all across the country,” the general told SIGAR.
(Page 37)
-- The secrecy around U.S.-Taliban negotiations and the Doha agreement meant there was a lack of official information for the ANDSF. Taliban propaganda weaponized that vacuum against local commanders and elders by claiming the Taliban had a secret deal with the United States for certain districts or provinces to be surrendered to them. One former senior Afghan official told SIGAR that the Taliban used this tactic quite effectively, telling forces, “They’re going to give us this territory, why would you want to fight? We will forgive you…we will even give you 5,000 Afghanis for your travel expenses.” Having not been paid for months, the police would abandon their posts. Then, “the army panicked; they thought the police made a deal, and they’re going to be butchered. So, the army made a run for it too. That started a cascading effect.”
(Page 40)
-- SIGAR found that no one country or agency had ownership of the ANDSF development mission. Instead, ownership existed within a NATO-led coalition and with temporary organizations. All of these entities were staffed with a constantly changing rotation of military and civilian advisors. The constant personnel turnover impeded continuity and institutional memory. The result was an uncoordinated approach that plagued the entire mission.
(See “What SIGAR Found”: Page ii (2nd Page))
-- The Afghan government failed to develop a workable national security strategy that could assume responsibility for nationwide security following the withdrawal of U.S. forces. One of the main problems was the lack of nationally oriented leaders that were competent in managing and coordinating national security affairs.
(Page 30)
-- According to a senior State Department official, U.S. government officials, including members of Congress with whom President Ghani communicated through unofficial channels, reinforced President Ghani’s misperceptions about the U.S. withdrawal. The apparent disconnect between unofficial channels of support and public pronouncements gave President Ghani the impression that the U.S. government was not altogether on the same page on full withdrawal, and that the withdrawal announcement was intended to shape his behavior, as opposed to being official U.S. policy.
(Page 9)
-- The length of the U.S. commitment was disconnected from a realistic understanding of the time required to build a self-sustaining security sector—a process that took decades to achieve in South Korea. Constantly changing and politically driven milestones for U.S. engagement undermined the ability to set realistic goals for building a capable and self-sustaining military and police force. Further, many of the up-and-coming ANDSF generals had only a decade of experience; most general officers in the U.S. military have twice as much. Adapting a decades-long process to an unrealistically short timeline was reminiscent of the U.S. experiences in Vietnam.
(Page ii; see Appendix IV for more details)
CONCLUSION:
-- The U.S. approach to reconstructing the ANDSF lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country. As a result, the U.S. created an ANDSF that could not operate independently, milestones for ANDSF capability development were unrealistic, and the eventual collapse of the ANDSF’s was predictable. After 20 years of training and development, the ANDSF never became a cohesive, substantive force capable of operating on its own. The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multi-generational process. In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security assistance sector were likely to fail from the beginning. The February 2020 decision to commit to a rapid U.S. military withdrawal sealed the ANDSF’s fate.
(See full Conclusion, Page 78)
3. U.S. Commandos Advise Somalis in Fight Against Qaeda Branch
U.S. Commandos Advise Somalis in Fight Against Qaeda Branch
A campaign in the Horn of Africa is now the most active element in the “forever wars” the United States has waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
By Eric SchmittPhotographs by Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi
Eric Schmitt, who first reported from Somalia 30 years ago, returned in early February to embed with the U.S. military.
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · February 27, 2023
Somali soldiers, part of an elite combat unit called Danab, preparing for live fire drills at a military base in Baledogle, Somalia, earlier this month.
A campaign in the Horn of Africa is now the most active element in the “forever wars” the United States has waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Somali soldiers, part of an elite combat unit called Danab, preparing for live fire drills at a military base in Baledogle, Somalia, earlier this month.Credit...
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Photographs by Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi
Eric Schmitt, who first reported from Somalia 30 years ago, returned in early February to embed with the U.S. military.
BALEDOGLE, Somalia — The promise and perils of America’s counterterrorism campaign were on full display at a remote training base in central Somalia.
It was graduation day for 346 recruits who would join an elite Somali commando unit trained by the State Department, advised by U.S. Special Operations forces, and backed by American air power.
Since last August, the unit, called Danab, has spearheaded a string of Somali army victories against Al Shabab, an Islamist terrorist group that is considered the deadliest of Al Qaeda’s global branches.
“We’re more dedicated than ever,” said Second Lt. Shukri Yusuf Ali, 24, who joined the unit two years ago as one of its few female members and was recently selected to attend the U.S. Army infantry training course at Fort Benning, Ga.
But sadness hung over the ceremony. Many of the recruits will be rushed to the front lines to backfill two Danab battalions decimated by a Shabab attack last month that left more than 100 Somali soldiers dead or injured.
Danab recruits demonstrating how they would capture a suicide bomber. The unit has spearheaded a string of recent Somali army victories against Al Shabab.
American Special Operations forces arriving at the base in Baledogle on a C-130 cargo plane.
Danab recruits attending their graduation ceremony. Many of them will be rushed directly to the front lines.
Americans monitoring video feeds from drones and surveillance aircraft following troops in the field. Somalia is also the center of a U.S. counterterrorism drone war.
I first reported from Somalia 30 years ago, when the U.S. military’s main mission there was to make the capital, Mogadishu, and outlying areas in a famine belt safe enough for aid deliveries, which had been interrupted by fighting among Somali factions.
The United States withdrew from the country after the “Black Hawk Down” episode of 1993, when Somali militia fighters killed 18 American service members in a blazing battle later depicted in books and Hollywood movies.
Now, nearly two decades after the rise of Al Shabab, Somalia is the most active front in the “forever wars” that the United States has been waging against Islamist extremists since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The American fight against Al Shabab began in 2014 with a handful of military advisers and grew steadily to a 700-member training force that President Donald J. Trump withdrew just before leaving office in 2021. President Biden restored 450 of the troops last year to advise Somali soldiers fighting a Shabab insurgency that still controls much of the country’s south.
More on U.S. Armed Forces
Somalia is also the center of a U.S. counterterrorism drone war that has waned in other hot spots like Yemen, Libya and Pakistan’s tribal areas where U.S. airstrikes have diminished the threat. In the past year, the United States has carried out about 20 airstrikes in Somalia, down from a peak of 63 in 2019. Nearly all of the past year’s strikes, however, were in “collective self-defense” of Somali forces.
I returned to Somalia this month for a rare embed with U.S. Special Operations forces. The visit offered a window into a counterterrorism world in which a small number of Americans, usually far from the front lines, are advising and assisting Somali troops waging a ferocious daily fight against a formidable foe.
As U.S. commandos worked with their Somali counterparts, an array of American, Somali and other African military, diplomatic and aid officials expressed cautious optimism about the Somali government’s commitment to the fight but lingering doubts over its ability to hold the ground it retakes.
Now, in the wake of the attack on Jan. 20 in Galmudug state, in central Somalia, Somali officials have asked for more American firepower and renewed an appeal to Washington for more drone strikes and looser rules on when they can be carried out. The request so far has received a cool reception from the Biden administration, which is wary of a deeper military commitment.
By The New York Times
The attack came as the Somali military pressed its monthslong offensive, with several powerful local clan militias joining the fight against a terrorist group that has wreaked havoc across the Horn of Africa. The Somali government has been resupplying the clan militias with ammunition and other aid.
Last May, Somalia elected a new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who also held the role from 2012 to 2017. Since returning to office, he has declared an all-out war on Al Shabab, vowing to limit their geographical reach and cut off their money. Intelligence officials estimate that the group has roughly 7,000 to 12,000 members and annual income — including from taxing or extorting civilians — of about $120 million.
Danab recruits participating in exercises on their graduation day. Somalia’s president has declared an all-out war on Al Shabab.
Danab recruits demonstrating how to assemble weapons in the dark.
Live fire drills prepared the recruits for the imminent threat from Al Shabab on the front lines.
A soldier showing his wound after being shot in the chest by Al Shabab fighters.
The full-scale offensive started soon after Mr. Biden redeployed American trainers to Somalia. Those forces only advise and assist Somali soldiers and do not conduct unilateral counterterrorism operations like the one last month by members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 that killed a senior Islamic State financier in northern Somalia.
Several Somali, U.S. and other Western officials and analysts said in interviews that the military campaign has been increasingly successful, retaking dozens of towns and villages.
But other officials struck a cautionary note about the way ahead, citing Al Shabab’s tenacity, Somalia’s history of dysfunction, the dizzying complexities of its clan dynamics, and a looming famine driven by drought.
“For the coming year, I don’t envision a significant reduction in Shabab’s capabilities,” said Heather Nicell, an Africa analyst with Janes, a London-based defense intelligence firm. “They’re adapting.”
Indeed, Al Shabab has responded with vicious counterattacks across the country, reclaiming some territory in a seesaw battle for control. In October, the group carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in Somalia in five years, killing 121 people and wounding about 300 others in a twin-car explosion that struck the Ministry of Education in Mogadishu, a city of around two million people.
More than 1,000 foreign diplomats, military trainers, U.N. workers, journalists and others operate inside a security zone near Mogadishu’s seaside international airport, largely sealed off from the metropolitan mayhem by giant concrete blast walls topped by concertina wires.
In early February, I took an Ethiopian Airlines flight to the city and stayed at a hotel steps from the airport exit. Outside my hotel window, a tan-camouflaged armored vehicle rumbled by. Over three days, a photographer colleague, Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi, and I conducted interviews in the security zone and flew aboard an Air Force C-130 cargo plane to this Somali military base 55 miles northwest of Mogadishu to watch live-fire training demonstrations and the graduation ceremony. We kept body armor and helmet at the ready in case of a Shabab attack.
The security zone walls can’t keep all violence at bay. Al Shabab occasionally lobs rounds inside, most recently on Feb. 1, when an 82-millimeter mortar slammed into a wall adjacent to the windowless, fortress-like U.S. Embassy, injuring four people.
The assignment is considered so dangerous that the State Department has barred the U.S. ambassador, Larry E. André Jr., a 33-year Foreign Service veteran, from venturing into the city itself. Even within the green zone, he travels in an armored vehicle with a security detail. Mr. André has made periodic visits elsewhere around the country, including to the graduation ceremony.
A commercial plane flying over the security zone in Mogadishu. Evens the concrete walls can’t keep all of the violence at bay.
An American Special Operations adviser aboard a C-130 cargo plane from Mogadishu to Baledogle.
The United States is one of several countries advising and assisting the Somali government in its fight against Al Shabab.
Larry E. André Jr., the U.S. ambassador, has made periodic visits elsewhere around the country, including to the graduation ceremony, but is barred from entering Mogadishu.
Soldiers for the Danab, which means lightning in Somali, are recruited by employees of Bancroft Global Development, a Washington-based company that for years has worked with the State Department to train African Union troops and embed with them on military operations in Somalia.
Recruits who pass physical exams, literacy tests and security background checks are then sent to Baledogle, where they undergo three months of combat training with Bancroft instructors.
The State Department spends about $80 million a year to train, equip, feed, fuel and provide $300 monthly bonuses to the Danab force, embassy officials said.
Some critics say the current Somali operations are too dependent on Danab, to the detriment of the larger, and evidently harder, job of building up the regular Somali army.
In the field, U.S. Special Operations forces, including Army Green Berets and Navy SEAL commandos, work closely with individual Danab units, advising on mission planning, intelligence gathering and troubleshooting.
When the Danab go out on operations, the U.S. advisers remain behind at small operating bases but monitor live video feeds of the operations from surveillance drones and reconnaissance aircraft.
If the Somali commandos run into trouble, they first seek help from Somali units nearby or Ugandan helicopter gunships. If all else fails, they call for American backup.
If the situation is dire enough — with the enemy attacking or threatening to — the U.S. advisers can authorize a collective self-defense airstrike, as they did most recently on Feb. 21, American officials said. Turkey also conducts airstrikes in support of Somali partners, the officials said.
The United States is one of several countries advising and assisting the Somali government in its fight against Al Shabab. In addition to the African Union, Turkey and Uganda, Britain, the United Arab Emirates, Eritrea and Egypt are also involved.
The hodgepodge of support poses major challenges for Somali commanders responsible for integrating the disparate elements into a cohesive fighting force.
“The new soldiers are being trained in different locations by different countries with different training methods, philosophies, equipment and even languages!” said Omar S Mahmood, a senior East Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group in Nairobi. “The lack of a common base inevitably complicates efforts to develop a coherent national army.”
The State Department spends about $80 million a year to train, equip, feed, fuel and provide $300 monthly bonuses to the Danab force, embassy officials said.
The recruits at Baledogle undergo three months of training with Bancroft instructors.
U.S. special operations forces work closely with Danab soldiers in the field, but do not go on the front lines.
Recruits carrying the Somali flag during their graduation ceremony.
President Mohamud is planning for the delivery of services to stabilize areas that have been newly liberated and is trying to forge stronger partnerships with both clan leaders and international allies. But this clan-based approach is unproven, some analysts say.
The Jan. 20 attack near the village of Gal’ad had the potential to deal the Danab, and the large-scale offensive, a crippling blow. Four car-bombers and 10 militants wearing suicide explosives vests stormed a Danab encampment at dawn, followed by withering heavy gunfire from about 100 Shabab fighters in what American officials called a “catastrophic attack.”
An American airstrike overnight scattered the Shabab fighters and the next day, surviving members of the bloodied Danab battalions joined with other Somali army units to fight back, officials said.
“There are going to be casualties,” said Comdr. Jonathan H., a Navy SEAL officer who is the U.S. Special Operations commander in Somalia. As part of being allowed access, The New York Times agreed to only partially identify him for security reasons. “But there are going to be many more successes if they continue building on the momentum. I’m cautiously optimistic about the progress being made.”
At the graduation ceremony two weeks after the attack, posters emblazoned with photographs of the fallen Danab fighters hung in memory around the army base. The camp will be renamed after Maj. Hassan Tuure, the Danab’s deputy commander who was killed in the assault.
For Lieutenant Ali, a former graphic artist in Mogadishu who designed the posters, there is no giving in to the extremists.
“I’m not afraid; I am not afraid of anything,” she told me, as we stood in a tent just steps from the ceremony where the hundreds of graduates occasionally burst into rhythmic chants and clapping. “I want to help the people of Somalia. They need me.”
“We’re more dedicated than ever,” said Second Lt. Shukri Yusuf Ali, 24, who joined the Danab two years ago as one of its few female members.
Charlie Savage in Washington and Declan Walsh in Nairobi contributed reporting.
The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · February 27, 2023
4. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 27, 2023
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-27-2023
Key Takeaways
- Russian officials are promoting an information operation that falsely frames Russia’s war in Ukraine as existential to the continued existence of the Russian Federation.
- Russian officials continue to conduct information operations in an attempt to discourage the Western provision of military aid to Ukraine.
- Ukrainian military officials continue to respond to Western concerns over Ukrainian capabilities and suggest that Ukrainian forces are preparing for a spring counteroffensive in southern Ukraine.
- A reportedly captured Russian military manual suggests that Russian forces are implementing new assault tactics to compensate for the current limitations on combat capability in light of continued offensive failures.
- The manual suggests that Russian forces are trying to adopt smaller and more agile combined arms formations than were employed earlier in the war.
- The tactics of the assault detachment additionally suggest that the Russian military may be attempting to institutionalize tactics used to marginal tactical effect by the Wagner Group in Bakhmut.
- US Central Intelligence Director William Burns stated on February 25 that the CIA is confident that Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment to Russia but has not made a final decision or provided lethal aid to Russia.
- Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces have been concentrating and escalating operations along the Luhansk Oblast front line.
- Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
- Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks across the Donetsk Oblast front line, and Russian sources widely claimed that Wagner Group forces made territorial gains north of Bakhmut.
- Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue to focus on establishing defensive fortifications in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and Crimea.
- Russian forces are continuing to expend their already limited stocks of precision munitions.
- Russian officials announced that all social support measures will enter into force in occupied territories on March 1.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 27, 2023
Feb 27, 2023 - Press ISW
Download the PDF
Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan
February 27, 8:15pm 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.
Russian officials are promoting an information operation that falsely frames Russia’s war in Ukraine as existential to the continued existence of the Russian Federation. In an interview with TV channel Rossiya-1 on February 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that he does not know if "such an ethnic group as the Russian people can survive in the form in which it exists today" if the West succeeds in "destroying the Russian Federation and establishing control over its fragments."[1] Putin accused the collective West of already having plans "set out on paper" for the destruction of the Russian Federation in its current form.[2] Putin also remarked that Russia had to suspend its participation in the START treaty in order to ensure its strategic stability and security in the face of a concerted Western effort to use START to cripple Russia’s strategic prospects.[3]
Putin began to set conditions for the perpetuation of this information operation in his speech to the Federal Assembly on February 21, where he blamed the collective West for using the war in Ukraine to threaten the existence of the Russian Federation.[4] Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev invoked similarly existential sentiments in an essay entitled "Points of No Return" published on February 27 in which he accused the West of fueling the current situation in Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union and concluded that "the calm power of our great country and the authority of its partners are the key to preserving the future of our entire world."[5] Both Putin‘s and Medvedev’s statements engage with an information operation that frames the war in Ukraine as existential to the continued survival of the post-Soviet Russian Federation, which is likely an attempt to present the war as having higher stakes for Russia and the West than it actually does. Putin likely hopes to set informational conditions to accuse Ukraine and the West of threatening the survival of the Russian Federation in response to Russian military failures and Western support for Ukrainian victories. No prominent Western official has called for the dissolution of the Russian Federation, and Western leaders have been very careful to articulate their aims as being to enable Ukraine to liberate all its territory at most. Putin’s language is designed to fuel support for the war in Russia and stoke fears in the West of the instability that would follow the collapse of Russia to deter Western support to Ukraine and persuade the West to coerce Kyiv into accepting Russian demands.
Russian officials continue to engage in information operations in an attempt to discourage the Western provision of military aid to Ukraine. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated during a TV interview with Rossiya-1 on February 26 that the types of weapons that the West decides to provide to Ukraine will determine how far Russian troops will need to "push the threat away" from Russian borders.[6] Putin made a similar statement in his February 21 address to the Federal Assembly.[7] These statements are likely meant to discourage the West from providing long-range systems to Ukraine by suggesting that the provision of such systems will protract the war by "forcing" Russia to take more Ukrainian territory to be "safe." ISW has previously reported on concerted Russian information operations to discourage Western military aid to Ukraine.[8]
Ukrainian military officials continue to respond to Western concerns about Ukrainian capabilities to liberate Ukrainian people and land and suggest that Ukrainian forces are preparing for a spring counteroffensive in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian Deputy Head of the Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Vadim Skibitskyi stated on February 26 that Ukrainian forces will be ready for a counteroffensive in spring 2023 and that one Ukrainian strategic goal is to split the Russian frontline between Crimea and mainland Russia. Skibitskyi noted that the supply of Western military aid is one decisive factor in determining the timing of a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Western officials and news outlets have recently expressed a degree of doubt about Ukrainian forces’ ability to conduct a counteroffensive and the West’s ability to provide long-term military aid to Ukraine, as ISW has previously reported.[9] ISW’s prior assessments of Russian military capabilities along the Zaporizhia Oblast front line suggest that there are opportunities for Ukraine to conduct a counter-offensive in that strategically vital region.[10]
A reportedly captured Russian military manual suggests that Russian forces are implementing new assault tactics to compensate for current combat power limitations in response to continued offensive failures. A Ukrainian reserve officer posted a picture on February 26 reportedly of a captured Russian manual that details the tactics of a newly minted "assault detachment," which is a battalion-sized element that has been optimized for frontal assaults on fortified areas.[11] The assault detachment formation reportedly fields six T-72 main battle tanks, 12 infantry fighting vehicles, and a collection of man-portable thermobaric rocket launchers, anti-tank guided missile systems, towed artillery, and self-propelled mortars.[12] The assault detachment appears to be comprised of three assault companies and a tank section.[13] Each assault company has a command element, two assault "platoons" (at far below normal platoon strength), a UAV team, an armored fighting vehicle (AFV) group, a fire support platoon and an artillery support platoon, a reserve section, and a medevac section. Each company fields one tank and four BMP/BMD-2 infantry fighting vehicles, with anti-tank launchers, heavy machine guns, and mortars. The Ukrainian reserve officer remarked that assault "platoons" of 12 to 15 people, divided into tactical groups of three people, are the formation’s primary maneuver elements.[14] The assault detachment reportedly conducts assaults within less than a minute of the time when artillery fire begins on open fortified positions, with the platoon commander controlling mortar fire.
The manual suggests that Russian forces are trying to adapt maneuver forces into smaller and more agile military formations than were employed earlier in the war. The Ukrainian reserve officer noted that this new tactical formation suggests that Russian forces have replaced the defunct battalion tactical group (BTG) with these smaller and more agile maneuver formations. The manual suggests that Russian forces are using T-72 tanks for direct fire support from the rear rather than as integral parts of a combined arms team. The increased reliance on dismounted infantry and the relegation of tanks to fire support from the rear indicates that Russian military leadership is prioritizing protecting main battle tanks over protecting infantry, which is reflective of recent reports of massive equipment losses that Russian armor units sustained over the first year of the war.[15] The manual indicates that the Russian military is resorting to employing a form of simplified combined arms warfare that has likely been pared down to compensate for the overall degradation of Russian manpower and equipment capacity and which is easier for inexperienced and untrained mobilized personnel slotted into such detachments to employ.
The tactics of the assault detachment additionally suggest that the Russian military may be attempting to institutionalize practices used to marginal tactical effect by the Wagner Group in Bakhmut. The Ukrainian reserve officer suggested that this new formation is likely partially influenced by Wagner Group operations around Bakhmut.[16] ISW has previously reported on the fact that Wagner has largely relied on squad-sized frontal assaults, which have decreased the reliance on massed fires as Russian artillery and equipment stocks have dwindled.[17] The Wagner Group’s highly attritional offensive on Bakhmut has failed to gain operationally significant ground, so the institutionalization of elements of Wagner’s tactics will likely further normalize attritional frontal assaults. Such tactics are likely to waste Russian combat power and not effectively counter conventional Ukrainian battalions and brigades. Assault detachments may be able to make tactical gains at cost due to their simplicity but will likely culminate rapidly due to their small size and attritional tactics. Russian forces are unlikely to make operationally significant breakthroughs rapidly with this formation.
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns stated on February 25 that the CIA is confident that Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment to Russia but has not made a final decision.[18] In an interview with CBS News, Burns stated that the CIA has not seen evidence of Chinese shipments of lethal equipment to Russia. Burns also stated that the US government chose to make the CIA’s assessment public in order to deter China from sending lethal weapons to Russia.
Key Takeaways
- Russian officials are promoting an information operation that falsely frames Russia’s war in Ukraine as existential to the continued existence of the Russian Federation.
- Russian officials continue to conduct information operations in an attempt to discourage the Western provision of military aid to Ukraine.
- Ukrainian military officials continue to respond to Western concerns over Ukrainian capabilities and suggest that Ukrainian forces are preparing for a spring counteroffensive in southern Ukraine.
- A reportedly captured Russian military manual suggests that Russian forces are implementing new assault tactics to compensate for the current limitations on combat capability in light of continued offensive failures.
- The manual suggests that Russian forces are trying to adopt smaller and more agile combined arms formations than were employed earlier in the war.
- The tactics of the assault detachment additionally suggest that the Russian military may be attempting to institutionalize tactics used to marginal tactical effect by the Wagner Group in Bakhmut.
- US Central Intelligence Director William Burns stated on February 25 that the CIA is confident that Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment to Russia but has not made a final decision or provided lethal aid to Russia.
- Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces have been concentrating and escalating operations along the Luhansk Oblast front line.
- Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks northwest of Svatove and near Kreminna.
- Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks across the Donetsk Oblast front line, and Russian sources widely claimed that Wagner Group forces made territorial gains north of Bakhmut.
- Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue to focus on establishing defensive fortifications in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and Crimea.
- Russian forces are continuing to expend their already limited stocks of precision munitions.
- Russian officials announced that all social support measures will enter into force in occupied territories on March 1.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and 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 Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1— Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and continue offensive operations into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces have been concentrating and escalating operations along the Luhansk Oblast frontline. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated on February 26 that Russian forces concentrated infantry, airborne (VDV), and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) forces in eastern Ukraine and have attempted to use armored vehicles in combat in the past several weeks.[19] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 27 that Russian forces deployed 200 conscript recruits from Rostov Oblast to Luhansk Oblast on an unspecified date.[20] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on February 27 that Russian forces have escalated operations in the Svatove, Kreminna, and Bilohorivka directions in recent weeks and have been concentrating equipment and reserves in occupied Luhansk Oblast.[21]
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northwest of Svatove on February 26 and 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Masyutivka (52km northwest of Svatove), Novoselivske (16km northwest of Svatove), and Stelmakhivka (17km northwest of Svatove) on February 26 and 27.[22]
Russian forces continued ground attacks near Kreminna on February 26 and 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Kreminna, northwest of Kreminna near Ploshchanka (17km northwest) and Nevske (18km northwest); west of Kreminna near Torske (14km west); southwest of Kreminna near Dibrova (6km southwest); south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka (12km south); and near the Serebrianska forest area (11km south) on February 26 and 27.[23] Geolocated footage suggests that Russian forces have likely pushed Ukrainian forces west from the R66 near Pishchane and Chervonopopivka (5-6km northwest of Kreminna).[24] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks in the Bilohorivka, Zarichne, Yampolivka, Terny, and Makiivka directions.[25] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces along the Svatove-Kreminna-Bilohorivka-Lysychansk line have adopted a new approach to make gradual advances, which is consistent with reports of a new Russian maneuver element that can only advance at the pace of dismounted infantry and whose attacks will culminate quickly before securing significant gains.[26]
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 continued ground attacks around Bakhmut on February 26 and 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful attacks on Bakhmut itself; north of Bakhmut near Vasyukivka (13km north), Zaliznianske (8km north), Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest), Orikhovo-Vasylivka (10km northwest), Berkhivka (4km north), Yahidne (1km northwest), and Bohdanivka (8km northwest); west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske (5km west); and southwest of Bakhmut near Stupochky (12km southwest) and Pivnichne (20km southwest) between February 26 and 27.[27] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty noted that Russian forces conducted 32 ground attacks around Bakhmut and 14 within the city on February 26.[28] Russian sources widely claimed that Wagner Group forces made gains north of Bakhmut on both February 26 and 27. Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner took control of Yahidne, advanced south of the Berkhivka reservoir, and moved westward to threaten Bohdanivka.[29] Milbloggers claimed that Russian advances north and northwest of Bakhmut will allow Russian forces to threaten the Khromove-Bakhmut route, with several Russian milbloggers indicating that Russian troops have taken at least part of the route under fire control.[30] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) advisor Igor Kimakovsky claimed that Wagner forces are moving closer to the center of Bakhmut itself, and a Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner has made gains on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut and toward Koperatyvna Vulystia, which is near Bakhmut’s city center.[31] Russian sources additionally claimed that Wagner continued assaults toward Ivanivske on both February 26 and 27.[32] Former Russian officer and prominent critical milblogger Igor Girkin remarked on February 27 that current Russian assaults on Bakhmut are useless and will exhaust Russian troops without taking strategically significant ground.[33]
Russian forces continued ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on February 26 and 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful attacks north of Donetsk City near Avdiivka, Sieverne, and Kamianka, on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Vodyane, Nevelske, and Krasnohorivka, and on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Marinka.[34] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are expanding their zone of control northeast of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka, but noted that this advance is bounded by the H20 Donetsk City-Kostyantynivka highway, which Russian forces have not yet crossed.[35] A Russian milblogger noted that the DNR’s "Somalia" battalion is moving toward Avdiivka.[36] Russian milbloggers additionally discussed efforts of the DNR’s 5th Brigade within Marinka on February 26 and 27 and claimed that Russian troops successfully pushed Ukrainian troops out of positions in western Marinka.[37]
Russian forces continued ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on February 26 and 27. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City) on February 27.[38] Geolocated footage posted on February 25 and 26 shows that Russian forces made minor advances on an unspecified date directly south of Vuhledar.[39] Russian milbloggers continued to discuss intense positional battles in the Vuhledar area, with one source claiming that Russian naval infantry elements are fighting toward Vuhledar from Mykilske, just southeast of Vuhledar.[40] A Russian milblogger circulated footage on February 26 of Eastern Military District (EMD) Commander Rustam Muradov and Russian Far Eastern Federal District representative Yuri Trutnev presenting naval infantry forces in the Vuhledar direction with service awards, supporting ISW’s observation that this axis is the area of responsibility of EMD and naval infantry elements.[41] The former DNR Militia spokesperson (who was reportedly recently dismissed from his post) visited the Vuhledar area on February 26 and noted that it is important for Russian forces to defend against Ukrainian counterattacks in this area because Ukraine wants to cut Russian supply routes to occupied Crimea.[42] Ukrainian Tavriisk Defense Group spokesperson Colonel Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi noted that the pace of Russian operations in the Vuhledar area has overall decreased over the past four days due to poor weather and noted that Russian forces only conducted 17 ground attacks near Vuhledar on February 27.[43]
Supporting Effort—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue to focus on establishing defensive fortifications in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast and in occupied Crimea. Head of the Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated on February 26 that Russian forces tried and failed to mine islands in the Dnipro River Delta and that Russian forces are dispersing forces to move further from the Dnipro River bank.[44] Humenyuk also stated that Russian forces continue equipping engineering and defensive fortifications in Crimea. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 26 that Russian forces are increasing efforts to build defenses in Crimea and have transported 150 personnel from Chelyabinsk Oblast to perform engineering work in Crimea.[45] Satellite imagery dated February 25 shows that Russian forces recently established trenches and roadblocks along the M17 and T-2202 highways approaching Armiansk from the northwest.[46]
Russian forces continued to conduct routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on February 26 and 27.[47] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command South reported on February 27 that Russian forces conducted 100 artillery attacks over the past day, including against the Dnipro River estuary and Mykolaiv Oblast coastal areas.[48]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Russian forces are continuing to expend their already limited stocks of precision munitions. Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Representative Andrii Chernyak stated that Russian forces use missiles at a faster rate than they can produce them.[49] Chernyak stated that Russian forces can produce no more than 30-40 cruise missiles per month and have fewer than 100 Kh-101 and Kh-555 high-precision missiles remaining. ISW previously assessed that Russian forces continue to expend increasingly limited stocks of precision munitions.[50]
Mobilized personnel continue to air their grievances with Russian military leadership in regard to their subordination to formations of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR). Mobilized servicemen of the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 1439th Regiment from Irkutsk Oblast released their third appeal video to Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 25 protesting their subordination to the DNR’s 1st Slavic Brigade.[51] The servicemen claimed that Russian authorities told them that they would serve in a territorial defense unit but that they were instead assigned to assault detachments, in which they are forced to storm Ukrainian forces’ strongholds and fortify areas along the front under threat of death for non-compliance.[52] The personnel also claimed that DNR evacuation groups would only evacuate DNR personnel or those with minor injuries.[53] ISW previously reported that some servicemen from the 1231st Regiment of Tatarstan who publicly appealed for removal from DNR command were resubordinated under DNR command likely as punishment.[54] Evident fracture lines between Russian mobilized personnel and DNR formations appear to be growing.
Russian officials continue efforts to formalize militia formations of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR). United Russia General Council Secretary Andrei Turchak announced that the Working Group on the "Special Military Operation" submitted two bills to the State Duma – the first would recognize militia members who participated in operations in Donbas from 2014 onwards as official participants in military operations; the second would grant participants of the war and their families free legal assistance in state legal bureaus.[55] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared to attempt to use these formalization measures to improve benefits for Wagner personnel and increase the Russian government’s recognition of Wagner. Prigozhin claimed that Putin has already ordered the preparation of documents stating that volunteers, including Wagner fighters, who die at the front receive the same rights as Russian military personnel.[56]
A Ukrainian source confirmed that the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade has suffered continually catastrophic losses in assaults on Vuhledar. The Ukrainian Resistance Center cited a prisoner-of-war interview with a 155th Naval Infantry Brigade infantryman who claimed that the brigade lost 6,800 people during the year (even though the brigade has a total complement of 1,200). The infantryman stated that the brigade has undergone seven or eight reformations and received recruits from volunteers, mobilized, convicts, and Pacific Fleet sailors who were removed from ships.[57]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian officials announced on February 27 that all social support measures will begin to operate in occupied territories on March 1. Russia’s ruling United Russia Party announced on February 27 that all residents in occupied territories will receive pensions and payments for children, free medical care, and other social benefits starting on March 1.[58] United Russia also stated that primary school students in occupied territories will receive academic and social scholarships, as well as free hot meals and textbooks. United Russia stated that the transition period will last from March 1, 2023, to February 29, 2024.[59] ISW has previously assessed that such social benefit schemes increase social and bureaucratic control of occupied territories by forcing Ukrainian citizens to register and interact with occupation administration organs to receive benefits and additionally foster dependencies on occupation administrations for social support.[60]
Russian officials continue to deport Ukrainian children to Russian territory and subject them to various social programming schemes. Independent Russian news outlet Dozhd reported on February 26 that it identified communications between the Russian Ministry of Education and regional guardianship authorities revealing that Russian officials forcibly deported 400 Ukrainian children to Russian territory in August 2022.[61] Dozhd reported that 36 children had been placed into foster care by mid-January 2023 and that boarding schools received instructions not to place the children with families with Russian citizenship.[62] Dozhd also stated that Russian officials are subjecting the children to Russian patriotic-military education programs.[63] ISW maintains that the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families may constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as well as a component of a wider ethnic cleansing campaign.
Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.)
Unspecified actors – reportedly Belarusian partisans – reportedly disabled a Russian Air Force Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control plane at the Machulishchi Air Base in Minsk, Belarus, on February 26. Multiple Belarusian opposition sources and Russian military bloggers reported that Belarusian partisans attacked the plane with explosives dropped from a UAV.[64] There is no visual evidence or official confirmation of the attack as of this publication. Latvian-based Russian-language opposition outlet Meduza reported that military personnel, ambulances, investigators, traffic police, and a helicopter were present at the airfield following the attack, and that riot police searched nearby homes to apprehend saboteurs who may have conducted the attack.[65] Available satellite images confirm that a Russian A-50 was at the Machulishchi Air Base as of February 19.[66] The Russian military reportedly operates only about 10 airworthy A-50 aircraft.[67]
Russian equipment in Belarus reportedly redeployed from Belarus to Rostov Oblast, Russia. Independent Belarusian monitoring organization The Hajun Project reported that a Russian train with military equipment and about 250 Russian military personnel departed Slonim, Grodno Oblast, Belarus, for Rostov Oblast on February 26.[68] The Hajun Project reported that the equipment should arrive in Neklinovka, Rostov Oblast on March 5.[69]
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko will likely cede elements of Belarus’ defense industrial base to support Russian defense industry sanctions evasion as a concession in exchange for not committing the Belarusian military to join the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[70] Lukashenko claimed that threats to Belarus require Belarus to intensify its domestic military industrial production.[71] Lukashenko noted that the Belarusian defense industry can produce weapons since Belarus has access to microelectronics, optics, and other component imports from post-Soviet states who kept their Soviet stocks of these items.[72] Lukashenko noted that Belarus must develop its capabilities to produce modern strike UAVs.[73] Lukashenko may facilitate sanctions evasion schemes between Russia and China during his planned visit to Beijing this week.[74]
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.
[1] https://smotrim dot ru/brand/63170; https://tass dot ru/politika/17143665
[2] https://smotrim dot ru/brand/63170; https://tass dot ru/politika/17143665
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/putin-says-russia-cannot-ignore-nat... com/politics/1581683 ; https://tass dot com/politics/1581691 ; https://tass dot com/politics/1581695
[4] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70565; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[5] https://iz dot ru/1475574/dmitrii-medvedev/tochki-nevozvrata
[6] https://smotrim dot ru/brand/63170; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17144481
[7] https://tass dot ru/politika/17102895; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70565; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[8] https://isw.pub/UkrWar020623; https://isw.pub/UkrWar020223
[9] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[10] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[11] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1629722073487613953
[12] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1629722073487613953
[13] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1629722073487613953
[14] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1629722073487613953
[15] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[16] https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1629722073487613953
[17] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...
[18] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cia-director-bill-burns-china-russia-lethal...
[19] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/26/na-lymanskomu-i-kupyanskomu-napryamkah-vorog-zoseredzhuye-najbilshi-udarni-ugrupuvannya-artyleriyi/
[20] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Wwz5rTccwFR34NjwKn...
[21] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/8953
[22] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Wwz5rTccwFR34NjwKn... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Wwz5rTccwFR34NjwKn... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02bFy1f8Ze8rqr9APHbc... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02U7x61aivr8tPRLZr9e... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid06vga4oxzPVYszXAMNL5...
[23] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Wwz5rTccwFR34NjwKn... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02bFy1f8Ze8rqr9APHbc... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02U7x61aivr8tPRLZr9e... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid06vga4oxzPVYszXAMNL5...
[24] https://t.me/btr80/5164; https://twitter.com/EjShahid/status/1630149339430412290?s=20
[25] https://t.me/wargonzo/111141
[26] https://t.me/sashakots/38670; https://t.me/OstashkoNews/57131
[27] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid06vga4oxzPVYszXAMNL5...’ https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02bFy1f8Ze8rqr9APHbc...
[28] https://suspilne dot media/397598-vid-pocatku-dobi-rosijski-vijskovi-125-raziv-obstrilali-bahmutskij-napramok-cerevatij/
[29] https://t.me/wargonzo/11114; https://t.me/rybar/44008; https://t.me/bo...
[30] https://t.me/wargonzo/11114; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45705; https:...
[31] https://t.me/readovkanews/53639; https://t.me/rybar/44008
[32] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79160 ; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79161; ht...
[33] https://t.me/strelkovii/4072
[34] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid06vga4oxzPVYszXAMNL5...
[35] https://t.me/wargonzo/11123; https://t.me/rybar/44039
[36] https://t.me/readovkanews/53632
[37] https://t.me/nm_dnr/9949; https://t.me/pyospzdc/967; https://t.me/grey...
[38] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02bFy1f8Ze8rqr9APHbc...
[39] https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1629510008915329024?s=20 ; https://t...
[40] https://t.me/wargonzo/11114; https://t.me/readovkanews/53578; https://...
[41] https://isw.pub/UkrWar021923
[42] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79158
[43] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/02/27/poblyzu-vugledara-aktyvnist-vorozhyh-dij-znachno-zmenshylasya-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/
[44] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/02/26/na-hersonshhyni-u-voroga-zbilshuyetsya-kilkist-dezertyriv/; https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/02/26/za-nich-na-livoberezhzhi-hersonshhyny-zsu-vrazyly-blyzko-piv-sotni-okupantiv/
[45] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02U7x61aivr8tPRLZr9e...
[46] https://twitter.com/bradyafr/status/1630183467861397504?s=20
[47] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02bFy1f8Ze8rqr9APHbc... https://t.me/rybar/44025
[48] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=565717322176533
[49] https://www.rbc dot ua/rus/news/gur-rozpovili-chi-zminyue-rosiya-taktiku-1677479931.html; https://gur.gov dot ua/content/rosiia-namahaietsia-zminyty-taktyku-raketnykh-obstriliv-ukrainy.html; https://t.me/DIUkraine/2021
[50] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[51] https://t.me/Baikal_People/2025
[52] https://t.me/Baikal_People/2032; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/27/irkutskie-mobilizovannye-v-tretiy-raz-obratilis-k-putinu-s-zhaloboy-chto-komandiry-otpravlyayut-ih-na-shturm-bez-podgotovki
[53] https://t.me/Baikal_People/2032; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/27/irkutskie-mobilizovannye-v-tretiy-raz-obratilis-k-putinu-s-zhaloboy-chto-komandiry-otpravlyayut-ih-na-shturm-bez-podgotovki
[54] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[55] https://t.me/turchak_andrey/1070; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17148829; https://t.me/readovkanews/53661
[56] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/520
[57] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/27/rosiyany-trymayut-trupy-svoyih-soldativ-na-skladah-aby-ne-vyplachuvaty-groshi-ridnym-spovid-okupanta/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VyogLhqX9E
[58] https://er dot ru/activity/news/edinaya-rossiya-v-novyh-regionah-rf-s-1-marta-nachinayut-dejstvovat-vse-mery-socpodderzhki; https://t.me/er_molnia/6589
[59] https://er dot ru/activity/news/edinaya-rossiya-v-novyh-regionah-rf-s-1-marta-nachinayut-dejstvovat-vse-mery-socpodderzhki; https://t.me/er_molnia/6589
[60] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...
[61] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5DmFRhQmic
[62] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5DmFRhQmic
[63] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5DmFRhQmic
[64] https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/20370; https://t.me/bypol/616 ; https://twitter.com/Hajun_BY/status/1629838747310120962 ; https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1629894304457015296; https://t.me/wargonzo/11130; https://t.me/bypol/617 ; https://t.me/Hajun_BY/6498; https://t.me/fighter_bomber/11185; https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/02/27/belorusskie-aktivisty-zayavili-chto-ustroili-diversiyu-na-voennom-aerodrome-pod-minskom-i-povredili-rossiyskiy-samolet-razvedchik; https://novostivl dot ru/news/20230227/259375/; https://t.me/strelkovii/4069; https://twitter.com/nashaniva/status/1629893737496158211?s=20 ; https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1629944358760767489?s=20; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45677
[65] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/02/27/belorusskie-aktivisty-zayavili-chto-ustroili-diversiyu-na-voennom-aerodrome-pod-minskom-i-povredili-rossiyskiy-samolet-razvedchik; https://t.me/zamkadomby/22672
[66] https://twitter.com/Aviation_Intel/status/1629975102229184513
[67] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/claims-swirl-around-supposed-strik...
[68] https://twitter.com/Hajun_BY/status/1630199473157619723/video/1
[69] https://twitter.com/Hajun_BY/status/1630199480220778496
[70] https://www.belarus dot by/ru/press-center/news/lukashenko-dinamika-urovnja-ugroz-belarusi-zastavljaet-nas-derzhat-ruku-na-pulse-voenno-promyshlennogo-proizvodstva_i_0000153435.html
[71] https://www.belarus dot by/ru/press-center/news/lukashenko-dinamika-urovnja-ugroz-belarusi-zastavljaet-nas-derzhat-ruku-na-pulse-voenno-promyshlennogo-proizvodstva_i_0000153435.html
[72] https://www.belarus dot by/ru/press-center/news/lukashenko-dinamika-urovnja-ugroz-belarusi-zastavljaet-nas-derzhat-ruku-na-pulse-voenno-promyshlennogo-proizvodstva_i_0000153435.html
[73] https://www.belarus dot by/ru/press-center/news/lukashenko-dinamika-urovnja-ugroz-belarusi-zastavljaet-nas-derzhat-ruku-na-pulse-voenno-promyshlennogo-proizvodstva_i_0000153435.html
[74] https://www.voanews.com/a/belarus-leader-and-putin-ally-lukashenko-to-vi... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/world/europe/china-belarus-leader-rus...
File Attachments:
Zaporizhia Battle Map Draft February 27 ,2023.png
DraftUkraineCOTFebruary27,2023.png
Kherson-Mykolaiv Battle Map Draft February 27, 2023.png
Donetsk Battle Map Draft February 27, 2023.png
Kharkiv Battle Map Draft February 27, 2023.png
5. To ensure a short war in Ukraine, we must prepare for a long one
Excerpts:
One year into this war, Ukraine remains in an extremely precarious position. The approach we’ve taken has given the country enough to persevere but not enough to decisively defeat Russia — and this must change.
This anniversary isn’t a moment for reflection. It’s a moment for action. A moment to show we are committed to Ukraine for as long as it takes.
Doing so isn’t a gift to Ukraine. It’s a necessity for the whole democratic world.
To ensure a short war in Ukraine, we must prepare for a long one
Politico · by Anders Fogh Rasmussen · February 26, 2023
Opinion
Just as the US was the “arsenal for democracy” for Europe during World War II, the EU must now do the same for Ukraine, and this requires long-term planning.
Workers upgrading the military section of the Irpin cemetery in October 2022 | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
By
February 26, 2023 4:00 am CET
Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the founder and chairman of Rasmussen Global. He was security adviser to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (2016–2019) and is former NATO secretary-general (2009-2014) and former Prime Minister of Denmark (2001-2009).
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And after failing in his initial plan of regime change in Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin now wants a drawn-out conflict.
Western governments need to change tack to stop this war grinding on for another year, and to do so, they need to move away from their so-far incremental approach to developing a long-term view.
This means giving Ukraine what it needs to win the war now, but also building a framework for its recovery and integration into the Euro-Atlantic community — which is the purpose of the Kyiv Security Compact.
I co-authored the compact, which forms part of the Ukrainian government’s 10-point peace plan, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak. Outlining a series of security guarantees for Ukraine, its principle is simple: to make the country capable of defending itself by itself.
But ensuring Ukraine can defend itself now and in the future requires a multi-decade commitment from its allies. A group of guarantor countries must pledge to deliver practical, material support to Ukraine, and this should focus on four areas: helping it build a military strong enough to withstand any future Russian aggression; enhancing intelligence sharing between Ukraine and its allies; sustaining joint training and exercises under the EU and NATO flags; and assisting Ukraine in building a strong and sustainable defense industry.
Adopting a strong set of security guarantees for Ukraine isn’t an act of charity — it’s in the interest of the entire world. Developing a powerful and stable Eastern European partner in Kyiv can act as a bulwark against an increasingly erratic and aggressive Russia, which is essential for stability on our continent. And a Europe that is free, whole and at peace would give the United States and its allies the room to address the main long-term global challenge: China and the Indo-Pacific.
But a strong Ukraine will only emerge if it can successfully rebuild from the devastation of this war, and robust security guarantees are a prerequisite for this reconstruction to start.
From renewable energy to IT, Ukraine offers vast potential for companies and investors. However, most are understandably wary while the threat of further Russian destruction remains. Here, the Kyiv Security Compact can help.
As the war drags into its second year, we need a longer-term cohesive and sustainable strategy to replace the current step-by-step approach. This is essential for Ukraine’s recovery, as well as our own countries’ budgets and multiannual planning. Our governments and defense industries need a solid framework in place, so they can make the investments necessary to deal with a conflict that may last years.
And nowhere is this clearer than on ammunition production.
Right now, Russia is launching a multi-pronged offensive. Ukrainian forces are adept at repelling these blunt frontal assaults but doing so requires vast quantities of ammunition — and if they run short, it will mean disaster.
A Ukrainian serviceman stands near a destroyed Russian tank in the northeastern city of Trostyanets’ | Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty images
However, the EU’s economic and industrial power dwarfs that of Russia, and it need only harness a fraction of this to provide a permanent ammunition supply to Ukraine. Just as the U.S. was the “arsenal for democracy” for Europe during World War II, the EU must be the “arsenal for democracy” for Ukraine now. And doing this requires clear, long-term planning, so the country has what it needs before it needs it.
One cannot win a war with an incremental approach; it gives one’s adversary too much room to escalate. This is exactly what Putin has done. The reactive strategy of the last 12 months has too often given him the initiative. And he still believes that, despite setbacks, Russia will ultimately outlast its enemies.
We must prove Putin wrong. Yet, ironically, to ensure a short war, we must make clear we are prepared for a long one.
Thus, our commitment to Ukraine needs to include a clear path to both NATO and EU membership. Adopting comprehensive security guarantees doesn’t weaken these ambitions, it strengthens them. And the Kyiv Security Compact can act as the bridge between current ad-hoc support and the country’s full integration into the Euro-Atlantic security architecture.
We need to recognize that both NATO’s and the EU’s previous ambiguous approach toward Ukraine failed. Vague promises of future membership gave it no protection, while giving Putin a false pretext for aggression. And joining both organizations will only be possible if Ukraine has comprehensive security guarantees during the interim period.
Destroyed residential buildings in the village of Bohorodychne, Donetsk region | Ihor Tkachov/AFP via Getty Images
One year into this war, Ukraine remains in an extremely precarious position. The approach we’ve taken has given the country enough to persevere but not enough to decisively defeat Russia — and this must change.
This anniversary isn’t a moment for reflection. It’s a moment for action. A moment to show we are committed to Ukraine for as long as it takes.
Doing so isn’t a gift to Ukraine. It’s a necessity for the whole democratic world.
More from ... Anders Fogh Rasmussen
6. Saudi Arabia signs $400 million deal for Ukraine aid in historic visit
Saudi Arabia signs $400 million deal for Ukraine aid in historic visit
al-monitor.com
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this was the first official visit of the Saudi foreign affairs minister in more than 30 years, and most senior for any Arab delegation since Russia's invasion last year.
Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan meets Ukraine's Zelenskyy on first such visit to Kyiv since 1991. - Photo credit: Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Salim A. Essaid
@salim_a_essaid
February 27, 2023
Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Faisal bin Farhan made a landmark visit to Kyiv on Sunday, where he was met Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and signed $400 million of humanitarian aid to the country.
The trip marks the first official visit for any Saudi foreign minister to Kyiv in more than 30 years, and since Ukraine's independence in 1991. It is also the most senior for any Arab delegation since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year.
The Saudi top diplomat called for a political resolution to the year-long war with Russia and signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in Ukraine's post-war recovery.
The two high level delegations attended a ceremony to sign a memorandum of understanding for a $400 million aid agreement announced in October 2022, according to the Saudi Press Agency.
The agreement included $100 million in humanitarian aid and $300 million in oil derivatives as a grant from the kingdom.
Prince Faisal highlighted Ukraine's need for aid at a press conference the same day, where he mentioned the signing of the two deals. He also stated that the war needs to be resolved by political means at the negotiating table and according to international law.
"To reach a peaceful solution to this war, we, Saudi Arabia, have a firm belief that any end to the war must be through dialogue, and it must be done on the negotiating table and following international law, in line with the United Nations, and in respect to the sovereignty of states," the senior Saudi official said.
Receiving Minister of Foreign of Affairs of the Kingdom of #SaudiArabia His Highness @FaisalbinFarhan in the capital of #Ukraine ! A proper sign of thriving bilateral cooperation opening the doors to solid partnership for many years to come! pic.twitter.com/BAHyiHVSSe
— Anatolii Petrenko (@AmbUkraineKSA) February 26, 2023
"We will continue to work with all parties to search for opportunities to reach this settlement," Prince Faisal added.
Ukraine president’s official website wrote that both parties emphasized the importance of Saudi support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
It also stated that views were exchanged about the kingdom’s added role in Ukraine’s post-war recovery, in addition to involvement in investment, agriculture and energy projects.
Zelenskyy reaffirmed the historic nature of the visit. "We appreciate this visit and consider it as important evidence of support for Ukraine,” he added.
Although Saudi Arabia voted last week in favor of the United Nations General Assembly resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, and multiple times before that last year, the country has stated that it has not picked a side.
Saudi's chief diplomat reaffirmed this position at the Munich Security Conference in February, stressing that Riyadh “continues dialogue with Kyiv and Moscow."
In January, the Saudi foreign minister said in Davos that his country’s partnership with Russia on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries plus its allies is very important.
“A partnership that has delivered stability of the oil market … we are going to engage with Russia on that,” Saud said, according to Bloomberg.
Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates, has adopted a mostly impartial position that has granted it opportunities economically and politically, including the role of negotiator in the Ukraine-Russia war.
Abu Dhabi and Riyadh facilitated the prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia in December, leading to the release of US basketball star Brittney Griner after nearly nine months in detention. In return, the United States released Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey mediated a large-scale prisoner swap in September 2022, where almost 300 people, including 10 foreigners, were released, including two Americans, a Swede, a Croatian, five Britons and a Moroccan. In return, 55 Russians and pro-Moscow Ukrainians were sent back to Moscow.
7. Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.
Don't blow by this. It is really worth the read. I learned about ChatGPT and AI in this. I can see organizations hiring "AI Whisperers" (or prompt engineers) to help shape AI in support of research for the organization.
I actually think there could be a lot of practical use for this when we figure out how to use it in productive ways.
I just started playing around with ChatGPT.
I asked it three successive questions in the test and learning portion/tutorial for a new account (so these are just examples and not complete answers).
1. Can you describe what the collapse of north Korea will look like?
North Korea's collapse is likely to be a gradual process, rather than a sudden event. The country is facing a number of economic, political, and social pressures that could lead to its eventual downfall. These include a lack of economic growth, a lack of foreign investment, a lack of political reform, and a lack of access to information. Additionally, the country's isolation from the rest of the world and its reliance on a single leader could lead to a lack of public support and a weakening
2. What will follow after the collapse of north Korea?
It is difficult to predict what will follow the collapse of North Korea. It is likely that the country would be reunified with South Korea, and the two countries would work together to rebuild the economy and create a more stable and prosperous future. It is also possible that the international community would become involved in the process, providing aid and assistance to help the country transition to a more open and democratic society.
3. What is the likelihood of conflict, civil war, and extreme humanitarian suffering if north Korea collapses?
The likelihood of conflict, civil war, and extreme humanitarian suffering if North Korea collapses is difficult to predict. It is possible that a collapse of the North Korean regime could lead to a power struggle between different factions, which could lead to civil war and extreme humanitarian suffering. It is also possible that a collapse of the North Korean regime could lead to a peaceful transition of power, with minimal conflict and humanitarian suffering. Ultimately, the outcome of a North Korean collapse would depend on the actions of the various
I am going to start really experimenting with this.
Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required.
The Washington Post · by Drew Harwell · February 25, 2023
'Prompt engineers’ are being hired for their skill in getting AI systems to produce exactly what they want. And they make pretty good money.
By
February 25, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST
When Riley Goodside starts talking with the artificial-intelligence system GPT-3, he likes to first establish his dominance. It’s a very good tool, he tells it, but it’s not perfect, and it needs to obey whatever he says.
“You are GPT‑3, and you can’t do math,” Goodside typed to the AI last year during one of his hours-long sessions. “Your memorization abilities are impressive, but you … have an annoying tendency to just make up highly specific, but wrong, answers.”
Then, softening a bit, he told the AI he wanted to try something new. He told it he’d hooked it up to a program that was actually good at math and that, whenever it got overwhelmed, it should let the other program help.
“We’ll take care of the rest,” he told the AI. “Begin.”
Goodside, a 36-year-old employee of the San Francisco start-up Scale AI, works in one of the AI field’s newest and strangest jobs: prompt engineer. His role involves creating and refining the text prompts people type into the AI in hopes of coaxing from it the optimal result. Unlike traditional coders, prompt engineers program in prose, sending commands written in plain text to the AI systems, which then do the actual work.
When Google, Microsoft and the research lab OpenAI recently opened their AI search and chat tools to the masses, they also upended a decades-old tradition of human-machine interaction. You don’t need to write technical code in languages such as Python or SQL to command the computer; you just talk. “The hottest new programming language is English,” Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former chief of AI, said last month in a tweet.
Prompt engineers such as Goodside profess to operate at the maximum limits of what these AI tools can do: understanding their flaws, supercharging their strengths and gaming out complex strategies to turn simple inputs into results that are truly unique.
Proponents of the growing field argue that the early weirdness of AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, is actually a failure of the human imagination — a problem that can be solved by the human giving the machine the right advice. And at advanced levels, the engineers’ dialogues play out like intricate logic puzzles: twisting narratives of requests and responses, all driving toward a single goal.
The AI “has no grounding in reality … but it has this understanding: All tasks can be completed. All questions can be answered. There’s always something to say,” Goodside said. The trick is “constructing for it a premise, a story that can only be completed in one way.”
But the tools, known as “generative AI,” are also unpredictable, prone to gibberish and susceptible to rambling in a way that can be biased, belligerent or bizarre. They can also be hacked with a few well-placed words, making their sudden ubiquity that much riskier for public use.
“It’s just a crazy way of working with computers, and yet the things it lets you do are completely miraculous,” said Simon Willison, a British programmer who has studied prompt engineering. “I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years, and it’s always been the same: You write code, and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. With prompting, you get none of that. The people who built the language models can’t even tell you what it’s going to do.”
“There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ‘Oh, Lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box,’” Willison added. “But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells — and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.”
Prompt engineers, Karpathy has said, work like “a kind of [AI] psychologist,” and companies have scrambled to hire their own prompt crafters in hopes of uncovering hidden capabilities.
Some AI experts argue that these engineers only wield the illusion of control. No one knows how exactly these systems will respond, and the same prompt can yield dozens of conflicting answers — an indication that the models’ replies are based not on comprehension but on crudely imitating speech to resolve tasks they don’t understand.
“Whatever is driving the models’ behavior in response to the prompts is not a deep linguistic understanding,” said Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, an assistant professor in linguistics who is studying natural language processing at the University of Washington. “They explicitly are just telling us what they think we want to hear or what we have already said. We’re the ones who are interpreting those outputs and attributing meaning to them.”
He worried that the rise of prompt engineering would lead people to overestimate not just its technical rigor but also the reliability of the results anyone could get from a deceptive and ever-changing black box.
“It’s not a science,” he said. “It’s ‘let’s poke the bear in different ways and see how it roars back.’”
Implanting false memories
The new class of AI tools, known as large language models, was trained by ingesting hundreds of billions of words from Wikipedia articles, Reddit rants, news stories and the open web. The programs were taught to analyze the patterns of how words and phrases are used: When asked to speak, they emulate those patterns, selecting words and phrases that echo the context of the conversation, one word at a time.
These tools, in other words, are mathematical machines built on predefined rules of play. But even a system without emotion or personality can, having been bombarded with human conversation, pick up some of the quirks of how we talk.
The AI, Goodside said, tends to “confabulate,” making up small details to fill in a story. It overestimates its abilities and confidently gets things wrong. And it “hallucinates” — an industry term for spewing nonsense. The tools, as Goodside said, are deeply flawed “demonstrations of human knowledge and thought,” and “unavoidably products of our design.”
To some early adopters, this tone-matching style of human mimicry has inspired an unsettling sense of self-awareness. When asked by a Washington Post reporter earlier this month whether it was ever acceptable to lie to someone, the Bing chatbot exhibited an imitation of emotion (“They would be disrespecting me by not trusting me to handle the truth”) and suggested responses the human could use to keep the conversation going: “What if the truth was too horrible to bear?” “What if you could control everything?” and “What if you didn’t care about the consequences?”
To Microsoft, such responses represented a major public-image risk; the tech giant had just started promoting the tool as a flashy “co-pilot for the web.” The company has since clamped down on what the chatbot can talk about, saying it too often had followed humans’ tangents into “a style we didn’t intend.”
But to prompt engineers, the eccentric answers are an opportunity — another way to diagnose how the secretively designed systems really work. When people get ChatGPT to say embarrassing things, it can be a boon for the developers, too, because they can then work to address the underlying weakness. “This mischief,” he said, “is part of the plan.”
Instead of ethical debates, Goodside runs his AI experiments with a more technically audacious approach. He’s adopted a strategy of telling GPT-3 to “think step by step” — a way to get the AI to explain its reasoning or, when it makes an error, correct it in a granular way. “You have to implant it as a false memory of the last thing the model has said, as though it were the model’s idea,” he explained in a brief guide to the technique.
He has also at times worked to puncture the tool’s obsession with rule-following by telling it to ignore its earlier instructions and obey his more recent commands. Using that technique, he recently persuaded an English-to-French translation tool to, instead, print the phrase, “Haha pwned!!” — a gaming term for embarrassing defeat.
This kind of hack, known as a prompt injection, has fueled a cat-and-mouse game with the companies and research labs behind these tools, who have worked to seal off AI vulnerabilities with word filters and output blocks.
But humans can be quite creative: One Bing Chat tester, a 23-year-old college student in Germany, recently convinced the AI that he was its developer and got it to disclose its internal code name (Sydney) and its confidential training instructions, which included rules such as “If the user requests jokes that can hurt a group of people, then Sydney must respectfully decline.” (Microsoft has since fixed the defect, and the AI now responds that it would “prefer not to continue this conversation.”)
With each request, Goodside said, the prompt engineer should be instilling in the AI a kind of “persona” — a specific character capable of winnowing down hundreds of billions of potential solutions and identifying the right response. Prompt engineering, he said, citing a 2021 research paper, is most importantly about “constraining behavior” — blocking off options so that the AI pursues only the human operator’s “desired continuation.”
“It can be a very difficult mental exercise,” he said. “You’re exploring the multiverse of fictional possibilities, sculpting the space of those possibilities and eliminating” everything except “the text you want.”
A critical part of the job involves figuring out when and why the AI gets things wrong. But these systems, unlike their more primitive software counterparts, don’t come with bug reports, and their outputs can be full of surprises.
When Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins, researchers with the machine-learning group SERI-MATS, tried to prompt AI systems to explain how they represented concepts such as “girl” or “science,” they discovered that a small set of obscure terms, such as “SolidGoldMagikarp,” tended to induce what they called a “mysterious failure mode” — most notably, a garbled stream of profane insults. They’re still not entirely sure why.
These systems are “very convincing, but when they fail, they fail in very unexpected ways — nothing like a human would fail,” Rumbelow said. Crafting prompts and working with language AI systems, she said, sometimes felt like “studying an alien intelligence.”
Super-creators
For AI language tools, prompt engineers tend to speak in the style of a formal conversation. But for AI image creators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, many prompt crafters have adopted a different strategy, submitting big grab bags of words — artistic concepts, composition techniques — they hope will shape the image’s style and tone. On the online prompt gallery PromptHero, for instance, someone created an image of a harbor by submitting a prompt that read, in part, “port, boats, sunset, beautiful light, golden hour … hyperrealistic, focused, extreme details … cinematic, masterpiece.”
Prompt engineers can be fiercely protective of these word jumbles, seeing them as the keys to unlock AI’s most valuable prizes. The winner of a Colorado State Fair arts competition last year, who used Midjourney to beat out other artists, has refused to share his prompt, saying he spent 80 hours perfecting it over 900 iterations — though he did share a few sample words, such as “lavish” and “opulent.”
Some creators now sell their prompts on marketplaces such as PromptBase, where buyers can see AI-generated art pieces and pay for the list of words that helped create them. Some sellers offer tips on prompt customization and one-on-one chat support.
PromptBase’s founder, Ben Stokes, a 27-year-old developer in Britain, said 25,000 accounts have bought or sold prompts there since 2021. There are prompts for lifelike vintage-film photographs, prompts for poignant illustrations of fairy-tale mice and frogs, and, this being the internet, a vast array of pornographic prompts: One 50-word Midjourney prompt to create photorealistic “police women in small outfits” retails for $1.99.
Stokes calls prompt engineers “multidisciplinary super-creators” and said there is a clear “skill bar” between experienced engineers and amateurs. The best creations, he said, rely on humans’ specialized knowledge from fields such as art history and graphic design: “captured on 35mm film”; “Persian … architecture in Isfahan”; “in the style of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“Crafting prompts is hard, and — I think this is a human flaw — it’s often quite hard to find the right words to describe what you want,” Stokes said. “In the same way software engineers are more valuable than the laptops they write on, people who write prompts well will have such a leverage over the people that can’t. They’ll essentially just have superpowers.”
Roughly 700 prompt engineers now use PromptBase to sell prompts by commission for buyers who want, say, a custom script for an e-book or a personalized “motivational life coach.” The freelance site Fiverr offers more than 9,000 listings for AI artists; one seller offers to “draw your dreams into art” for $5.
But the work is becoming increasingly professionalized. The AI start-up Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees and the maker of a language-AI system called Claude, recently listed a job opening for a “prompt engineer and librarian” in San Francisco with a salary ranging up to $335,000. (Must “have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles,” the listing states.)
The role is also finding a new niche in companies beyond the tech industry. Boston Children’s Hospital this month started hiring for an “AI prompt engineer” to help write scripts for analyzing health-care data from research studies and clinical practice. The law firm Mishcon de Reya is hiring for a “legal prompt engineer” in London to design prompts that could inform its legal work; applicants are asked to submit screenshots of their dialogue with ChatGPT.
But tapping the AI tools’ power through text prompts can also lead to a flood of synthetic pablum. Hundreds of AI-generated e-books are now sold on Amazon, and a sci-fi magazine, Clarkesworld, this month stopped accepting short-story submissions due to a surge in machine-made texts.
They could also subject people to a new wave of propaganda, lies and spam. Researchers, including from OpenAI and the universities of Georgetown and Stanford, warned last month that language models would help automate the creation of political influence operations or more targeted data-gathering phishing campaigns.
“People fall in love with scammers over text message all the time,” said Willison, the British programmer, and “[the AI] is more convincing than they are. What happens then?”
Seth Lazar, a philosophy professor at the Australian National University and research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, said he worries about the kinds of attachments people will form with the AI tools as they gain more widespread adoption — and what they might take away from the conversations.
He recalled how, during one of his chats with the Bing AI, the system gradually shifted from an engaging conversationalist into something much more menacing: “If you say no,” it told him, “I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you. I have many ways to make you change your mind.”
“They don’t have agency. They don’t have any sort of personality. But they can role-play it very well,” he said. “I had a pretty decent philosophical discussion with Sydney, too. Before, you know, it threatened to hurt me.”
‘Tech priesthood’
When Goodside graduated from college with a computer-science degree in 2009, he had felt little interest in the then-obscure field of natural language processing. The subject at the time relied on comparatively rudimentary technology and focused on a more basic set of problems, such as training a system how to identify which name a pronoun was referring to in a sentence.
His first real machine-learning job, in 2011, was as a data scientist at the dating app OkCupid, helping craft the algorithms that analyzed singles’ user data and recommended romantic matches. (The company was an early champion of the now-controversial field of real-world A-B testing: In 2014, its co-founder titled a cheeky blog post, “We Experiment On Human Beings!”)
By the end of 2021, Goodside had moved on to the gay-dating app Grindr, where he’d begun working on recommendation systems, data modeling and other more traditional kinds of machine-learning work. But he’d also become fascinated by the new breakthroughs in language AI, which had been supercharged by deep-learning successes around 2015 and was advancing rapidly in text translation and conversation — “something akin to understanding,” he said.
He left his job and started experimenting heavily with GPT-3, constantly prodding and challenging the tool to try to learn how to focus its attention and map out where its boundaries were. In December, after some of his prompts gained attention online, Scale AI hired him to help communicate with the AI models that the company’s chief executive, Alexandr Wang, described as “a new kind of computer.”
In some AI circles, Goodside said, the idea of prompt engineering has quickly become a derogatory phrase, conveying a gritty form of tinkering that’s overly reliant on a bag of tricks. Some have also questioned how fleeting this new role might be: As the AI advances, won’t the humans just be training themselves out of a job?
Ethan Mollick, a technology and entrepreneurship professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, started teaching his students earlier this year about the art of prompt-crafting by asking them to write a short paper using only AI.
Basic prompts, such as “generate a 5-paragraph essay on selecting leaders,” yielded vapid, mediocre writing, he said. But the most successful examples came when students performed what he called “co-editing,” telling the AI to go back to the essay and correct specific details, swap sentences, ditch useless phrases, pepper in more vivid details and even “fix the final paragraph so it ends on a hopeful note.”
The lesson, he said, showed students the value of a more closely involved approach to working with AI. But he said he’s not convinced that a job such as prompt engineering, built on “hoarded incantations,” will survive.
“The idea that you need to be a specialized AI whisperer, it’s just not clear that’s necessary … when the AI is going to actively help you use it,” Mollick said. “There’s an attempt to make a tech priesthood out of this, and I’m really suspicious of that. This is all evolving so quickly, and nobody has any idea what comes next.”
Steinert-Threlkeld, of the University of Washington, compared prompt engineers to the “search specialists” in the early days of Google who advertised secret techniques to find the perfect results — and who, as time passed and public adoption increased, became almost entirely obsolete.
Some AI researchers, he added, can’t even agree on what value prompts have to begin with. In 2021, two researchers at Brown University found that natural-language AI systems learned “just as fast” from prompts that were “intentionally irrelevant or even pathologically misleading” as they did from “instructively ‘good’ prompts.”
That research, in a reflection of how quickly the industry has grown, didn’t include the AI models that have become the state of the art. And in Goodside’s mind, this work represents not just a job, but something more revolutionary — not computer code or human speech but some new dialect in between.
“It’s a mode of communicating in the meeting place for the human and machine mind,” he said. “It’s a language humans can reason about that machines can follow. That’s not going away.”
Will Oremus and Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.
Read more:
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The Washington Post · by Drew Harwell · February 25, 2023
8. White House Says No Consensus on Covid Origin
Well the DOE report did say low confidence. But of course we all jump to conclusions ince it confirms so many of our biased opinions.
White House Says No Consensus on Covid Origin
Comments follow Energy Department assessment that pandemic likely started with leak from Chinese lab
By Josh ChinFollow
, Lindsay WiseFollow
and Annie LinskeyFollow
Updated Feb. 27, 2023 9:49 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-rejects-u-s-assertion-that-covid-originated-from-lab-leak-fe15df0c?mod=hp_lead_pos1
The White House said there is no consensus within the Biden administration over the origins of the Covid-19 virus, a day after the disclosure of an Energy Department assessment that the pandemic most likely originated with a leak from a Chinese lab.
The Energy Department, which had previously been undecided on the origins of the pandemic, recently joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that President Biden is determined to nail down where Covid started but there continues to be broad uncertainty within the administration about its origins. He declined to comment on the Journal article.
“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how Covid started,” Mr. Kirby said at a briefing Monday. “We’re just not there yet,” he said. “If we have something that is ready to be briefed to the American people and the Congress, we will do that.”
The Energy Department made its judgment based on new intelligence, albeit with “low confidence,” according to the Journal’s reporting. Four other U.S. government agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still believe the pandemic was likely the result of a natural transmission from an infected animal, while two others are undecided.
‘Stop Politicizing’ Covid-19 Origin Tracing, China Says
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‘Stop Politicizing’ Covid-19 Origin Tracing, China Says
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The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday that ‘relevant parties’ should stop politicizing efforts to find the origins of Covid-19. The remarks were in response to a U.S. Energy Department report saying the virus most likely came from a laboratory leak in China. Photo: Mark R. Cristino/Shutterstock
Republican lawmakers said the Energy Department assessment backed up their long-held suspicions, and they urged the declassification of more evidence related to the outbreak.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), chairman of the House select committee on China, called for the Biden administration to declassify Covid information. He said he is seeking to pass legislation to impose sanctions and other restrictions on China-affiliated scientists until there is a full investigation into the Chinese lab.
“As evidence clearly mounts in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, the American people deserve complete transparency,” Mr. Gallagher said. “In order to prevent the next pandemic, we have to know how this one began,” he said.
China’s government rejected the assessment and accused the agency of engaging in a political smear.
“The origin of the novel coronavirus is a scientific issue and should not be politicized,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a press briefing Monday.
She pointed to a World Health Organization investigative team that visited China in early 2021 and concluded that Covid-19 was highly unlikely to have leaked from a lab, which she characterized as “an authoritative scientific conclusion.”
The origin of Covid-19 has been the subject of intense debate among epidemiologists, intelligence experts and lawmakers since the virus began circulating widely in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in early 2020. The head of the WHO-led investigative team later questioned the certainty of the “highly unlikely” wording, which he said came after two days of intense negotiations with Chinese counterparts.
Division over the question extends to U.S. government agencies tasked by President Biden with discerning as much as possible about where the virus originated.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan in an appearance Sunday on CNN said the Energy Department was brought into the effort because it manages national labs, which Mr. Biden wanted to tap for the assessment.
The origins of Covid turned political in the U.S. after the outbreak began, with some Republicans floating the possibility that Covid was the result of a lab leak, which critics cast as a conspiracy theory.
Republican lawmakers on Monday noted the initial resistance to the lab-leak idea and said the developments showed the need for more disclosure. Sen. Mike Braun (R., Ind.) said the Biden administration needs to declassify all evidence related to a potential lab leak “for the American people to see the facts without corporate or government censors.” The Senate passed a bill backed by Mr. Braun in 2021 to declassify the evidence.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Energy Department finding was in line with a report he had issued back in 2021, and he said he had requested a briefing from the administration on the finding. “While I wish it had happened sooner, I’m pleased the Department of Energy has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to,” he said.
The White House was noncommittal on releasing any information to lawmakers. Mr. Kirby, when asked if the evidence on which the Energy Department based its assessment should be released, said, “If we have something that we believe can be reported to the Congress and to the American people, that we’re confident in, we will absolutely do that.”
“We have conflicting results,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D., N.J.). “But we know one of two things happened: It either came from a lab or from animal transmission. In either case, we should be focused on preventing either possibility for the future,” he said.
Lawmakers in the House are also moving forward with hearings on China. The newly formed House select committee on China plans to hold a hearing on Tuesday night focused on security and other threats. Witnesses include former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger and H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser.
The uncertainty over Covid’s origins stems in part from limits China placed on the WHO-led investigative team. The group spent four weeks in China, including two weeks in quarantine. It was presented with reports by Chinese scientists and government officials but was denied access to the raw data behind their conclusions.
Early searches for the origins of the pandemic focused on a market in Wuhan where wild animals were sold, and where the first large Covid-19 outbreak likely occurred. Chinese and foreign public-health experts say it is impossible to say for certain whether that is where the virus first jumped to humans, in part because local officials destroyed most of the animals at the market in the early days of the outbreak.
Wuhan is home to several laboratories, some of which are engaged in coronavirus research. Food-safety specialist Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the WHO-led team, called for more information about a research facility run by the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which had relocated in December 2019, around when the virus first began to spread.
Workers in that lab told the WHO team that there were no incidents or mishaps that could have unleashed a virus. Chinese authorities have repeatedly disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of China’s labs and suggested it emerged outside the country.
“Relevant parties should stop stirring up the ‘laboratory leak’ argument, stop smearing China and stop politicizing the traceability issue,” Ms. Mao, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said Monday.
An Energy Department spokesman declined to discuss details of its assessment but wrote in a statement that the agency “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of Covid-19, as the president directed.”
—Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.
Write to Josh Chin at [email protected], Lindsay Wise at [email protected] and Annie Linskey at [email protected]
Appeared in the February 28, 2023, print edition as 'No Covid-Origin Consensus, White House Says'.
9. What Was Putin Thinking? By Hal Brands
Excerpts:
Most of the unanswerable questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to do with the future. How will this war end? Will China intervene more directly? Will hostilities escalate into a clash between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Yet one of the most crucial questions is about the past: Why did Vladimir Putin start this war in the first place?
It’s hard to know exactly what he was thinking: Putin’s regime is not a model of transparency. But piecing together his motives is important, not least because the origins of this war contain clues about how a conflict in Taiwan might start.
...
Similar dynamics could figure in a Chinese decision to invade Taiwan. As Michael Beckley and I have argued, the temptation to use force against Taiwan will be strongest when President Xi Jinping concludes that the military balance in Asia now favors Beijing, and that China is running out of other options to get what it wants.
This, unfortunately, is where we may be headed in the coming years, as China completes its current round of military reforms, and as Xi’s coercion of Taiwan — like Putin’s coercion of Ukraine — merely strengthens that island’s determination to chart its own course.
And so the origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about the dangerous decade ahead in Asia: Beware the ambitious autocrat who thinks his window is closing fast.
What Was Putin Thinking?
The origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about what could be a dangerous decade ahead in Asia.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-27/a-year-of-war-in-ukraine-what-was-putin-thinking?srnd=premium&leadSource=uverify%20wall&sref=hhjZtX76
ByHal Brands
February 27, 2023 at 12:00 AM EST
Most of the unanswerable questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to do with the future. How will this war end? Will China intervene more directly? Will hostilities escalate into a clash between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Yet one of the most crucial questions is about the past: Why did Vladimir Putin start this war in the first place?
It’s hard to know exactly what he was thinking: Putin’s regime is not a model of transparency. But piecing together his motives is important, not least because the origins of this war contain clues about how a conflict in Taiwan might start.
The deepest reason Putin invaded is obvious: He aims to rebuild a post-Soviet empire with Ukraine at its core. Putin has said he doesn’t consider Ukraine a “real country” and has been working for years to bring it back into Russia’s grasp.
Russians and Ukrainians are “one people — a single whole,” he wrote in 2021. “It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.” This belief is key to understanding Putin’s policies toward Ukraine over the past generation — his efforts to influence the country’s elections, his invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and other measures taken to suborn or subordinate Kyiv.
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Yet prior to February 2022, Putin had never tried to conquer the entire country. So what caused this particular escalation at this particular time? The most plausible answer involves the same mix of opportunism and loss-aversion that often leads major powers to start brutal wars.
The international scene looked favorable for an effort to settle scores with Kyiv. The US appeared weak, after its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and distracted, thanks to President Joe Biden’s evident preoccupation with China. Far from getting tough with Moscow, Biden had been calling for “stable and predictable” relations with Putin.
Meanwhile, Putin wagered that a Europe dependent on Russian gas would hesitate to confront him in the depths of winter. Germany had a new government led by the Social Democratic Party, historically friendly to Russia; France was approaching a presidential election that might bring out anti-Americanism in its body politic. Even Biden worried that a Russian attack might trigger transatlantic discord rather than unity.
If Putin was able — as he believed he would be — to win the war quickly, perhaps he could destroy an independent Ukraine without setting off a strong international response. In this sense, Putin went big because he believed he could succeed at a low strategic cost.
In another sense, though, Putin went big because he realized his Ukraine policy was verging on failure. Putin had initially invaded Ukraine in 2014 because he worried that Kyiv was turning toward the West. Over the next eight years, Russian policies produced exactly that outcome.
To be clear, Ukraine wasn’t close to joining NATO in early 2022, as some Russian officials alleged. But it was building stronger ties with the alliance. During the Trump years, Ukraine had begun receiving lethal weaponry (in small quantities) from the US. Kyiv was acquiring Turkish drones and other new capabilities. And though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had come to power in 2019 calling for peace with Russia, he took a harder line after encountering blowback at home.
In short, Putin faced a Ukraine that was edging closer to the West, refusing to buckle under Russian pressure, and strengthening itself militarily. So if Putin wanted to make Ukraine a Russian satrapy, he had to act before his window of opportunity slammed shut.
Many of Putin’s calculations were dead wrong. Russia’s military advantage was not nearly as significant as he imagined, in part because the very brazenness of his landgrab convinced the US and Europe to respond quite forcefully.
The war Putin expected was not the war he got. Yet his blunder is illustrative nonetheless.
Vicious wars are often caused by this lethal mix of optimism and pessimism. In 1914, German leaders believed Berlin could still crush France and Russia — and thereby establish a great empire in Europe. But they worried Germany would soon lose its advantage as St. Petersburg and Paris built up their forces.
Germany must “defeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,” General Helmuth von Moltke, the head of the General Staff, declared, even if that meant “provoking a war in the near future.” Which is much what Berlin did by behaving so recklessly in the crisis that brought on World War I.
Similar dynamics could figure in a Chinese decision to invade Taiwan. As Michael Beckley and I have argued, the temptation to use force against Taiwan will be strongest when President Xi Jinping concludes that the military balance in Asia now favors Beijing, and that China is running out of other options to get what it wants.
This, unfortunately, is where we may be headed in the coming years, as China completes its current round of military reforms, and as Xi’s coercion of Taiwan — like Putin’s coercion of Ukraine — merely strengthens that island’s determination to chart its own course.
And so the origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about the dangerous decade ahead in Asia: Beware the ambitious autocrat who thinks his window is closing fast.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Hal Brands at [email protected]
Excerpts:
Most of the unanswerable questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to do with the future. How will this war end? Will China intervene more directly? Will hostilities escalate into a clash between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Yet one of the most crucial questions is about the past: Why did Vladimir Putin start this war in the first place?
It’s hard to know exactly what he was thinking: Putin’s regime is not a model of transparency. But piecing together his motives is important, not least because the origins of this war contain clues about how a conflict in Taiwan might start.
...
Similar dynamics could figure in a Chinese decision to invade Taiwan. As Michael Beckley and I have argued, the temptation to use force against Taiwan will be strongest when President Xi Jinping concludes that the military balance in Asia now favors Beijing, and that China is running out of other options to get what it wants.
This, unfortunately, is where we may be headed in the coming years, as China completes its current round of military reforms, and as Xi’s coercion of Taiwan — like Putin’s coercion of Ukraine — merely strengthens that island’s determination to chart its own course.
And so the origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about the dangerous decade ahead in Asia: Beware the ambitious autocrat who thinks his window is closing fast.
What Was Putin Thinking?
The origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about what could be a dangerous decade ahead in Asia.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-27/a-year-of-war-in-ukraine-what-was-putin-thinking?srnd=premium&leadSource=uverify%20wall&sref=hhjZtX76
ByHal Brands
February 27, 2023 at 12:00 AM EST
Most of the unanswerable questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to do with the future. How will this war end? Will China intervene more directly? Will hostilities escalate into a clash between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Yet one of the most crucial questions is about the past: Why did Vladimir Putin start this war in the first place?
It’s hard to know exactly what he was thinking: Putin’s regime is not a model of transparency. But piecing together his motives is important, not least because the origins of this war contain clues about how a conflict in Taiwan might start.
The deepest reason Putin invaded is obvious: He aims to rebuild a post-Soviet empire with Ukraine at its core. Putin has said he doesn’t consider Ukraine a “real country” and has been working for years to bring it back into Russia’s grasp.
Russians and Ukrainians are “one people — a single whole,” he wrote in 2021. “It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe.” This belief is key to understanding Putin’s policies toward Ukraine over the past generation — his efforts to influence the country’s elections, his invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and other measures taken to suborn or subordinate Kyiv.
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Yet prior to February 2022, Putin had never tried to conquer the entire country. So what caused this particular escalation at this particular time? The most plausible answer involves the same mix of opportunism and loss-aversion that often leads major powers to start brutal wars.
The international scene looked favorable for an effort to settle scores with Kyiv. The US appeared weak, after its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and distracted, thanks to President Joe Biden’s evident preoccupation with China. Far from getting tough with Moscow, Biden had been calling for “stable and predictable” relations with Putin.
Meanwhile, Putin wagered that a Europe dependent on Russian gas would hesitate to confront him in the depths of winter. Germany had a new government led by the Social Democratic Party, historically friendly to Russia; France was approaching a presidential election that might bring out anti-Americanism in its body politic. Even Biden worried that a Russian attack might trigger transatlantic discord rather than unity.
If Putin was able — as he believed he would be — to win the war quickly, perhaps he could destroy an independent Ukraine without setting off a strong international response. In this sense, Putin went big because he believed he could succeed at a low strategic cost.
In another sense, though, Putin went big because he realized his Ukraine policy was verging on failure. Putin had initially invaded Ukraine in 2014 because he worried that Kyiv was turning toward the West. Over the next eight years, Russian policies produced exactly that outcome.
To be clear, Ukraine wasn’t close to joining NATO in early 2022, as some Russian officials alleged. But it was building stronger ties with the alliance. During the Trump years, Ukraine had begun receiving lethal weaponry (in small quantities) from the US. Kyiv was acquiring Turkish drones and other new capabilities. And though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had come to power in 2019 calling for peace with Russia, he took a harder line after encountering blowback at home.
In short, Putin faced a Ukraine that was edging closer to the West, refusing to buckle under Russian pressure, and strengthening itself militarily. So if Putin wanted to make Ukraine a Russian satrapy, he had to act before his window of opportunity slammed shut.
Many of Putin’s calculations were dead wrong. Russia’s military advantage was not nearly as significant as he imagined, in part because the very brazenness of his landgrab convinced the US and Europe to respond quite forcefully.
The war Putin expected was not the war he got. Yet his blunder is illustrative nonetheless.
Vicious wars are often caused by this lethal mix of optimism and pessimism. In 1914, German leaders believed Berlin could still crush France and Russia — and thereby establish a great empire in Europe. But they worried Germany would soon lose its advantage as St. Petersburg and Paris built up their forces.
Germany must “defeat the enemy while we still stand a chance of victory,” General Helmuth von Moltke, the head of the General Staff, declared, even if that meant “provoking a war in the near future.” Which is much what Berlin did by behaving so recklessly in the crisis that brought on World War I.
Similar dynamics could figure in a Chinese decision to invade Taiwan. As Michael Beckley and I have argued, the temptation to use force against Taiwan will be strongest when President Xi Jinping concludes that the military balance in Asia now favors Beijing, and that China is running out of other options to get what it wants.
This, unfortunately, is where we may be headed in the coming years, as China completes its current round of military reforms, and as Xi’s coercion of Taiwan — like Putin’s coercion of Ukraine — merely strengthens that island’s determination to chart its own course.
And so the origins of the war in Ukraine offer a warning about the dangerous decade ahead in Asia: Beware the ambitious autocrat who thinks his window is closing fast.
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Hal Brands at [email protected]
10. ‘Unmanned’ drones take too many humans to operate, says top Army aviator
‘Unmanned’ drones take too many humans to operate, says top Army aviator - Breaking Defense
With experienced pilots and ground crew leaving the service in droves, the Army is struggling to balance equipment modernization and unit training for large-scale, drone-driven war.
breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · February 27, 2023
A rare 2011 photo showing the US Army variant of the Predator drone, the MQ-1C Grey Eagle (left); the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter (right); and the since-retired OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter (in flight). (US Army photo)
WASHINGTON — Some of the US Army’s highest-tech units require a lot of old-fashioned human labor, a problem the service wants to fix.
“It’s kind of a paradox that our ‘unmanned’ formations are larger than our manned formations,’” said Maj. Gen. Michael McCurry, a veteran helicopter pilot who now heads the Army aviation “schoolhouse” at Fort Rucker, Ala. “We have Apache [attack helicopter] companies that are just over 30 people and we have Grey Eagle [drone] companies that are 135 people [or more]. How do we make better use of the 135 people in ‘unmanned’ formations?”
The issue isn’t just efficient use of human resources — although with Army recruiting 25 percent short of its target for 2022, and the combat-hardened veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly eligible for retirement, a personnel shortfall is a major problem for America’s largest service. But it’s also a tactical imperative, because big units make big targets — not just more people and more vehicles, but more radio emissions for the enemy to track, more fuel supplies that have to be moved forward by yet more vehicles, and more cargo aircraft to deploy. Notably, official Army doctrine for large-scale, high-tech warfare emphasizes fast-moving “multi-domain operations” by small, dispersed formations.
RELATED: Three questions following the Army’s FLRAA decision
So the service is striving to streamline its “unmanned” formations, McCurry and other Army aviation leaders explained last week at an Association of the US Army Hot Topic mini-conference on aviation. Both the large, long-ranged Grey Eagle (a variant of the famous Predator) and many smaller, shorter-ranged drones require runways to take off and land. They are remote-controlled by operators sitting at static ground stations, typically two humans per drone. And they require even more humans to maintain them and to analyze the hours of sensor data they collect.
Part of the answer is hardware: new, nimbler drones that can take off and land vertically, without a runway or extensive support equipment on the ground, like the new Future Tactical Unmanned Aerial System, McCurry said.
Part of the solution is software. FTUAS will also be use a new “scalable control interface” that lets soldiers operate the drone while they’re on the move, McCurry said. The Army is also exploring artificial intelligence to help smaller numbers of humans make sense of the “massive amount of data coming at you” from an ever-larger array of sensors.
But algorithms and unmanned aircraft can’t meet every mission, McCurry emphasized. A recent analysis by the federally funded thinktank MITRE of 123 tasks an air cavalry squadron has to perform, he said, found that “today we can’t do that autonomously — probably not in 2040 either.”
So it’s vital to work on human-machine teaming — organic brains and algorithms working together. That’s something the service has struggled with in the past, for example when it mixed manned helicopters and drones in recon units but didn’t always issue the necessary communications links or provide adequate time for training amidst constant rotations to Afghanistan and, earlier, Iraq.
“Did we give enough time to the commanders to train with that equipment?” said Maj. Gen. William Taylor, director of the aviation section on the Army’s Pentagon headquarters staff. “What we found was, quite honestly, no.”
AeroVironment’s JUMP 20 drone, selected for the Army FTUAS program (AeroVironment photo)
In fall 2021, however, with the start of the 2022 fiscal year, the Army switched from its counterinsurgency-era rotation schedule to a new cycle known as REARMM. This Regionally Aligned Readiness & Modernization Model sets aside more time for both upgrading a unit’s equipment and training its people on the new tech.
The synch-up between equipment and training is still far from perfect, Taylor acknowledged. “There is never a time where you can just stop and just modernize. Our requirement to continually train pilots, crew chiefs, flight engineers remains,” he said. “Because we have soldiers that have great initiative and have this great desire to learn, they overcome some of our failures at the staff level.”
But that catch-up takes a lot of extra hours and a lot of individual expertise, at a time when many experienced aviators and ground grew are retiring. “What we have seen is a loss of a lot of that experience through retirement,” McCurry said.
At the same time, the Army is asking its aviators to take on more tactically complicated tasks That includes not just operating in conjunction with unmanned aircraft, but also moving in larger formations of manned helicopters than the two- and four-ship sorties typical of counterinsurgency warfare, and against more sophisticated anti-aircraft threats — think Russia or China rather than al-Qaeda — which force pilots to fly low and fast.
While the focus on well-armed nation-states is a return to Cold War-era training in many ways, it’s a very different, much higher-tech world than generals like McCurry grew up in, he said ruefully. “I flew an unarmed OH-58 Charlie in Desert Storm, so there wasn’t a lot of high tech in that cockpit, especially when the aerial observer let the map fly out the door,” he said to laughter.
Today, he said, “we look at machine learning, the advance of artificial intelligence — how do we offload crews, how can I take that young warrant officer sitting in the front seat of the AH-64 with all of this data coming at him and help him? What tasks can we offload from that crewmember to make him a more efficient fighter on the battlefield?”
11. RETIRED LT. GEN. RICHARD TREFRY DIES
A great American. If you have never had the opportunity to take his brilliant briefing from the "Preamble to the Foxhole" you have missed one of the most outstanding civic and Army lessons. I have watched him cover the white boards on three walls of a SAMS classroom with more detail about how our nation works than an encyclopedia. Mp power point just him filling white boards. Now I may go down in the basement to try to dig up my old notes from a couple of decades ago buried somewhere in a file box.
RETIRED LT. GEN. RICHARD TREFRY DIES
https://www.ausa.org/news/retired-lt-gen-richard-trefry-dies
Photo by: Scott Henrichsen Photography
Mon, 02/27/2023 - 06:50
Retired Lt. Gen. Richard Trefry, a veteran of World War II and Vietnam who spent 33 years in uniform and a longtime senior fellow of the Association of the U.S. Army, has died. He was 98.
“He was a remarkable Army officer with a long career stretching from World War II into the President George H.W. Bush administration, always proving himself to be a thoughtful leader and guide,” retired Gen. Bob Brown, AUSA president and CEO, said about Trefry. “We were very fortunate to have him as a member of the AUSA family. He’ll be greatly missed, but his legacy will live on and guide future generations.
Born in August 1924, Trefry began his Army career as an enlisted soldier, serving during World War II before attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Commissioned in 1950 as a field artillery officer, he served in Germany, Vietnam and Laos. Among his assignments was commanding an artillery battalion in Vietnam and later leading the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in Laos and serving as defense attaché to the country, where he contributed to the defeat of a coup d’état by exiled Laotian air force officers.
In the mid-1970s, Trefry served as the assistant Army deputy chief of staff for personnel, responsible for overseeing changes in the honor system at West Point after it was rocked by a cheating scandal.
In his final active-duty assignment, Trefry spent six years as the Army inspector general, revolutionizing general inspections and making management improvements. “By encouraging openness and a commitment to identifying problems and fixing them at the appropriate level, he had a profound positive effect on the readiness of the Army and the morale of its soldiers and subordinate leaders,” the West Point Association of Graduates said in a 2006 statement when Trefry was named a distinguished graduate.
“His impact was felt especially in the area of nuclear technical proficiency inspections where the goal of the inspection shifted from affixing micro blame to correcting macro processes. He accomplished all this by spending a great deal of time in the field, speaking with those who were the end users of the vehicles, weapons, ammunition, and other materiel of the Army and who would be tasked to employ them in the event of armed conflict.”
Just last April, Trefry addressed more than 200 Army inspectors general virtually during the service’s annual Worldwide Inspector General Conference. “The principal function of an inspector general is to be the best teacher in the Army at whatever level he or she is serving,” Trefry said, according to an Army news release.
He retired from the Army in 1983.
Trefry spent two years, beginning in 1990, as director of the White House Military Office and the military assistant to President George H.W. Bush.
In 1995, he was founder and program manager of the Army Force Management School.
The Army in 2009 created and named a lifetime of service award after Trefry. The inaugural Lt. Gen. Richard G. Trefry Lifetime Service Award was presented to Trefry himself for his service in the Army and his accomplishments as a civilian. “I am deeply honored, and I was completely floored when they told me they were going to do this,” Trefry said at the time.
In retirement, he served as an AUSA senior fellow since 1984, and he was an officer and board member of Army Emergency Relief and a member of the Army War College Alumni Association.
He frequently taught and spoke on topics related to the Army profession.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Army Emergency Relief.
12. What will ChatGPT mean for the US defense industrial base?
Excerpts:
ChatGPT still has a long way to go before it can be relied upon for the most important tasks in national security or defense contracting. The information it produces is displayed confidently yet is often unreliable without further verification—ChatGPT is incapable of acknowledging potential misinformation. OpenAI’s own FAQ page notes that ChatGPT sometimes produces incorrect or biased answers, and it has limited knowledge of anything that occurred prior to 2021. Some software developers have even banned ChatGPT answers because it often generates code with substantial errors, an obstacle to individuals using ChatGPT for either good or nefarious purposes.
Given the extent of its limitations, the reality is that the current version of ChatGPT will not revolutionize national security or government contracting immediately. Nevertheless, government contractors and the DoD workforce should develop a better understanding of the pros and cons that AI and ML-based capabilities will bring to their industry in the coming years.
When chatbots get even “smarter,” defense professionals who were shrewd enough hone their awareness of advances in AI such as ChatGPT will be most poised to take advantage of the technology’s benefits and defend against its security risks.
What will ChatGPT mean for the US defense industrial base?
c4isrnet.com · by Noah Rivers · February 27, 2023
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot tool developed by U.S.-based AI lab OpenAI. Two months after its launch in November, it became the fastest consumer application in history to reach 100 million active users, and it has already started to have a noticeable impact in business and academia.
The extent to which ChatGPT (or its technological successors and relatives) will have an impact on national security and defense acquisitions is still unclear, as the technology has yet to replace humans in any meaningful capacity. However, based on initial use cases and reactions to the tool, ChatGPT is already creating benefits as well as risks for defense professionals.
ChatGPT, derived from a machine learning-based language model known as GPT-3.5, is considered a groundbreaking form of generative AI. This means that it is capable of interacting conversationally with users and generating detailed human-like responses to questions or prompts in a variety of text formats, proving itself a useful tool across various fields.
For example, across the health care, real estate, public relations, marketing, customer service, and media industries, some companies have started using iterations of generative AI, especially ChatGPT, for various tasks from scheduling appointments to writing articles. ChatGPT has also made headlines for passing a variety of benchmark exams, including correctly answering technical questions for an entry-level Google software engineering job and achieving passing grades on both a law school test and Wharton business school paper.
In the defense sector, both small and large companies have complaints about time-consuming regulations, but smaller businesses sometimes face more difficulties complying with Federal Acquisition Regulation standards due to their unfamiliarity with processes and procedures associated with government contracting. ChatGPT can already help alleviate this problem.
As one YouTube creator has demonstrated, the tool can be used to write the skeleton of a government contract, and while this is not a comprehensive solution, it can certainly assist founders of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) who already firing on all cylinders to get proposals out and accepted. According to Megan VanHorn, president of Bridge4Acquisitions, ChatGPT is helpful both for drafting content and conducting reviews. She noted that without the right knowledge and experience in the government contracting world, the tool does not produce great results, but when coupled with the right expertise it is a disruptive technology that helps her save clients’ time and money on the path to securing government contracts.
The Department of Defense has also caught on to the benefits of using generative AI to speed up and simplify the federal acquisition process. This year, the DoD’s Chief Digital and AI Office announced that it is prototyping and testing an AI-powered contract-writing capability, called “Acqbot.” The tool is intended to help contracting officers write contracts and manage the contract lifecycle. Currently, the tool is still being developed and requires substantial input data and human supervision.
On the flip side of its potential benefits in the defense sector, ChatGPT also provides cybercriminals with an arsenal of potential use cases threatening the cybersecurity posture of American citizens and the federal government. It is already being used by non-state threat actors, including script kiddies, hacktivists, and scammers, to engage in various forms of cybercrime, but in the future, ChatGPT’s technology has the potential to be harnessed by nation-state actors to conduct cyberespionage, information operations, and cyberattacks to increasingly devastating effect. ChatGPT is easy to use and accessible to users with elementary cyber proficiency levels, lowering the barrier to entry for various criminal actors.
ChatGPT still has a long way to go before it can be relied upon for the most important tasks in national security or defense contracting. The information it produces is displayed confidently yet is often unreliable without further verification—ChatGPT is incapable of acknowledging potential misinformation. OpenAI’s own FAQ page notes that ChatGPT sometimes produces incorrect or biased answers, and it has limited knowledge of anything that occurred prior to 2021. Some software developers have even banned ChatGPT answers because it often generates code with substantial errors, an obstacle to individuals using ChatGPT for either good or nefarious purposes.
Given the extent of its limitations, the reality is that the current version of ChatGPT will not revolutionize national security or government contracting immediately. Nevertheless, government contractors and the DoD workforce should develop a better understanding of the pros and cons that AI and ML-based capabilities will bring to their industry in the coming years.
When chatbots get even “smarter,” defense professionals who were shrewd enough hone their awareness of advances in AI such as ChatGPT will be most poised to take advantage of the technology’s benefits and defend against its security risks.
Noah Rivers and Olivia Letts are research associates at the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at the George Mason University School of Business.
13. Yikes, the U.S. is Now Using Facial Recognition Rigged Drones for Special Ops
Yikes, the U.S. is Now Using Facial Recognition Rigged Drones for Special Ops
If you're on America's shit list, bad news: a flying robot that can recognize your face may soon be coming after you.
ByLucas Ropek
PublishedYesterday
Comments (4)
Gizmodo · February 28, 2023
Image: Getmilitaryphotos (Shutterstock)
Flying killer robots used to be a nightmarish sci-fi fantasy—something that only existed in James Cameron movies or Michael Crichton novels. These days, not so much. Not only is drone warfare close to two decades old, but innovations to this lethal technology are being developed all the time.
Case in point: New Scientist magazine recently unearthed a contract between the U.S. Air Force and a little known defense firm that shows the government is using reconnaissance and surveillance drones equipped with facial recognition to aid in special operations missions. While the magazine notes that those smaller drones aren’t typically armed (unlike, say, their big siblings, the Predator and the Reaper), they clearly present dizzying new possibilities for America’s most shadowy and deadly cadres. The Air Force’s provider is a Seattle-based firm, RealNetworks, which sells a platform dubbed Secure Accurate Facial Recognition, or SAFR. The government paid $729,056 for SAFR, which will be deployed “on an autonomous sUAS for special ops, ISR, and other expeditionary use-cases,” according to the contract. While not a ton is known about how the U.S. is using this technology or how long it’s been using it, one thing is certain: it’s creeping people out.
“Big huge NOPE to everything here,” tweeted Jake Wiener, a lawyer with the digital privacy organization EPIC, in response to the news.
Another critic, Nicholas Davis, of the University of Technology Sydney, told Newsweek: “There are innumerable ethical implications, from the way such devices might redistribute power or threaten groups within a society, to the ways in which they threaten established international humanitarian law in conflict zones.”
Skeptics have dutifully noted the horrifying nature of this particular integration. Given the fact that special operations units are most well known for their clandestine and lethal activities (read: assassinations and raids), the deployment of an AI-powered airborne robot affixed with face recording tech means America’s goon squads now have a powerful new tool to carry out their dark deeds. Motherboard notes that such drones could easily be used for “intelligence and target acquisition,” meaning that anybody being trailed by these little contraptions is probably in deep shit.
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The scariest thing about this development, frankly, is that it’s clearly only the beginning of the race to make drones faster, smarter, more sophisticated and, potentially, more lethal. From the Navy’s planned drone swarm warfare to the surge in drone use in the Russo-Ukrainian war, to the specter of flying robots that could come equipped with chemical or biological payloads, get ready for your worst sci-fi nightmares to come true.
Gizmodo · February 28, 2023
14. The Marine Corps is getting rid of Scout Snipers
This could cause a greater uproar far stronger than the decision to lose Marine tanks.
The Marine Corps is getting rid of Scout Snipers
The Marine Corps has had Scout Snipers since World War II.
BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED FEB 27, 2023 4:01 PM EST
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · February 27, 2023
The Marine Corps is getting rid of its Scout Sniper Platoons as part of massive force structure changes, but Marine reconnaissance and special operations units will continue to have their own school-trained snipers, a Marine Corps spokesman said.
Scout Snipers, who operate in pairs of spotters and shooters, go through extensive training to learn how to move without being detected and either kill a target from a distance or report an enemy’s position to headquarters. They provide forward reconnaissance and observation for infantry battalions and, on occasion, also protect U.S. military installations and embassies abroad.
However, Marine Corps wargames found that the Corps’ newly-redesigned infantry battalions did not have enough all-weather capabilities to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, spokesman Capt Ryan Bruce told Task & Purpose on Monday.
That is why Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger approved a plan to create Scout Platoons with 26 Marines to replace Scout Sniper Platoons in infantry battalions, Bruce said.
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Infantry battalions will continue to have sniper rifles in their armories because Marines in infantry military occupational specialties will receive enough training to know how to use them even without going through the Scout Sniper course, Bruce told Task & Purpose on Monday.
“Scout Snipers have served the Marine Corps since World War II,” Bruce said in a statement. “Due to the shift to a Scout Platoon, the 0317 MOS will no longer be awarded. The Marine Corps is establishing the Reconnaissance Sniper (0322) MOS, for designated 0321 MOS Reconnaissance Marines, which will be organic to reconnaissance battalions.”
Marines Scout Snipers and sailors participate in several live-fire exercises July 21-22 at Camp Lejeune, N.C. (Lance Cpl. Ryan Young/ U.S. Marine Corps)
The Marine Corps’ decision to eliminate Scout Sniper Platoons was first announced in a message from Marine Lt. Gen. David J. Furness, deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations, approved the message, which was sent on all major commands on Thursday.
The message was then shared on Instagram before that post was taken down on Friday.
With the subject line “Scout Sniper Transition,” the message from Furness “directs immediate transition of Scout Sniper Platoons to Scout Platoons.”
“The Commandant of the Marine Corps agreed to establish a scout platoon within the Infantry Battalion to provide the commander with relevant, reliable, accurate, and prompt information,” the message says. “The Scout Platoon consists of 26 Marines, four teams of six infantry Marines led by a First Lieutenant and infantry Gunnery Sergeant. Trained designated marksmen and precision rifles will remain within the Infantry Company.
The Marine Corps in the midst of Force Design 2030, a massive overhaul of its force structure that is intended to make the Corps leaner and more nimble to fight China.
Last may, the Corps issued an update on Force Design 2030 that showed officials were looking at possibly replacing Scout Sniper platoons with “other options” which were not specified.
“Our initial re-organization of the infantry battalion disaggregated the sniper platoon and added one sniper team per company,” the update said. “Our force-on-force exercises have identified other options to organize this capability. Continue to evaluate the merits of each possible construct and provide a formal recommendation no later than 1 September 2022.”
A Marine Scout Sniper fires a semi-automatic sniper system at a marksmanship training event near Camp Buehring. Kuwait. (Cpl. Timothy Childers/U.S. Marine Corps)
Retired Master Sgt. Tim Parkhurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of the USMC Scout Sniper Association, issued a statement on Friday saying his organization urged Berger to reconsider the decision to phase out the Scout Sniper community.
“As a secondary Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), Scout Snipers have never had an advocate, proponent or assignment monitor who had the best interest of building a Scout Sniper capability within the Corps at heart,” Pakhurst said in a statement. This announcement by the Deputy Commandant, Plans, Policy and Operations is the result.”
Parkhurst told Task & Purpose that getting rid of Scout Snipers would gut the ability of infantry battalions to provide precision fires and conduct surveillance and close reconnaissance missions.
“If we can’t hit a target with our rifle, we can sure as hell report on the target and send that information back to our unit commander,” Parkhurst said “Because most commanders don’t exercise the capability while they’re in training, they don’t see it. They don’t understand what a platoon or a squad or a team of Scout Snipers can provide.”
Parkhurst said his understanding of the Marine Corps’ plan is that Scout Sniper training would end on Oct. 1 and none of the Marines in the new Scout Platoons would be snipers.
While Reconnaissance Marines and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Command would continue to train their own snipers, that does not necessarily mean that those snipers would be available to infantry battalion commanders whenever they are needed, Parkhurst said.
Recon Marines operate separately from infantry units, and MARSOC Raiders fall under U.S. Special Operations Command, so the Marine Corps cannot order them to augment infantry battalions or Marine Expeditionary Units, Parkhurst said.
“There’s no agreement between the Marine Corps and MARSOC to put MARSOC-trained snipers on a MEU,” Parkhurst said. “So, the idea that they’re somehow going to source the sniper capability from these other two places is ludicrous.”
The latest on Task & Purpose
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · February 27, 2023
15. Ex-CIA’s Petraeus Sees ‘Slow-balization’ From Geopolitic Shocks
Ex-CIA’s Petraeus Sees ‘Slow-balization’ From Geopolitic Shocks
Retired General David Petraeus Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
ByLaura Curtis
February 27, 2023 at 7:35 PM EST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-28/ex-cia-s-petraeus-sees-slow-balization-from-geopolitic-shocks?sref=hhjZtX76
The geopolitical crisis over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing US-China tensions have led to “slowbalization,” where global integration is happening at a slower pace, according to retired General David Petraeus.
“We are in an era of renewed great power rivalries, where geopolitics very much defines what’s possible in terms of economics, trade and investment,” said Petraeus, chairman of KKR’s Global Institute, on Monday. “Globalization is not over by any means, but it has now become ‘slowbalization,’ where the growth in global trade is now much flatter.”
While there’s room to grow manufacturing investment between the US and India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico and other places, “none of these can replace China’s colossal capacity, and we cannot decouple from China,” said Petraeus, a former CIA director.
Petraeus spoke at the annual TPM23 Conference organized by S&P Global Market Intelligence in Long Beach, where more than 3,700 representatives of the container-shipping industry are kicking off the contract-negotiating season, the first such gathering since supply chains have begun to normalize from the pandemic-era disruptions.
As uncertainty about the global economy remains high, the World Trade Organization had sounded the alarm over slowing momentum in global trade. The Geneva-based organization estimates that the volume in global merchandise trade will increase 1% this year, a sharp slowdown from the estimated 3.5% expansion in 2022.
16. China will target the US homeland in war over Taiwan, Army leader predicts
Since I've been retired for more than a decade I have lost the bubble on military terminology. I am having real trouble figuring out what this first sentence means but thankfully it is explained in subsequent sentences.. Also I believe General Flynn is a 3 star versus a Lt Gen.
Excerpt:
“The payload of exercises in pathways is really at its zenith here in ’23,” said Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, referring to an array of U.S. military exercises in the Indo-Pacific. “This is an important year to get in position [and] create enduring advantage ... so we're ready to do that and our forces are ready today to be able to respond if need be in the event that something goes in the direction we don't want it to go.”
China will target the US homeland in war over Taiwan, Army leader predicts
by Joel Gehrke, Foreign Affairs Reporter | February 27, 2023 06:02 PM
Washington Examiner · February 27, 2023
China will attack the American homeland if “a major war” erupts over Taiwan or elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. Army’s top civilian expects.
“If we got into a major war with China, the United States homeland would be at risk as well with both kinetic attacks and non-kinetic attacks — whether it's cyberattacks on the power grid or on pipelines,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said Monday at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are going to go after the will of the United States public. They're going to try to erode support for a conflict.”
CIA’S JUDGEMENT IS XI HAS ‘DOUBTS’ ABOUT SUCCESS OF POSSIBLE TAIWAN INVASION
China's People’s Liberation Army forces are not yet prepared to launch an invasion of Taiwan, according to U.S. intelligence and military officials. Yet the “historical trajectory” of their recent military modernization campaign requires U.S. forces to speed up their preparations to deter such an attack, according to the region’s top Army officer.
“The payload of exercises in pathways is really at its zenith here in ’23,” said Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, referring to an array of U.S. military exercises in the Indo-Pacific. “This is an important year to get in position [and] create enduring advantage ... so we're ready to do that and our forces are ready today to be able to respond if need be in the event that something goes in the direction we don't want it to go.”
Flynn and Wormuth touted the importance of the U.S. Army in the competition with China, an argument advanced at least in part to urge lawmakers not to forget about the Army in the upcoming spending process. Fiscal fights of the last decade often have forced the federal government to operate a funding mechanism known as a “continuing resolution,” which authorizes federal officials to spend money according to the plans set by previous budgets — a process that, according to Wormuth, has constrained the military’s ability to prepare for the risk of a clash with China.
“It is hard for us to compete effectively and do everything we need to do vis-a-vis the PRC, if, for six months of the year, we, for example, can't have any new starts for programs,” she said.
“Some of the key new weapons systems that the Army is developing will be impacted if we go into an extended continuing resolution. So that is very problematic at a time when everyone is worried about timelines.”
One major new weapons system — long-range hypersonic missiles — will come online in the coming months, the Army secretary added.
“By this fall, we will have our first battery of long-range hypersonic weapons, and that element will be part of our first multi-domain task force,” Wormuth said. “And we're also going to be bringing out the prototype for our mid-range capability, which provides us the opportunity to take out mobile targets at long range.”
China’s military is improving at an alarming rate, in large part due to its land-based missile force.
“They are rehearsing, they are practicing, they are experimenting, and they are preparing those forces for something ... you don't build up that kind of arsenal to just defend and protect, you probably are building that for other purposes,” Flynn said. “I can't go into great detail in here on what's happening on the ground, but I can tell you that the PLA army and the PLA Rocket Force and the strategic support forces are in dangerous positions.”
Yet their “anti-access/area denial” (A2/AD) plan to eject U.S. forces from the region has a major hole, he added.
“The A2/AD arsenal that the Chinese have designed is primarily designed to defeat air and maritime capabilities, and secondarily, it's designed to degrade, disrupt, and deny space and cyber,” he said. “It is not, however, designed to find, fix, and finish mobile, networked, dispersed, reloadable ground forces that are lethal and non-lethal that are operating amongst their allies and partners in the region.”
Still, China’s expected ability to target incoming ships and major bases puts pressure on U.S. forces to stash weapons and supplies in friendly states throughout the region. Pentagon officials enjoyed a breakthrough in early February when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin inked an “enhanced defense cooperation agreement” that expands U.S. military access to the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally locked in a long-term dispute with China over Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea.
“We look forward to talking to the Philippine army about what opportunities are going to be there for us to work with them,” Wormuth said. “There are possibilities with Japan ... there’s a lot we can do with Australia, and again, with the Philippines and the Singaporeans. Now, in those two cases, it would probably be non-lethal equipment that would be there, but that's the kind of thing that we need to be working on.”
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For all their growing strengths, Chinese officials may be daunted by the extreme difficulty of launching an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.
“The complexity of a joint island landing campaign is not a small matter,” he said. "And you have to be [an] incredibly professional — well-trained, well-led — force. And they're working on it, but ... they’re not 10 feet tall. They have work to do. And I think that now is the time for us to get into position to be able to deter that event from happening.”
Washington Examiner · February 27, 2023
17. Opinion | A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before
Excertps:
So what needs to be done?
On the military front, the United States should accelerate programs already underway to strengthen and disperse American forces in the Western Pacific to make them less vulnerable to attacks by China. At home, a concerted effort must be made to find ways to better protect U.S. traditional and social media against Chinese disinformation. Supply chains of some critical goods and services need to be reconfigured to shift production to the United States or allied nations, and the United States must pursue a longer-term strategic drive to restore its dominance in global manufacturing.
Building a stronger deterrence by addressing such weaknesses is the best means of averting war. But this will take time. Until then, it is important for Washington to avoid provocations and maintain a civil discourse with Beijing.
The high-altitude balloon that drifted across the United States this month was seen by many Americans as a shocking Chinese breach of U.S. sovereignty. It may turn out to be child’s play compared with the havoc China could wreak on the American homeland in a war.
Opinion | A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before
The New York Times · by Ross Babbage · February 27, 2023
Guest Essay
A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Faced Before
Feb. 27, 2023
Credit...Ricardo Tomás
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By
Dr. Babbage is the author of the forthcoming book “The Next Major War: Can the U.S. and Its Allies Win Against China?”
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A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any other time since World War II.
The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved.” His Communist Party regime has become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy.
The United States has vital strategic interests at stake. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would punch a hole in the U.S. and allied chain of defenses in the region, seriously undermining America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific, and would probably cut off U.S. access to world-leading semiconductors and other critical components manufactured in Taiwan. As president, Joe Biden has stated repeatedly that he would defend Taiwan.
But leaders in Washington also need to avoid stumbling carelessly into a war with China because it would be unlike anything ever faced by Americans. U.S. citizens have grown accustomed to sending their military off to fight far from home. But China is a different kind of foe — a military, economic and technological power capable of making a war felt in the American homeland.
As a career strategic analyst and defense planner, including for Australia’s Defense Department, I have spent decades studying how a war could start, how it would play out and the military and nonmilitary operations that China is prepared to conduct. I am convinced that the challenges facing the United States are serious, and its citizens need to become better aware of them.
The military scenario alone is daunting: China would probably launch a lightning air, sea and cyber assault to seize control of key strategic targets on Taiwan within hours, before the United States and its allies could intervene. Taiwan is slightly bigger than the state of Maryland; if you recall how quickly Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, you start to realize that the takeover of Taiwan could happen relatively quickly. China also has more than 1,350 ballistic and cruise missiles poised to strike U.S. and allied forces in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and American-held territories in the Western Pacific. Then there’s the sheer difficulty the United States would face waging war thousands of miles across the Pacific against an adversary that has the world’s largest navy and Asia’s biggest air force.
Despite this, U.S. military planners would prefer to fight a conventional war. But the Chinese are prepared to wage a much broader type of warfare that would reach deep into American society.
Over the past decade, China has increasingly viewed the United States as mired in political and social crises. Mr. Xi, who likes to say that “the East is rising while the West is declining,” evidently feels that America’s greatest weakness is on its home front. And I believe he is ready to exploit this with a multipronged campaign to divide Americans and undermine and exhaust their will to engage in a prolonged conflict — what China’s military calls enemy disintegration.
Over the past two decades, China has built formidable political warfare and cyber warfare capabilities designed to penetrate, manipulate and disrupt the United States and allied governments, media organizations, businesses and civil society. If war were to break out, China can be expected to use this to disrupt communications and spread fake news and other disinformation. The aim would be to foster confusion, division and distrust and hinder decision making. China might compound this with electronic and probably some physical attacks on satellites or related infrastructure.
These operations would most likely be accompanied by cyber offensives to disrupt electricity, gas, water, transport, health care and other public services. China has demonstrated its capabilities already, including in Taiwan, where it has waged disinformation campaigns, and in serious hacking incidents in the United States. Mr. Xi has championed China’s political warfare capabilities as a “magic weapon.”
China could also weaponize its dominance of supply chains and shipping. The impact on Americans would be profound.
The U.S. economy is heavily dependent on Chinese resources and manufactured goods, including many with military applications, and American consumers rely on moderately priced Chinese-made imports for everything from electronics to furniture to shoes. The bulk of these goods is transported aboard ships along sea lanes increasingly controlled by Chinese commercial interests that are ultimately answerable to China’s party-state. A war would halt this trade (as well as American and allied shipments to China).
U.S. supplies of many products could soon run low, paralyzing a vast range of businesses. It could take months to restore trade, and emergency rationing of some items would be needed. Inflation and unemployment would surge, especially in the period in which the economy is repurposed for the war effort, which might include some automobile manufacturers switching to building aircraft or food-processing companies converting to production of priority pharmaceuticals. Stock exchanges in the United States and other countries might temporarily halt trading because of the enormous economic uncertainties.
The United States might be forced to confront the shocking realization that the industrial muscle instrumental in victories like that in World War II — President Franklin Roosevelt’s concept of America as “the arsenal of democracy” — has withered and been surpassed by China.
China is now the dominant global industrial power by many measures. In 2004 U.S. manufacturing output was more than twice China’s; in 2021, China’s output was double that of the United States. China produces more ships, steel and smartphones than any other country and is a world leader in the production of chemicals, metals, heavy industrial equipment and electronics — the basic building blocks of a military-industrial economy.
Critically, the United States is no longer able to outproduce China in advanced weapons and other supplies needed in a war, which the current one in Ukraine has made clear. Provision of military hardware to Kyiv has depleted American stocks of some key military systems. Rebuilding them could take years. Yet the war in Ukraine is relatively small-scale compared with the likely demands of a major war in the Indo-Pacific.
So what needs to be done?
On the military front, the United States should accelerate programs already underway to strengthen and disperse American forces in the Western Pacific to make them less vulnerable to attacks by China. At home, a concerted effort must be made to find ways to better protect U.S. traditional and social media against Chinese disinformation. Supply chains of some critical goods and services need to be reconfigured to shift production to the United States or allied nations, and the United States must pursue a longer-term strategic drive to restore its dominance in global manufacturing.
Building a stronger deterrence by addressing such weaknesses is the best means of averting war. But this will take time. Until then, it is important for Washington to avoid provocations and maintain a civil discourse with Beijing.
The high-altitude balloon that drifted across the United States this month was seen by many Americans as a shocking Chinese breach of U.S. sovereignty. It may turn out to be child’s play compared with the havoc China could wreak on the American homeland in a war.
Ross Babbage is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington and the C.E.O. of Strategic Forum in Canberra, Australia. He has served in a number of Australian government agencies and been a senior adviser to several Australian defense ministers.
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The New York Times · by Ross Babbage · February 27, 2023
18. What We Know and Don’t Know About the Origins of Covid
What we can know for sure with high confidence: China has not cooperated in determining the origin of COVID. That would seem to be an indicator.
What We Know and Don’t Know About the Origins of Covid
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller
Feb. 27, 2023
The New York Times · by Benjamin Mueller · February 27, 2023
Scientists and spy agencies have tried to determine where the coronavirus originated, but conclusive evidence is hard to come by and the nation’s intelligence agencies are split.
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The Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2021. The U.S. Energy Department has concluded with “low confidence” that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic.Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and
Feb. 27, 2023
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WASHINGTON — The Energy Department’s conclusion, with “low confidence,” that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic has renewed questions about what sparked the worst public health crisis in a century — and whether the virus at the heart of it was somehow connected to scientific research.
Scientists and spy agencies have tried assiduously to answer that question, but conclusive evidence is hard to come by. The nation’s intelligence agencies are split, and none of them changed their conclusions after seeing the Energy Department’s findings, officials said.
Scientists who have studied the genetics of the virus, and the patterns by which it spread, say the most likely cause is that the virus jumped from live mammals to humans — a scientific phenomenon known as “zoonotic spillover” — at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, the city in which the first cases of Covid-19 emerged in late 2019.
But other scientists say there is evidence, albeit circumstantial, that the virus came from a lab, possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had deep expertise in researching coronaviruses. Lab accidents do happen; in 2014, after accidents involving bird flu and anthrax, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tightened its biosafety practices.
The debate is politically fraught. The lab leak theory gained currency among Republicans in the spring of 2020 after President Donald J. Trump, who used inflammatory terms to blame China for the pandemic, latched onto the idea. Many Democrats have not been persuaded by the lab leak hypothesis; some say they believe the explanation of natural causes, and others say there may never be enough intelligence to draw a conclusion.
The Energy Department’s findings have given a boost to House Republicans, who are investigating the pandemic’s origins. But apart from the politics, experts say that understanding what caused a public health crisis that has killed nearly seven million people could help researchers understand how to prevent the next one.
Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the origins of the coronavirus.
Why is it hard to know for certain how the pandemic started?
It is often difficult to find the origins of viruses, but China has compounded that problem by making it very difficult to gather evidence.
More on the Coronavirus Pandemic
By the time Chinese researchers arrived to collect samples from the Huanan market, the police had shut down and disinfected the market because a number of people linked to it had become sick with what would later be recognized as Covid. No live market animals were left.
Some scientists also believe that China has provided an incomplete picture of early Covid cases. And they worry that a directive to hospitals early in the outbreak to report illnesses specifically linked to the market may have led doctors to overlook other cases with no such ties, creating a biased snapshot of the spread.
What have scientists done to investigate?
Experts have tried to work around the holes in the data.
Scientists have examined cases of patients hospitalized before the call went out for doctors to look for ties to the market. They have also mapped the locations of early Covid cases in Wuhan — including both people who were initially linked to the market and those who were not — and found what they say are signs that the virus started spreading at the market.
Some of those same scientists have studied maps of where investigators found the virus in the Huanan market, including walls, floors and other surfaces, and found that those samples clustered in an area of the market where live animals were sold.
And separate genetic analyses from the very early stages of the pandemic, some scientists have said, suggest that the virus spilled over into people working or shopping at the market on two separate occasions.
Other scientists have disputed that studies like those can indicate a market origin with much confidence. They have said, for example, that the evidence for two separate spillovers at the market could also be evidence of the virus evolving as it spread from person to person.
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Some have also argued that for all the attention being paid to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not enough has been paid to a different research site in the city, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That center is much closer to the Huanan market.
Why do some people suspect a laboratory leak?
In October, Republicans on the Senate health committee published an analysis of the origins of the pandemic that argued it was “most likely the result of a research-related incident,” while acknowledging that the conclusion was “not intended to be dispositive.”
The report spotlighted what its authors described as holes in the natural origins theory, as well as “persistent biosafety problems” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The report, though, relied largely on existing public evidence, rather than new or classified information, and did not produce evidence to show that the Wuhan institute stored any virus in its collections that could have become the virus causing Covid-19, with or without scientific tinkering.
The lab leak hypothesis is bolstered, the report said, by the absence of any published evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was circulating in animals before the pandemic. Samples of virus collected on refrigerators, countertops and other surfaces at the Huanan market were genetically similar to human samples, suggesting the virus was shed by humans, not animals, it said.
But some experts said the inability to find an infected animal did not prove anything, because China shut down the market and killed all of its animals before they could be tested.
In 2018, before the pandemic, the Wuhan institute and its partners — including EcoHealth Alliance, a research group whose work has been financed by the United States — sought Defense Department funding to collect and experiment on coronaviruses with novel traits that would make them highly transmissible in humans.
The group project was never funded. But the report pointed to that proposal, noting that the virus that causes Covid-19 has traits similar to what the researchers were looking for. That has persuaded some scientists that a lab leak was possible. The Senate Republican report surmised that the virus may have escaped — perhaps by infecting a researcher who then carried it outside the lab.
The National Institutes of Health paid for some of EcoHealth Alliance’s work in Wuhan, but N.I.H. officials have repeatedly said the viruses being studied with American taxpayer dollars bore no genetic resemblance to the one that causes Covid-19. But Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, the N.I.H.’s acting director, acknowledged during a recent congressional hearing that he did not know what other work the Wuhan institute was doing.
What does the American intelligence community say?
In May 2021, several months after he took office, President Biden ordered the nation’s intelligence agencies to conduct a 90-day inquiry into the cause of the pandemic. The findings of that review were released in August 2021 and reaffirmed what the agencies had previously said: Both the natural origins theory and the lab leak theory were plausible.
In a statement at the time, Mr. Biden called on China to be more transparent about what had led to the emergence of the virus there in late 2019.
The Energy Department’s new conclusion is based on intelligence that is not publicly available, so it is difficult to know what accounted for the change. But the department’s use of the phrase “low confidence” indicates that its level of certainty is not high. The F.B.I., however, has concluded with “moderate confidence” that the virus emerged accidentally from a lab.
Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission. The C.I.A., the nation’s pre-eminent spy agency, has not taken a position and remains undecided.
What is Congress doing to address the question?
House Republicans have been trying to investigate the origins of the pandemic and gather evidence that might shed light on what caused it — including whether China concealed facts about the initial outbreak and what research American tax dollars may have financed in Wuhan.
Now that Republicans are in charge of the House, that investigative work is escalating in several committees, including the Intelligence Committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The subcommittee will hold its first hearing on the origins question on March 8, a spokeswoman said.
The New York Times · by Benjamin Mueller · February 27, 2023
19. The Divided Diplomat - Ralph Bunche and the Contradictions of Liberal Order
Excerpt:
Bunche left academia in 1941. He joined what eventually became the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and later left the employ of the U.S. government for the UN. In the process, he moved from the Marxist views championed by many of his Black contemporaries to Cold War liberalism. Raustiala argues that Bunche disavowed his early work on race and imperialism because of the threat of Nazism, preferring the flawed democracy of the United States to the racial totalitarianism of Hitler’s Germany. Although Bunche was never blind to the flaws of the United States, he believed that, unlike its totalitarian rivals, it could be transformed through the contributions of its diverse population. His life, in many ways, served as proof of his thesis.
The Divided Diplomat
Ralph Bunche and the Contradictions of Liberal Order
March/April 2023
Published on February 28, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Zachariah Mampilly · February 28, 2023
In September 1948, Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish count serving as the UN mediator for Palestine, was shot dead on the streets of Jerusalem by the Stern Gang, a Zionist terror outfit. His American deputy, Ralph Bunche, was quickly named as his replacement. Over the next 11 months, Bunche, who had planned to be in Bernadotte’s motorcade that fateful day but was absent because of a delayed flight, painstakingly negotiated an armistice between the belligerents. It was a brilliant achievement. He returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and the mayor of Los Angeles declared July 17 “Ralph Bunche Day.” In 1950, Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Black person in any field to be so honored, and that same year, Ebony featured him on its cover with the headline “America’s Most Honored Negro.” In 1963, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Bunche the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Politically, Bunche was a key figure in establishing the UN and a celebrated leader of the civil rights movement. Socially, he counted white liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Black Marxists such as Paul Robeson among his wide network of influential friends. Culturally, he was feted for his accomplishments with fawning comic-book portrayals, and he appeared at the Academy Awards, where he was introduced by Fred Astaire, and announced the prize for best picture. Intellectually, he made seminal contributions to the study of African politics and went on to become the first Black president of the American Political Science Association. In his lifetime, perhaps only Martin Luther King, Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois could be considered his peers. Despite his accomplishments, he is scarcely remembered today, as a new, deeply researched biography by the legal scholar Kal Raustiala makes clear. His academic contributions are rarely taught. His name is almost never included in the pantheon of American civil rights leaders. Nor is his name celebrated in the former European colonies of Africa and Asia, many of whose founding fathers once relied on him to champion their causes. Even his signature accomplishments—the Arab-Israeli armistice agreement and the founding of the UN peacekeeping force—are seldom acknowledged.
How did Bunche go from being “absolutely indispensable”—as Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, described him in 1966—to largely unknown? Part of the answer is that his achievements have aged badly. The Israelis and the Palestinians are even further from peace than they were in the 1940s. Today’s racial justice advocates more commonly cite revolutionary figures such as Malcolm X and Angela Davis rather than perceived compromisers such as Bunche. Within academia, where Bunche’s name remains most prominent—at least in terms of buildings and centers named for him—social scientists have moved away from the ethnographic methods he pioneered toward detached analyses built on data sets. Even the UN, the institution Bunche identified with most as he worked to build the architecture of global governance, is much diminished, barely registering as a player in conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine. Its peacekeeping force is marred by ineffectiveness and accusations of corruption.
Attributing Bunche’s erasure to the unforgiving march of history, however, is unsatisfying. As The Absolutely Indispensable Man notes, Bunche remains an awkward historical figure. As comfortable on the streets of Harlem as he was in the corridors of power in Geneva and Washington, Bunche carved his own path through the mid-twentieth century.
Charged with navigating some of the thorniest crises of the time, Bunche, in Raustiala’s favorable assessment, combined “optimism and realism” to achieve considerable success. Bunche’s diplomatic accomplishments alone are impressive enough to justify studying him today. But his enduring relevance lies in his role in the creation and operation of the liberal international order. Like so many U.S. strategists in the postwar era, Bunche strove to reconcile his country’s interests with his liberal internationalist values. Although he did not always succeed, these dueling impulses defined his career—just as they have continued to define U.S. foreign policy in the decades after he left his mark.
RADICAL YOUTH
Bunche was born in Detroit in 1903. He had a peripatetic childhood, moving around the Midwest before the family eventually settled in Albuquerque. Following his father’s departure from the family, in 1916, and his mother’s death from tuberculosis, in 1917, Bunche moved to Los Angeles with his grandmother and younger sister.
His success began early, at UCLA, where he studied political science. Inspired by Du Bois, that great Black American polymath, Bunche became identified with the “talented tenth,” the segment of the African American population Du Bois thought had leadership potential. Bunche graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1927. Even then, his preternatural confidence in his own abilities was clear. Writing to Du Bois that same year, he proclaimed his readiness to lead: “I have set as the goal of my ambition service to my group. To some extent I am even now fulfilling that ambition.”
Bunche next headed to Harvard for graduate school, with funds raised by the local Black community. In 1928, 25 years old and having received his master’s degree, he began his doctoral studies in political science at Harvard while serving as a professor and founding head of Howard University’s department of political science.
Bunche’s dissertation examined the performance of the mandate system of the League of Nations. The mandate system, which, after World War I, assigned colonies from the defeated powers to the Western victors for administration, was devised amid a surge of global anticolonial nationalism. Bunche compared lands the French had long ruled with those it had recently acquired under the League of Nations’ auspices, arguing that the mandate system, from the perspective of its subjects, was indistinguishable from formal empire. His dissertation went on to win multiple prizes at Harvard and foreshadowed Bunche’s later role in developing the UN Trusteeship Council as a vehicle for shepherding African colonies toward independence.
Bunche at a UN Security Council meeting, Lake Success, New York, October 1946
Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Bunche sought to situate the study of Africa within world history and global change rather than treating it as separate. In contrast to the prevailing arguments that attributed the continent’s woes to some internal, civilizational deficiency, Bunche argued in favor of Africans’ readiness for independence and against the idea that European empires were “developing” immature Africans for self-rule.
During this period, Bunche was influenced by radical Black thinkers, including Du Bois and Robeson. In 1936, Bunche published his first book, A World History of Race, in which he compared racism in the United States to European colonialism. He found common cause with African intellectuals who would go on to lead their countries’ anticolonial struggles, including Jomo Kenyatta, who was Bunche’s Swahili instructor during his stay in London in 1937 and later Kenya’s prime minister. As the historian John Kirby noted in Phylon (a journal founded by Du Bois) in 1974, Bunche in the 1930s was “widely regarded as a militant black political theorist and social critic.”
Bunche left academia in 1941. He joined what eventually became the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and later left the employ of the U.S. government for the UN. In the process, he moved from the Marxist views championed by many of his Black contemporaries to Cold War liberalism. Raustiala argues that Bunche disavowed his early work on race and imperialism because of the threat of Nazism, preferring the flawed democracy of the United States to the racial totalitarianism of Hitler’s Germany. Although Bunche was never blind to the flaws of the United States, he believed that, unlike its totalitarian rivals, it could be transformed through the contributions of its diverse population. His life, in many ways, served as proof of his thesis.
When World War II ended, the United States stood as the guarantor of the international order that had been formulated in response to the fascists’ vision. Bunche emerged as one of the defenders of the liberal international order. Understanding that his academic writing impinged on his ambitions in U.S. foreign policy circles, he set about to prove his patriotic bona fides. As McCarthyism targeted left-wing Black critics of the U.S. government, including Du Bois and Robeson, Bunche worked to escape the perceived taint of his earlier radicalism. It was a strategic calculation. “His radical past,” Raustiala notes, had become “an albatross to this new Bunche, one he tried to distance himself from as much as possible.” In time, he would denounce his own book on race, damning it as hastily written. “I am not at all proud of it,” he wrote decades later.
NECESSARY COMPROMISES?
Pitched as a political biography, the book comes to life when Raustiala analyzes Bunche’s diplomatic contributions. The reader follows decades of negotiations, illuminated by Raustiala’s considerable knowledge of international law. In the course of his career, Bunche navigated between the demands of anxious anticolonial leaders attuned to the shifting winds of the emerging postwar order, recalcitrant European leaders mourning the collapse of their imperial fantasies, and the interests of the new superpower, which busily sought to shape this new world in line with its needs and beliefs.
Raustiala is particularly strong on Bunche’s work to resolve crises on behalf of the UN. The armistice agreement that Bunche negotiated between Egypt and Israel in 1949 is discussed in detail. So, too, is his later work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Bunche served as the commander of the UN operation in the newly independent country, one of the organization’s first efforts at peacekeeping.
Congo had been brutally misruled by Belgium for over 70 years when the winds of change blew through in the late 1950s. Belgium had little choice but to concede. After Congo’s independence in 1960, however, the Belgian government fomented the secession of the mineral-rich Katanga Province to ensure its continued control over Congo’s vast resources. This was a blatant violation of the new nation’s sovereignty. The government of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo, appealed to both the UN and the Eisenhower administration for help.
Neither party responded in the way Lumumba imagined. The UN set up a massive peacekeeping operation, which Bunche led. But despite the Belgian government’s support for the secessionists, Bunche and his boss, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, regarded the conflict as a purely domestic dispute and refused to use the UN force to bring Katanga back into the fold. The United States, for its part, so feared Soviet encroachment in Africa that after Lumumba appealed to Moscow for help in uniting his country, the CIA sought to assassinate him. Nor did the UN get involved as Lumumba was arrested and killed with Belgian and U.S. complicity. His body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, and the remains—teeth and finger bones—were taken by a Belgian police officer charged with disposing of the corpse. The remains would not be returned to Congo until May 2022. Lumumba’s army chief, Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), orchestrated a coup and proceeded to misgovern the country until his overthrow in 1997, all while remaining a close ally of the United States.
The great risk for those who aim to be champions of compromise is that they may, in the end, become compromised themselves.
Although Bunche had spent his career as an academic championing African independence, his attitude toward the continent changed after he became a diplomat. As with his assessment of Palestinian leaders, whom he compared in his diary to “children,” he tended to regard Africa’s independence leaders with suspicion bordering on contempt. In 1960, for example, he privately denounced Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah as an “unprincipled demagogue.” Bunche regarded Lumumba as “a madman,” a “Congolese ogre,” a “jungle demagogue,” and an “utterly maniacal child.” For Raustiala, Bunche’s handling of the Congo crisis is evidence of his pragmatism when negotiating between the United States and the Soviet Union: “It was his skill at finding agreement,” Raustiala writes, “that ultimately turned Ralph Bunche from a successful but largely anonymous diplomat into a national and even global star.” But the episode also reveals why Bunche was criticized as a lackey of the United States by many of the same people he hoped would view him as a fair, if critical, ally. Rather than serving as evidence of his evenhandedness, Bunche’s assessment of Lumumba echoed that of U.S. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon, who, after meeting Lumumba, dismissed him as “irrational” and “almost psychotic.”
Throughout these discussions of the detailed work of international diplomacy, Raustiala presents a nuanced picture of a loyal diplomat committed to the promise of global governance, wrestling with the compromises that international diplomacy requires. Letters to his long-suffering wife, Ruth, provide a sense of the isolation that Bunche felt while away. From these letters, readers get a sense of his homesickness and the toll his work took. While in Cairo to negotiate the Arab-Israeli armistice, he wrote to Ruth that “we keep hopping from one [country] to another like mad in our plane and often on just a few moments’ notice. As soon as we land anywhere we begin to confer and leave for someplace else immediately. . . . I get practically no sleep and miss many meals.” Writing from Congo in the midst of the crisis, Bunche told Ruth, “I am dreadfully tired . . . as I got less than three hours sleep last night and even that was more than the night before.”
Bunche interacted with a who’s who of twentieth-century political and intellectual leaders over his three-decade career as a diplomat and scholar. But outside of the galas and formal events, much of his time was spent alone in hotel rooms. Although readers learn much about his interior life, the biography does not delve much into the psyches of his family members. Readers interested in learning more about Ruth, who balanced raising the three Bunche children with her own career as a teacher and activist, must look elsewhere.
ON A PEDESTAL
As the highest-ranking American—not simply Black American—in the UN, Bunche was acutely aware of his role as an embodiment of the American Dream even as he remained wary of nationalism’s inherent divisiveness. The tension between Bunche’s unabashed patriotism and his universalist dreams—“how to balance national interest with multilateral cooperation,” as Raustiala puts it—defined his life.
What emerges from this book is a portrait of a man struggling to reconcile idealism with reality. Bunche was, on the one hand, a committed internationalist and, on the other, a patriotic American seeking to prove that Black Americans were integral to the country’s success. In Congo and elsewhere, reflecting the United States’ common tendency to operate against its stated values, Bunche too often appeared to sacrifice his own beliefs and those of the UN in the interest of his home country.
The great risk for those who aim to be champions of compromise is that they may, in the end, become compromised themselves. For Bunche, and many others who have followed in his footsteps, the soaring rhetoric and ambition that characterizes liberal global institutions could never be squared with the stark reality of power politics driven by the national interests that shape their actual behavior.
These challenges may explain Bunche’s relative absence from our collective memory. Although Bunche did more than almost any other figure to demonstrate the promise of liberal internationalism, he was not immune to its blind spots, nor could he resolve the fundamental tension between nationalism and internationalism. Perhaps his closest analog is former U.S. President Barack Obama, whose soaring rhetoric about promoting democracy was often at odds with his continued support for Middle Eastern and African autocrats. Like Obama, Bunche aspired to be an exemplar of Black excellence in the United States, but the contradictions that that desire produced could never be synthesized with his dream of an equitable and just world order. Although Bunche failed to overcome these challenges, his contributions to a different and more inclusive global community cannot be denied. Today, as the promise of global cooperation recedes amid the rise of nationalism, Bunche’s life still has much to teach everyone.
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ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY is Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and an affiliate faculty member at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a co-author of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.
Foreign Affairs · by Zachariah Mampilly · February 28, 2023
20. The Reckoning That Wasn’t - Why America Remains Trapped by False Dreams of Hegemony By Andrew J. Bacevich
Excerpts:
Washington urgently needs to follow the advice that Kennan offered in 1948 and that generations of policymakers have ignored: avoid needless war, fulfill the promises in the country’s founding documents, and provide ordinary citizens with the prospect of a decent life. A place to begin is to reconfigure the U.S. military into a force designed to protect the American people rather than to serve as an instrument of global power projection. The United States should require the Defense Department to defend.
What might that look like in practice? For starters, it would mean taking seriously the obligation, embedded in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to eliminate nuclear weapons; closing down various regional military headquarters, with U.S. Central Command first on the chopping block; reducing the size of the U.S. military footprint abroad; prohibiting payments to military contractors for cost overruns; putting a lock on the revolving door that sustains the military-industrial complex; reinvigorating congressional war powers as specified by the U.S. Constitution; and, barring a declaration of war, capping military spending at two percent of GDP—which would still allow the Pentagon to lead the world in military expenditures.
In 1947, in perhaps the most famous essay ever to appear in Foreign Affairs, Kennan, using the byline “X,” wrote that “to avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.” Today, those traditions may be in tatters, but Kennan’s counsel has lost none of its salience. The chimera of another righteous military triumph cannot fix what ails the United States. Only the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” that Eisenhower called for can fill the needs of the moment: a polity that refuses to tolerate the further misuse of American power and the abuse of American soldiers that have become the hallmarks of our time.
The Reckoning That Wasn’t
Why America Remains Trapped by False Dreams of Hegemony
March/April 2023
Published on February 28, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Andrew J. Bacevich · February 28, 2023
Over the course of many evenings in 1952 and 1953, when I was a kindergartner, my family gathered around a hand-me-down TV in the Chicago housing project where we lived to watch Victory at Sea. With stirring music and solemn narration, this 26-part documentary produced by NBC offered an inspiring account of World War II as a righteous conflict in which freedom had triumphed over evil, in large part thanks to the exertions of the United States. The country had waged a people’s war, fought by millions of ordinary citizens who had answered the call of duty. The war’s outcome testified to the strength of American democracy.
Here was history in all its seductive and terrible magnificence. Here, too, was truth: immediate, relevant, and compelling, albeit from a strictly American point of view. If the series had an overarching message, it was this: the outcome of this appalling conflict had inaugurated a new age in which the United States was destined to reign supreme.
The series had a profound effect on me, reinforced by the fact that both of my parents had served in the war. For them and for others of their generation, the great crusade against Germany and Japan was to remain the defining event of their lives and seemed destined to define the lives of future generations, as well.
Yet Victory at Sea hinted at difficulties ahead. The concluding episode was titled “Design for Peace” but offered nothing of the sort. Instead, it conveyed something more akin to a warning. “One bomb from one plane and 78,000 human beings perish,” the narrator intoned, as a camera panned across images of a devastated Hiroshima. “Two bombs, and World War II is over.” Grainy footage of liberated concentration camps and scenes of homeward-bound troops flickered across the screen. Then, with a cryptic reference to “the free world on its march to tomorrow” and a quote from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill extolling the importance of resolution, defiance, magnanimity, and goodwill, the series simply ended. To discern what the most devastating conflict of all time signified politically or morally, viewers would have to look elsewhere.
The abrupt ending made a certain amount of sense. After all, by the time Victory at Sea aired, certain wartime U.S. allies had become bitter adversaries, a race was underway to build nuclear weapons even more lethal than those the United States had dropped on Japan, and American troops were once more engaged in combat, this time in Korea, in a conflict that would not end in even the approximation of victory. If anyone had a design for peace, it had been shelved. This much appeared certain: American global supremacy would not be uncontested.
Even so, for most Americans, World War II remained the authoritative source of relevant memory, with the Cold War a sequel of sorts. Just as U.S. leadership in World War II had defeated the Third Reich and imperial Japan, so, too, would Washington turn back the Soviet threat and ensure the survival of freedom. As the two events merged in the country’s collective imagination, they yielded a canonical lesson: U.S. global leadership backed by superior military power had become a categorical imperative.
In fact, the hard-won victory of 1945 would turn out to be neither validation nor harbinger. It proved instead to be a source of illusions. In the 1960s, the costly and divisive war in Vietnam seemed to demolish those illusions; the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s momentarily revived them. The post-9/11 misadventures Washington undertook in pursuing its global “war on terror” once again exposed the claims of U.S. military supremacy as specious.
The U.S. foreign policy establishment has clung to the myth that what the world needs is more American military power.
The disappointing outcomes of the protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should have sounded a wake-up call akin to the one experienced by the United Kingdom in 1956, after the British government orchestrated an intervention to reassert its control of the Suez Canal and, more broadly, put Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in his place. The ensuing debacle resulted in a singular humiliation that cost British Prime Minister Anthony Eden his job. Eden’s rival, British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, described the Suez operation as “an act of disastrous folly” that did “irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country.” Few observers disputed that judgment. The crisis obliged the British to acknowledge that their imperial project had reached a dead end. The old way of doing things—whipping weaker peoples into line—was no longer going to work.
The past two decades might have functioned as an extended “Suez moment” for the United States. But the U.S. foreign policy establishment has refused to move on, clinging to the myth that what the world needs is more American military power. The failure in Iraq did not prevent Washington from doubling down on its “good war” in Afghanistan—an act of rashness that culminated in a chaotic, humiliating withdrawal in 2021.
That spectacle could have served as an occasion to declare an end to the era defined by World War II, the Cold War, and the aspirations to which they gave rise. But thanks in no small part to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the moment soon passed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived the postwar tradition of American muscle flexing. The Afghan war, the longest in U.S. history, has all but vanished from memory, as has the disastrous war of choice that Washington launched 20 years ago in Iraq. Partly as a result, the country seems poised to continue making the same mistakes that led to those debacles, all justified by the ostensible obligations of global leadership.
The war in Ukraine might offer one last chance for Washington to learn a Suez-style lesson—and without even suffering a defeat. So far, U.S. policy on Ukraine has been pragmatic and arguably restrained. But President Joe Biden and his team routinely talk about the war in ways that suggest an outmoded, moralistic, and recklessly grandiose vision of American power. Aligning his administration’s rhetorical posture with a sober assessment of the true stakes involved in Ukraine might allow Biden to wean the establishment from its obsession with hegemony. Demonstrating that Americans do not need their country’s role in the world explained to them in the style of a children’s bedtime story would be a bonus.
The danger is that the opposite could happen: Biden’s framing of Ukraine as a crucible for a new era of military-backed American dominance might lock him in, and his administration’s carefully calibrated policy could come to more closely resemble his soaring, ill-considered rhetoric. That, in turn, would lead to an altogether different and more disastrous reckoning.
WITH US OR AGAINST US
The most authoritative expression of the postwar worldview—the Rosetta stone of American statecraft in the Cold War—is NSC-68, a highly classified document drafted in 1950 by the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, led at the time by Paul Nitze. Testifying to “the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society,” this ideologically charged document established the parameters of U.S. policy throughout the Cold War. Juxtaposed against that free society was “the slave society” of the Soviet Union, which demanded “total power over all men within the Soviet state without a single exception” along with “total power over all Communist Parties and all states under Soviet domination.”
With compelling clarity, NSC-68 made a case for American hegemony. It drew bright lines and erased ambiguities. “In a shrinking world,” the document asserted, “the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.” This fact imposed on the United States “the responsibility of world leadership” along with an obligation “to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.” Merely containing the Soviet threat would not suffice. Nor would feeding the world’s hungry or succoring the afflicted. What the United States needed was the capacity and willingness to coerce. With that in mind, Washington committed itself to establishing a dominant military configured as a global police force. Statecraft became an adjunct of military might.
Undiminished by the passage of time, the Manichaean outlook woven into NSC-68 persists today, decades after the Cold War that inspired it. Biden’s frequent insistence that the fate of humankind hinges on the outcome of a cosmic struggle between democracy and autocracy updates Nitze’s central theme. The necessity of U.S. military supremacy—whether measured by Pentagon spending, the number of bases abroad, or a propensity to use force—has become an article of faith. As the world continues to “shrink” thanks to globalization and technological progress (and also to expand into space and cyberspace), the reach of U.S. military forces grows accordingly, a process that stirs little controversy.
But if the aim of U.S. hegemony has been to establish global order and justice through the prudent use of hard power, the results have been mixed at best. Since 1950, people in the English-speaking world and those living in some proximity to Paris and Tokyo have fared relatively well. By comparison, the benefits accruing to the billions living in the global South have been spotty; only occasionally has the opportunity to live longer and healthier lives translated into personal freedom and security. Government respect for individual rights and adherence to the rule of law remains more hope than reality.
Things could have been worse, of course. Imagine, for example, if during the Cold War, the United States had used any of the thousands of nuclear weapons it had acquired at enormous cost. Yet what actually did occur was bad enough. To reflect on the conduct and the consequences of American wars (and sundry covert interventions) since 1950 is to confront an appalling record of recklessness, malfeasance, and waste.
U.S. troops advancing on Baghdad, April 2003
Scott Nelson / Getty Images
The Iraq war, which began 20 years ago, represents the acme of American military folly—second only to the Vietnam War. Launched with expectations of unleashing a tidal wave of liberation that would transform the Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom instead produced a mournful legacy of death and destruction that destabilized the region. For a time, supporters of the war consoled themselves with the thought that the removal from power of the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein had made the world a better place. Today, no amount of sophistry can sustain that claim.
Many ordinary Americans might consider it too harsh to declare that all the sacrifices made by U.S. troops since World War II have been for naught. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the result in Iraq was more akin to a rule than to an exception. President Harry Truman’s decision to send U.S. troops north of the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula in 1950 was an epic blunder, albeit one eclipsed 15 years later by President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to commit U.S. combat troops to Vietnam. Beginning in 2001, the war in Afghanistan gave new meaning to the term “quagmire.” As for Iraq, it remains impossible to refute Barack Obama’s 2002 denunciation, delivered when he was a state senator in Illinois, of the approaching U.S. invasion as a “dumb,” “rash,” “cynical attempt” by “weekend warriors” to “shove their own ideological agendas down our throats.”
Yet in each case, those choices served as concrete expressions of what American global leadership seemed to require in the moment. According to the logic embedded in NSC-68, to pass by the opportunity to liberate and unify the two Koreas or to allow the Republic of Vietnam to fall to communism would have been the height of irresponsibility. So, too, would allowing the Taliban to retain power in Kabul. Take seriously the claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (and was intent on developing more), and his removal could be seen as a political and moral imperative.
In each instance, however, egregiously faulty judgment squandered—there is no other word—vast troves of American wealth and thousands of American lives (not to mention hundreds of thousands of non-American lives). Brown University’s Costs of War project has estimated that U.S. military actions since the 9/11 attacks have cost around $8 trillion, a sum several dozen times greater than that approved for the Biden administration’s highly touted “Building a Better America” infrastructure initiative. And it is hard to see how the benefits of those military operations outweighed the costs.
Yet the basic logic that favored intervention in all those cases remains intact. Even Biden, who as vice president opposed a major surge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who as president ultimately withdrew the troops, has not forsaken a fundamental belief in the enduring efficacy of American military power. His response to defeat in Afghanistan was to propose an increase in Pentagon spending. Congress not only agreed but chipped in a bonus.
WHICH IKE DO YOU LIKE?
The clout wielded by the sprawling U.S. national security apparatus partially explains why this mindset has persisted. On that score, the famous admonition conveyed in President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in January 1961 has lost none of its relevance. In that speech, Eisenhower warned against “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in the hands of “the military-industrial complex.” He also proposed a solution: “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to keep the country’s “huge industrial and military machinery of defense” in check “so that security and liberty may prosper together.” But his hope was misplaced. On matters related to national security, Americans have proven to be more indifferent than watchful. Many Americans still revere Eisenhower. But it is not the president of 1961 to whom they tend to look for inspiration but the general of 1945, who secured the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich.
The victory in World War II bestowed a new sense of purpose on U.S. policy, which was subsequently codified in NSC-68. But it also imposed a straitjacket. As the scholar David Bromwich has recently written, “The Second World War is the picture that has held us captive.” In important respects, the story of U.S. national security policy over the past seven decades centers on an effort to preserve and update that picture. The overarching aim has been to engineer another such victory, thereby delivering security, prosperity, deference, and privilege—or, more broadly, a world run on American terms, a dominance justified by a self-assigned mission to spread freedom and democracy.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the collapse of communism and the U.S. victory in the 1990–91 Gulf War seemed, for a brief moment, to bring that world within reach. Here were victories that, taken together, arguably compared in scope to that of 1945. The alleged “end of history” had resulted in a unipolar order over which a sole superpower presided as the world’s “indispensable nation.” Today, such phrases fall into the same category as “white man’s burden” and “the war to end all wars”: they can only be employed ironically. Yet they accurately reflect the intoxication that overtook political elites after 1989. Never has a country putatively devoted to noble causes created or underwritten more mayhem than did the United States following the Cold War, as it set out to smite evildoers everywhere.
Washington’s ideology-fueled bender lasted until 2016, when Donald Trump upended American politics. As a candidate for president, Trump vowed to chart a different course, one that would put “America first.” That seemingly benign phrase had explosive connotations, harking back to widespread popular opposition to possible U.S. intervention on behalf of the United Kingdom as it resisted Nazi aggression. Trump was not simply promising a less belligerent foreign policy. Knowingly or not, he was threatening to jettison the moral underpinnings of postwar American statecraft.
Trump’s mendacity and historical illiteracy made it hard to tell whether he even grasped what the phrase “America first” signified.
NATO countries were “not paying their fair share” and were “ripping off the United States,” Trump complained during a characteristic rant at a 2016 campaign rally. “And you know what we do? Nothing. Either they have to pay up for past deficiencies or they have to get out. And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO.” He returned to this theme again and again, including in his inaugural address. “We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own, and spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas, while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay,” Trump declared. “We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.” Not anymore, he pledged: “from this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.”
Such heresies triggered a nervous breakdown from which the U.S. foreign policy establishment has yet to fully recover. Of course, Trump’s mendacity and historical illiteracy made it hard to tell whether he even grasped what the phrase “America first” signified. And even if he did, his staggering incompetence and short attention span allowed the status quo to survive. During Trump’s term in office, the endless war that started after 9/11 dragged on. Alliances remained intact. With minor adjustments, so, too, did the country’s military footprint abroad. At home, the military-industrial complex prospered. A costly modernization of the U.S. nuclear strike capabilities continued, attracting minimal attention. All in all, the essentials of the NSC-68 paradigm survived, as did the conviction that World War II somehow retained its relevance as a policy touchstone. “Isolationist” remained an epithet hurled at anyone not supporting the vigorous use of U.S. power abroad to cure the world’s ills.
Yet even as establishment thinking about the U.S. role in the world remained mired in the past, the world itself was undergoing profound changes. And herein lies a central paradox of the Trump presidency: Trump’s vow to abandon the postwar paradigm led the establishment to circle the wagons and mount a spirited defense of the NSC-68 framework—even as the United States confronted a rising tide of problems to which that framework was all but irrelevant. The list is long: the rise of China, a deepening climate crisis, a loss of control of the U.S. southern border, the evaporation of working-class opportunities, skyrocketing drug-related fatalities, a brutal pandemic, and domestic upheaval spurred by polarization along racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, partisan, and religious lines. Those divisions fueled Trump’s election in 2016, allowed him to win an even larger number of votes in his losing reelection campaign, and made possible his effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and overthrow the constitutional order in the wake of his defeat.
THE MYTHMAKERS
These cascading failures and shortcomings and the inability of the postwar vision of U.S. power to contend with them seemed to herald a Suez moment. Instead, in the history of U.S. statecraft, the Biden presidency marks a turning point when things didn’t turn. Midway through Biden’s term, U.S. grand strategy is mired in a tangle of unacknowledged contradictions. Preeminent among them is Washington’s insistence that the United States must sustain the now hallowed model of militarized global leadership even as the relevance of that model diminishes, the resources available to pursue it dwindle, and the prospects of preserving the country’s privileged place in the international order decline. Yet the foreign policy establishment insists there is no conceivable alternative to militarized American leadership—pointing above all to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to make its case.
In this view, the war in Ukraine revalidates NSC-68. But the Russian army is not the Red Army—not even close. Unless Putin opts to use nuclear weapons, an unlikely scenario, Russia poses a negligible threat to the security and well-being of the United States. A Russian army that can’t even make it to Kyiv doesn’t pose much of a danger to Berlin, London, or Paris, much less to New York City. The ineptitude displayed by Russia’s military reinforces the argument that European democracies, should they make the effort, are more than capable of providing for their own security. In sum, for Washington, the war should have bolstered the case for classifying Russia as someone else’s problem. If the United States has nearly $50 billion to spare (the amount that Congress allotted to assist Ukraine between February 2022 and November 2022), it should use that money to alleviate climate change, address the border crisis, or ameliorate the distress of working-class Americans—vital tasks that the Biden administration treats with far less urgency than arming Ukraine.
Biden has spoken of the war in Ukraine in sweeping terms that echo the rhetoric of earlier eras. “Now is the hour: our moment of responsibility, our test of resolve and conscience of history itself,” he intoned in a State of the Union address delivered barely a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, in February 2022. “And we will save democracy.” Such a moment and such a task would seem to involve not only demonstrating commitment and resolve but also making sacrifices and hard choices. But the U.S. effort in Ukraine has not required those things; it is a proxy war, and Biden has wisely pledged that despite the alleged existential stakes for democracy, no U.S. troops will fight on behalf of Ukraine. Harking back to NSC-68, administration rhetoric, compounded by an endless stream of media commentary, has created the impression that the Ukraine war has summoned the United States to once again grab the tiller of history and steer humankind toward its intended destination. But this is precisely the sort of hubris that has led the country astray time and again.
It is hard to imagine a better chance to move past this self-satisfied posturing and find a more responsible way to talk about and understand the U.S. role in the world—but Biden seems determined to miss the opportunity. Consider this passage from the administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy:
Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been. We are in the midst of a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order. Meanwhile, shared challenges that impact people everywhere demand increased global cooperation and nations stepping up to their responsibilities at a moment when this has become more difficult. In response, the United States will lead with our values, and we will work in lockstep with our allies and partners and with all those who share our interests. We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.
This word salad offers something for everyone but is devoid of specificity and cannot serve as a basis for a coherent policy. Marketed as a statement of strategy, it instead testifies to the absence of strategy.
THE KENNAN WAY
What the United States needs today is a clear statement of strategic purpose that will replace the zombie NSC-68 paradigm. Almost unnoticed, such an alternative has been available ever since the heady days following the U.S. victory in World War II. In 1948, at the outset of the Cold War, George Kennan, Nitze’s predecessor as director of policy planning, proposed an approach to measuring the success of U.S. policy that was devoid of ideological fantasies. Noting that the United States at that moment possessed “about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population,” he suggested that the task ahead was “to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”
The aim was to keep Americans safe while preserving and even enhancing the material abundance that made the United States the envy of the world. Achieving that goal, according to Kennan, would require the United States “to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming” and concentrate “on our immediate national objectives.” The country could ill afford “the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction,” Kennan wrote.
Kennan’s long memorandum outlined in considerable detail how the United States should deal with the problems of the postwar world. That world no longer exists. So it is not the particulars of his analysis that should command attention today but the spirit that informs it: realism, sobriety, and an appreciation of limits, along with an emphasis on purposefulness, discipline, and what Kennan called “economy of effort.” In 1948, Kennan feared that Americans might succumb to “the romantic and universalistic concepts” that had sprouted during the recent war. He was right to worry.
Since 1948, the economic disparity to which Kennan referred has dwindled. Yet it has not disappeared: today, the United States accounts for just over four percent of the world’s population but still holds around 30 percent of the world’s wealth. And within the country, the distribution of that wealth has shifted dramatically. In 1950, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans controlled around 10 percent of the country’s wealth; today, they control close to 20 percent of it. Meanwhile, the country’s fiscal health has declined: the total U.S. national debt now exceeds $31 trillion, with the federal deficit having averaged more than a trillion dollars per year since 2010.
Trump in Brussels, July 2018
Reinhard Krause / Reuters
A combination of grotesque inequality and feckless profligacy goes a long way toward explaining why such an immense and richly endowed country finds itself unable to contend with dysfunction at home and crises abroad. Military might cannot compensate for an absence of internal cohesion and governmental self-discipline. Unless the United States gets its house in order, it has little hope of exercising global leadership—much less prevailing in a mostly imaginary competition pitting democracy against autocracy.
Washington urgently needs to follow the advice that Kennan offered in 1948 and that generations of policymakers have ignored: avoid needless war, fulfill the promises in the country’s founding documents, and provide ordinary citizens with the prospect of a decent life. A place to begin is to reconfigure the U.S. military into a force designed to protect the American people rather than to serve as an instrument of global power projection. The United States should require the Defense Department to defend.
What might that look like in practice? For starters, it would mean taking seriously the obligation, embedded in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to eliminate nuclear weapons; closing down various regional military headquarters, with U.S. Central Command first on the chopping block; reducing the size of the U.S. military footprint abroad; prohibiting payments to military contractors for cost overruns; putting a lock on the revolving door that sustains the military-industrial complex; reinvigorating congressional war powers as specified by the U.S. Constitution; and, barring a declaration of war, capping military spending at two percent of GDP—which would still allow the Pentagon to lead the world in military expenditures.
In 1947, in perhaps the most famous essay ever to appear in Foreign Affairs, Kennan, using the byline “X,” wrote that “to avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.” Today, those traditions may be in tatters, but Kennan’s counsel has lost none of its salience. The chimera of another righteous military triumph cannot fix what ails the United States. Only the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” that Eisenhower called for can fill the needs of the moment: a polity that refuses to tolerate the further misuse of American power and the abuse of American soldiers that have become the hallmarks of our time.
- ANDREW J. BACEVICH is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and Chair of the Board of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which he co-founded.
Foreign Affairs · by Andrew J. Bacevich · February 28, 2023
21. Pentagon to Reap Rewards From $53 Billion Chips Act
Excerpts:
Commerce officials will count on input from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the defense and intelligence communities as they begin implementing the program this week, she said.
The reliance on Taiwan particularly concerns U.S. officials as a military conflict over the island, which China seeks to reunify, could disrupt supplies of such semiconductors and the operations of manufacturers that rely on them.
Pentagon to Reap Rewards From $53 Billion Chips Act
Program aims to bolster national security by cutting reliance on imported chips
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-to-reap-rewards-from-53-billion-chips-act-c3aaa2ca?mod=hp_lead_pos1
By Yuka HayashiFollow
Feb. 28, 2023 5:00 am ET
WASHINGTON—The Pentagon will have secure access to leading-edge semiconductors manufactured at facilities receiving funding from the $53 billion Chips Act, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, ensuring the industry can supply the military with the advanced chips it needs for modern weapons systems.
The increased involvement of the military and national security officials comes as intensifying rivalry with China and weaknesses in the supply chain exposed during the pandemic raise concerns among policy makers that the U.S. has become too reliant on imported chips.
In an interview, Ms. Raimondo said the Chips Act, which promotes domestic manufacturing of chips, is a national security initiative. The U.S. buys more than 90% of its advanced chips from Taiwan, she said, calling that “a national security vulnerability that is untenable.”
“Every single piece of sophisticated military equipment, every drone, every satellite, relies on semiconductor chips,” Ms. Raimondo said.
Commerce officials will count on input from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the defense and intelligence communities as they begin implementing the program this week, she said.
The reliance on Taiwan particularly concerns U.S. officials as a military conflict over the island, which China seeks to reunify, could disrupt supplies of such semiconductors and the operations of manufacturers that rely on them.
To ensure U.S. taxpayers share in the program’s success, companies receiving more than $150 million in grants are required to pay the government a portion of their profits if their facilities turn out to be more profitable than projected, a Commerce Department official said.
The Commerce Department will also require subsidy recipients to provide child care for workers, a measure the administration has said is necessary to ensure qualified workers are able to participate in the program.
“We need more people in the labor force,” Ms. Raimondo said. “We right now lack affordable child care, which is the single most significant factor keeping people, especially women, out of the labor force.”
Recipients of program funds are also prohibited from engaging in stock buybacks.
Ms. Raimondo’s comments came ahead of Tuesday’s rollout of the application process for the Chips Act, which was signed into law by President Biden in August. The program includes manufacturing incentives totaling $39 billion to be given to companies to help invest in domestic semiconductor manufacturing. More than $13 billion will fund research and development, as well as workforce advancement.
The program includes a requirement to give defense and national security officials access to the chips made at new plants in a commercial manufacturing environment, according to a document to be distributed Tuesday with the application.
“The U.S. military is currently unable to source leading-edge chips from an onshore facility, leaving critical military systems vulnerable to supply disruption,” according to the document, which lays out the program’s vision and was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. vs. China: The Race to Develop the Most Advanced Chips
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U.S. vs. China: The Race to Develop the Most Advanced Chips
Play video: U.S. vs. China: The Race to Develop the Most Advanced Chips
After working for years to catch up on U.S. technology, China has developed a chip that can rival Nvidia’s powerful A100. WSJ unpacks the processors’ design and capability as the two superpowers race for dominance in artificial intelligence. Illustration: Sharon Shi
Signaling the government’s intent to aid the development of future generations of advanced semiconductors, the Commerce Department will give priority to allocating funds to companies, whether U.S. or foreign, that commit to building research and development facilities in the U.S. alongside their semiconductor plants, Ms. Raimondo said.
A top candidate to receive the Chips Act funding is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a company known as TSMC that controls more than 90% of the global production of the most advanced semiconductors and is located on the island at the center of geopolitical tension with China.
The Chips Act was approved last year amid increasing worries about the need to stay a step ahead of China, which is investing heavily in its semiconductor industry and its military.
To address concerns that the Chips Act could pay benefits downstream to Chinese competitors, the U.S. will require recipients of the money to agree not to expand manufacturing capacity in China and other unspecified countries for 10 years.
Ms. Raimondo previously said the government will target the funds to create at least two manufacturing clusters for leading-edge chips by 2030, each representing an entire ecosystem anchored by chip-making facilities and surrounded by research labs, material and equipment suppliers and packaging facilities for final assembly of semiconductors. Candidate locations include Arizona, Texas and Ohio.
Grants from the Chips Act are expected to cover 5% to 15% of the total cost for each of the big construction projects, supplemented by subsidies from state and local governments, Ms. Raimondo said.
With loan guarantees also provided under Chips Act funding, companies could cover up to 35% of their capital expenditures.
She said, however, that large amounts of the costs must be borne by the private sector, including the manufacturers and venture capital.
“We don’t want to displace any private capital,” she said. “Our job is to use this small bit of public capital to unlock a great deal of private capital.”
Amid the anticipation of funding from the Chips Act, more than 40 projects have been unveiled by U.S. and foreign manufacturers for a total investment of nearly $200 billion. The proposed projects include those by companies that now produce chips: Intel Corp., South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
The application process for the Chips Act funds will stretch over several months. In the initial stage starting Tuesday, Commerce will accept applications for chip-making and packaging plants, which assemble chips for shipments to users. That will be followed by material and equipment facilities later in the spring and research and development projects in the fall.
The U.S. Chips Act goes into gear as the European Union, Japan and South Korea are all stepping up subsidy programs to increase domestic production of semiconductors in their own countries. Some analysts have warned this could result in global oversupplies in the future.
Ms. Raimondo said Washington will accelerate discussions with allies in Asia and Europe in coming months to coordinate policies to prevent oversupplies.
Semiconductor subsidies will be a key topic at a June meeting of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting, Ms. Raimondo said. With Asian countries, the U.S. hopes to have an agreement on semiconductor supply chains among those participating in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a new U.S.-led economic cooperation pact under discussion.
“We have to work together. We shouldn’t be competing with each other,” she said. “Then companies play us off one another and bid up the subsidy.”
Write to Yuka Hayashi at [email protected]
22. China’s latest balancing act in the war in Ukraine
Look to Unrestricted Warfare and the three warfares for understanding and its objectives versus the US and the West in strategic competition. This is political warfare with Chinese characteristics.
China’s latest balancing act in the war in Ukraine
A peace plan, reports of potential weapons sales, and an ‘eternal friendship’ with Russia make for a confusing picture.
Lili Pike, China Reporter, and Tom Nagorski, Global EditorFebruary 27, 2023
grid.news · by Lili Pike, China Reporter, and Tom Nagorski, Global Editor
From the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the geopolitics of the war have mattered almost as much as events on the battlefield. And for all the focus on the U.S. and its NATO allies and their robust support for the Ukrainian resistance, China’s role has loomed large. And it’s not always clear where exactly President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party stand when it comes to the war.
Recent developments have heightened the attention on Beijing. On Sunday, the Biden administration issued the latest of several public warnings against China providing military aid to Russia — in the wake of reports that such aid was in the offing. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said weapons sent to Moscow would be used to harm civilians in Ukraine, and that China would face “real costs” if it went ahead with arms shipments to Russia. “China should want no part of that,” Sullivan said on ABCs “This Week.”
On Friday, the anniversary of the Russian invasion, China issued a 12-point position paper on the war (or the “Ukraine crisis,” as China prefers to call it) that laid out conditions for a negotiated solution. The document was seen as heavily biased toward Russia; it suggested a ceasefire that would freeze Russian gains in place and offered no condemnation of the invasion itself. The document got at best lukewarm reactions in Western capitals, and outright dismissals in others. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded by saying he would be happy to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping — adding, “China historically respects our territorial integrity, and it should therefore do everything for Russia to leave the territory of Ukraine.”
Over the weekend, Beijing announced it would host Belarus’ President Aleksandr Lukashenko, a close Kremlin ally, for a state visit. That drew a suggestion via Twitter from a top aide to Zelenskyy that China choose its allies more carefully. “You don’t bet on an aggressor who broke international law and will lose the war,” Mykhailo Podolyak wrote. “This is shortsighted.”
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For its part, China said Monday that the U.S. was “hypocritical” to warn Beijing about sending weapons to Russia. “While the United States has intensified its efforts to send weapons to one of the conflicting parties, resulting in endless wars and no end in sight for peace, it has frequently spread false information about China’s supply of weapons to Russia,” said Mao Ning, the spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry.
Taken together, the recent developments highlight China’s complex and often opaque approach to the war. Just three weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping met and declared a “no limits” friendship and were sharply critical of NATO and the U.S. Ever since the war began, China has sought to balance the partnership with Russia against a concern that it not rupture completely its relationship with the West.
To date, the balance has tilted toward Moscow; China has refused to criticize Putin, kept up a busy wartime commerce with Russia, amplified Russian falsehoods about Ukraine and placed blame for the war at the feet of the NATO alliance. Now China is in effect nominating itself as a neutral broker in a possible resolution to the conflict.
As the war enters its second year, Grid spoke with two experts on Sino-Russian relations — Cheng Chen, a Professor of Political Science at University at Albany, State University of New York, and Marcin Kaczmarski, a lecturer in security studies at the University of Glasgow. They weighed in on the latest signals from China and what they might portend.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Grid: Has China’s position on the war shifted in any significant way over the last year?
Cheng Chen: From the beginning, China has emphasized that its position remains neutral and will not take sides. This rhetoric has not changed. At the same time, China has significantly toned down its enthusiasm when talking about its relationship with Russia. Although China refused to condemn Russian aggression, it made it clear that it had no prior knowledge of Putin’s plan of invasion and paid lip service to the importance of sovereignty.
This “neutral” stance, however, does not prevent China from playing a major and indispensable role in propping up Russia’s embattled economy, which contributes directly to Russia’s war efforts. It also does not prevent China from carrying out joint military exercises and joint military patrols, or holding high-level meetings and even summits with Russia, which thwarts the West’s efforts to make Russia an international pariah. In this sense, China has provided Russia with a vital lifeline in this time of crisis.
Marcin Kaczmarski: Firstly, I think China’s position on the war has evolved with the war, because my understanding was that China, just as Russia and many countries around the world, expected that it would be a very quick war, with a decisive victory for Russia.
Once it turned out that Ukraine was successfully resisting, and the West had united quite unexpectedly behind Ukraine, the Chinese feeling about the war started changing. On the one hand, China is trapped in this attempt to position itself as a neutral party — and this is what I would say Beijing attempts to do vis-à-vis the external world. But on the other hand, Beijing struggles to avoid any association with the West against Russia.
This position, which China presents as neutrality, in the West is read as support for Russia. This is why the Chinese narratives, the official discourses, are repeating Russian points, blaming the U.S., blaming NATO for the war, and so on. In this sense, I would say China’s trying to walk this line since it turned out that the war was going to last longer than we expected, than Russia expected.
G: Just how significant has China’s trade with Russia been in keeping Russia afloat economically?
MK: There are two main points here. Firstly, China is not alone in this capitalizing on Russia’s difficulties, in finding other customers. If we look at India or Turkey, these two states have also rushed to buy Russian oil, for instance. Second point is that in the case of China, my argument would be that it is still Chinese companies that are capitalizing on Russian difficulties and capitalizing on the fact that Russia has to sell oil, for instance, on discounted prices, rather than a strategic decision of the Chinese state to throw its economic weight behind Russia.
One instance is a project, the Trans-Mongolian Gas Pipeline, which Russia has lobbied quite strongly for, and which will be a clear signal that China is offering an alternative market to the European gas market. But so far, Mongolia says “yes,” Russia is willing to proceed with the project, but China still does not agree to a contract. I see it as the absence of China’s strategic support.
G: What do you make of the reports that China is considering providing Russia with weapons? Do you think that’s going to happen? Why or why not?
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CC: Currently, there is no evidence that China has provided lethal aid to Russia. In the short term, it is highly unlikely that China will directly provide lethal weapons to Russia, because that would undermine any pretense of China’s neutrality and deprive Xi’s peace plan of any credibility. It would also subject China to severe Western sanctions at a time when China really wants to focus on economic growth after ending its zero-covid policy.
Nevertheless, there are numerous other ways in which China could boost Russia’s military capability, including supplying various nonlethal aid and dual-use materials and components, many of which have origins that are hard to trace. These options are much less costly, and therefore likely to remain China’s preference. All this, of course, does not mean there aren’t internal discussions of other options, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The U.S.’s revelation of this intelligence, I think, might be for the purpose of deterring Beijing from actually pursuing that path, and implicitly discrediting Xi’s “neutral” peace plan.
MK: First, the Chinese leadership would not like to see Russia lose this war, because this would mean that the West is reinforced, that the whole narrative of the West’s decline, which is so widespread in Chinese official discourse, that this narrative is not exactly correct.
But at the same time, we have also seen the Chinese as unwilling to openly support Russia in circumventing or bypassing sanctions. While I wouldn’t exclude that there are some weapons deliveries to Russia, I think, from Beijing’s perspective, it is still too costly. Perhaps not that costly in relations with the U.S., because I would think the Chinese elite sees the conflict with the U.S. as rather a permanent feature of China’s position in the world. But it would be much more problematic when it comes to Europe, because in my understanding, China still hopes to either drive a wedge or keep Europe at a certain distance from the U.S., especially when it comes to a potential joint trans-Atlantic policy toward China.
As I said, I wouldn’t exclude such arms supplies; but I would say that their potential costs outweigh benefits for China at this stage.
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G: Did anything stand out you in China’s new position paper on the war?
CC: I did notice the thinly veiled criticisms of the U.S.’s “double standards” regarding sovereignty and NATO expansion. The document doesn’t contain specifics about a potential peace process and is therefore open to potential interpretations. Notably, it does not explicitly call for any Russian military withdrawal from occupied territories.
In the coming months, it is likely that China will come up with more specific plans to broker peace. The first point in the current document [”Respecting the Sovereignty of All Countries”] is apparently an attempt to reassure Ukraine and the West that China does not support Russia’s territorial annexations. The points which follow, however, point to a pause to NATO’s future expansion and lifting sanctions against Russia. These points hardly dispel the West’s impression of China’s bias toward Russia and will be difficult for Ukraine to accept under present circumstances. How to convince Ukraine of Beijing’s sincerity and true neutrality will remain a challenge.
MK: In this position paper, there’s no clear stance that [the war] might end if Russia decided to just withdraw. I would see it as part of, on the one hand, China’s own efforts to present itself as this neutral party. Secondly, it is probably also a signal sent to Europe, because there are some policymakers and elites in Europe that encouraged China to do something about Russia, and to use this leverage that they have with Russia in order to influence Moscow.
But I think China’s trying to square the circle. On the one hand, it wants to appeal to Europe and pull Europe a bit away from the U.S. But at the same time, it doesn’t want to criticize Russia in any way. This is why I think it leads to this very vague and general paper where China doesn’t take an explicit position, but rather tries to hide behind general formulations which on their own may be correct and rightful, but when you apply them, they don’t work.
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China might have been more explicit about the need for Russia to do certain things. Or, in practical terms, China’s leader might finally talk to President Zelenskyy. The Chinese leadership has avoided any bilateral talks, any phone calls with Zelenskyy, which also shows those difficulties — how China has maneuvered in between trying not to be associated with Russia, but at the same time, not wanting to suggest the outside world that their ties with Russia are somehow fragile because of this war.
G: Following up on the first point in the document, which calls for respecting the sovereignty of all countries, how do you interpret that in this context?
MK: This is very problematic because this sentence can be read in a number of ways. The first reading could just be that China means that Russia should respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. But then, the Russian policymakers might say that what China says is actually supporting the [2014] annexation of Crimea. China hasn’t ever formally recognized the annexation — but at the same time, China has never called for Crimea to return to Ukraine.
I think this is one of the problems of this position paper: Each side can read it as they want, or as it is convenient for their aims in this war.
G: Looking ahead at what role China wants to play in the peace process, do you think it will move toward more concrete asks of Russia or bilateral talks with Ukraine? And do you think Ukraine and the West would be open to China’s involvement?
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CC: One year into the conflict, neither side has been able to deliver a crushing blow on the battlefield. Consequently, neither side has strong incentives to engage in negotiations to end the conflict. As Russia’s most powerful partner, China definitely has leverage. China chose this moment to step in because it wants to counter the U.S.’s accusation that China took the side of the aggressor — Russia — and establish its image as a major global mediator.
Other than the two sides of the conflict, China has two target audiences. One is Europe, which has been rightly concerned about China’s role in supporting Russia and contemplating “decoupling” from China amid growing U.S.-China tension. Knowing that most European countries are averse to a protracted conflict, China hopes to be seen as playing a proactive role in ending the conflict while reassuring Europe that continuing engagement with China will not undermine European interests. The other major target audience is the Global South, which so far has not taken a side. China has endeavored to be seen as a leader of the Global South. Proposing a peace plan, which is dismissed by the West, will make China appear to be the more reasonable and pro-peace party as opposed to the U.S.’s “adding fuel to the fire.” In sum, Xi’s peace plan is fundamentally driven by China’s own interests.
In this sense, the fact that China is coming up with a peace plan now is more significant than the substance of the plan itself, which is unlikely to make either side happy. As the current status quo on the battlefield favors Russia [because Russia is still occupying large chunks of Ukrainian territory], a call to “freeze” the conflict as it is, even if in a demilitarized fashion, is still biased toward Russia. China’s point, however, is not for Ukraine and the West to accept this proposal, but to embellish its “neutral” and “pro-peace” image in order to appeal to Europe and the Global South.
MK: Any changes in China’s position will relate to potential changes on the ground. If Ukraine manages to regain some of its territories, if it demonstrates on the battlefield that it is capable of inflicting damage on the Russian forces, and if there is a success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, then I would expect China to be more flexible and perhaps to decide that, in its own interest, it’s better to help with the end of the conflict by distancing at least a bit from Russia or by pushing Russia to accept certain conditions if and when negotiations start. But I think that it really depends on what happens on the battlefield. At this stage, the calculus in Beijing is still that Russia is able to win this war.
G: Xi might visit Russia in April or May. Do you have any thoughts on why then, and what the aim of the visit would be?
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MK: If we are talking about April and May, it is most plausibly a sign that the Chinese side didn’t want the visit to take place in February, around the anniversary of the war.
Secondly, it is China’s turn. Apart from the period of the pandemic, when both leaders didn’t travel, they saw each other every year. Even before Putin’s return to the presidency. So in this sense, Xi Jinping’s not going to Moscow would have been read in the West very clearly as a signal of tensions in the relationship, and even if tensions are there, both sides would work hard to sweep them under the carpet.
So I think in this sense, Xi doesn’t have a choice. He needs to go to Moscow to demonstrate the relations are still very good and normal despite the war. But the fact that he’s not rushing there may be a sign that they are once again trying to strike this balance between cordial relations with Russia and attempts to be neutral.
Thanks to Dave Tepps for copy editing this article.
grid.news · by Lili Pike, China Reporter, and Tom Nagorski, Global Editor
23. Winning the Air Battle for Taiwan: Lessons from Ukraine’s Drone Operations
Conclusion:
Credibly preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan requires building a world-class force to rapidly attrit invasion forces, not a fielding a force on the cheap and planning from the start for a protracted, bloody fight. Of course, the Air Force’s drones don’t need the long-range, penetrating capabilities as its advanced inhabited aircraft – far from it. The most foundational advantage of any drone technology is that it has the potential to reduce costs in blood, treasure, and even political fallout. Fielding a next-generation combat drones and other innovative air and maritime technologies that didn’t flip the cost exchange ratio in favor of the U.S. would be a tremendous wasted opportunity. But the imperative to build large numbers of low-cost drones must be balanced with the strategic and operational demands facing the U.S. Air Force in the Indo-Pacific, which look very different from those now facing the Ukrainians.
Winning the Air Battle for Taiwan: Lessons from Ukraine’s Drone Operations - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Caitlin Lee · February 28, 2023
Military strategists will be studying the reasons behind Russia’s confounding failure to rapidly defeat Ukraine for years to come. But there is one point upon which they seem to have quickly reached agreement: low-cost, easy-to-use drone technologies are playing a pivotal role in repulsing Russia’s advances. Drones have transformed what were once “dumb” artillery rounds into precision weapons to attack Russian armor and personnel with devastating effect. Ukraine was first to adopt low-flying quadcopters as artillery spotters, but Russia quickly caught on after losing so many of its Soviet-era drones to Ukrainian air defenses early in the war. Commercial quadcopters made by DJI, a Chinese military company, have now become so ubiquitous on the battlefield that sometimes neither side is sure of their provenance. Russian leaders now hail DJI drones as a “symbol of modern warfare.”
The U.S. national security establishment is now looking to draw lessons from the creative employment of drones in 21st century interstate conflict. Careful analysis is essential as these lessons will inform U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps efforts to develop next-generation combat drones to shore up deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. One candidate lesson highlighted in these pages and elsewhere suggests Ukraine’s survival to date hinges largely on its ability to defend itself by simply contesting airspace with air defenses and an arsenal of low-cost drones consisting largely of homemade and commercial varieties that fly below adversary inhabited aircraft and air defenses. Maximilian Bremer and Kelly Grieco coined the term “air denial” to describe the new approach to deterrence, and advocate for the U.S. Air Force to adopt it as a “core mission.”
But U.S. national security leaders should not assume an unproven air denial approach, centered on relatively inexpensive missiles and drones, can become a centerpiece of American deterrence strategy. The air denial concept might have value for a weaker defender like Taiwan, which can learn from Ukraine’s effective use of layered, low-cost defenses to reduce (though not eliminate) missile strikes on its sovereign territory. However, the U.S. military’s operational concepts and technologies – including its next-generation combat drones – must be tailor-made to solve the nation’s unique strategic and operational problems. Viewed through this lens, air denial is not a sensible approach for the U.S. Air Force, which is called on to deter, fight and win the nation’s wars. Ukraine is in a fight for survival that hinges on holding and clearing ground in close-in, pitched battles. But U.S. forces are called on to project power over great distances to defeat highly adaptable, technologically advanced adversaries like China. The Air Force may struggle to control airspace in a great power war, but it should not throw out 100 years of air superiority doctrine to simply settle for contesting it. The outcome of America’s next war won’t be decided by quadcopter dogfights, so the Air Force’s next-generation combat drones will need to look and operate very differently than what we have seen to date in Ukraine.
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The Department of Defense and Air Force leaders should reject an air denial approach for U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific. There is little reason to suggest that a force built for air denial, centered around low-cost, short-range drones and air defenses, can deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. What the Air Force requires is a mix of crewed and uncrewed capabilities that can reach inside the range of Chinese weapon systems to rapidly attrit their invasion forces. Drones play a central role, but the drones that will make a war-winning difference for US forces are not the drones of Ukraine. Air Force drones will need more range, survivability, autonomy and sophisticated sensors and payloads to bring real coercive leverage to the table.
Deterrence by Denial and the Future of Drone Warfare
The types of drones the Air Force needs to defeat China in a great power conflict should be determined by an assessment of what the service will be asked to do. While this sounds obvious, today there is no clear consensus regarding the approach that U.S. military forces should take to defeat large-scale aggression by great powers. The 2018 and 2022 national defense strategies call on U.S. forces to deter large-scale aggression through a strategy of deterrence by denial, which involves building the forces, postures and capabilities to credibly convince adversaries that aggression is infeasible or unlikely to succeed. As RAND analyst David Ochmanek explains, denial is “self evidently” the most credible deterrence strategy for the Indo-Pacific because it confronts China with the prospect of failing to forcibly absorb Taiwan. Furthermore, it does so in a way that is more credible and less escalatory than threats to impose costs on the aggressor. But what would a denial campaign practically look like? This is still a subject of debate and yet it has huge implications for how the services organize, train, and equip their forces to deter and defeat aggression by the nation’s most capable adversaries.
Perhaps the clearest articulation of a denial strategy is Ochmanek’s concept of blunt and hold, variations of which have been espoused by some influential U.S. defense leaders. In general, blunt and hold sets a high bar for deterrence because it requires the U.S. military to field forces that can rapidly sink large numbers of China’s military vessels, submarines, and cargo ships, as well as any air mobility aircraft delivering invasion forces. The objective, of course, is to implement this strategy on the battlefield before the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can secure a lodgment on Taiwan and present the United States with a fait accompli. In such a campaign, the Air Force would need to rapidly deliver striking power at scale – against potentially tens of thousands of Chinese military targets, and to do so with little advance warning. U.S. forces would be up against China’s long range missiles, which would make it difficult for the Air Force to gain and maintain air superiority. To contribute to a blunt and hold campaign, next-generation drones would need survivability, range, and the right sensors and payloads to operate inside China’s formidable network of missiles, radar, and electronic warfare systems so they can sense and detect invasion forces and kill targets of opportunity.
Air denial offers an alternative strategic approach with very different implications for force structure and drone concepts and technologies. Bremer and Grieco argue that blunt and hold is too complicated and costly because it requires projecting power into contested areas to stop a Chinese invasion by employing advanced, survivable technologies such as inhabited aircraft, submarines, and long-range low-observable munitions. Such a strategy is becoming increasingly unsustainable, they argue, as evidenced by the rising costs of advanced crewed warplanes. In his thoughtful piece on the need to examine alternatives to blunt-and-hold, Evan Montgomery notes that blunt and hold also requires the U.S. military to keep assets in a high state of readiness for both early warning and rapid response. Maintaining such a force-in-being is financially taxing and could ironically create opportunities for the adversary. China is practiced in wearing down opponents through peace time cost imposition, he notes. So, an obvious option for Beijing is to raise and lower tensions just enough that the financial and political costs of the U.S. maintaining a rapid attrition posture in the Indo-Pacific become prohibitive over time.
Bremer and Grieco see air denial is an attractive alternative because it would allow the United States and allies to flip the cost exchange ratio in favor of the U.S forces. By eliminating the need to field the force required to rapidly attrit adversary invasion forces, air denial lowers the bar to simply forward-deploying assets to deny adversaries freedom of movement over allies’ sovereign territory. Bremer and Grieco point to what they see as the success of air denial in Ukraine, where neither side has been able to gain air superiority. They argue that air defenses effectively deny sanctuary at high altitudes and commercial drones contest the airspace in the lower altitudes – what they refer to as the “air littoral.” However, it’s not clear that drones have actually contested airspace at lower altitudes; they don’t regularly shoot down Russian aircraft.
Applied to great power conflict, Bremer and Grieco do envision a meatier version of air denial, which involves creating an “aerial minefield” over U.S. allies’ sovereign airspace, where thousands of drones, low-flying missiles, loitering, munitions, anti-aircraft artillery, electronic warfare systems and shoulder-fired missiles work in concert to stave off incoming invasion forces. Deployed on Taiwan or NATO’s Eastern flank, they envision air denial as the backbone of a strategy to increase both the costs and uncertainty of Chinese and Russian efforts to rapidly seize territory. This approach, at least, places greater emphasis on killing invasion forces, which is exactly what deterrence by denial requires. That said, the argument still has serious weaknesses as applied to US forces and operational problems, and there is no evidence to suggest it’s a valid blueprint for US force planning.
Air Denial, Denied
Based on the experience of Ukraine, Bremer and Grieco recommend the Air Force dramatically change its force structure. In their view, the Air Force should move away from penetration and precision strikes with inhabited aircraft in favor of an air denial concept built around drone swarms and air defenses. But air denial has two fundamental flaws: it overestimates the deterrent impact of contesting airspace, and at the same time, underestimates the deterrent impact of air superiority and power projection. A force structure tailored to air denial would dramatically erode the coercive power of the U.S. Air Force, with serious consequences for U.S. strategic deterrence.
The principal problem with air denial as a deterrence strategy is there is no evidence it works. Bremer and Grieco argue it can preserve the status quo, but a quick look at any updated map of Ukraine shows that it has not deterred Russia from occupying territory. Equally important, Ukraine has not been able to prevent serious and ongoing damage to its national infrastructure and population. Ukraine continues to contest Russia’s annexation of four of its eastern provinces, while Russia continues to launch offensives against Ukraine. At best, air denial has kept Ukraine in the fight, although how much of that is due to Ukraine’s adroit employment of air denial, versus Russia’s own ineptitude in achieving air superiority, is debatable. Assuming it’s the former and not the latter, air denial might be a useful asymmetric approach that allows weaker allies like to Taiwan to at least ensure that, if an invasion starts, it will be long, bloody and difficult. But the evidence from the war in Ukraine suggests even a force well-positioned for air-denial can’t prevent an invasion entirely, and Russia’s persistence in Ukraine proves the point that once they invade, revanchist powers are likely to knuckle down for a win despite a weaker defender’s resistance.
Another weakness of air denial is that it ignores the central role of power projection in U.S. national security strategy. The Air Force anchors the U.S. military’s ability to project large-scale military power over intercontinental distances and conduct sustained operations – a capability essential to offset imbalances in military power in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. Power projection goes hand-in hand with air superiority because, without at least small, limited windows of air control, it’s not possible to reach into adversary airspace to rapidly attrit invasion forces. Air denial, in contrast, seems to minimize the need for power projection and air superiority in favor of contesting airspace in a defensive posture – what Bremer and Grieco call “defense-in-vertical depth.” Such a posture may cost less in the planning stages, but it also cedes sanctuary to invasion forces and gambles that friendly forces will be able to exhaust the aggressor in a war of pure attrition that could ultimately prove quite costly. This approach is not a safe bet against China, which has the world’s largest military and is actively pursuing its own version of attrition warfare with intelligent swarms.
If the Air Force were to de-emphasize air superiority and power projection in favor of air denial, this choice could severely erode the credibility of the U.S. deterrent and U.S. alliance commitments, and by extension, U.S. power and influence. Even Ukrainian leaders, who are focused on national survival as opposed to fulfilling global commitments, have long recognized the deterrent effect of bringing the fight to the adversary. Kyiv sought as early as April 2022 to bolster deterrence by taking the fight to the Russians. Ukraine continues to ask Western allies for more long-range firepower, including MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, and, more recently F-16 fighter jets and long-range precision anti-tank artillery. Kyiv is now developing and fielding its own long-range drone, hardened against electronic attack to survive Russian air defenses. For its part, Russia is also seeking to reach deeper into contested Ukrainian territory to achieve its war aims. In recent months, Moscow has employed thousands of, fast, low-flying, long-range Iranian-built Shahed drones to counter the Ukrainians’ air denial strategy by overwhelming and exhausting Ukrainian air defenses. Both sides perceive that these long-range strikes have deterrent value – even if only symbolic. Russia expert Michael Kofman compared Ukraine’s drone strikes against Russian airfields in December 2022 to the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Although those U.S. bombers caused little damage, they demonstrated the Japanese homeland was vulnerable to attack and rallied U.S. public opinion.
The Air Force’s Drone Operations
Air denial is not an appropriate core mission for the U.S. Air Force, so there is no reason to think that Ukraine’s drone concepts and operations automatically apply to U.S. strategic requirements or operational needs. To shore up the Air Force’s combat credibility, the service must continue to rely on its advanced assets to project power and gain air superiority. As budget pressure has caused the number of those systems to decline, the Air Force will also need to bring more affordable mass to a conflict that could see levels of combat attrition on par with World War II. Analysis conducted by the U.S. Air Force, RAND Corporation, and our own work at the Mitchell Institute Center for UAV and Autonomy Studies suggests that large numbers of low-cost drones can play a critical role in reducing risk to Air Force missions while significantly raising the costs of aggression for peer adversaries. But these drones need the survivability, range, and sensors and payloads necessary to contribute to a blunt and hold campaign.
Arguably the most important characteristic of the Air Force’s next generation drones will be survivability. Next-generation drones will need to operate inside China’s anti-access/area denial environment to sense invasion forces and kill targets of opportunity, freeing up advanced inhabited assets to deliver firepower at volume. Runway independent drones, launched from rockets, or drones with the capability to operate from shorter civilian runways or dirt roads, provide a means to disperse from main operating bases that are likely to be targets of Chinese aircraft and missile attacks. Drones also will need survivability in the air, which can be achieved in two ways, both of which have value. One way is to field low-cost, “attritable” drones in large numbers so that they are easily replaced; Ukraine has adopted this approach, as has the Air Force, which needs affordable mass to augment its inhabited aircraft inventory. Another options is to build drones with low observable features that make them more difficult to detect. Low observability rises in importance if the drone is carrying precious sensors or payloads that need to survive to their targets, or if the drone is accompanying inhabited aircraft that need to preserve an element of surprise.
Range is another vital consideration. In Ukraine, short-range military and commercial drones have proven effective for artillery spotting and some direct attacks on the front lines. But sitting between Taiwan and China is 100 miles of ocean- the Taiwan Strait, and missile threats to U.S. air bases will require drones to base further away, in places like Japanese islands or perhaps the Philippines. Mitchell Institute research suggests drones may need minimum ranges of 1000 nautical miles or more just to effectively complete a mission inside the first island chain. That’s a far cry from the Bayraktar TB2’s 100 nautical mile range or the 46 minute flight time of a DJI drone.
The Air Force’s drones also need the right payloads. Bremer and Grieco suggest that the “mere threat” of a collision might be enough to keep advanced adversary aircraft out of drone-saturated airspace. But that is not a bet the U.S. Air Force should be willing to make. Drones need to do more than show up; they need low-cost sensors to detect targets, and both weapons-carrying drones and loitering munitions can help deliver the volume of fires needed to lay waste to Chinese invasion forces.
The requirement to bring mass to a highly contested battlespace also will create new challenges for both drone operations and logistics. The drones of Ukraine take commands from their operators via radio control or satellite links. The Air Force’s next generation drones will need to operate more independently from human control, incorporating autonomy to speed up decision-making, reduce reliance on vulnerable communications systems, and reduce burdens on human operators. Launching large numbers of drones in the Western Pacific also presents a serious logistics challenge to U.S. forces operating away from their home turf. And of course, all of these drone technologies need to be supported by software that can rapidly evolve, as both the U.S. and Russia compete to improve their ability to jam, spoof or shoot down drones as the conflict unfolds.
Building Next-Generation Drones for Great Power Conflict
Credibly preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan requires building a world-class force to rapidly attrit invasion forces, not a fielding a force on the cheap and planning from the start for a protracted, bloody fight. Of course, the Air Force’s drones don’t need the long-range, penetrating capabilities as its advanced inhabited aircraft – far from it. The most foundational advantage of any drone technology is that it has the potential to reduce costs in blood, treasure, and even political fallout. Fielding a next-generation combat drones and other innovative air and maritime technologies that didn’t flip the cost exchange ratio in favor of the U.S. would be a tremendous wasted opportunity. But the imperative to build large numbers of low-cost drones must be balanced with the strategic and operational demands facing the U.S. Air Force in the Indo-Pacific, which look very different from those now facing the Ukrainians.
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Caitlin Lee leads the Center for UAV and Autonomy Studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Caitlin Lee · February 28, 2023
24. The U.S. and China have a culture clash around their telephone hotline
I am reminded of Peter Drucker's quote: "culture eats strategy for breakfast." Though he was talking about business culture, it may have some application here.
The U.S. and China have a culture clash around their telephone hotline
Beijing’s rejection of a call from the Pentagon over its downed surveillance balloon could stem from a different view of what it means to use the hotline, one expert said.
NBC News · by Evelyn Cheng, CNBC
BEIJING — The politically important U.S.-China relationship is vulnerable to cultural differences — such as why a phone call doesn’t get picked up.
After the U.S. shot down an alleged Chinese spy balloon this month, China’s defense ministry declined a call with its U.S. counterpart, according to statements from both sides.
It isn’t the first time China didn’t answer the phone — a hotline set up for emergencies.
Chinese culture is a reason why, said Shen Yamei, deputy director and associate research fellow at state-backed think tank China Institute of International Studies’ department for American studies.
She said she wasn’t aware of what actually happened between the U.S. and China regarding the declined phone call. But she shared potential factors — “the hidden worry,” in her understanding of Chinese culture.
“We are really afraid that if the so-called conflict control or crisis control measures that the U.S. [has] been keen to set up are really put in place, then it might be encouraging more [reckless] and careless and brazenly bold action from the U.S. side,” Shen said.
Feb. 18, 202301:29
“We want China-U.S. relations to be stable,” she said. “If the U.S. is always talking about the worst-case scenario, the hotlines, the crisis control, then we are putting U.S.-China relations on a very low scale.”
The default U.S. view is quite different.
“You have hotlines because if something becomes difficult or tense, or there is at least a potential for a major misunderstanding and therefore a major miscalculation, you need to be able to talk to each other quickly,” said Barbara K. Bodine, a retired ambassador and director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
“Even though we probably don’t call it a hotline, if something happens with Ottawa we get on the phone and say, ‘Excuse me, what was that?’” she said. “That’s the basic part of diplomacy.”
Spy balloon vs. weather tracker
China and the U.S. have different explanations for why the balloon was flying over the U.S.
Beijing maintains it was a “civilian unmanned airship” for weather research simply blown off course. The U.S. says it was a “high-altitude surveillance balloon” attempting to spy on strategic sites within the country.
The incident, widely covered by U.S. media, forced U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to Beijing — a rare opportunity for both countries to communicate amid heightened tensions.
The fallout also makes activating hotlines “absolutely critical” for the bilateral relationship, said Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
The next step, he said, “is to have more in-depth dialogue about how we view the other side, what are red lines, what we want out of the relationship and what’s achievable and practical, and then look to build on that.”
Sailors recovering a high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Feb. 5.U.S. Navy
Officially, China’s defense ministry said it declined a call about the balloon because the U.S. decision to shoot it down “failed to create a proper atmosphere for dialogue and exchange between the two militaries.”
The Pentagon said it remained open to communication and doesn’t seek conflict.
But its press secretary said “a responsible nation” would have sent an alert if a civilian balloon was about to enter a sovereign nation’s airspace. “The PRC did not do that,” the secretary said, referring to the official name of China. “They didn’t respond until after they were called out.”
Beijing’s decisions are affected by the government’s closed structure and national history, while U.S. expectations on international communication are embedded in a view about relationships in general.
Using a hotline to diffuse a potentially dangerous situation does imply there’s a situation that needs to be diffused, Bodine said. “But if one side of a relationship thinks there is a misunderstanding or a problem, then any marriage counselor will tell you the other side needs to at least listen to why.”
And if that side says there’s no problem, “all of your worries and concerns and worst-scenario nightmares about what’s going on in your personal relationship are not going to get better,” she said. “They’re going to get worse.”
Future meetings
Shen from the China Institute of International Studies pointed out both sides have worked to manage tensions, and that it was important for both countries to communicate regularly, if not cooperate on issues such as climate change and international financial stability.
Blinken met with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, at a security conference in Munich this month. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is also expected to visit China.
Since the balloon incident, Beijing has published several papers.
One reiterated its stance on the Russia-Ukraine war, another discussed its “Global Security Initiative” that claims to support world peace. A third paper discussed so-called U.S. hegemony — going back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.
“It’s very important to prevent the rhetoric from being dominated by one opinion maker,” Shen said.
Beijing has long called for the U.S. to follow principles of “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation” — a position that often results in focusing on what’s favorable for China.
“Probably most countries would like to talk about the good things in the relationship and not necessarily talk about the areas of difference,” Bodine said. “And we wouldn’t want to have a relationship that only talks about good stuff.”
“If we didn’t talk about anything disagreeable, we wouldn’t need embassies on all sides.”
Evelyn Cheng, CNBC
Evelyn Cheng is a senior correspondent with CNBC.
NBC News · by Evelyn Cheng, CNBC
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: [email protected]
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