Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“This military model is extremely adaptable to any group. It has one simple requirement: before formulating a strategy or taking action, understand the structure of your group. You can always change it and redesign it to fit your purposes.”

- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

“you can’t fool all the people all the time,” but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”

- Will Durant, The Lessons of History

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

- John Steinbeck, "East of Eden”

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 2, 2023

2. What Ukraine Needs to Liberate Crimea

3. Aid to Ukraine: Much More Than Tanks

4. Why does Ukraine want Western jets—and will it get them?

5. Biden Aims to Deter China With Greater U.S. Military Presence in Philippines

6. DoD Statement on High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon

7. U.S. Tracking High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon

8. Suspected Chinese spy balloon found over northern U.S.

9. Ukraine Proves U.S. Troops Need Quick Access to Commercial Technology

10. The Pentagon must make a culture shift to embrace innovation

11. Blind Sided: A New Playbook for Information Operations – Irregular Warfare Center

12. Ukraine can’t retake Crimea soon, Pentagon tells lawmakers in classified briefing

13. Is the U.S. Military Capable of Learning From the War in Ukraine?

14. Xi set to host Blinken in signal of China-U.S. detente

15. Ukraine’s Coming Electricity Crisis

16. China says it's looking into report of spy balloon over US

17. Along Ukraine-Belarus border, a war of nerves — and drones

18. China and Russia are as close as ever, and that's a problem for the US

19. Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics

20. How the US is boosting military alliances to counter China

21. Ukraine War Drives Rapid Growth in South Korea’s Arms Exports

22. Tanking Up: Understanding the Materiel—and Moral—Implications of the New Armor Heading to Ukraine

23. Is China poised to help other unaligned powers usurp the dollar?

24. What is an OSINT Tool - Best OSINT Tools 2023

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-2-2023

Key Takeaways

A Ukrainian intelligence official stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to capture Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by March 2023, supporting ISW’s most likely course of action assessment (MLCOA) for a Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
Russian authorities blocked internet cell service in occupied Luhansk Oblast likely as part of an effort to intensify operational security to conceal new Russian force deployments in Luhansk Oblast.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov supported ISW’s MLCOA assessment and possibly suggested that Russian forces have mobilized substantially more personnel for an imminent offensive.
Russian officials are continuing efforts to frame the war in Ukraine as an existential threat to Russian audiences in order to set information conditions for protracted war and maintain domestic support for continued military operations. These efforts on the part of Russian officials are not succeeding in generating the likely desired effect of motivating Russians to want to participate in the war, however.
Russian and Ukrainian sources suggested that Russian forces may be preparing offensive actions in the Svatove area.
Russian forces intensified ground attacks in the Kreminna area on February 2.
Russian forces continued ground attacks northeast and southwest of Bakhmut.
Russian officials are likely trying to prepare the Russian military’s disciplinary apparatus for an influx of mobilized personnel.
Russian forces and occupation authorities continue efforts to identify and arrest Crimean Tatars on allegations that they associate with extremist movements banned in Russia.
Russian federal subjects and occupation authorities continued announcing patronage programs to support infrastructure projects in occupied territories.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Feb 2, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 2, 2023

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, George Barros, Layne Philipson, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 2, 7:15pm 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.

A Ukrainian intelligence official stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to capture Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by March 2023, supporting ISW’s most likely course of action assessment (MLCOA) for a Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Representative Andriy Chernyak told the Kyiv Post on February 1 that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to capture all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by March 2023.[1] Chernyak also stated that Russian forces are redeploying additional unspecified assault groups, units, weapons, and military equipment to unspecified areas of eastern Ukraine, likely in the Luhansk Oblast area.

Russian authorities blocked internet cell service in occupied Luhansk Oblast likely as part of an effort to intensify operational security to conceal new Russian force deployments in Luhansk Oblast. The only mobile cell service provider in Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast reported on February 2 that it would suspend mobile internet coverage in Luhansk Oblast starting on February 11 on orders from the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media.[2] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian officials already disabled mobile internet in occupied Luhansk Oblast as of February 2.[3] Ukrainian citizens have used cell phones to collect information about Russian forces in occupied Ukraine and send targeting information to the Ukrainian military.[4] Russian forces may be learning from their previous operational security failures and adapting to protect Russian force concentrations in Luhansk Oblast ahead of the major offensive about which Ukrainian officials are increasingly warning.[5]

Putin may have overestimated the Russian military’s own capabilities again, as ISW previously assessed.[6] ISW has not observed any evidence that Russian forces have restored sufficient combat power to defeat Ukraine’s forces in eastern Ukraine and capture over 11,300 square kilometers of unoccupied Donetsk Oblast (over 42 percent of Donetsk Oblast’s total area) before March as Putin reportedly ordered. ISW previously assessed that a major Russian offensive before April 2023 would likely prematurely culminate during the April spring rain season (if not before) before achieving operationally significant effects.[7] Russian forces’ culmination could then generate favorable conditions for Ukrainian forces to exploit in their own late spring or summer 2023 counteroffensive after incorporating Western tank deliveries.[8]

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov supported ISW’s MLCOA assessment and possibly suggested that Russian forces have mobilized substantially more personnel for an imminent offensive. Reznikov stated on February 2 that Russian forces are preparing to launch an offensive, likely in eastern or southern Ukraine.[9] Reznikov stated that Ukrainian officials estimate that the number of mobilized Russian personnel is higher than the Kremlin’s official 300,000 figure.[10] Reznikov stated that the Kremlin mobilized 500,000 Russian soldiers, although it is unclear whether this figure refers to Russian force generation efforts following the start of partial mobilization in September of 2022 or the total number of forces that Russia has committed to the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo Budanov stated on January 31 that there are currently 326,000 Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, excluding the 150,000 mobilized personnel still at training grounds.[11] The total 476,000 personnel could be representative of Reznikov‘s figure, or the 500,000 figure could reflect an assessment that ongoing Russian crypto-mobilization efforts since the end of the first mobilization wave have generated a substantial number of additional forces. ISW has not observed indicators that crypto-mobilization efforts in past months have produced as many as 200,000 additional mobilized personnel, however, although it is possible. The mobilization of 300,000 Russian citizens generated far-reaching domestic social ramifications and provisioning challenges, and the further covert mobilization of another 200,000 personnel would likely produce similarly noticeable problems.

Russian officials are continuing efforts to frame the war in Ukraine as an existential threat to Russian audiences in order to set information conditions for a protracted war and maintain domestic support for continued military operations. In a February 2 speech at a concert dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi troops by the Red Army in the Battle of Stalingrad, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia is once again facing a modern manifestation of Nazism that is directly threatening Russian security.[12] Putin falsely accused the collective West of forcing Russia to repel its aggression and remarked that Russia is “once against being threatened with German Leopard tanks” that are “going to fight with Russia on the soil of Ukraine with the hands of Hitler‘s descendants.” [13] Putin has previously similarly weaponized erroneous historical parallels to analogize the “special military operation” in Ukraine with the Great Patriotic War, partially in an effort to set long-term information conditions for a protracted war in Ukraine.[14] German tanks, and Ukraine and the West more generally, are nowhere near attacking Russian borders. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov similarly perpetuated the information operation that the war in Ukraine poses a tangible domestic threat to Russia on February 2 and claimed that Western-supplied long-range weapons necessitate efforts to drive Ukrainian artillery far enough away from Russian territory that Ukraine will no longer be able to strike these areas.[15] Lavrov is advancing an ongoing information operation that seeks to highlight the fictional threat of Ukrainian ground attacks on Russian territory to make the consequences of the war seem more salient to a domestic audience.

These efforts on the part of Russian officials are not succeeding in generating the likely desired effect of motivating Russians to want to participate in the war, however. Russian State Services announced that as of February 2, the acceptance of applications for new passports has been suspended.[16] Russian research and design joint-stock company Goznak (responsible for manufacturing security products such as banknotes and identity cards) responded with a statement that it has received an inundation of applications for the personalization of foreign passports, which require special embedded microchips.[17] The shortage of microchips for passports and subsequent suspension of passport applications are in part consequences of the mass application for foreign passports in 2022, partially due to the exodus caused by partial mobilization.[18] The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that it issued over 5.4 million passports in 2022, 40% more than in the previous year.[19] The increase in passport applications indicates that social conditioning efforts to bring the “special military operation” home to Russia and reinvigorate patriotic fervor are not having the desired effect. The Kremlin need not look further than passport statistics to poll domestic attitudes on the Russian population’s desire to fight Putin’s war.[20]

Key Takeaways

A Ukrainian intelligence official stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to capture Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts by March 2023, supporting ISW’s most likely course of action assessment (MLCOA) for a Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
Russian authorities blocked internet cell service in occupied Luhansk Oblast likely as part of an effort to intensify operational security to conceal new Russian force deployments in Luhansk Oblast.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov supported ISW’s MLCOA assessment and possibly suggested that Russian forces have mobilized substantially more personnel for an imminent offensive.
Russian officials are continuing efforts to frame the war in Ukraine as an existential threat to Russian audiences in order to set information conditions for protracted war and maintain domestic support for continued military operations. These efforts on the part of Russian officials are not succeeding in generating the likely desired effect of motivating Russians to want to participate in the war, however.
Russian and Ukrainian sources suggested that Russian forces may be preparing offensive actions in the Svatove area.
Russian forces intensified ground attacks in the Kreminna area on February 2.
Russian forces continued ground attacks northeast and southwest of Bakhmut.
Russian officials are likely trying to prepare the Russian military’s disciplinary apparatus for an influx of mobilized personnel.
Russian forces and occupation authorities continue efforts to identify and arrest Crimean Tatars on allegations that they associate with extremist movements banned in Russia.
Russian federal subjects and occupation authorities continued announcing patronage programs to support infrastructure projects in occupied territories.

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.

Ukrainian Counteroffensives—Eastern Ukraine
Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and one supporting effort);
Russian Subordinate Main Effort—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Ukrainian Counteroffensives (Ukrainian efforts to liberate Russian-occupied territories)

Eastern Ukraine: (Eastern Kharkiv Oblast-Western Luhansk Oblast)

Russian and Ukrainian sources suggested that Russian forces may be preparing offensive actions in the Svatove area. Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on February 2 that Russian forces have increased the rate of shelling in the Svatove and Kremmina directions in preparation for an offensive effort in February, supporting ISW’s previous assessment that a Russian offensive effort in Luhansk Oblast is the most likely course of action (MLCOA).[21] A Russian milblogger claimed on February 2 that Ukrainian forces pulled troops to the Kupyansk area due to increased Russian forays on the Hrianykivka-Petropavlivka-Synkivka line (about 50km northwest of Svatove).[22] The milblogger also added that Ukrainian troops deployed sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Kyslivka (25km northwest of Svatove) to monitor the Russian presence in the area.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 2 that Russian forces are preparing to destroy road infrastructure and mine bridges, dams, and crossings near Tavilzhanka (50km north of Svatove on the P79 Kupyansk-Lyman Druhyi highway) in Kharkiv Oblast.[24] These attacks may suggest that Russian forces seek to disrupt Ukrainian logistics necessary for future Ukrainian advances or could be meant to isolate the Ukrainian-held territory between Kupyansk and the front line to facilitate Russian offensive operations in this sector.

Russian forces intensified ground attacks in the Kreminna area on February 2. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Ploshchanka (16km northwest of Kreminna), Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), Chervonopopivka (6km north of Kreminna), Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), and Kuzmyne (3km southwest of Kreminna) in Luhansk Oblast.[25] This is notably a higher number of reported repelled attacks than is typical in the Kreminna area. A Russian milblogger claimed on February 2 that unspecified Russian airborne elements with the support of the 144th Motorized Rifle Division and its 59th Tank Regiment (20th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) pushed Ukrainian forces back by one kilometer near Kreminna.[26] Another Russian milblogger claimed on February 2 that the 144th Motorized Rifle Division almost reached Yampolivka (16km west of Kreminna) in Donetsk Oblast and that assault groups began advancing on Ukrainian positions near Dibrova.[27] ISW continues to assess that the MLCOA for the coming months is a Russian offensive effort in Luhansk Oblast, likely along the Svatove-Kreminna line, and will continue to present indicators that this offensive may be beginning as it observes them. The increased pace of attacks near Kreminna on February 2 may suggest that Russian forces are setting conditions for an offensive effort in this sector, but the offensive effort itself has likely not yet commenced.

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort—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 2. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself; northeast of Bakhmut near Spirne (27km northeast), Bilohorivka (20km northeast), Vasyukivka (10km north), Blahodatne (5km north), and Krasna Hora (4km north); and southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka (7km southwest).[28] Geolocated footage confirms that Russian forces have made incremental advances northeast of Bakhmut near Rozdolivka (15km northeast of Bakhmut) and on the northern outskirts of Bakhmut itself.[29] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that the Wagner Group captured Sacco i Vanzetti and Mykolaivka, two settlements about 15km north of Bakhmut, on February 1 and 2, respectively.[30] Russian milbloggers continued to claim that Wagner Group forces are trying to encircle Krasna Hora from the direction of Paraskoviivka (5km north of Bakhmut) and Blahodatne and making gains in urban areas on the northern and eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[31] Russian milbloggers additionally reported that Ukrainian troops are holding their positions in Ivanivske (5km west of Bakhmut along the T0504 Kostyantynivka-Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut highway) and claimed that Wagner fighters have advanced to within two kilometers of the T0504 highway.[32]

It is still unclear whether Russian operations in the Rozdolivka-Mykolaivka area northeast of Bakhmut are intended to support the encirclement of Bakhmut by pushing southwest along the T1302 Bakhmut-Siversk highway, or if they are meant to splinter from the Bakhmut axis and push northeast along the T1302 towards Siversk. Russian forces may feasibly seek to use gains north of Soledar as a launching pad for northeastward attacks towards Siversk, potentially to support enveloping the Ukrainian defensive position on the west side (right bank) of the Siversky Donetsk River. Russian forces may also be trying to consolidate gains northeast of Bakhmut, however, in order to create a wider pocket of defensible terrain from which they can attempt to encircle Bakhmut by pushing down along the T1302. ISW will continue to monitor the situation on this sector of the front to determine indicators for intent to either support the encirclement of Bakhmut or open a new axis of attacks towards Siversk. Further Russian operations northeast of the Rozdolivka-Mykolaivka area may be indicators of the Siversk course of action (COA).

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks along the western outskirts of Donetsk City or in western Donetsk Oblast on February 2. Russian milbloggers noted that the pace of hostilities on the Donetsk front has decreased but that Russian troops are still fighting for the western parts of Marinka, on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City.[33] A Russian source reported that elements of the Donetsk People’s Republic 5th Brigade and tank battalion elements of the 103rd Motorized Rifle Regiment of the 150th Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) are operating in the Marinka area.[34] Russian milbloggers also claimed that the frontline near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City) has stabilized and that fighting in this area has become positional.[35] A Ukrainian reserve officer claimed that an unspecified brigade of the Russian 3rd Army Corps and a few battalions of the 36th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) are reinforcing the front near Vuhledar.[36] Head of the Joint Press Center of Ukrainian Defense Forces in the Tavriisk direction, Colonel Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi, reported that 10 soldiers of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade surrendered to Ukrainian troops near Vuhledar.[37]

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

Ukrainian forces continue to strike Russian concentration areas and logistics in southern Ukraine. Social media sources amplified geolocated footage on February 2 that shows Ukrainian forces striking Russian surface-to-air missile systems near Oleskhy, Kherson Oblast, reportedly belonging to the 80th Separate Arctic Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Northern Fleet.[38] Geolocated footage published on February 2 shows the aftermath of a reported Ukrainian HIMARS strike on a Russian ammunition depot near Novoukrainka, Zaporizhia Oblast.[39]

Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv oblasts on February 2.[40] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City and Ochakiv, Mykolaiv Oblast.[41]

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

Russian officials are likely trying to prepare the Russian military’s disciplinary apparatus for an influx of mobilized personnel. Russian Duma Deputies Andrey Kartopolov and Andrey Krasov submitted a bill that would allow Russian military unit commanders and garrison commandants to arrest personnel, send them to guardhouses, and hold them there for up to 10 days without a court decision.[42] Russian officials likely introduced the measure to prepare the Russian military’s disciplinary apparatus for the likely deployment of roughly 150,000 remaining mobilized personnel to Ukraine in support of a Russian offensive in the coming months, as well as to prepare for future waves of mobilization. Russian officials likely seek to avoid the chaos that the Russian military faced during partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 when the rapid influx of mobilized personnel resulted in a significant increase in cases of desertion, refusal to follow orders, and other disciplinary offenses. The bill would allow the Russian military to respond more expeditiously to the increase in disciplinary misconduct that would likely accompany the large-scale deployment of mobilized personnel.

Russian officials are reportedly intensifying crackdowns against migrants within Russia. A Russian source stated that Moscow City police have tightened checks on migrants and have initiated criminal cases for the forgery of migration documents on a massive scale.[43] The source stated that Russian law enforcement became more attentive to pursuing criminal charges against illegal migrants, instead of just expelling them from Russia.[44] Select Russian officials have recently framed non-Russian migrants as a source of crime and social unrest, and the reported increase in crackdowns on migrants in Russia may be tied to this rhetoric.[45] Russian officials may also be attempting to coerce migrants into serving with the Russian military in Ukraine in place of serving out prison terms. This possible effort could also be aimed at providing the Wagner Group with a larger recruitment pool amid indications that its prison recruitment campaign is slowing.[46]

Ukrainian sources reported that Russian officials are continuing covert mobilization measures in occupied territories. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 2 that Russian occupation officials in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast ordered all budget and communal institutions to submit lists of persons to the occupation military registration office and that a special commission will evaluate these people for conscription into the Russian military.[47]

Ukrainian sources reported that Russian servicemembers continue to face issues in completing contracts due to the partial mobilization decree. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian military is refusing to release 300 Russian soldiers operating in Luhansk Oblast from service, despite the fact that their three-month contracts have expired.[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that these Russian servicemembers have not received any financial support despite their continued service.[49] ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin will not formally rescind the partial mobilization decree in order to legally justify the continued service of mobilized personnel for an indefinite period of time.

Russian sources are likely amplifying claims that select groups of foreigners are serving in a Russian volunteer battalion to signal to specific foreign countries that there are supposedly domestic constituencies in their countries that hold pro-Russian positions. Russian sources amplified claims on February 2 that Turkish volunteers began combat training with Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration head Yevgeny Balitsky’s Sudaplatov Volunteer Battalion occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[50] One Russian source amplified a video showing an anonymous volunteer speaking Turkish, but Russian sources did not provide any other visual confirmation that Turkish nationals were serving with the volunteer battalion.[51] Russian sources have also claimed that Serbian and Swedish nationals are serving in the same volunteer battalion.[52] ISW has not observed any confirmation that Turkish, Serbian, or Swedish nationals are serving in this volunteer formation. Whether these foreign nationals are serving in this formation or not, Russian sources are likely amplifying these claims to signal to Turkey, Serbia, and Sweden that there are supposed domestic constituencies in their respective countries that hold pro-Russian positions. If these claims are true, then the volunteer battalion will likely face significant command and control challenges.

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 forces and occupation authorities continue efforts to identify and arrest Crimean Tatars on allegations that they associate with extremist movements banned in Russia. Russian sources claimed on February 2 that the Russian Federal State Security Service (FSB) arrested an alleged member of the Noman Chelebidzhikhan Volunteer Battalion (an armed resistance formation established and disbanded in 2016 to reject Russia’s invasion of Crimea, which remains banned in Russia).[53] The FSB’s recent arrests of Crimean Tatars are likely connected to Russia’s long-standing effort to consolidate societal control of occupied Crimea by promoting the notion that anti-Russian sentiment is extremist or terrorist activity.[54] The FSB’s intensifying crackdowns on Crimean Tatars are also likely connected with Russia’s large-scale efforts to conduct an ethnic cleansing campaign in occupied territories.

Russian federal subjects and occupation authorities continued announcing patronage programs to support infrastructure projects in occupied territories on February 2. Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin and Kamchatka Krai Governor Vladimir Solodov announced on February 2 that Kamchatka Krai has taken patronage of Svitlodarsk and Myronivskyi, both in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[55] Pushilin stated that Kamtachtka Krai has already provided the two settlements with humanitarian aid and claimed that he and Solodov discussed plans to build roads, kindergartens, schools, and a sports complex.[56] Pushilin stated that residents in occupied Svitlodarsk and Myronivskyi should expect the results of the partnership by the fall of 2023.[57]

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.)

Belarusian military authorities stated that Belarusian and Russian forces concluded their joint tactical aviation exercises on February 2, as ISW assessed on February 1.[58] It is unclear whether the Russian aircraft that deployed to Belarusian airfields to participate in these exercises will remain in Belarus or return to Russia.

Belarusian maneuver elements continue conducting exercises in Belarus. Unspecified elements of the Belarusian 38th Airborne Assault Brigade conducted live fire training at the Brest Training Ground in Brest, Belarus, on February 2.[59]

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://www.kyivpost dot com/post/11732

[2] https://news dot obozrevatel.com/economics/dobro-pozhalovat-v-rossiyu-v-lnr-bolshe-ne-budet-mobilnogo-interneta.htm; https://t.me/s/milinfolive?before=96412; https://mcs dot ooo/articles/uvazaemye_abonenty_01_02_2023

[3] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/02/vorog-vidklyuchyv-mobilnyj-internet-na-luganshhyni/

[12] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70434; https://t.me/readovkanews/51850

[13] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70434; https://t.me/readovkanews/51850

[15] https://tass dot ru/politika/16944163

[16] https://www.gosuslugi dot ru/zagran

[18] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/01/31/v-rossii-v-2022-godu-vydali-maksimalnoe-chislo-zagranpasportov-za-devyat-let

[19] https://мвд dot рф/dejatelnost/statistics/migracionnaya/item/35074904/

[37] https://24tv dot ua/boyi-za-vugledar-biytsi-155-brigadi-rosiyi-zdalisya-polon-pid_n2248273; https://t.me/Bratchuk_Sergey/28638; https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/02/02/u-polon-zdalysya-bijczi-sumnozvisnoyi-brygady-okupantiv-yaki-maroderyly-v-buchi-ta-irpini/

[42] https://sozd.duma dot gov.ru/bill/289614-8 ; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/02/v-gosdumu-vnesli-zakonoproekt-razreshayuschiy-bez-suda-otpravlyat-pod-arest-voennosluzhaschih;

understandingwar.org

2. What Ukraine Needs to Liberate Crimea

Conclusion:

Instead of allowing the conflict to drag on through the winter, the Biden administration should help Ukraine bring the war to a swift and decisive end. Doing so might allow Crimea’s final status to be determined through negotiation rather than force, sparing both Ukraine and Russia the tragedy of another year of fighting. It would also secure Ukrainian democracy, dissuade authoritarian powers from considering military aggression in the future, and reduce the risk of a nuclear escalation that could spiral into an existential conflict.

What Ukraine Needs to Liberate Crimea

A Credible Military Threat Might Be Enough

By Alexander Vindman

February 2, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Vindman · February 2, 2023

The next six months will witness a great deal of human tragedy. Ukraine’s armed forces will face harsh battlefield conditions, and Ukrainian civilians will continue to endure daily Russian attacks. Meanwhile, Russia’s underequipped and poorly led troops will suffer thousands of casualties, destroying the country’s remaining fighting capability. Already, the Russian military has suffered “significantly more than 100,000” deaths and injuries, according to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. And thanks to the neglect and cruel indifference of President Vladimir Putin’s regime, thousands more will perish this winter because of the Kremlin’s callous disregard for human life.

With the help of newly promised Western tanks and other weapons, Ukraine’s armed forces will also liberate more territory in the east and south of the country, making it possible to imagine an eventual Ukrainian campaign to retake Crimea. Illegally annexed by Putin in 2014, the peninsula served as a staging ground for Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Now, occupation of Crimea enables the Russian military to threaten Ukrainian positions from the south and gives Russia’s Black Sea Fleet a forward base for carrying out long-range attacks. But for the first nine month of the war, Kyiv’s Western backers were reluctant to support any military effort to return the territory to Ukraine, partly out of concern that such an attempt would cross a redline for Putin and invite disastrous Russian retaliation and partly because the peninsula is now home to a sizable number of people who identify with Russia, which could make it more difficult to reintegrate the territory into Ukraine.

For much of last year, while the idea of liberating Crimea remained academic, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was willing to set aside the question of the region’s near-term status. Ukrainian forces were focused on liberating occupied territory outside the peninsula, and the future of Crimea seemed likely to be determined after the end of the war through diplomatic negotiations. But as the war has progressed and Ukraine has liberated large swaths of its territory from occupying Russian forces, Zelensky’s rhetoric around Crimea has shifted. “Crimea is our land, our territory,” he said last month in a video appeal to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Give us your weapons,” he urged, and Ukraine will retake “what is ours.” And according to The New York Times, the Biden administration has begun to come around to the idea that Ukraine may need to threaten Russia’s foothold on the peninsula to strengthen its negotiating position, even at the risk of escalating the conflict.

If earnest negotiations were to start soon, Zelensky might still be open to a deal that ended the war and deferred the question of Crimea to a later date. But if the fighting drags on through the spring and summer and Ukraine inflicts enormous casualties on Russia while liberating substantial territory, it will become increasingly difficult for Zelensky to grant Putin a face-saving exit from the war and permit Russia’s continued but temporary occupation of Crimea. By the summer, Ukraine is likely to begin targeting more of Russia’s military infrastructure in Crimea in preparation for a broader campaign to liberate the peninsula. Instead of waiting for this scenario to play out, risking a longer and more dangerous war that could embroil NATO, Washington should give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively in all occupied territories north of Crimea—and to credibly threaten to take the peninsula militarily.

Doing so would force Putin to the negotiating table and create an opening for diplomatic talks while the final status of Crimea remains unsettled, offering Putin a path out of Ukraine that doesn’t guarantee his political demise and allowing Ukraine to avoid an enormously costly military campaign that is by no means guaranteed to succeed. The eventual deal would require an immediate reduction of Russian conventional forces on the peninsula and outline a path to a referendum allowing the people of Crimea, including those displaced after the 2014 invasion, to determine the final status of the region.

LIBERATION THE HARD WAY

Contrary to what some skeptical analysts have asserted, a Ukrainian military campaign to liberate Crimea is hardly out of the question. The first step would be to pin down Russia’s forces in the Kherson and Luhansk regions and in the northern part of Donetsk. Next, Ukraine would free the remainder of Zaporizhzhia Province and push through southern Donetsk to reach the Sea of Azov, severing Russia’s land bridge to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces would also need to destroy the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Russia to the Crimean peninsula and allows Moscow to resupply its troops by road and rail. An explosion knocked out part of the bridge in October 2022, but it may be fully restored by the summer.

Without a land bridge or road or rail links to Crimea, the Kremlin would be forced to revert to maritime resupply, but ferries and barges would not meet its logistical needs for fighting in Crimea and southern Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces would carry out weeks of strikes on Russian forces and infrastructure to degrade the enemy’s military capability. Targets would include logistics hubs, air bases, command and control centers, naval installations, and transportation nodes.

Western powers don’t need to risk a perilous and prolonged war.

If Ukraine were to succeed in this initial phase of the operation, it would need to conduct land and amphibious attacks to gain a foothold in Crimea—another herculean effort. Then it would need to build up forces in multiple locations in northern Crimea so that it could seize large strategic installations such as the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, the Crimean capital of Simferopol, the coastal city of Feodosiya, and the port of Kerch. To achieve these objectives, Ukraine would need to concentrate its forces in Kherson and in newly captured territory in northern Crimea, making them vulnerable to a Russian tactical nuclear strike. For this reason (and because the loss of Crimea could endanger Putin’s regime), the final phase of this campaign would be the most perilous.

Even with a flood of Western support, Ukraine would struggle to undertake such an operation. The German Leopard 2 tanks, British Challenger 2 tanks, and American M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles promised in recent weeks would certainly improve the odds. But the Ukrainian military would need hundreds of these vehicles as well as an air attack capability (either a dozen well-armed combat drones or hundreds of smaller single-use anti-armor drones), thousands of HIMARS rocket rounds and long-range missiles, and tens of thousands of artillery shells. It would also need greater manned airpower and engineering, amphibious, and logistics capacity to penetrate fortified Russian defensive lines, clear hundreds of miles of occupied territory, and conduct amphibious and ground assaults to cross into Crimea and dislodge Russian forces.

A RECIPE FOR DISASTER

Western reluctance to fully support Ukraine and defeat Russia—illustrated both by the enduring resistance of Washington and its allies to providing Ukraine with all the weapons systems it needs and by their drawn-out timelines for delivering what they have promised—undercuts Ukraine’s ability to conduct such an offensive and will likely cause the war to stretch deep into 2023. This is a recipe for incremental escalation. Losing Crimea militarily would strike a heavy blow to Putin’s credibility, so as the war drags on, he could resort to clandestine means to warn NATO off from supporting Ukraine, conducting deniable attacks on computer networks and infrastructure in Europe and the United States or causing industrial chemical or nuclear accidents in Ukraine to demonstrate his willingness to escalate. The West has shown little appetite for risk so far, so Putin may think he can bluff his way to an agreement with Ukraine that meets his demands.

But Western officials are less worried about Russian nuclear saber rattling than they once were. And in the face of incremental Russian escalation, the Euro-Atlantic resolve to back Ukraine will hold, as it has throughout the war. Instead of folding, the West will respond to the Kremlin’s gradual escalation with gradual increases in military support. As a result, NATO and Russia will continue to inch toward confrontation, progressively increasing the risk that an accident or miscalculation ignites a full-scale war. This is a formula for a conflagration that scorches NATO and for a potential escalation from conventional to nuclear war.

In reality, Putin has no interest in a fight with NATO. That much he has made clear by reserving no conventional military capability for such a confrontation. But that doesn’t mean the Russian leader isn’t willing to play a dangerous game of chicken with the West. And the longer that game drags on, the greater the chance it will end in tragedy.

CREDIBLE THREAT, POSSIBLE PEACE

Western powers don’t need to risk a perilous and prolonged war. They can help bring the conflict to a much swifter conclusion by delivering the weapons, equipment, and logistical support that Ukraine needs to expel Russian troops from all occupied territories north of Crimea and to credibly threaten Moscow’s hold on the peninsula.

Right now, Ukraine is winning with only moderate support from the West. The tanks and other materiel recently promised by the United States, Germany, and various other European powers will undoubtedly give Ukraine an even greater advantage. But to convince Putin that he is better off withdrawing from Crimea, Western countries will need to do much more. They will need to do away with the artificial constraints they have placed on military assistance to Kyiv and supply the long-range weapons that would allow Ukraine to play offense as well as defense. And they will need to deliver hundreds of tanks, armored personnel carriers, drones, planes, and other weapons needed to threaten the liberation of Crimea.

Instead of allowing the conflict to drag on through the winter, the Biden administration should help Ukraine bring the war to a swift and decisive end. Doing so might allow Crimea’s final status to be determined through negotiation rather than force, sparing both Ukraine and Russia the tragedy of another year of fighting. It would also secure Ukrainian democracy, dissuade authoritarian powers from considering military aggression in the future, and reduce the risk of a nuclear escalation that could spiral into an existential conflict.

ALEXANDER VINDMAN, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and former Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, is a Hauser Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School and a director of the Informed American Leadership program at the VetVoice Foundation.
MORE BY ALEXANDER VINDMAN

Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Vindman · February 2, 2023

3. Aid to Ukraine: Much More Than Tanks

Please go to this link to view the charts and graphs. https://www.csis.org/analysis/aid-ukraine-much-more-tanks

Aid to Ukraine: Much More Than Tanks

csis.org · by Commentary by Mark F. Cancian Published February 2, 2023

Although Germany’s angst about tanks dominated the discussion the recent Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) (ultimately, the Germans agreed), there is much more going on than just tanks. Allies are squeezing more air defense from their limited capabilities, expanding artillery support, building Ukraine’s inventory of armored vehicles, and might have a few surprises hidden away in the bland bureaucratic language. The most important news is that the aid continues at a high level.

Aid Continues

The controversy about tanks gives a misplaced sense that the meeting’s success—and Ukraine’s future―hinged on their availability. Such a perception misses a key point: there is no silver bullet that will bring victory. Even if NATO and coalition countries provide tanks, they will not be a game changer. Tank battlefield capabilities will be useful, but numbers will be limited compared to the 800 or so tanks that Ukraine already possesses. Victory will come from the cumulative effect of weapons and munitions provided, training for Ukrainian soldiers and units, and the resilience of the Ukrainian people.

What is essential is that aid has continued at a high level, as evidenced in the recent European and U.S. aid packages. This has become a long war of attrition that requires military support across the board―weapons and munitions of all kinds as well as mundane elements like trucks, medical supplies, and spare parts. Ukraine can win the war without tanks if this level of overall support continues. If it gets tanks, but support is cut substantially, Ukraine will lose because its forces will gradually run out of munitions, mobility, and weapons.

The continuing high level of support is significant because skepticism about aid to Ukraine is increasing not just in the United States but across Europe. Everywhere a peace party is rising in strength, arguing that the war will be long, casualties and destruction will be great, and it is time to end the “forever war” through negotiations. Negotiations would inevitably result in some sort of in-place ceasefire, which would solidify Russia’s occupation. The UDCG meeting’s outcome reflects a rejection of that approach.

More Air Defense

Air and missile attacks against Ukrainian electrical infrastructure have been Russia’s most effective use of airpower. Although these attacks are periodic in spasms of 100 or so missiles and not continuous, they have nevertheless succeeded in shutting down a large part of Ukraine’s electrical grid and imposing hardship on the Ukrainian people. Thus, in the fall, Zelensky and the Ukrainian leadership focused on enhancing air defense.

NATO and the United States have sent some equipment, but there are limits because NATO and the United States had deactivated most of their ground-based air defense capability at the end of the Cold War. The commitment to transferring Patriot air and missile defense systems seemed to solve this problem. However, Patriot has superb but narrow capabilities. For example, it is far too expensive ($4 million per missile) to use against drones or many kinds of cruise missiles.

To enhance Ukraine’s air defenses, the United States and Europe have again squeezed their forces to provide additional systems. These will take a step towards establishing the robust defenses that Ukraine needs though many gaps will remain.

Remote Visualization

Expanding Artillery Support

Static front lines have put a premium on firepower. Thus, the war has become artillery intensive. The United States has already provided much support here, including 160 155 mm howitzers and a million rounds of 155mm ammunition. NATO allies have provided small amounts of other artillery systems and ammunition. All this support helps in a critical area but will not be enough to fully satisfy the front’s voracious appetite for firepower. New approaches will be needed.

Remote Visualization

Armored Vehicles

The expectation is that Ukraine will launch an offensive later in the winter or early spring. It has no choice since they must drive the Russians from its territory. Armored vehicles, which were largely absent from earlier packages, are now seen more frequently because of their usefulness in offensive operations

Remote Visualization

Hidden Surprises?

Before the UDCG meeting, several reports suggested that the ground-launched Small Diameter Bomb II (SDB II) might be included in the aid packages. The U.S. announcement does not include SDB II but does have the vague statement, “Additional ammunition for High Mobility Rocket System (HIMARS).” That is likely more guided MLRS rockets since those were provided previously. However, the phasing does not exclude ground-based SDB II. SDB II would be significant because of its longer range (93 miles).

If Ukraine has the ground launched SDB II, evidence will eventually emerge in a world of ubiquitous cellphone cameras. Even if SDB II is not in this aid package, it is worth watching for in case it appears in future packages because it would signal a change in administration policy.

Looking Ahead to the Ukrainian Offensive

Although tanks have received much attention, they will take many months to arrive on the battlefield. They will not be available for the initial phases of the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive. However, many of these other capabilities, particularly artillery, will arrive quickly. Ukrainians will then use them in the forthcoming offensive.

The aid packages are not all good news. The Europeans lag far behind what the United States is providing. While the eastern European countries and the United Kingdom are doing a lot, France, Spain, and Italy are absent entirely from the latest aid packages, and Germany, the wealthiest country in Europe, provides relatively little. Further, much of their equipment will take months to arrive. Some is new production, which will take years. Nevertheless, the overall size of the aid provided and the implied statement of political support is good news for Ukraine.

Mark F. Cancian is a retired Marine colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

Why does Ukraine want Western jets—and will it get them?

Russia’s air force has not yet gained the upper hand. That could soon change

The Economist

UKRAINE HAS been asking for fourth-generation Western combat jets pretty much since Russia invaded it in February 2022. But after January 25th, when the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, at last agreed to export Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine (nudged by a matching offer of M1 Abrams tanks from America), the demand has become more insistent. Ukraine wants American F-16s or F-15s, which are both numerous and being phased out by many NATO air forces as deliveries of the stealthy fifth-generation F-35 ramp up. On January 30th President Joe Biden said that America would not supply F-16s. Will Ukraine end up getting them anyway?

The request has become urgent. Ukraine is preparing to launch a spring offensive to regain territory, perhaps before the next wave of Russian mobilisation. The Russian air force has so far failed to establish air superiority over Ukraine, despite having a big advantage in both numbers and capability over the Ukrainian one, which relies principally on Soviet-era Mig-29s and Su-27s. That is thanks to a well-integrated ground-based air defence derived mainly from 1970s S-300 surface-to-air missiles and the large number of MANPADS (shoulder-launched missiles) supplied by NATO members. These have allowed Ukraine’s air force to contest the skies and provide much-needed support for ground forces. But this may be about to change.

Ukraine does not confirm how many aircraft and pilots it has lost, but it is undoubtedly feeling the effect of a year’s attrition. Worse, the missile and drone barrage targeting critical infrastructure and residential areas that the Russians have inflicted over the winter has left Ukraine’s anti-aircraft missile stocks dangerously low. A particular problem is Russia’s use of the Iranian Shahed-136 drone which can provide precision strikes on poorly defended targets, such as power stations. Most of the munitions needed to take them out are many times more expensive than the Shahed itself (which costs about $20,000). While urgently needing many more MANPADS, the Ukrainians fear that without the F-16s or other Western fast jets their ability to prevent Russia gaining air superiority is eroding.

So why has the West not yet supplied them? One reason is that some leaders, Mr Biden seemingly among them, fear that equipping Ukraine with F-16s would enable it to strike targets deep into Russian territory and would thus be seen by the Kremlin as escalatory, once again sparking threats of nuclear retaliation. Another reason often cited is that the F-16 is a complex system. Pilots need at least three months’ training and mechanics even more. It also requires considerable logistics support and long, smooth runways to get aloft; Ukraine does not have enough, though its air force says it is upgrading air fields across the country in anticipation of receiving Western jets. But these strips will immediately become targets for the Russians.

The first excuse has been offered almost every time Ukraine has asked the West for new or improved capabilities, especially for anything which can be labelled offensive rather than defensive. The truth is that the F-16, like tanks, can be both depending on how it is used. Also, suggests Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at RUSI, a think-tank, employing the F-16 for deep interdiction in Russia would put it at the mercy of Russian surface-to-air missiles, including the lethal S-400. There are probably better ways to hit remote targets in Russia.

The second rationale for not supplying the planes is more serious, but not insurmountable. Training for pilots and ground crews could begin immediately, before aircraft are sent. Douglas Barrie, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, another think-tank, says that runways are an issue, but pilots could use dispersed airfields. These could be numerous and would be harder for the Russians to find—but the landing strips would be shorter and rougher, and so put plane and pilot at greater risk. Still, if Ukrainians say they want F-16s, recent form suggests that they have a fairly good idea how they would use them.

Many of Ukraine’s supporters in the West have become convinced that it is not enough for Ukraine to avoid defeat, but that Russia must lose. The Netherlands has already indicated a willingness to send its F-16s. Ukraine says Poland is considering the same. The Pentagon is said to be preparing to give its assent to such exports. As usual, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, is leader of the laggards. If the West believes that without better fighter jets, Russia will eventually establish dominance over its airspace, it should provide them: this time sooner rather than later. ■

The Economist

5. Biden Aims to Deter China With Greater U.S. Military Presence in Philippines

My comments, among others, are below.

Biden Aims to Deter China With Greater U.S. Military Presence in Philippines

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · February 2, 2023

By Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt

Feb. 2, 2023

Updated 8:16 p.m. ET

U.S. officials say they are preparing to surge forces in the event of conflict with China, including over Taiwan, but do not intend to build up permanent bases.

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The new agreement allows the United States to put military equipment and build facilities in nine locations across the Philippines.Credit...Bullit Marquez/Associated Press

Feb. 2, 2023, 7:26 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — President Biden and his aides have tried to reassure Chinese leaders that they do not seek to contain China in the same way the Americans did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But the announcement on Thursday that the U.S. military is expanding its presence in the Philippines leaves little doubt that the United States is positioning itself to constrain China’s armed forces and bolstering its ability to defend Taiwan.

The announcement, made in Manila by Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. defense secretary, was only the latest in a series of moves by the Biden administration to strengthen military alliances and partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region with an eye toward countering China, especially as tensions over Taiwan rise.

“This is a really big outcome,” said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Society and an adviser to Mr. Biden when he was vice president. “You can better mass forces and project power if you can rotate into those locations in the Philippines.”

He added that the greater military presence “sends a deterrent message to China.”

Under Mr. Biden, the United States is working to strengthen military ties with Australia, Japan and India, and it has gotten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to speak out on potential threats from China.

President Biden, standing with President Xi Jinping of China, has said that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan in the event of conflict with China, but his aides insist that the policy of strategic ambiguity has not changed. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Austin’s announcement signals that the United States could use its own armed forces to push back harder against the Chinese military’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, where China and several Southeast Asian nations, including the Philippines, have territorial disputes. More important, they could aid Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army were to attack or invade the democratic, self-governing island, which China considers part of its territory.

Mr. Biden has said four times that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan in the event of conflict, but his aides insist that American policy has not changed. Since the United States ended formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has avoided declaring whether it would deploy military forces to defend Taiwan, a position commonly known as “strategic ambiguity.”

A congressional mandate requires every presidential administration to give weapons of a defensive nature to Taiwan, and Mr. Biden’s team is intent on accelerating that and shaping the sales packages so that Taiwan becomes a “porcupine” that China would fear attacking.

A greater U.S. military presence in the Philippines would go beyond that — it would make rapid American troop movement to the Taiwan Strait much easier. The archipelago of the Philippines lies in an arc south of Taiwan, and the bases there would be critical launch and resupply points in a war with China. The Philippines’ northernmost island of Itbayat is less than 100 miles from Taiwan.

The Military Ties Between the U.S. and the Philippines

Card 1 of 6

A complex alliance. The United States and the Philippines announced a deal that would give U.S. forces access to four more military sites in the Southeast Asian country, creating the largest American military presence there in decades. Here is what to know:

A strategic partner. The Philippines, a former Spanish colony that was ruled as an American territory for decades before gaining independence in 1946, is the oldest of the United States’ five treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific region. It is also a crucial strategic partner in a region where China has been asserting its military power and building military outposts on contested islands.

Colonial legacy. The Philippines, which signed the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States in 1951, once hosted some of America’s largest overseas military facilities. But many Filipinos saw the arrangement as a vestige of American colonialism. In 1992, the United States vacated its last base in the country, after street protests and the Philippine Senate’s decision to sunset America’s military presence.

The rise of Duterte. Agreements in 1999 and 2014 allowed the American military to rebuild its presence in the Philippines to some degree. But when President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016, he expressed an intention to seek a military “separation” from the United States. He eventually backed off his threats.

Warming ties. Mr. Duterte’s successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., has sought to revive the relationship with the United States since taking office in 2022. The new military agreement, which is an extension of the deal signed in 2014, is a big step in that direction.

Significance of the deal. American officials say that getting access to the Philippines’ northernmost islands is crucial to countering China in the event of an attack on nearby Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory. The new agreement could also have implications in the South China Sea, which is home to some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

The United States is relying on Japan, which, like the Philippines, is a military treaty ally, to be the bulwark on the northern flank of Taiwan. Mr. Biden promised Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan last month that the Americans would help build up the Japanese military.

The announcement in Manila took place right before Antony J. Blinken was scheduled to fly to China in the first visit there by a U.S. secretary of state since 2018. That timing could be interpreted by Chinese leaders as a signal that the main U.S. policy priority in the region is working with allies and partners to rein in China, rather than stabilizing relations with Beijing.

“The U.S. side, out of selfish interests, holds on to the zero-sum mentality and keeps strengthening military deployment in the Asia-Pacific,” Mao Ning, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, said at a news conference in Beijing on Thursday. “This would escalate tensions and endanger peace and stability in the region. Regional countries need to remain vigilant and avoid being coerced or used by the U.S.”

The new agreement allows the United States to put military equipment and build facilities in as many as nine locations across the Philippines, which would lead to the biggest American military presence in that country in 30 years.

“This is an opportunity to increase our effectiveness, increase interoperability. It is not about permanent basing,” Mr. Austin said in Manila. “It is a big deal. It’s a really big deal, in that, you know, it provides us the opportunity, again, to interact a bit more in an effective way.”

The last American soldiers left the Philippines in the 1990s, and the country’s Constitution now bars foreign troops from being permanently based there.

A U.S. Marine helicopter participating in an annual U.S.-Philippines joint military exercise. The last American soldiers left the Philippines in the 1990s, and the country’s Constitution now bars foreign troops from being permanently based there.Credit...Aaron Favila/Associated Press

In November, a Philippine general identified five possible sites for the agreement. The announcement on Thursday mentioned nine, though Mr. Austin and his aides did not publicly say where the additional four sites would be located. Randall Schriver, a former assistant secretary of defense for the Asia-Pacific region, said in an interview that he thinks the four sites are on the northern island of Luzon, in the southwest province of Palawan and part of the old U.S. military facility at Subic Bay.

Mr. Schriver added that the Pentagon’s aim is to get at least one site that each of the U.S. armed services — the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force — could use as a point for surging forces, if necessary. They would not just be air bases, and a big question is how much construction would be needed to get each one ready.

The sites would likely be incorporated as soon as possible into the U.S. military’s regional exercise schedule, and Pentagon could leave equipment behind rather than bring it back to home bases, Mr. Schriver said.

The agreement extends the Pentagon’s forward presence in the Indo-Pacific region — in addition to forces in Australia, South Korea, Japan and Guam, military officials said.

“Sites could potentially be used for a wide range of missions such as joint military training, disaster relief and humanitarian efforts, and combined exercises,” said Lt. Col. Martin J. Meiners, a Defense Department spokesman.

One of the most important activities at the bases would probably be logistics — storing fuel, ammunition, spare parts and equipment, said current and former military officials, including some who served in the Philippines.

Pentagon officials said on Thursday that the military was working out the details of how many U.S. military forces would be located at the bases at any given time, how long those rotational tours of duty would be, and what the troops would do once they were there.

By adding to the Pentagon’s vast logistics network, the agreement makes it more difficult for an enemy to target U.S. supply hubs in the region.

“Logistics wins battles and campaigns and wars,” said David Maxwell, a retired Army Green Beret commander who served in the Philippines.

In the early 1990s, the United States had nearly 6,000 troops permanently based in the Philippines. Officials said under the new basing plan, that figure would be dramatically lower, with a combination of uniformed U.S. service members, American civilian contractors, and local Filipino contractors and security personnel.

“Our actual presence will be very limited and temporary,” said Joseph H. Felter, a former top Pentagon official on Southeast Asia who now directs Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

In other parts of the world where U.S. forces are temporarily based, such as in Iraq, Syria and Somalia, military deployments of six months to one year are common, but the length of tour duties varies, officials said.

In any war, operational and supply bases would be among the first targets an enemy would try to strike. Mr. Maxwell said a key to the bases’ success will be what kind of air and missile defense systems are deployed to protect them against possible Chinese ballistic or cruise missile attacks, or warplanes dropping precision-guided bombs.

“If China is going to try to take steps with its missile arsenal to take out locations where the U.S. projects forces, it now has more targets it would have to deal with,” Mr. Stokes said. “China has a big missile arsenal and many aircraft, but this still presents it with a bigger problem.”

The New York Times · by Eric Schmitt · February 2, 2023

6. DoD Statement on High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon

This is getting a lot of media attention for obvious reasons.

DoD Statement on High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon

defense.gov

Release

Immediate Release

Feb. 2, 2023 |×

Attributed to Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder:

The United States Government has detected and is tracking a high altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now. The U.S. government, to include NORAD, continues to track and monitor it closely. The balloon is currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground. Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years. Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.

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defense.gov

7. U.S. Tracking High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon

Excerpts:

While the senior defense official would not say how large the balloon is, the official did say its size did figure into the calculation to not use kinetic force to take it out of the sky.

"We did assess that it was large enough to cause damage from the debris field if we downed it over an area," the official said. "I can't really go into the dimension — but there have been reports of pilots seeing this thing, even though it's pretty high up in the sky. So ... it's sizable."

As early as yesterday, the official said, the balloon was seen over Montana.

U.S. Tracking High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

An intelligence-gathering balloon, most certainly launched by the People's Republic of China, is currently floating above the United States, the Defense Department announced Thursday evening.

"The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now," Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said during an impromptu briefing Thursday evening. "The U.S. government, to include NORAD, continues to track and monitor it closely."

The Pentagon

An aerial of the The Pentagon, May 12, 2021.

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Ryder said the balloon is well above commercial air traffic and doesn't pose a threat to civil aviation. He also said this isn't the first time such a balloon has been seen over the United States.

After the balloon was detected, Ryder said, the U.S. government "acted immediately" to protect against the collection of sensitive information, though he didn't detail what measures were taken.

A senior defense official who participated in the briefing on background only said the U.S. intelligence community has "very high confidence" the balloon belongs to the People's Republic of China, and that the United States has engaged with Chinese officials "with urgency, through multiple channels" regarding the presence of the balloon.

"We have communicated to them the seriousness with which we take this issue," the official said. "We have made clear we will do whatever is necessary to protect our people and our homeland."

Right now, the official said, following recommendations of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley and Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. position is to allow the balloon to continue to float above the United States, rather than attempt to shoot is down.

The official said the risk of using kinetic force to take the balloon out of the sky might put civilian communities at risk, and that the threat the balloon poses now to both safety and U.S. intelligence doesn't justify such an action.

"Currently, we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collective collection perspective," the official said. "But we are taking steps, nevertheless, to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information."

The official said this is not the first time such a balloon has been seen above the United States, but did say this time the balloon appears to be acting differently than what has been seen in the past.

"It's happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration," the official said. "It is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time, this time around, [and is] more persistent than in previous instances. That would be one distinguishing factor."

While the senior defense official would not say how large the balloon is, the official did say its size did figure into the calculation to not use kinetic force to take it out of the sky.

"We did assess that it was large enough to cause damage from the debris field if we downed it over an area," the official said. "I can't really go into the dimension — but there have been reports of pilots seeing this thing, even though it's pretty high up in the sky. So ... it's sizable."

As early as yesterday, the official said, the balloon was seen over Montana.

defense.gov · by C. Todd Lopez

8. Suspected Chinese spy balloon found over northern U.S.

Video report at the link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/suspected-chinese-spy-balloon-found-northern-us-rcna68879

Suspected Chinese spy balloon found over northern U.S.

“The United States government ... is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now," said a Pentagon spokesperson.

NBC News · by Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days, and military and defense leaders have discussed shooting it out of the sky, according to two U.S. officials and a senior defense official.

“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told NBC News. “We continue to track and monitor it closely.”

“Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information,” Ryder said.

U.S. strengthens military ties to counter growing Chinese threat

Feb. 2, 202301:21

The high-altitude balloon was spotted over Billings, Montana, on Wednesday. It flew over the Aleutian Islands, through Canada, and into Montana. A senior defense official said the balloon is still over the U.S. but declined to say where it is now.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin convened a meeting of senior military and defense leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, NORTHCOM/NORAD Commander Gen. Glen VanHerck, and other combatant commanders.

Austin was traveling in the Philippines at the time.

The leaders reviewed the threat profile of the Chinese stratospheric balloon and possible response options, and ultimately decided not to recommend taking it out kinetically, because of the risk to safety and security of people on the ground from the possible debris field. Pentagon leaders presented the options to President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

“Currently we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective over and above what the PRC can do through other means,” the senior defense official said. “Nevertheless we are taking all necessary steps to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.” The official said the balloon does not pose a threat to civil aviation because of its altitude.

The official said the U.S. military will continue to monitor it closely and will keep the option of taking out the balloon on the table.

“We are tracking it in minute detail in real time and we will constantly update our assessment,” the official said. “We are in constant surveillance of this thing through a bunch of different means.”

The official said there was a window while the balloon was over Montana Wednesday when they could have taken it down. NORAD sent aircraft — including F-22 Raptors from Nellis Air Force Base and airborne early warning aircraft known as AWACs — but the official would not say whether one of the options was to shoot the balloon out of the sky with a U.S. aircraft.

The U.S. military flights prompted a ground stop at the airport in Billings, with air traffic controllers citing a “special military mission.”

The U.S. is confident the balloon belongs to China, the official said, and they have communicated to the Chinese government “through multiple channels both here in D.C. and in Beijing.” The official did not say whether the Chinese admitted the balloon was theirs.

Chinese warplanes, ships cross unofficial boundary in Taiwan Strait

Dec. 26, 202200:25

This type of activity is not unprecedented, the senior defense official said, with China flying stratospheric balloons like this before, but the difference this time is the balloon is staying over the U.S. longer than usual.

The stratosphere starts between 4 and 12 miles above the Earth’s surface and extends around 31 miles, according to the National Weather Service.

Tensions are high between the U.S. and China. On Thursday, the Pentagon announced it would bolster the U.S. military presence near Taiwan, with plans to expand the number of U.S. military personnel in the Philippines. Announced during Austin’s visit to Manila, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) designates four more bases where U.S. military personnel can now base in strategic areas of the country, adding to the five already authorized to house American troops.

“We’re not seeking permanent basing in the Philippines,” Austin said during a news conference Thursday.

NBC News · by Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

9. Ukraine Proves U.S. Troops Need Quick Access to Commercial Technology

I defer to all the technical and communications experts, But I think one simple concept we should examine is simply developing software that can be easily installed to encrypt and secure communications on commercial devices. Rather than producing military specific designed equipment we should design concepts to use whatever communications systems exist in the theater of operations and upload whatever is necessary to encrypt communications. As much as possible we should exploit local communications infrastructure or other systems that can be rapidly introduced into the theater such as Starlink. This is also important when supporting indigenous forces or civil resistance.

Ukraine Proves U.S. Troops Need Quick Access to Commercial Technology

Ukraine has held off Russia’s attacks using a readily available mix of military and commercial technology. The United States is taking note.

defenseone.com · by Mike Bloomberg

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has all the traditional hallmarks of a conventional war, with troops and tanks on the ground and airstrikes from above. But even as today’s battles resemble wars of old, Ukraine has been successfully defending itself beyond expectations in part because of the courage and determination of its people who have used new technology in ways that are changing how wars are fought.

Historically, the speed and accuracy of information that reaches decision-makers has been an Achilles heel of armies. But Ukraine is showing the world how a smaller force can fend off a larger military foe using a readily available mix of military and commercial technologies, especially for communications. The Russia-Ukraine war is a warning: to ready the U.S. military for future conflicts our nation needs far more public-private collaboration, and fast.

When Russian strikes in early 2022 hit Ukraine’s infrastructure and knocked out the ability for Ukrainian military leaders to communicate with their troops, Ukraine moved fast to use commercially available, satellite-based internet access via Starlink and logistics services like FedEx to reopen lines of communication. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have used technology to report critical battlefield information to the government, such as enemy troop movements and local intelligence.

On the battlefield, soldiers with limited weapons use handheld tablets and mobile devices to get real-time data from satellites to target their efforts. Algorithms help Ukrainian troops rapidly determine the most urgent threats and opportunities, from the enemy’s exact location to the weapons most likely to prove effective in a strike.

Traditionally, intelligence about the enemy would be communicated up the chain of command and then down through the military command structure. But Ukrainian troops are accessing this information immediately via an array of drone and satellite imagery, some of it from publicly available sources. Having that data can be the difference between an army’s commanders deciding to advance or retreat from an attack.

Many of these practices are not new; armies using new technologies to win battles is as old as war. And certainly, we will continue to need clearly defined intelligence chains of command. But as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley recently said to the Washington Post, “We are witnessing the ways wars will be fought and won for years to come.”

As the United States leads the world’s technological revolution, Department of Defense leaders should continue working to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors in ways that will help ensure the spirit of innovation is put to use advancing America’s defense and security. At the same time, the leaders of America’s most innovative companies must also see the department as a potential customer and feel an obligation to assist in the defense of our country regardless of profits. Patriotism requires more than waving a flag.

The U.S. has taken notice of the critical role technology is playing the in the war in Ukraine, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is making concerted new efforts to break down barriers between the Pentagon and America’s tech community. Red tape and bureaucracy often prevent the Pentagon from capitalizing quickly on America’s technological advantages, which denies our service members capabilities that would help keep them and our nation safe.

The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit based in Silicon Valley is tasked with working with America's most innovative companies and startups to deploy new technologies into the field. In recent years, it has enlisted more than 100 companies that previously were not involved in defense contracts, and it has begun to see the benefits. For instance: The Army and Air Force have incorporated artificial intelligence in aircraft maintenance to help predict what parts of an aircraft need to be repaired before the repair is needed. The Air Force has also been experimenting with commercially produced technology to help servicemembers remotely fly electric aircraft that take off and land vertically.

The past year in Ukraine has underscored how wars will increasingly be won and lost based on which side proves more adept at developing, deploying, and scaling advanced technology. It’s a lesson that Russia is learning the hard way and one that we must take to heart to effectively defend our values at home and abroad.

Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, and served as Mayor of New York City, 2002-2013. The views in this column are his own.

defenseone.com · by Mike Bloomberg

10. The Pentagon must make a culture shift to embrace innovation

We are seeing members of the Defense INnovation Board speak out.

The Pentagon must make a culture shift to embrace innovation

Defense News · by Mac Thornberry · February 2, 2023

People are the bedrock of our nation’s military and create the culture that is foundational for innovation. But thus far, our Department of Defense is falling short of building an organization where people are encouraged to lead, make mistakes as they learn, challenge outdated thinking and pursue new creative initiatives.

That sort of culture is essential to success on the battlefield. And a culture of innovation is fundamental to acquiring, adopting and scaling new technologies that will give our men and women in uniform the advantage they deserve over our competitors.

Beginning in 2015, the House and Senate Armed Services committees made acquisition reform the highest priority. Many new provisions were passed into law to help get the best technology our nation can produce into the hands of the warfighter as soon as possible. While there are pockets in DOD using some of those authorities to drive modernization, there are still pervasive cultural barriers inhibiting the agility and private-public sector collaboration we need.

One of America’s key advantages in the fight against our adversaries is our ecosystem of innovation within government and more widely in the private sector and academia. Without an adaptable, collaborative culture, it is difficult to harness all of the nation’s innovation.

In certain fields, the private sector is far surpassing the government in developing new technologies. We will lose partners quickly if DOD’s culture is not open to working with both traditional and non-traditional suppliers. When the government makes it difficult, costly and unwelcoming in some cases to support our national security, the partners we need to protect the country will point their business resources in a different direction.

An innovative culture is fueled by strong leadership that breeds collaboration and autonomy, embracing failure and learning, and funding curiosity and new ideas. Some organizations have been created to follow those practices, such as the Defense Innovation Unit, AFWERX and the Defense Digital Service. But there are limits to their growth and influence within the broader acquisition system.

We need a culture of collaboration that opens new pathways to work with the private sector, relooks at our approach to interactions with outside organizations and reframes the department as open to sharing research and information rather than one that is uncooperative both internally and externally. Viewing failure and the learning that comes from it as a good thing is crucial in an organization that rapidly innovates.

Hypersonic missiles are a good example of how embracing failure could have helped speed up development and keep up with our adversaries racing to develop this definitive platform. The U.S. had previously halted hypersonic testing after several failures. Meanwhile, both China and Russia ramped up their testing.

National security leaders in Washington were surprised when news emerged that China conducted hypersonic weapons tests with technology the United States didn’t appear to have — and of the type that could render current U.S. missile defense systems obsolete. Now, the U.S. is pouring additional resources against the problem, but we are still playing catchup.

Lastly, making funds available to support an innovative culture is crucial to success. Budgetary restrictions and regulations hamper DOD’s ability to work with outside partners and foster a culture where the workforce is encouraged to build and adopt new technologies and practices.

I hope the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process reform commission makes actionable recommendations that will encourage such practices. In the meantime, Congress can play a crucial role in providing more flexible funding that encourages moving quickly to adapt and to get capability into the hands of the warfighters.

A new culture is not created just by passing a new law or new policy pronouncements. It comes from leadership, incentives and inspiration. Congress, the administration and even the media play a role. To truly innovate and remain at the forefront of global competition, we must work together to drive collaboration and build agile organizations that embrace risk. The culture we create will mean the difference in success and failure and ultimately the security of our nation.

Mac Thornberry is a former Texas congressman who served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He serves on the board of directors of CAE USA, is a member of the Defense Innovation Board and is a senior adviser to the Silicon Valley Defense Group.

11. Blind Sided: A New Playbook for Information Operations – Irregular Warfare Center

Excerpts:

Today’s threat environment gives renewed importance to information operations. Whether we call it gray zone competition, strategic competition, or irregular warfare, the contemporary threat environment can be generally characterized by state (or sub-state) conflict that falls below the threshold of open war. For U.S. adversaries, information operations have been essential in allowing them to compete with the U.S. in this liminal space without direct physical confrontation.

To carry out information operations in the gray zone, actors rely on and manipulate psychological biases, social and political structures, and emerging technologies. And today’s modern media ecosystem—which combines traditional, digital, and social media—provides multiple vectors for our adversaries to deploy information operations.

A forthcoming report from the Irregular Warfare Center, titled Blind Sided: A Reconceptualization of the Role of Emerging Technologies in Shaping Information Operations in the Gray Zone, provides a new approach to assessing such information operations. The report advances the propagation-mobilization framework for analyzing gray zone IOs. This framework maintains that two primary components determine the success of most contemporary information operations: 1) propagation of information, and 2) mobilization to action. Information operations can have one of two impacts upon these two lines of effort: IOs can either be amplifying or suppressive on the propagation and mobilization. In other words, an IO can either amplify or suppress propagation of information, and similarly amplify or suppress mobilization to action—sometimes simultaneously.

Blind Sided: A New Playbook for Information Operations – Irregular Warfare Center

irregularwarfarecenter.org

February 2, 2023

Blind Sided: A New Playbook for Information Operations

BG Christopher M Burns USA (Ret.)

Lori Leffler

Varsha Koduvayur

Download PDF Version by clicking the button to the right.

Last summer, a coordinated campaign by users on Facebook and Twitter targeted the Australian company Lynas. In 2021, Lynas—the largest rare earths mining and processing company outside China—finalized a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense to build a processing facility for rare earth elements in Texas. A year later, numerous concerned Texas residents began to criticize the deal on social media, claiming that Lynas’s facility would create pollution, lead to toxic waste dumping, and harm the local population’s health. Their posts also denigrated Lynas’s environmental record and called for protests against the construction of this facility and a boycott of the company.

Except the posts were not written by Texas residents—nor even by real people. The vast majority of posts came from fake accounts that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) created and maintained as part of an influence operation. The PRC’s goal was to do reputational damage to one of the main threats to its dominance in the geopolitically important rare earths sector. Rare earth metals are critical to producing a range of technologies, including semiconductors, batteries, cell phones, electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and missiles. China has a veritable chokehold on the global market for rare earth elements, controlling almost 90 percent of their production—an edge that Beijing is eager to maintain. More recently, PRC information operations (IOs) took aim at the U.S.’s midterm elections, with posts that disparaged certain senators and spread disinformation about politically-motivated violence.

Sample of posts created by PRC against Lynas. Source: Mandiant.

Of course, China is not the only foreign state engaged in targeting the American public through the information space. Other countries, such as Russia and Iran, are also known to carry out significant information operations. Nor are information operations new phenomena. During the Cold War, for example, the Soviet Union deployed what it dubbed “active measures” against the U.S. in an attempt to promote communism, discredit the Western liberal order, and redirect Western criticism of the Soviet Union. As Mark Galeotti notes, the main department responsible for active measures within the KGB was originally named “Service D,” a reference to disinformation (dezinformatsiya). Indeed, going back further in history, we can see that information operations are an ancient art. They are referenced in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and even ancient Egyptians deployed information operations. Ramesses the Great used temple carvings to communicate to his population that he had crushed the Hittite forces at the Battle of Kadesh, resulting in the Levant being subjected to Egyptian rule. His claims were grossly exaggerated. The result was in fact “inconclusive” at best, and both sides sustained high losses, a reality that Ramesses appeared to have accepted in private.

Today’s threat environment gives renewed importance to information operations. Whether we call it gray zone competition, strategic competition, or irregular warfare, the contemporary threat environment can be generally characterized by state (or sub-state) conflict that falls below the threshold of open war. For U.S. adversaries, information operations have been essential in allowing them to compete with the U.S. in this liminal space without direct physical confrontation.

To carry out information operations in the gray zone, actors rely on and manipulate psychological biases, social and political structures, and emerging technologies. And today’s modern media ecosystem—which combines traditional, digital, and social media—provides multiple vectors for our adversaries to deploy information operations.

A forthcoming report from the Irregular Warfare Center, titled Blind Sided: A Reconceptualization of the Role of Emerging Technologies in Shaping Information Operations in the Gray Zone, provides a new approach to assessing such information operations. The report advances the propagation-mobilization framework for analyzing gray zone IOs. This framework maintains that two primary components determine the success of most contemporary information operations: 1) propagation of information, and 2) mobilization to action. Information operations can have one of two impacts upon these two lines of effort: IOs can either be amplifying or suppressive on the propagation and mobilization. In other words, an IO can either amplify or suppress propagation of information, and similarly amplify or suppress mobilization to action—sometimes simultaneously.

Amplifying propagation is intended to rapidly push and spread information through the media ecosystem, such as when something goes “viral.” Suppressive propagation is when information is taken out of circulation, whether that occurs through content and account removals on social media platforms, censorship and self-censorship, or online harassment resulting in silencing of information, to name a few examples.

Amplification of mobilization is one of the classic goals of information operations. Amplifying mobilization is when a target population goes out and commits an action, often influenced by propagation of information, be it amplifying or suppressive. Such actions include, for example protesting and marching in response to social justice issues, sewing face masks for medical care providers during COVID-19, or storming the U.S. Capitol. On the flipside, suppressive mobilization seeks to prevent a population from doing something. Examples of suppressive mobilization include convincing people to stay home instead of going to vote, or to refrain from taking the COVID-19 vaccine, or to decline to join a gang.

The modern media ecosystem has drastically shortened the time it takes for propagation to impact mobilization—a sea change compared to the pace of information operations in the past. The reasons for this shrinking gap are mostly technological, but also cultural, with mobilization, action, and activism coloring our zeitgeist. It is much easier today for a wide range of actors, both benign and malign, to mobilize audiences, both at a distance and at scale. The national security consequences of this shortened timespan should be evident. Americans may mobilize with actions and demands well before the facts on the ground are ascertained, posing challenges for public leaders or law enforcement personnel coordinating a response.

The propagation-mobilization framework may seem simple, but it has revolutionary implications by providing an enduring schema that can be applied to any actor’s information operations. Thus, the framework de-emphasizes the centrality of specific actors to a particular IO. The dominant discourse on information operations is frequently actor-centric, assessing information operations through the lens of what individual actors carry out (i.e. PRC influence operations or Russia’s information operations during the 2016 U.S. election). But such a lens is, ultimately, reactive: the world waits for news about a new information operation to surface, and then pounces upon that IO to dissect who is behind it and what the actor’s tactics were. The propagation-mobilization framework, in contrast, offers a unifying and overarching blueprint that has the potential to help practitioners anticipate future IOs before they occur.

Moreover, the framework allows for a conceptualization of information operations that avoids being solely limited to mis/disinformation. Certainly, mis/disinformation is an element of information operations, but IOs comprise more elements than just mis/disinformation. Mis/disinformation is one tool, among many, that can make up an IO actor’s playbook.

Moreover, information and mis/disinformation are not a binary. Indeed, for various reasons, there has been significant truth decay in the mainstream media environment, which historically has been seen as a purveyor of accurate information. Americans are consistently reporting their growing distrust of mainstream media outlets. The media environment has undergone significant changes within the last two decades, including increased sensationalism, increased partisanship, and a rush to publish that is underpinned by the always-on, 24/7 news cycle. As the mainstream information environment’s credibility wanes, its ability to counter mis/disinformation fades in tandem.

The report makes two other groundbreaking contributions. First, the report adapts evolutionary theory to the application of information operations in the gray zone. Evolutionary theory has been used in certain contexts in the social sciences, and it appears to have unique value in the context of information operations. Second, the paper outlines a robust range of information operation elements and tools, both digital and offline, and in doing so offers a compendium or playbook of elements that IO actors may deploy.

The report uses IOs’ ends, ways, and means as a framework for better understanding them according to the playbook that it provides. By ends, we refer to the outcome that IO actors seek to achieve: why the actor is propagating information and/or mobilizing action in the first place. Ultimately, all information operations have a desired end, be it political, economic, diplomatic, social, etc. By ways, we indicate how IO actors seek to achieve their preferred end through amplifying or suppressing propagation and/or mobilization. And by means, we refer to the specific information operation that the IO actor employs—in other words, the specific play that they select from the IO playbook that the Blind Sided report presents. IO actors have a number of tools—which we also refer to as elements, aspects, or components of their information operations—at their disposal to conduct the IO. These tools provide the methods, capabilities, and resources for conducting information operations.

The elements and tools of propagating information and mobilizing action are shared and utilized by a wide range of actors. It is not simply that our adversaries learn from their own mistakes and from the mistakes of other adversaries—they are likely surveying the whole spectrum of information operations tools available, and new tools or IOs may evolve from older tools deployed in either beneficial or harmful contexts. Our report shows, crucially, how these aspects evolve—they are not simply static, unchanging tools that IO actors deploy. Different and seemingly disparate elements of IOs can interact, leading to the creation of new tools and elements. Additionally, components of IOs deployed in one context can be used in its opposite context: tools used in a benign or even beneficial manner can be coopted by adversaries and deployed to have a malign or harmful impact, and vice versa. For national security practitioners, this nuance is key. It will not be enough to only pay attention to what the “bad guys” do.

In praxis, how should this framework be synthesized when assessing information operations? Let us return to the case of Lynas. That information operation, which cybersecurity firm Mandiant identified and named DRAGONBRIDGE, was the means by which China sought to damage Lynas. The way, or lines of effort, was both propagation of information—promoting “narratives in support of the political interests of” Beijing—and attempts at mobilizing the public in response. The PRC used a range of technological tools and methods to carry out its IO, which included setting up fake social media accounts meant to appear real to users and spreading disinformation about the company. The end was to besmirch the reputations of and ultimately thwart gains made by competitors to China in rare earths, a sector that is important to China’s “geopolitical leverage” and strategic positioning.

Interestingly, Lynas was not the only victim. The PRC’s information operation also targeted Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp, a Canadian rare earths mining firm, and American rare earths producer USA Rare Earth. All the inorganic social media posts, and the fake accounts that created and spread them, were set up after each company announced new deals or discoveries: Lynas signed a deal with the Department of Defense, Appia announced that it had discovered a new rare earths area in Canada, and USA Rare announced that it would build a rare earths processing plant in Oklahoma.

Ultimately, the Blind Sided report aims to create a new playbook for understanding information operations in the gray zone, pushing past the actor-centric, reactive analyses that to date have largely colored our understanding of IOs. In doing so, we aim to enrich the current understanding of IOs.

The policy implications are manifold. First, policymakers must ensure that the U.S. is effective in developing IO-informed policies. Our national security policies must adequately reflect the complexities and nuances of information operations. Developing a forward-leaning, whole-of-government response to our adversaries’ information operations is essential to more effectively fight our enemies at their own information game.

Second, policymakers should consider adopting a more offensive posture to counter IOs. There is no reason to limit the framework to a defensive application only. Certainly, Washington needs to understand IOs better to be able to effectively counter our adversaries’ propagation and/or mobilization. But we can also use the propagation and mobilization framework for our own purposes and ends. By turning the playbook back on them, we can riddle our adversaries with the same strategic dilemmas they foist on us.

Third, the U.S. needs policymakers who understand IOs to be able to discern future technological adaptations that could increase malign actors’ abilities to propagate information or mobilize action. No one can predict with certainty what emerging technologies or future technological adaptations can come down the pike. But there is an urgent need for policymakers to be aware of, vocalize, and direct preparation for future IOs that will certainly capitalize on those trends.

Fourth, policymakers must build up internal resiliency against information operations. It is imperative to improve Americans’ digital and media literacy skills and critical thinking skills with targeted programs. Such an endeavor would need to cut across multiple generations to ensure effectiveness. Moreover, as technology improves, IOs will likely become harder to detect and disrupt. As such, policymakers must seriously address the internal conditions that our adversaries’ IOs are likely to exploit. By inoculating the population with more digital and media literacy awareness and critical thinking skills, we can build internal resilience and resistance against manipulation by adversaries.

In this era of irregular warfare, information operations are only likely to grow in frequency, scale, and intensity in future. The U.S. must take bold action to mitigate the challenges and limit the national security risks that our adversaries’ information operations pose—or risk being blindsided time and again.

About the Authors:

Brig. Gen. Chris Burns, U.S. Army, Retired, serves as senior advisor at the Irregular Warfare Center.

Lori Leffler is the chief of staff at the Irregular Warfare Center.

Varsha Koduvayur is a senior analyst at the Irregular Warfare Center.

See Gartenstein-Ross et al., Blind Sided: Information Operations in the Gray Zone, p. 96, which notes: “Indeed, activist groups and social movement participants look to other movements’ actions when developing their own strategies. A recent example of this is the migration of utilizing umbrellas to ward off rubber bullets and smoke canisters, originally used in the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in 2019, then used in the U.S. in ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon. In Portland, additional elements were developed by activists using everyday items such as garbage cans to make shielding for protection against anti-crowd and dispersal technologies used by the police.”

Hashtag hijacking is an example, where users on a social media platform coopt or “hijack” an existing popular hashtag to share unrelated content, so as to get that piece of content more viewership. See Gartenstein-Ross et al., Blind Sided: Information Operations in the Gray Zone, pp. 78-79, which notes: “Hashtag hijacking campaigns have been used by activists, advertisers, trolls, and violent non-state actors. Daesh [the Islamic State] performed several high-profile hashtag hijacks in 2014-15, including taking over hashtags associated with the World Cup to circulate propaganda and violent content to a massive worldwide audience. A more recent hashtag hijacking is QAnon’s takeover of the SavetheChildren hashtag. In the summer of 2020, QAnon followers determined that Wayfair’s prices for cabinets and other items were exorbitantly high, and based on an esoteric reading of Wayfair’s website, they circulated theories that Wayfair was in fact trafficking in children.… Over the course of days and weeks, #WayfairGate morphed into a hijack of the SavetheChildren hashtag, which was used regularly by international NGO Save the Children to promote its work and fundraise. Posts flooded social media, spreading rapidly through mothers’ groups. A series of SavetheChildren protest marches were organized across the United States for July and August, from big demonstrations in large cities to smaller protests in rural towns.”

irregularwarfarecenter.org

12. Ukraine can’t retake Crimea soon, Pentagon tells lawmakers in classified briefing

So who is releasing classified information?

Of course this could all be part of an influence campaign. Are we that sophisticated?

Excerpts:

House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said in an interview Wednesday that the war “needs to end this summer,” placing urgency on the U.S. to rapidly supply Ukraine for a coming offensive and on Kyiv to forge a clearer outline of how the conflict ends.

“There’s a school of thought … that Crimea’s got to be a part of it. Russia is never going to quit and give up Crimea,” said Rogers, who did not address the contents of the classified briefing his committee received last week. Vladimir “Putin has got to decide what he can leave with and claim victory.”

“What is doable? And I don’t think that that’s agreed upon yet. So I think that there’s going to have to be some pressure from our government and NATO leaders with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy about what does victory look like,” Rogers added. “And I think that’s going to help us more than anything be able to drive Putin and Zelenskyy to the table to end this thing this summer.”

Ukraine can’t retake Crimea soon, Pentagon tells lawmakers in classified briefing

By ALEXANDER WARD, PAUL MCLEARY and CONNOR O’BRIEN

02/01/2023 08:08 PM EST

Politico

The assessment from the DoD officials is likely to anger Kyiv, which wants to recapture the peninsula from Russia.

This photo taken from video distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service shows Russian military vehicles move during drills in Crimea, April 22, 2021. Russian forces have occupied Crimea since 2014, and the peninsula is bristling with air defenses and tens of thousands of troops. | Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP Photo

02/01/2023 08:08 PM EST

Ukrainian forces are unlikely to be able to recapture Crimea from Russian troops in the near future, four senior Defense Department officials told House Armed Services Committee lawmakers in a classified briefing. The assessment is sure to frustrate leaders in Kyiv who consider taking the peninsula back one of their signature goals.

It’s unclear what led the briefers to that assessment. But the clear indication, as relayed by three people with direct knowledge of Thursday’s briefing’s contents, was that the Pentagon doesn’t believe Ukraine has — or soon will have — the ability to force Russian troops out of the peninsula Moscow seized nearly a decade ago.

A fourth person said the briefing was more ambiguous, but the point remained that Ukraine’s victory in an offensive to retake the illegally annexed territory wasn’t assured. All four asked for anonymity in order to disclose details from a classified briefing.

The briefers included Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, director of operations on the Joint Staff.

“We’re not going to comment on closed-door classified briefings nor will we talk about hypotheticals or speculate on potential future operations,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said. “In terms of Ukraine’s ability to fight and take back sovereign territory, their remarkable performance in repulsing Russian aggression and continued adaptability on the battlefield speaks for itself.”

A House Armed Services spokesperson declined to comment.

The assessment from the briefers echoes what Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, has alluded to in recent weeks.

“I still maintain that for this year it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from all –– every inch of Ukraine and occupied –– or Russian-occupied Ukraine,” he said during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Germany on Jan. 20. “That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but it’d be very, very difficult.”

Russian forces have occupied Crimea since 2014, and the peninsula is bristling with air defenses and tens of thousands of troops. Many of those infantry forces are dug into fortified positions stretching hundreds of miles facing off against Ukrainian troops along the Dnipro River.

The issue of retaking Crimea has been a contentious one for months, as American and European officials insist the peninsula is legally part of Ukraine, while often stopping short of fully equipping Kyiv to push into the area.

One person familiar with the thinking in Kyiv said the Zelenskyy administration was “furious” with Milley’s remarks, as Ukraine prepares for major offensives this spring. Ukrainians also note that U.S. intelligence about their military abilities have consistently missed the mark throughout the nearly year-long war.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Zelenskyy adviser Andriy Yermak rejected the idea of a Ukrainian victory without taking Crimea.

“This is absolutely unacceptable,” Yermak said, adding that victory means restoring Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders “including Donbas and Crimea.”

Ukraine has repeatedly asked for longer-range weapons, including rocket artillery and guided munitions fired by fighter planes and drones, to target Russian command-and-control centers and ammunition depots far behind the front lines in Crimea.

After the U.S. gave Ukraine the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the summer, Russia moved many of its most vulnerable assets out of its 50-mile range. The Biden administration continues to refuse to send missiles for the launcher that can reach 300 miles, which would put all of Crimea at risk.

House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said in an interview Wednesday that the war “needs to end this summer,” placing urgency on the U.S. to rapidly supply Ukraine for a coming offensive and on Kyiv to forge a clearer outline of how the conflict ends.

“There’s a school of thought … that Crimea’s got to be a part of it. Russia is never going to quit and give up Crimea,” said Rogers, who did not address the contents of the classified briefing his committee received last week. Vladimir “Putin has got to decide what he can leave with and claim victory.”

“What is doable? And I don’t think that that’s agreed upon yet. So I think that there’s going to have to be some pressure from our government and NATO leaders with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy about what does victory look like,” Rogers added. “And I think that’s going to help us more than anything be able to drive Putin and Zelenskyy to the table to end this thing this summer.”

POLITICO

Politico

13. Is the U.S. Military Capable of Learning From the War in Ukraine?

I think we should recall that learning the lessons from the Yom Kipper War helped shaped the future AirLand Battle concept that really made the US military quite proficient in large scale combat operations (re: the first Gulf War not only due to the Big 5 modernization programs but also the establishment of the National Training Center).

Excerpts:

Embracing the full implications of the war in Ukraine requires accepting the fact that there are still lessons to be learned from Russia’s failures. At the very least, the onus for future U.S. defense strategy must shift. Why won’t American helicopters, ships, or aircraft suffer the same fate as their Russian counterparts? Why won’t the next war turn into a protracted one? Why won’t the next war look more like the one in Ukraine?

Fortunately, major wars are rare events. And wars such as Russia’s in Ukraine—which provide a meaningful test of U.S. hardware and strategic assumptions without costing American blood—are even rarer occasions. But whether the war enables the United States to place wiser bets on the future as it prepares for the next conflict partly depends on the U.S. military’s ability to engage in introspection. And that, in turn, hinges on whether the United States allows itself to be blinded by Ukraine’s battlefield successes and potential victory.

If the United States does learn the lessons of this war, as it did after the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, it may secure the U.S. military’s qualitative edge for decades to come. If it does not, it may not get a second chance.

Is the U.S. Military Capable of Learning From the War in Ukraine? - TDW %

ADMIN

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

thediplomaticworld.com · by Themeinwp. · February 2, 2023

At its core, a country’s defense strategy is a very expensive gamble. Every year, the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars on defense—all on the assumption that such investments will allow it to win the next war. Absent a conflict in which the United States is directly involved, policymakers rarely get a window into whether these bets have actually paid off. One such window is when other countries fight a war using U.S. military equipment and tactics—such as the one in Ukraine today. Another one was the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s near-defeat prompted a thorough reexamination of U.S. weapons and tactics in Washington. Today, Russia’s war also poses the question whether the United States needs to reexamine the way it prepares for future conflict: not only which weapons it buys, but also how it envisions great-power wars in the 21st century—whether they will be short, sharp affairs or grinding, protracted struggles.

When, in 1973, the United States last had a window into the future of conflict without fighting in one, Israel was caught flat-footed by the surprise attack of an Egyptian-Syrian-led coalition. Although Israel prevailed in the end, the war was a debacle for the Jewish state. Despite having a seasoned military leadership with decades of collective combat experience—and being equipped with U.S. weaponry—Israel lost more than 800 armored vehicles and 100 attack aircraft. Just six years after Israel stunned the world by quickly crushing a combined Arab army during the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War stood in stark contrast: It dragged on for weeks, required emergency U.S. assistance to backfill equipment losses, and Israel came uncomfortably close to defeat.

The Yom Kippur War was a wake-up call—and not just for Israel. Even though the United States was not a direct participant, U.S. Army leaders witnessed in real time how U.S. equipment and tactics used by the Israeli army fared against their Soviet counterparts in the Egyptian and Syrian militaries. The United States did not like what it saw. If U.S. forces did not adapt, Washington surmised, they might come similarly close to defeat—or worse—in a potential future conflict.

And so, the U.S. military went to work, studying every aspect of the war. Out of those lessons, the Army developed a new doctrine—AirLand Battle—as well as an updated training regimen that laid out a new blueprint for the post-Vietnam War, post-draft military. And while the United States never directly fought the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Yom Kippur War—and the lessons the United States drew from it—provided the intellectual bedrock of how to blend ground maneuvers, precision air power, and overall speed: the very mix of strategies that enabled the United States’ lightning defeat of Soviet-equipped Iraq during the First Gulf War. Even half a century later, the Yom Kippur War continues to shape how the United States military thinks and plans for the future.

Today, Russia’s war against Ukraine could well provide as many insights about 21st-century warfare as the Yom Kippur War did for 20th-century conflicts. For decades, the U.S. Defense Department has shaped the U.S. military for flash conflicts and quick interventions where speed and precision rule. But one year into a war that some thought would last only days, Ukraine raises the question of whether the age of industrial warfare has returned. The consequence: The United States would need to prepare to fight a very different type of conflict than it plans for today.

A lot of ink has already been spilled questioning the continued relevance of the tank, for example, given the Ukrainians’ successful use of anti-tank weapons and ubiquitous small to large unmanned aerial systems in ground combat. The current war also raises questions about whether helicopters still have a place on the modern battlefield, given the 75 or so Russian helicopters, including scores of the most advanced models, that the Ukrainians have destroyed or damaged, mostly using relatively old air defense missiles.

And even though the Ukraine war is primarily a land war, the conflict has similarly raised disconcerting questions for the U.S. Navy. The sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva—as well as the dozen or so other, smaller Russian vessels that have been damaged or destroyed by a country without any serious naval forces of its own—should raise serious questions about the survivability of large surface ships in modern war. Conversely, Ukraine’s success at employing smaller uncrewed vessels suggests a potential alternative way to wield naval power.

The lessons for the U.S. Air Force have been no less profound. Despite the prewar predictions that Russian airpower would quickly overwhelm Ukraine absent NATO’s establishment of a no-fly zone, Russia has failed to gain air dominance and the Ukrainian Air Force is still flying nearly one year into the war. The Ukraine conflict shows that airpower can, indeed, still operate within the range of enemy missiles—not with impunity, but not with certain death, either. Even more importantly, the war highlights the increasing importance of drones to modern combat in the land, sea, and air domains. Indeed, in some sense, manned aircraft have taken a backseat to remotely piloted aircraft in the battle for the skies over Ukraine.

Key lessons have emerged for space and cyberspace as well. The Ukraine war has been called the first commercial space war. Whether or not the label is accurate, there is no doubt that private space companies have played an outsized role in the conflict—from keeping Ukrainian forces online to providing the imagery that has shaped media coverage of the conflict around the world. In cyberspace, Russia’s vaunted capabilities never lived up to expectations, raising questions of whether cyberattacks really are the next weapons of mass destruction—as some have claimed—or whether their effects are somewhat more limited.

In sum, a year in, the Ukraine war is providing the same wealth of insights that the Yom Kippur War did a half-century ago. But there is one major difference that could turn into a problem: Whereas the Yom Kippur War painted such a vivid and bleak picture for the U.S. military that it was forced to innovate, the Ukraine war looks like a win for U.S. equipment and tactics—at least for now. As a result, the same impetus to heed the lessons and effect change is not there.

To its credit, the United States is doubling down on the capabilities that the Ukrainians have employed successfully. The Army, for example, is buying more artillery shells, more Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and more High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers to make up for those expended in Ukraine. These, however, are arguably the easy lessons. They do not require the United States to do anything differently, only buy more of the same.

The United States is also right not to act on the non-lessons of the conflict. In some cases, the Ukraine war is simply not instructive. For example, Russia has kept its most advanced aircraft mostly over Russian airspace and out of range of Ukrainian air defense. The war, therefore, only offers inconclusive results so far on whether stealth aircraft or air defenses have the upper hand.

In other cases, the technological lessons may be clear, but the operational implications are not. Take the great tank debate, for instance. The battle for Kyiv showed that tanks are very vulnerable. At the same time, Ukraine’s successful counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts demonstrated that there are few alternatives to armored warfare for taking ground, especially in open terrain. And so, it is perhaps unsurprising that the U.S. military is similarly split. The Marine Corps jettisoned its tanks, while the Army is pushing ahead with ever more modern ones.

The jury is still out, however, on whether the United States will embrace the hard lessons of the war—those that actually require the U.S. military to fundamentally change direction—especially if it requires learning from Russia’s failures, rather than Ukraine’s successes. The U.S. Army is still pressing ahead with its Future Vertical Lift program—the costly development of five new helicopter types—despite all the Russian helicopter losses. The Navy is still investing in surface ships, despite the sinking of the Moskva and other Russian vessels. And the Air Force remains committed to its manned aircraft fleet, despite the dominance of drones in the airspace.

Even more fundamentally, the United States needs to rethink the balance between capability and capacity. From missiles costing tens of millions of dollars each to planes costing hundreds of millions to ships costing billions, the U.S. military continues to default to the high end, even if it means acquiring fewer systems. But the Ukraine war’s most important lesson is that cheap and plentiful may, in fact, trump the exquisite but expensive. Indeed, Russia’s use of relatively small numbers of wonder weapons—such as hypersonic missiles—seemingly bought it little success. At the same time, the Ukraine war shows—just like the Yom Kippur War did—that numbers matter. Modern wars involve significant losses.

Indeed, for all the intense public debate on whether to give Patriot air defense systems, Abrams and Leopard tanks, or F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, it currently appears that mass—more than any one particular weapons system—will determine the war’s outcome. While individual capabilities certainly help, as multiple commentators have noted, specific weapons systems are unlikely to meaningfully change the balance unless they are provided in sufficient quantities. In a protracted war, the question becomes less who has the silver bullet and more who simply has more bullets. And so, the United States needs to ensure that it, indeed, has more bullets.

To be fair, the Ukraine war is only one data point, and the U.S. military is not Russia’s. U.S. hardware may be more survivable and employed using more thoughtful tactics than the analogous Russian platforms. U.S. leadership may also be more circumspect and not fall victim to the same foibles as the Russians have in Ukraine. And U.S. strategy may, indeed, be better—raising the likelihood that the United States could win fast and not end up in a protracted conflict. (Although the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would suggest otherwise.)

Embracing the full implications of the war in Ukraine requires accepting the fact that there are still lessons to be learned from Russia’s failures. At the very least, the onus for future U.S. defense strategy must shift. Why won’t American helicopters, ships, or aircraft suffer the same fate as their Russian counterparts? Why won’t the next war turn into a protracted one? Why won’t the next war look more like the one in Ukraine?

Fortunately, major wars are rare events. And wars such as Russia’s in Ukraine—which provide a meaningful test of U.S. hardware and strategic assumptions without costing American blood—are even rarer occasions. But whether the war enables the United States to place wiser bets on the future as it prepares for the next conflict partly depends on the U.S. military’s ability to engage in introspection. And that, in turn, hinges on whether the United States allows itself to be blinded by Ukraine’s battlefield successes and potential victory.

If the United States does learn the lessons of this war, as it did after the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, it may secure the U.S. military’s qualitative edge for decades to come. If it does not, it may not get a second chance.

thediplomaticworld.com · by Themeinwp. · February 2, 2023

14. Xi set to host Blinken in signal of China-U.S. detente

I wonder if the Chinese balloon over Montana is a signal of detente? Now perhaps a better signal might be the SECSTATE bringing it with him to return it to China after it is shot down.

Xi set to host Blinken in signal of China-U.S. detente

Both Beijing and Washington have a shared incentive to limit downside risks

KEN MORIYASU, Nikkei Asia diplomatic correspondent

February 3, 2023 13:14 JSTUpdated on February 3, 2023 19:34 JST

TOKYO -- Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to host U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken next week in Beijing, signaling his desire to stabilize relations with Washington as he faces economic headwinds at home.

The planned reception, first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed by U.S. sources, will likely set the tone for China's new foreign policy team -- top diplomat Wang Yi and Foreign Minister Qin Gang -- as they put together their diplomacy playbook.

"If President Xi meets Secretary Blinken, it will reinforce to the Chinese government that he is personally engaged in steering the relationship and that any moves Beijing makes must be in line with his chosen direction," said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"Both the U.S. and China have a shared incentive to limit downside risks and demonstrate competence in managing the relationship," Hass, a former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council, said.

The two day visit, which starts Sunday, comes at a time when the relationship is in an "extraordinarily fraught state," Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told reporters in a briefing Monday.

Overnight, Taiwan detected five People's Liberation Army aircraft entering its air defense identification zone, and the Pentagon said the U.S. is tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S. airspace. Last week, a U.S. Air Force general made headlines by instructing officers to prepare for a possible military conflict with China over Taiwan in 2025.

This follows various statements from U.S. military leaders that offered different timelines. Retired Adm. Philip Davidson, the former head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, reiterated to Nikkei last week that he remains concerned that "the period between now and 2027" is a window in which China may use force against Taiwan.

Regarding the different timelines, Blanchette said, "What we're effectively signaling is we have no idea, and I'm not sure we understand just how damaging that is."

The White House's goal, regarding Blinken's trip to Beijing, "is to basically fast-forward this Cold War to its detente phase, thereby skipping a Cuban missile crisis," Blanchette said.

A detente would also work for Xi. He faces a surge in COVID-19 cases, a slowing economy and in the longer term, a population that has begun to shrink. Last December, the Japan Center for Economic Research released a forecast that said China's nominal gross domestic product is unlikely to surpass that of the U.S. in the next few decades -- reversing an estimate the previous year that said the world's two largest economies would switch places in 2033.

Toshihiko Okano, a senior specialist who watches China at the NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting in Tokyo, said Beijing is paving the way for Li Qiang, the Chinese Communist Party's No. 2, to become premier and to lead a new government in the spring.

"The Chinese business leaders and think tank analysts I have spoken to are in unison that once the new State Council is in place, Chinese policy will drastically shift to deregulation to secure economic growth," Okano said.

In this context, the goal of Chinese foreign policy vis-a-vis the U.S. will be to buy time, Okano said.

"For a communist government that aspires to divide the economic pie among the people, it is imperative to avoid a military confrontation with the U.S. while it seeks the unification of Taiwan," Okano added. "The strategy includes waiting for a future U.S. administration that is more focused on American domestic issues. Until then, China will continue to build up the People's Liberation Army to make sure the military balance around Taiwan is overwhelmingly in China's favor."

Recently, the Xi administration has toned down its hawkish rhetoric on foreign affairs and sidelined a Foreign Ministry spokesperson who was a flag-bearer of "wolf-warrior diplomacy."

Xi's handshake with Blinken in Beijing would confirm a course correction to pragmatism -- although some are skeptical if that would change Xi's end goals. Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, this week told Nikkei Asia: "My cautionary note is 'Don't ever confuse tactics with objectives.' I don't believe the ends have changed."

Bonny Lin, the director of the China Power Project at CSIS, told reporters Monday that it would be useful to look at the general atmospherics of the Blinken visit. When former President Donald Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited China in 2018, he had a short meeting with then-Foreign Minister Wang Yi and top diplomat Yang Jiechi, but there was no dinner afterward, Lin noted.

That stands in contrast to John Kerry when he traveled to Beijing in 2015, Lin said. Kerry "had meetings with China's foreign minister, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, premier, state councilor, and President Xi Jinping."

The diplomatic calendar offers several opportunities for U.S. President Joe Biden and Xi to meet in person, including the Group of 20 meeting in New Delhi in September and the November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders meeting in San Francisco.

Yet, even if both Washington and Beijing seek detente, it will likely be a bumpy road.

"We have a pretty fraught year ahead of us in the political calendar," said Blanchette, starting with a possible trip by House Speaker McCarthy to Taiwan in the coming months, and a consequential election on the democratic island next January.

"This is not a 12 months that either Beijing or Washington are fully in control [of]," he said.

15. Ukraine’s Coming Electricity Crisis

Excerpts:

The war in Ukraine is the largest conflict in Europe since World War II and the first since the widespread adoption of electric grids that extend hundreds of miles. Whole societies depend on the grids’ custom-designed, hard-to-transport components, manufactured half a world away. Decades of peace and the economics of globalization have resulted in the concentration of grid equipment manufacturing in just a few countries. The war has glaringly exposed such vulnerabilities in the current operation of electric grids. NATO leaders are currently concerned with the supply of M1 Abrams and Leopard 2 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Patriot missile systems, and even F-16 aircraft. Advanced weapons may help to win the war, but a lack of autotransformers may lose it.

Ukraine’s woes should serve as a reminder that esoteric technical matters, such as the pivotal role of large transformers in electric grids, can shape the outcomes of conflicts. Countries fight not just military battles, but infrastructure battles, too. Modern societies will face calamity if electricity is out for an extended period. In Ukraine, epidemics caused by dirty water, starvation, mass migration, reactor meltdowns, dam failures, and even military defeat have become real possibilities. But policymakers should remember that Ukraine’s electricity situation is also an opportunity to practice creative solutions, such as the remanufacturing of large transformers.

Ukraine’s electric grid can be reinforced, but time is running short. NATO’s leaders need to give their full attention to this looming crisis if they—and the Ukrainians—do not want to be left in the dark.

Ukraine’s Coming Electricity Crisis

How to Protect the Grid from Russian Attacks

By Thomas Popik

February 3, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Thomas Popik · February 3, 2023

After 11 months of war and nearly four months of relentless Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector, the country’s electric grid comes nearer to collapse each day. In addition to its brutal barrages on residential areas, Russia has targeted power plants, substations, and other critical infrastructure that electrifies the country. Ukrainians are now habituated to rolling blackouts, but the electricity supply falls far short of what the country needs, inducing severe economic disruption. Further strikes could cause the total failure of Ukraine’s electric grid, plunging tens of millions of people into darkness.

Deaths from a grid collapse could be far greater than the casualties caused by a Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons. A grid collapse could also lead to a humanitarian and refugee crisis for Europe, the meltdown of nuclear reactors, flooding from breached hydroelectric dams, and a deeper food crisis for countries dependent on exports from Ukraine.

But the West has the wherewithal to avert this catastrophe. Kyiv’s friends in NATO and elsewhere should deliver swift and targeted aid for the country’s electric grid, help that is commensurate to the financial resources and diplomatic attention devoted to weapons systems. After all, electric power, not just weapons, sustains Ukraine’s war effort. If Western democracies take effective action and reinforce the country’s tottering electric grid, they will show how societies can be protected from such attacks on critical infrastructure. But if these democracies do not rise to this challenge, bad actors worldwide will gain confidence that striking the electrical underbelly of a country is the best way to bring it to its knees.

UNDER ASSAULT

Electric grids are among the largest and most complex machines ever devised by humans. They consist of five basic categories of facilities and equipment: generation plants, transformers at plants that increase voltage for transmission, long-distance transmission lines that carry current from place to place, transformers that lower voltage at intermediate substations, and distribution networks that bring power to homes and businesses. The Achilles’ heel of electric grids are the large transformers that raise and lower the voltage of the electricity, which are called “generator step-up” transformers and “autotransformers.” Often the size of a small house, these devices weigh hundreds of tons and must be transported by special railcars and trucks. By necessity, transformers need to be placed in open spaces to allow the free circulation of air for cooling. This open-air design makes large power transformers a prime target for long-distance attacks by bombers, missiles, and drones.

Life in Ukraine without a functioning electric grid would soon become torturous—and for many, unlivable. Electricity powers the pumps on which Ukrainian cities’ water treatment systems rely. It provides refrigeration for the production and distribution of food. In the large cities, combined heat and power plants keep homes and businesses warm and lighted through the winter months. Electricity powers the country’s telecommunications, including what is needed for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s nightly address and other essential governmental functions. ATM machines, payment cards, and mobile wallets depend on electricity. Because electricity is used to pump fuel into and out of storage, it underpins the logistics network used by the Ukrainian military.

Electricity underpins the the Ukrainian war effort.

In the initial stages of the war, Russia showed restraint in attacking critical infrastructure, largely sparing Ukraine’s electric grid. Shelling near battle lines caused some damage to power plants, but the Kremlin was not deliberately trying to destroy such facilities. If Russia had succeeded in a quick campaign, it could have diverted electricity from captured plants to its own grid—or even sold Ukraine’s electricity at high prices to Europe. But as the Russian advance slowed, the Kremlin reevaluated its strategy and started attacking Ukrainian infrastructure.

Ukraine has a well-developed rail network that extensively uses electric locomotives. Specialized transformers convert electricity from transmission lines into the lower voltages necessary for railroad use. Last April, Russia targeted rail traction substations in western Ukraine, destroying their transformers and hampering rail service. In April and early May, Russia conducted three rounds of missile attacks on the Kremenchuk energy complex, a key facility in central Ukraine for petroleum refining, electricity generation, and oil storage. The Kremlin claimed that the purpose of these attacks was to make it harder for NATO to supply weapons to the Ukrainian war effort.

By late September, Russian and Ukrainian ground forces had reached a rough stalemate. On September 26, unknown actors sabotaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was built to supply Russian gas to Germany but had not yet begun operating. The next day, Russia conducted an attack on Ukraine’s electric grid. Three explosions occurred in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, including one at the site of a power transformer; Internet monitoring showed that the city suffered a large blackout.

Russian officials claimed that on October 8, Ukrainian operatives detonated a truck bomb on the Kerch Strait Bridge between Crimea and Russia. Two days later, on October 10, Russia conducted its first massive aerial assault on Ukraine’s electric grid. Putin announced that the grid attack was in retaliation for the bridge bombing. The resulting blackout in the western city of Lviv shut down Internet routers and reduced connectivity in the city and surrounding province by two-thirds. A full-fledged infrastructure war had begun.

THE ELECTRICAL UNDERBELLY

Russia was intimately involved in the design of Ukraine’s grid and is familiar with its vulnerabilities. Nearly all of Ukraine’s electric grid was constructed in the Soviet era. Over half of Ukraine’s electric generation capacity is supplied by 15 nuclear reactors at four plant locations. (One nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, has been captured by Russian forces and has been intermittently cut off from Ukraine’s grid.) With deliberation and increasing frequency since the Kerch Strait Bridge bombing, Russia has attacked vital transmission nodes. Ukraine’s air defenses successfully block about 80 percent of these strikes, but the missiles and drones that get through have had a devastating impact, especially on the large autotransformers that convert high-voltage electricity from Ukraine’s nuclear plants into the lower voltages used in urban areas.

The Russian attacks have so damaged the grid that its operator, Ukrenergo, has been forced to institute rolling blackouts throughout the country. The grid is able to meet about 75 percent of normal customer demand, with occasional dips below 50 percent. Measurements of Ukraine’s Internet connectivity, a good proxy for electricity service, are trending downward.

On November 23, Russia nearly landed a knockout blow on Ukraine’s grid when it used around 70 cruise missiles and kamikaze drones to target important grid infrastructure. Ukrainian forces shot down most of the cruise missiles, but their efforts did not prevent most of the country from losing power, with only a handful of electrified pockets remaining. Grid operators skillfully used these islands of electricity to restore power the following morning, but the events of that night demonstrated the possibility of a total system collapse.

Russia has tried not only to devastate Ukraine’s electric grid but also to shatter its supply chains for key electrical equipment. Before the invasion, the largest producer of transformers in all of Europe and the former Soviet states was the Ukrainian-based company Zaporozhtransformator, also known as ZTR. The company has a skilled workforce of 3,500 employees. ZTR supplied over 95 percent of the transformers used in Ukraine’s grid and some key transformers for Russia, too. ZTR’s principal factory lies in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, near the current frontlines. Until Ukraine nationalized the company last November, ZTR was jointly owned by Ukrainian and Russian entities. In the first week of December, Russia conducted an aerial attack on ZTR’s transformer factory, damaging production lines and storage areas.

WHEN THINGS FALL APART

The breakdown of an electric grid can be both a cause and a result of societal instability. For a country’s electric grid to keep operating, it requires the coordinated resources of a sophisticated society: skilled engineers and technicians; fuel supplies for the generation of electricity, physical and cybersecurity defenses; telecommunications; and supply chains for spare parts. Russia has eroded each of these pillars. In the wake of incessant attacks and only patchwork repairs, the possibility of a full collapse is real. Since complex societies cannot long survive without electricity, a broader societal collapse may follow.

Millions of Ukrainians have already fled the country, and the wartime population now stands at approximately 35 million. The destruction of the electric grid would send many millions more scrambling toward the country’s borders, plunging Europe into a new refugee crisis. Although duty may require the operators of nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams to remain at their posts, some will invariably decide to escape with their families. Already, three-quarters of the workers at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, now in Russian hands, have left.

The loss of such workers could be very dangerous. Never before has a country dependent on nuclear power plants experienced such a barrage on its electric grid. Nuclear power plants require highly trained technicians to keep their facilities running safely. If grid power fails for more than a week or two, reactors could melt down or fires might start in the spent fuel pools, releasing radiation into surrounding areas.

So, too, could the loss of key workers lead to catastrophe at hydroelectric facilities. Ukraine has an extensive network of dams on the Dnieper and Dniester rivers. The safe operation of these dams requires on-site personnel to adjust water flows, clear debris on spillways, and respond to emergencies. Dam gates, which are opened and closed by electric motors, need to be actively managed. Without personnel on hand and a supply of reliable electric power for the operation of the gates, water can surge over the top of the dam in a process called overtopping, which could lead to erosion and the dam’s eventual failure.

A Russian soldier guarding a captured nuclear plant in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, September 2022

Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters

Earthen dams are particularly susceptible to breaches caused by overtopping and rapid erosion. Just upstream of the capital is one of the longest earthen dams in the world, the 11-mile left bank dam of Kyiv Reservoir. The sediment in the bottom of the reservoir contains radioactive material from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A surge of water from a dam breach here could contaminate Kyiv as well as other cities and bodies of water downstream. During World War II, Stalin ordered the demolition of the Dneprostroi dam in the south of Ukraine to impede the advance of German troops; the resulting flood tore through villages and towns on the banks of the river, killing tens of thousands. A dam failure north of Kyiv, with water surging down the Dnieper valley, could have even more horrific results: the deaths alone could exceed the civilian toll to date of the current war.

Beyond such disasters, a total collapse of the grid would have calamitous consequences for Ukraine’s military, undermining its logistics networks. Western powers have spent over $100 billion supporting Ukraine, but the amount required to aid both the country’s military and humanitarian relief efforts would increase dramatically in a country without a functioning electric grid.

A complete electric grid collapse would likely kill a significant proportion of Ukraine’s population. Batteries for communication networks would run down. Government services would cease. Many of Ukraine’s citizens would attempt to evacuate, but when the electrically powered pumps at gas stations stopped functioning, motorists would not be able to refuel. Roads would soon become clogged with stalled vehicles. Some people would strike out on foot, but others would be left behind with dwindling supplies of food and water. Within weeks, famine would probably sweep the country. Without clean water from treatment plants, epidemics could flare.

The wider world would also suffer. In the year before the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s agricultural exports supplied 40 percent of the wheat for the UN’s World Food Program and made up 12 percent of global corn exports and nine percent of wheat exports. Ukraine’s much-reduced grain exports are mostly passing through the port of Odesa. The city’s electricity supply has already been hit hard, with only about half of the existing demand met by the available supply. If Ukraine’s electric grid were to collapse, grain exports could stop entirely, deepening hunger in the world’s poorest countries.

HOW TO KEEP THE LIGHTS ON

In the initial stages of the war, Ukraine rushed to obtain weapons from NATO member states. Foreign aid to support critical infrastructure, including Ukraine’s electric grid, was an afterthought. But if the country’s electric grid collapses, the billions of dollars spent on advanced weapons systems may come to naught.

Russia’s aerial attacks are destroying critical grid equipment faster than it can be repaired or replaced. Every single major transmission substation and thermal generation plant in Ukraine has experienced at least one attack, and some have been struck more than five times. Dozens of autotransformers, the most critical component of the grid, have been destroyed. The procurement of autotransformers has become an urgent priority for the Ukrainian government.

Through Western embassies, Ukraine has distributed a “priority” shopping list of grid equipment. The list includes hundreds of costly items, including 55 urgently needed autotransformers. On January 18, the U.S. State Department announced $125 million in funding for Ukraine’s electric grid, in addition to $53 million announced in November. As of this February, the Ukraine Energy Support Fund established by the EU Energy Community Secretariat had raised $157 million and disbursed $118 million. But this is woefully inadequate: the autotransformers alone on Ukraine’s shopping list would cost more than the entire sum raised. More resources are urgently needed. It will take billions of dollars to prevent the collapse of Ukraine’s electric grid, an outlay of great magnitude even if it is considerably less than what has already been spent to supply the country with weapons.

Obtaining replacement grid equipment for Ukraine—especially autotransformers—will be challenging, even if sufficient funding is available. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the manufacturing lead time for autotransformers was about one year; European customers now have to wait up to three years. These transformers are expensive, costing around $5 million to 10 million per unit, and they are durable, lasting 40 years on average. They are often custom-designed as well. As a result, few spares are stocked.

Advanced weapons may help Ukraine win the war, but a lack of transformers may lose it.

Transformers operating at 750 kilovolts, such as the replacements needed for the transmission backbone of Ukraine’s electric grid, are produced in volume in only a few countries; these include China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Smaller producers of autotransformers closer to Ukraine include the Netherlands, Spain, and Turkey. The United States has minimal capacity to build autotransformers. Although industry groups have been lobbying the U.S. government to apply the Defense Production Act to expand domestic capacity, their efforts have not yet succeeded.

NATO member states and other allies of Ukraine could supply replacement transformers from other sources: the spares kept by utility companies in their countries, transformers taken out of service near the end of their operational lives, and even newly manufactured units. Some of Ukraine’s grid voltages and transformers are compatible with transformers used in transmission systems of the former Warsaw Pact countries but less so with those of other regions. Transformers are often operated until the time when monitoring shows they are about to fail, but some may still have useful life remaining.

Wartime resourcefulness may offer some solutions. Already, Ireland and Latvia have contributed one spare autotransformer each. Canvasses of used transformer brokers are locating some units that might be useful for Ukraine. High-voltage transmission networks have thousands of transformers. Each year, hundreds come out of service and are cannibalized for their components, especially copper wire that is valuable in the scrap metal market. As a stopgap measure, transformer vendors could remanufacture these used transformers, especially those decommissioned by utility companies in Europe and North America.

The United States and its allies should impose a moratorium on dismantling large transformers. Their reusable components—iron tanks and laminated cores made of specialized electrical steel—can be reshaped to approximately fit the frequency and voltage combinations of Ukraine’s grid. The remanufacturing might be done in neighboring Poland, in other countries near Ukraine, or at the ZTR transformer factory in Ukraine itself. If necessary, ZTR’s skilled workforce could move to sites outside Ukraine. Remanufacturing could cut the lead time for replacement transformers to months instead of years.

Ukraine will ultimately require custom-produced transformers to rebuild its transmission system. If all the materials needed are on hand, it takes less than two months to build and test an autotransformer, far less than the three-year lead time commonly quoted by most manufacturers. Concerted diplomacy could help persuade governments and private companies to fast-track Ukraine’s transformer orders, putting them at the front of production queues.

FULL ATTENTION

The war in Ukraine is the largest conflict in Europe since World War II and the first since the widespread adoption of electric grids that extend hundreds of miles. Whole societies depend on the grids’ custom-designed, hard-to-transport components, manufactured half a world away. Decades of peace and the economics of globalization have resulted in the concentration of grid equipment manufacturing in just a few countries. The war has glaringly exposed such vulnerabilities in the current operation of electric grids. NATO leaders are currently concerned with the supply of M1 Abrams and Leopard 2 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Patriot missile systems, and even F-16 aircraft. Advanced weapons may help to win the war, but a lack of autotransformers may lose it.

Ukraine’s woes should serve as a reminder that esoteric technical matters, such as the pivotal role of large transformers in electric grids, can shape the outcomes of conflicts. Countries fight not just military battles, but infrastructure battles, too. Modern societies will face calamity if electricity is out for an extended period. In Ukraine, epidemics caused by dirty water, starvation, mass migration, reactor meltdowns, dam failures, and even military defeat have become real possibilities. But policymakers should remember that Ukraine’s electricity situation is also an opportunity to practice creative solutions, such as the remanufacturing of large transformers.

Ukraine’s electric grid can be reinforced, but time is running short. NATO’s leaders need to give their full attention to this looming crisis if they—and the Ukrainians—do not want to be left in the dark.

THOMAS POPIK is Chair and President of the Foundation for Resilient Societies.
MORE BY THOMAS POPIK

Foreign Affairs · by Thomas Popik · February 3, 2023

16. China says it's looking into report of spy balloon over US

Busted.

Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.

It will be interesting to see how they respond. Of course this could be something they want us to focus on. What do they not want us to see?

China says it's looking into report of spy balloon over US

AP · February 3, 2023

BEIJING (AP) — China said Friday it is looking into reports that a Chinese spy balloon has been flying in U.S. airspace and urged calm, adding that it has “no intention of violating the territory and airspace of any sovereign country.”

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning also said she had no information about whether a trip to China by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken planned for next week will proceed as scheduled.

At a daily briefing, Mao said that politicians and the public should withhold judgment “before we have a clear understanding of the facts” about the spy balloon reports.

Blinken would be the highest-ranking member of President Joe Biden’s administration to visit China, arriving amid efforts to mitigate a sharp downturn in relations between Beijing and Washington over trade, Taiwan, human rights and China’s claims in the South China Sea.

“China is a responsible country and has always strictly abided by international laws, and China has no intention of violating the territory and airspace of any sovereign country. As for the balloon, as I’ve mentioned just now, we are looking into and verifying the situation and hope that both sides can handle this together calmly and carefully,” Mao said.

“As for Blinken’s visit to China, I have no information,” she said.

A senior defense official told Pentagon reporters that the U.S. has “very high confidence” that the object was a Chinese high-altitude balloon and was flying over sensitive sites to collect information.

One of the places the balloon was spotted was over the state of Montana, which is home to one of America’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the balloon is “currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”

Ryder said similar balloon activity has been seen in the past several years and the government has taken steps to ensure no sensitive information was stolen.

President Biden was briefed and asked the military to present options, according to a senior administration official, who was also not authorized to publicly discuss sensitive information.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised against taking “kinetic action” because of risks to the safety of people on the ground. Biden accepted that recommendation.

The defense official said the U.S. has “engaged” Chinese officials through multiple channels and communicated the seriousness of the matter.

Blinken’s visit was expected to start this Sunday in an effort to try to find common ground on issues from trade policy to climate change. Although the trip has not been formally announced, both Beijing and Washington have been talking about his imminent arrival.

The senior defense official said the U.S. prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, to shoot down the balloon if ordered. The Pentagon ultimately recommended against it, noting that even as the balloon was over a sparsely populated area of Montana, its size would create a debris field large enough that it could have put people at risk.

It was not clear what will happen with the balloon if it isn’t brought down.

The defense official said the spy balloon was trying to fly over the Montana missile fields, but the U.S. has assessed that it has “limited” value in terms of providing intelligence it couldn’t obtain by other technologies, such as spy satellites.

The official would not specify the size of the balloon but said commercial pilots could spot it from their cockpits. All air traffic was halted at Montana’s Billings Logan International Airport from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, as the military provided options to the White House.

A photograph of a large white balloon lingering over the area was captured by The Billings Gazette. The balloon could be seen drifting in and out of clouds and had what appeared to be a solar array hanging from the bottom, said Gazette photographer Larry Mayer.

The balloon’s appearance adds to national security concerns among lawmakers over China’s influence in the U.S., ranging from the prevalence of the hugely popular smartphone app TikTok to purchases of American farmland.

“China’s brazen disregard for U.S. sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed,” Republican Party House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted.

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Tensions with China are particularly high on numerous issues, ranging from Taiwan and the South China Sea to human rights in China’s western Xinjiang region and the clampdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong. Not least on that list of irritants are China’s tacit support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its refusal to rein in North Korea’s expanding ballistic missile program and ongoing disputes over trade and technology.

On Tuesday, Taiwan scrambled fighter jets, put its navy on alert and activated missile systems in response to nearby operations by 34 Chinese military aircraft and nine warships that are part Beijing’s strategy to unsettle and intimidate the self-governing island democracy.

Twenty of those aircraft crossed the central line in the Taiwan Strait that has long been an unofficial buffer zone between the two sides, which separated during a civil war in 1949.

Beijing has also increased preparations for a potential blockade or military action against Taiwan, which has stirred increasing concern among military leaders, diplomats and elected officials in the U.S., Taiwan’s key ally.

The surveillance balloon was first reported by NBC News.

From an office window in Billings, Montana, Chase Doak said he saw a “big white circle in the sky” that he said was too small to be the moon.

“I thought maybe it was a legitimate UFO,” Doak said. “So I wanted to make sure I documented it and took as many photos as I could.”

___

Associated Press news assistant Caroline Chen in Beijing and writers Matthew Lee, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller in Washington, D.C., and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

AP · February 3, 2023

17. Along Ukraine-Belarus border, a war of nerves — and drones

Will there be an attack from the north?

Along Ukraine-Belarus border, a war of nerves — and drones

AP · by SAMYA KULLAB · February 3, 2023

BELARUS BORDER, Ukraine (AP) — The reconnaissance drones fly several times a day from Ukrainian positions deep inside the thick forest that marches across the border into Belarus, a close Russian ally, scouring sky and land for signs of trouble on the other side.

Ukrainian units are monitoring the 1,000-kilometer (650-mile) frontier of marsh and woodland for a possible surprise offensive from the north, a repeat of the unsuccessful Russian thrust toward Kyiv at the start of the war nearly a year ago.

This time the Ukrainians are taking no chances. Since the summer they have been reinforcing defenses, building and expanding trenches and laying mines in the forest ahead of the springtime offensive military officials expect. Residents of villages in the region that were temporarily occupied last year are horrified by the prospect of it all starting again.

“We’re listening out for every small sound and noise. This isn’t a way to live,” said Valentina Matveva, 64, from the village of Ripke. “When you’re in constant fear, that’s not life.”

Concerns of a renewed military push were stirred in January after Russia and Belarus held joint air force drills, one month after a rare visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Minsk.

Military experts and Western intelligence have played down the possibility of a renewed northern offensive. The British Defense Ministry tweeted on Jan. 11 that Russian aircraft and existing Russian troops in Belarus, though numerous, are “unlikely to constitute a credible offensive force.”

Belarusian officials attribute the troop deployment along the border to “strategic deterrence” according to local reports. The country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has insisted he will not send troops to Ukraine.

But Ukrainian commanders are wary, remembering how Russia used Belarus as a launching pad in early 2022.

“We continuously monitor the enemy from the ground and observe the movement of troops, if they are moving, how many troops, and where they are moving,” the area’s army intelligence unit head said during a press tour this week a few kilometers from the border. The officer only identified himself by his first name, Oleksandr, citing security reasons.

Unlike the east with its devastating artillery duels, here in the north it’s largely a war of quadcopters.

Oleksandr said the Belarusians and Russians are “constantly monitoring our guard changes, trying to find our military’s positions.”

At times, Oleksandr’s unit detects enemy reconnaissance drones and shoots them down using anti-drone rifles. Or an enemy drone detects a Ukrainian one and tails it, at which point the Ukrainians try to capture and add it to their stock.

“We got four of their drones this way recently, and they took two of ours,” Oleksandr said.

He says the reconnaissance missions have revealed no sign of worrying activity — yet. “They have a reinforcement section, and the patrol has been strengthened, but we do not observe a significant accumulation of troops from our section,” he said.

Ukraine’s Lt. Gen. Oleksii Pavlyuk, who is responsible for Kyiv province, was quoted in local reports as saying his country was preparing for a possible fresh attack through Belarus. “We’ve created a group on the border with Belarus, which is ready to meet the enemy with dignity,” he was quoted as saying.

Ukrainian officials argue that no one can know how Moscow will move in the coming months, and that a state of alert is necessary along the border.

“The (fortifications) were made to prevent re-infiltration,” said Oleksandr, “Whether it will happen or not, we must always be ready.”

Ukrainian soldiers armed with machine guns stand in five-foot-deep trenches dug into the forest floor and reinforced with planks.

A local villager briskly cycles past. Memories here are still fresh from the temporary occupation when Russian troops attempted to lay siege to the main city of Chernihiv. They withdrew on April 3 as Moscow switched its focus to Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

But despite the Russian-Belarusian drills, there’s also hope.

“The first time they invaded, we didn’t have the weapons and the army (at the border),” said Hanna Pokheelko, 66, from the village of Koluchivka. “But this time we do.”

Attack or no attack, Olena, from the village of Novi Yarylovychi, fears the border situation means she may never see her mother, brother and two sisters living just 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) away in a village inside Belarus.

“I can’t believe they are so close and I can’t see them,” said the 63-year old, who is a Belarusian by birth but married into a Ukrainian family and who didn’t give her full name out of concerns for her family.

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___

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

AP · by SAMYA KULLAB · February 3, 2023

18. China and Russia are as close as ever, and that's a problem for the US

What will happen if it turns out China is backing a losing cause in Putin's War?

China and Russia are as close as ever, and that's a problem for the US | CNN

CNN · by Simone McCarthy · February 3, 2023

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.

Hong Kong CNN —

When Antony Blinken makes an expected trip to Beijing in the coming days for what would be the first visit to China by a US secretary of state since 2018, he will be cutting a stark contrast to the scene in the Chinese capital one year earlier.

Then, Chinese leader Xi Jinping welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the opening of the Beijing Olympics – meeting for talks and dinner in Putin’s honor, and declaring a “no limits” partnership between the two neighbors.

Weeks later, as Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine starting an invasion that would devastate the country and cause a humanitarian crisis, Chinese leaders did not shrink from that declaration.

Though Beijing claimed impartiality in the conflict and no advance knowledge of Russia’s intent, it also refused to condemn Moscow. Instead, it parroted Kremlin lines blaming NATO for provoking the conflict – further fracturing relationships with both Europe and the US.

A year on, the contrast of a Blinken visit would be no coincidence.

Economically drained by its now-abandoned zero-Covid strategy, Beijing has been softening its tone on foreign affairs and upping its diplomacy with Western governments, analysts say, in a bid to win back lost ground and stabilize its relations.

In meetings with Blinken during his expected early February trip – as well as European leaders who’ve signaled they may visit in the coming months – Chinese counterparts are likely to emphasize their long-standing calls for a peaceful resolution and play up what they claim is China’s “objective and impartial position” on the conflict, analysts say.

But while the optics may be different from this time last year, China’s support for Russia – when measured by its annual trade, diplomatic engagements and schedule of joint military exercises – tells a different story.

Those metrics show that over the past year China has continued to bolster, not retreat from, its “no limits” partnership – a relationship that has been strengthening in recent years and which analysts say Beijing continues to view as key to its fundamental goals of maintaining national security and pushing back at a US-led world order.

“China is very skilled in calibrating the narrative depending on the audience,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But when it comes to China’s ties with Russia in the wake of the Ukraine war, “I don’t see any buyer’s remorse,” rather, he added, “China is helping itself to the opportunities that this crisis provides.”

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Retired colonel has a theory about why suspected Chinese spy balloon is over Montana

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‘Global partner’

Since the early days of the war in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden’s administration has warned the Chinese government of potential consequences for any material support for Putin’s invasion.

US intelligence officials have consistently said they have not seen evidence China provided lethal aid to Russia, but the US recently raised concerns with China about evidence suggesting state-owned Chinese companies had sold Russia non-lethal equipment – a charge Beijing vehemently denies.

While a handful of Chinese companies have been placed on US blacklists in connection with the conflict, most have appeared to calibrate their business to steer clear of violating the extensive sanctions unleashed by the US and its allies against Moscow.

Beijing has long stressed that it seeks to play a “constructive role” toward peaceful resolution of the conflict – and during a September meeting, Putin conceded Beijing had raised “questions and concerns” about the crisis.

Yet China has continued to expand trade with its northern neighbor, opening – for the first time – two permanent bridges to facilitate trade over a key border river and drumming up a record 1.28 trillion yuan ($190 billion) last year, according to Chinese data released last month.

BLAGOVESHCHENSK, RUSSIA - JUNE 10, 2022: A view of the first Russia-China bridge across the Amur River at the Kani-Kurgan-Heihe crossing point on the Russian-Chinese border. Construction of the bridge began in 2016 and was financed by non-government sources. Russia and China each built their half of the 1,080-meter-long bridge. The total length of the bridge crossing is 20km (Credit Image: © Amur Region Government/TASS via ZUMA Press)

Amur Region Government/TASS/ZUMA Press

China and Russia are building bridges. The symbolism is intentional

That marked an increase of around 30% from 2021, driven in part by Chinese companies snapping up discounted oil and coal, even as other governments moved to shun Russian fuel, shouldering mounting energy prices to avoid financing Russia.

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Xi congratulated Putin on the boosted trade numbers during a customary end-of-year talk between the two leaders, where he also called for the two countries to “enhance strategic coordination” and “continue to be each other’s development opportunity and global partner.” The talk, conducted over videolink in December, was one of at least four sets of conversations, including one face-to-face meeting, between Xi and Putin since the start of the war.

Xi has yet to speak to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during that time, though the Ukrainian leader has publicly expressed an interest.

Meanwhile, the security relationship between China and Russia has raised concern among America’s Asian allies.

In recent months, China has sent more than 2,000 personnel into Russia for a joint drill, dispatched its strategic warplanes for patrols alongside Russia’s over the Sea of Japan and East China Sea, and deployed a number of vessels for week-long, live-fire joint naval exercises in waters near Japan.

On Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and visiting NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg voiced concerns over Russia’s “growing military cooperation with China,” including “joint operations and drills in the vicinity of Japan,” in a meeting in Tokyo, according to their joint statement.

But even as those engagements – as well as its flourishing trade and diplomacy – may have elevated wariness about the China-Russia relationship in the West, they remain a foundation for China’s overall foreign policy, in which Russia also plays a key role bolstering China’s influence at the UN, according to Jean-Pierre Cabestan, an emeritus professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Government and International Studies.

“(The relationship with Russia) prevails in terms of China’s external interests … because it’s aimed against the United States and the United States’ alliance systems, both in Europe … and in Asia,” he said. “China’s main objective is to weaken those alliance systems.”

Technicians inspect a natural gas pipeline connected to Russia at a gas-distributing station in northern China's Hebei province in November 2022.

VCG/Getty Images

‘Charm offensive’

While the importance of its Russian relationship may not have changed, China has made efforts to dial down its overall rhetoric toward the West and revamp its diplomacy, analysts say, as it pushes for economic recovery following one of its worst annual economic performances in nearly half a century.

“The overwhelming priority for China is economic recovery, and economic recovery requires … not having a destabilizing relationship with the United States,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

“That’s contributing to this charm offensive,” she said, adding that this is more likely a short term maneuver as China seeks to recover its faltering growth – not a fundamental revision of Beijing’s assertive foreign policy.

Western governments will be carefully watching this tone shift and diplomatic outreach – and whether it has any potential impact on the war in Ukraine.

For Blinken, who is expected to arrive in China on the heels of a relatively amicable face-to-face between Biden and Xi at the Group of 20 in November – the Ukraine war is expected to be one of several key issues of focus during the visit.

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The secretary will likely repeat past American warnings about supporting the Russian war efforts, but may also look to scope out any potential for Beijing to influence Moscow toward peace, analysts say.

This has been a line of thinking in Europe, where leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, who is also expected to visit China in the coming months, have expressed hope for Beijing to assume such a role.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a press conference with Egypt's Foreign Minister (not pictured) in Cairo, on January 30, 2023. - Blinken kicked off a Middle East trip in Cairo focussed on urging calm amid an escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Blinken under pressure to push China on role in lethal fentanyl trade when he visits Beijing

But analysts are skeptical: China is “very carefully feeding these misconceptions” that it could influence Putin over the war – something Beijing likely has little confidence it could do, according to Carnegie Endowment’s Gabuev.

While managing expectations, China could look to parlay this perception to “get some goodwill,” but Beijing will still remain well aware that the root of tensions and challenges in its relationships with Western powers run far deeper than concerns over its rapport with Russia, he said.

That means expectations that China could help the West to resolve the conflict – an outcome China too has called for – are likely to meet their limit at Beijing’s bottom line.

As Sun puts it: “You will never see a scenario where China abandons Russia because in China’s dictionary, if Russia stands to fall, China is next.”

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CNN · by Simone McCarthy · February 3, 2023

19. Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics

Excerpts:

In an interview on Tuesday, a senior Defense Department official pointed to myriad military supply and tactical problems to explain the Russian tactics. The Russian military is running low on critical supplies and replenishment, said Colin H. Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy. “They’re running low on artillery. They’re running low on standoff munitions, and they are substituting by sending convicts in human waves into places like Bakhmut and Soledar.”

The Russian military has been following the Wagner playbook and deliberately using the poorly trained troops to draw, and deplete, Ukrainian fire, senior American military and defense officials said.

Kusti Salm, Estonia’s deputy defense minister, in a briefing with reporters in Washington last week, said that Russia was better able to stand its losses than Ukraine.

“In this particular area, the Russians have employed around 40,000 to 50,000 inmates or prisoners,” Mr. Salm said. “They are going up against regular soldiers, people with families, people with regular training, valuable people for the Ukrainian military.”

Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics

By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Thomas Gibbons-Neff

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · February 3, 2023

Moscow is sending poorly trained recruits, including convicts, to the front lines in eastern Ukraine to pave the way for more seasoned fighters, U.S. and allied officials say.

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Ukrainian medical evacuation team members await calls for wounded soldiers in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, which has been the scene of heavy fighting.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Feb. 2, 2023

WASHINGTON — The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials.

While the officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, they say the slaughter from fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and the town of Soledar has ballooned what was already a heavy toll.

With Moscow desperate for a major battlefield victory and viewing Bakhmut as the key to seizing the entire eastern Donbas area, the Russian military has sent poorly trained recruits and former convicts to the front lines, straight into the path of Ukrainian shelling and machine guns. The result, American officials say, has been hundreds of troops killed or injured a day.

Russia analysts say that the loss of life is unlikely to be a deterrent to Mr. Putin’s war aims. He has no political opposition at home and has framed the war as the kind of struggle the country faced in World War II, when more than 8 million Soviet troops died. U.S. officials have said that they believe that Mr. Putin can sustain hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine, although higher numbers could cut into his political support.

Ukraine’s casualty figures are also difficult to ascertain, given Kyiv’s reluctance to disclose its own wartime losses. But in Bakhmut, hundreds of Ukrainian troops have been wounded and killed daily at times as well, officials said. Better trained infantry formations are kept in reserve to safeguard them, while lesser prepared troops, such as those in the territorial defense units, are kept on the front line and bear the brunt of shelling.

The last public Biden administration estimate of casualties came last November, when Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed and wounded since the war began. At the time, officials said privately that the numbers were closer to 120,000.

“I would say it’s significantly well over 100,000 now,” General Milley said at a news conference last month in Germany, adding that the Russian toll included “regular military, and also their mercenaries in the Wagner Group.”

The State of the War

A New Assault: Ukrainian officials have been bracing for weeks for a new Russian offensive. Now, they are warning that the campaign is underway, with the Kremlin seeking to reshape the battlefield and seize the momentum.
In the East: Russian forces are ratcheting up pressure on the beleaguered city of Bakhmut, pouring in waves of fighters to break Ukraine’s resistance in a bloody campaign aimed at securing Moscow’s first significant battlefield victory in months.
Mercenary Troops: Tens of thousands of Russian convicts have joined the Wagner Group to fight alongside the Kremlin’s decimated forces. Here is how they have fared.
Military Aid: After weeks of tense negotiations, Germany and the United States announced they would send battle tanks to Ukraine. But the tanks alone won’t help turn the tide, and Kyiv has started to press Western officials on advanced weapons like long-range missiles and fighter jets.

At two meetings last month between senior military and defense officials from NATO and partner countries, officials said the fighting in the Donbas had turned into, as one of them put it, a meat grinder.

On Norwegian TV on Jan. 22, Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s defense chief, said estimates were that Russia had suffered 180,000 dead and wounded, while Ukraine had 100,000 killed or wounded in action along with 30,000 civilian deaths. General Kristoffersen, in an email to The New York Times through his spokesman, said that there is “much uncertainty regarding these numbers, as no one at the moment are able to give a good overview. They could be both lower or even higher.”

Senior U.S. officials said this week that they believe the number for Russia is closer to 200,000. That toll, in just 11 months, is eight times higher than American casualties in two decades of war in Afghanistan.

The figures for Ukraine and Russia are estimates based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports, as well as official reporting from both governments. Establishing precise numbers is extremely difficult, and estimates vary, even within the U.S. government.

A senior U.S. military official last month described the combat around Bakhmut as savage. The two sides exchanged several thousand rounds of artillery fire each day, while the Wagner private military company, which has been central to Russia’s efforts there, had essentially begun using recruited convicts as cannon fodder, the official told reporters. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

The convicts took the brunt of the Ukrainian response while the group’s more seasoned fighters moved in behind them to claim ground, the official said. Wagner has recruited some 50,000 troops to fight in Ukraine, according to senior American military and defense officials.

Thousands of the convicts have been killed, a loss of life that has shocked American officials, who say the strategic value of Bakhmut simply is not in line with the price Russia has paid.

A woman mourns her fiancé, who was killed fighting near Bakhmut. Moscow views Bakhmut as the key to seizing the entire eastern Donbas area.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

In an interview on Tuesday, a senior Defense Department official pointed to myriad military supply and tactical problems to explain the Russian tactics. The Russian military is running low on critical supplies and replenishment, said Colin H. Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy. “They’re running low on artillery. They’re running low on standoff munitions, and they are substituting by sending convicts in human waves into places like Bakhmut and Soledar.”

The Russian military has been following the Wagner playbook and deliberately using the poorly trained troops to draw, and deplete, Ukrainian fire, senior American military and defense officials said.

Kusti Salm, Estonia’s deputy defense minister, in a briefing with reporters in Washington last week, said that Russia was better able to stand its losses than Ukraine.

“In this particular area, the Russians have employed around 40,000 to 50,000 inmates or prisoners,” Mr. Salm said. “They are going up against regular soldiers, people with families, people with regular training, valuable people for the Ukrainian military.”

“So the exchange rate is unfair,” he added. “It’s not one to one because for Russia, inmates are expendable. From an operational perspective, this is a very unfair deal for the Ukrainians and a clever tactical move from the Russian side.”

Moscow has thrown people it sees as expendable into battles for decades, if not centuries. During World War II, Joseph Stalin sent close to one million prisoners to the front. Boris Sokolov, a Russia historian, describes in a piece called “Gulag Reserves” in the Russian opposition magazine Grani.ru that an additional one million “special settlers”— deportees and others viewed by the Soviet government as second-class citizens — were also forced to fight during World War II.

“In essence, it does not matter how big the Russian losses are, since their overall human resource is much greater than Ukraine’s,” Mr. Salm, the Estonian official, said in a follow-up email. “In Russia the life of a soldier is worth nothing. A dead soldier, on the other hand, is a hero, regardless of how he died. All lost soldiers can be replaced, and the number of losses will not shift the public opinion against the war.”

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · February 3, 2023

20. How the US is boosting military alliances to counter China

Alliances are key to our national security.

How the US is boosting military alliances to counter China

AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · February 2, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is expanding it military presence in Asia, in a string of moves aimed at countering Beijing and reassuring Indo-Pacific allies that America will stand with them against threats from China and North Korea.

The U.S. actions stretch from Japan to the Solomon Islands. And they involve more and increasingly advanced military exercises in the region and additional troop rotations in key areas facing the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. In some cases, they also could provide logistical support in the event of any conflict with China, specifically in defense of the self-governing island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own.

The announcements in recent weeks have triggered angry responses from both China and North Korea. And they come as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to go to China next week in what will be the first visit by a Cabinet-level official in the Biden administration.

PHILIPPINES

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, on his seventh trip to Asia during his two years in office, announced an agreement with the Philippines on Thursday that gives the U.S. access to four more military camps in the Southeast Asian country.

He called it a “big deal” even though it doesn’t establish a permanent U.S. military presence, which is prohibited under the Philippine Constitution. What it does do, however, is give U.S. troops — rotating in and out of the Philippines — a bird’s eye view of two critical spots: the Taiwan Strait and disputed regions of the South China Sea.

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There are about 500 U.S. troops in the Philippines on any given day, but thousands rotate in and out over the course of a year for military exercises, humanitarian aid, training and other missions, according to officials. The Philippines allows American forces to stay in barracks within designated Philippine camps. The U.S. already had access to five Philippine military bases.

Standing with his Philippine counterpart, Carlito Galvez Jr., during a press conference in Manila, Austin said the efforts to strengthen the alliance “are especially important as the People’s Republic of China continues to advance its illegitimate claims in the West Philippine Sea.”

In response, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswomen Mao Ning accused the U.S. of pursuing “its selfish agenda” with the new arrangement, calling it “an act that escalates tensions in the region and endangers regional peace and stability.”

SOUTH KOREA

In Seoul on Tuesday, Austin announced that the U.S. would increase its deployment of advanced military assets to the Korean Peninsula, including fighter jets and aircraft carriers to boost joint training and planning.

He and South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-Sup agreed to expand their combined military exercises, including more live-fire demonstrations. And they discussed preparations for a simulated exercise in February aimed at sharpening their response if North Korea used nuclear weapons.

North Korea test-fired dozens of missiles in 2022, including potentially nuclear-capable ones designed to strike targets in South Korea and the U.S. mainland.

The U.S. resumed large-scale military drills last year, including an aerial exercise involving U.S. strategic bombers in November, in a stepped-up effort to deter Pyongyang. The allies had scaled back exercises in recent years to create room for diplomacy with North Korea during the Trump administration and because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

North Korea, in response, said it’s prepared to counter U.S. military moves with the “most overwhelming nuclear force.” It said the expansion of military exercises is pushing tensions to an “extreme red line.”

JAPAN

Last month, the U.S. and Japan agreed to adjust the American troop presence on the island of Okinawa in part to enhance anti-ship capabilities that would be needed in the event of a Chinese incursion into Taiwan or other hostile acts in the South or East China sea.

They also added a formal mention of outer space in the longstanding U.S.-Japan security treaty, making clear that “attacks to, from and within space” could trigger the mutual defense provisions of the treaty. And Japan announced it would begin constructing a pair of runways on the small southern island of Mageshima where joint exercises, amphibious operations and missile interception could begin in about four years.

The island would be a hub for troop deployments and munition supplies in case of a conflict like a Taiwan emergency.

The changes in the U.S. deployment on Okinawa will transform the 12th Marine Regiment into a smaller, more rapidly mobile unit — the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, which will be better equipped to fight an adversary and defend the U.S. and its allies in the region.

SOLOMON ISLANDS

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands this week, in a direct effort to counter China’s growing influence there. There had been an embassy in the Solomons for several years, but it was closed in 1993 as part of a global reduction in diplomatic posts. Over time, however, the U.S. became concerned about possible weakening ties with the country.

The Solomon Islands switched allegiance from the self-ruled island of Taiwan to Beijing in 2019. And last year, the Solomons signed a security pact with China, raising fears of a military buildup by Beijing in the region.

Reopening an embassy there, the U.S. State Department said, was a priority to counter China’s growing influence in the region. The embassy in the capital, Honiara, is starting small, with a chargé d’affaires, a couple of State Department staff and a handful of local employees.

AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · February 2, 2023

21. Ukraine War Drives Rapid Growth in South Korea’s Arms Exports

A partner in the Arsenal of Democracy.

Ukraine War Drives Rapid Growth in South Korea’s Arms Exports

The country has been supplying the U.S. and its allies and is coming under pressure to aid Kyiv directly

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-war-drives-rapid-growth-in-south-koreas-arms-exports-11675345212?mod=flipboard

By Dasl YoonFollow

Feb. 2, 2023 9:00 am ET

SEOUL—The Ukraine war has fueled rapid growth in South Korea’s arms exports as countries supporting Kyiv turn to Seoul to replenish their supplies.

Now South Korea is facing increasing pressure to supply weapons directly to Ukraine.

Seoul has sent gas masks, bulletproof vests and medical supplies to Ukraine, but President Yoon Suk Yeol has declined to provide lethal aid directly to Kyiv, citing a law that prohibits the country from doing so during a conflict.

During a visit to Seoul on Monday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged South Korea to reconsider, pointing to several other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that had changed their policies to support Ukraine. Asked about the possibility on Tuesday, South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup said he was aware of the need for the international effort and the government was paying close attention to the situation, but declined to comment further.

The attention is partly due to the unique position South Korea occupies among global arms suppliers. With an arms industry built for decades to counter the rising threat from North Korea, it has been the world’s fastest-growing arms exporter over the past five years, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

South Korea’s presence in the global defense industry has been expanding.

PHOTO: YONHAP/SHUTTERSTOCK

Its share of the global arms market is still small when compared with those of giants like the U.S. and Russia, but it rose to become the eighth-largest exporter, with 2.8% of global exports, over the five years ended in 2021, from 13th and 1% in the previous five years, according to the institute.

South Korea has set a goal of being in the top four by 2027. Its arms sales last year were more than double those of the year before—topping $17 billion by the end of November, up from $7.25 billion—according to the Defense Ministry.

The global appetite has risen as a result of the war. South Korea signed its largest military-export deal last year, to supply tanks and jet fighters to Poland, enabling Warsaw to replace many of the weapons it has sent to Kyiv. Poland has also bought artillery and ammunition from South Korea as it rushes to build up its defenses.

Many European countries are turning to South Korea because it can deliver the weapons faster than other allies, said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, the KF-VUB Korea chair at the Brussels School of Governance. At the end of the Cold War, military powers in Europe began reducing their capacity to mass produce conventional weapons such as tanks and artillery. South Korea’s defense industry, meanwhile, has been ramping up its capacity because of the threat from North Korea. Its defense companies have been setting up overseas manufacturing facilities for years, and they now have established production lines with quick turnaround times.

“NATO countries historically trade weapons amongst themselves, but currently it could take several years for countries like Germany or the U.K. to export weapons, which is where South Korea comes in,” Mr. Pacheco Pardo said. “To aid Ukraine the weapons are not needed next year, they’re needed now.”

Last year, the U.S. struck a confidential deal to purchase artillery shells from South Korea that were destined for Ukraine. Under the deal, Seoul would sell 100,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition to the U.S., which would then deliver it to Ukraine.

South Korean soldiers during basic training, and below, in a combined drill with the U.S. military.

PHOTO: YONHAP NEWS/ZUMA PRESS

PHOTO: CHUNG SUNG-JUN/GETTY IMAGES

South Korea’s role in supplying the U.S. and its allies hasn’t gone unnoticed by Russia. In October, President Vladimir Putin accused South Korea of sending arms and ammunition to Ukraine, warning it would ruin relations between Moscow and Seoul. Mr. Yoon denied that the country had done so.

South Korea has tried to strike a delicate balance with Russia since the war in Ukraine began, in an effort to avoid antagonizing a country that provides about a quarter of its crude oil imports and holds significant sway with North Korea. The U.S. has accused North Korea of supplying weapons to aid the Russian war effort, which Pyongyang has denied.

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Last March, after Seoul—under pressure from Washington—joined the international sanctions against Moscow, Russia designated South Korea an unfriendly nation. As a result of the sanctions enforcement, imports from Russia, including crude petroleum and refined petroleum products, were down about 10% from a year earlier as of November. Russia hasn’t publicly sought retribution against South Korea, but last month the speaker of Russia’s Parliament warned that countries supplying Ukraine with more-powerful weapons would trigger retaliation.

The demand for South Korean arms extends beyond Europe and the U.S. Last month Mr. Yoon traveled to the United Arab Emirates, where the two countries’ arms-procurement agencies reached an agreement to make joint investments in their arms industries. South Korea reached a $3.5 billion deal last year to sell its surface-to-air missile-defense system, called Cheongung II, to the U.A.E. The system is designed to intercept enemy aircraft and ballistic missiles.

Seoul’s presence in the global defense industry has been expanding on the back of massive arms sales to countries such as Indonesia, Australia and Egypt. Indonesia has purchased armored vehicles and jet fighters, while Egypt has bought hundreds of self-propelled howitzers to update its artillery systems. Australia purchased howitzers and ammunition-resupply vehicles in 2021.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, center, in the second row, visiting troops based in the United Arab Emirates.

PHOTO: YONHAP NEWS/ZUMA PRESS

South Korea’s constant state of military readiness has given it an edge. Because the country consistently mass produces weapons, the unit cost of production is cheaper than in many other countries, and because it conducts frequent military exercises involving shells and ammunition, its stockpile is regularly refilled, weapons analysts say.

“Constant military exercises have verified the quality of South Korea’s weapons while the prices are comparatively lower,” said Moon Seong-mook, a former general in South Korea’s military who now heads the Seoul-based Korea Research Institute for National Strategy.

South Korea stepped up investments in its own weapons systems after the U.S. reduced its military presence in the early 1990s. Under a plan to shift from a leading to supporting role on the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. withdrew thousands of troops and withdrew its tactical nuclear weapons under a disarmament deal with the Soviet Union.

South Korea has largely built weapons and equipment to be compatible with U.S. gear, partially because of the technological know-how imparted by the U.S. and because the allies expect to fight side-by-side in any potential conflict with North Korea, defense industry experts said.

A prototype of South Korea’s KF-21 fighter.

PHOTO: YONHAP/POOL/SHUTTERSTOCK

South Korea’s arms industry has grown not only in capacity but also in capability. The homegrown KF-21 jet fighter, expected to replace the country’s aging fleet, achieved supersonic speeds for the first time last month. The military successfully test-fired submarine-launched ballistic missiles last year, becoming the world’s seventh country with the technology.

Hanwha Aerospace Co., which signed the deal with Poland for South Korea’s biggest-ever arms sale, will supply Warsaw with tanks, howitzers and jet fighters. The deal has brightened export prospects for the industry. After hovering around $3 billion between 2010 and 2020, South Korea’s annual arms exports surged past $7 billion in 2021, owing to Hanwha’s deal to export K-9 howitzers to Australia. The company now plans to establish a branch in Poland to expand defense exports to Europe.

“South Korea’s defense companies are set to see significant growth from overseas demand, especially as the war in Ukraine prolongs,” said Yang Uk, a military expert at Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Seoul.

Write to Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com

22. Tanking Up: Understanding the Materiel—and Moral—Implications of the New Armor Heading to Ukraine

As Bonaparte says, 'The moral is to the physical as three is to one." We need to consider the moral domain as much as the necessary equipment for kinetic operations.

I would think that the argument here is why we need a human domain of war. I do not think we pay enough attention to it.

Excerpts:

Finally, the Russian troops in the front line, whether they are sitting in a trench or in a T-72 from the 1st Guards Tank Army, realize what is now coming. They sit there now in the cold in Ukraine or just across the border, realizing that the chances of operational success in gaining more territory this year just went down appreciably. That reality may not ever sink in for Putin and his circle of sycophants in the warm halls of Moscow, but it will be much clearer to the average Russian soldier in Luhansk or Crimea that the chances of survival (much less success) just got slimmer. The Russian morale is brittle given the length of the conflict to date, and the revolving military leadership team is going to find the task of motivating the next cohort thrown into the meat grinder that much more difficult.

One of the chief lessons of the war so far is that human factors remain paramount. Technology is important, but what mattes more is the ability to apply it effectively. Americans have a strong bias toward technology and hardware, and overlook what Michael C. Davies and I termed the human domain. The Ukrainians have clearly demonstrated a competitive edge in morale, will to fight, and improvisation. It is possible that Russia’s mobilization, including the convicts being released to fight in Ukraine with the Wagner Group, will finally offset Kyiv’s manpower advantage. However, it is extremely unlikely that it will offset the qualitative superiority of those Ukrainians committed to defending their homeland. For that reason, the prospects for Ukrainian operational success this summer just got better.

In sum, the tanks themselves are not a game changer but they provide a competitive edge in both the materiel and moral dimensions of this war.

Tanking Up: Understanding the Materiel—and Moral—Implications of the New Armor Heading to Ukraine - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Frank Hoffman · February 3, 2023

There is much to celebrate in the collective decision by Ukraine’s Western supporters to again upgrade security assistance to Kyiv with modern armor systems including the well-regarded German Leopard 2. There is little doubt the new weapons systems will eventually make a substantial impact on the battlefield. Kyiv’s tank troops are elated with the decision, their tanks are old, and parts and ammunition are becoming scarce. Hence, the call to “send in the tanks.”

That said, the delayed approval of the transfer decision has further slowed the delivery of both the tanks and their requisite training, logistics and maintenance support. These will not be operationally relevant until the summer now, giving Russia more time to dig in or devise countermeasures. The US topline tank, the M1A2 Abrams, is not going to be delivered until late 2023, at best. In hindsight, this was a decision that would have been better timed if made three months ago.

The debate that delayed that decision cost the Ukrainians the chance to take the initiative. As George Barros from the Institute for the Study of War noted in a recent interview, “The Ukrainians were signaling an intention to conduct offensive operations over the winter, but the lack of Western security assistance has degraded their ability to do that.” The extended discussions more than degraded such operations; it has deleted that opportunity this winter entirely. Now the Russians have more time to prepare their defensive fortifications or launch their own counteroffensive before the Ukrainians have been augmented. The additive tanks will not be on the ground in time for Ukraine to use them in the near term, while Russian forces are cold and tired. They remain vulnerable for now, but that window could be closing as General Valery Gerasimov scrambles to reconstitute his mauled units and create an offensive capability to satisfy Vladimir Putin’s imperial illusions.

The delay is understandable given the domestic politics inside Germany. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sought and got political top cover for a risky move that some of his base thought was being pushed on Germany by allies. The American reluctance to introduce the world’s heaviest, jet fuel–guzzling, technologically loaded tank was a useful excuse for him to hide behind. But the US administration changed its position, which gave Scholz support to relent and give Kyiv the tanks necessary if it hopes to recover lost territory. The entire episode did little to enhance the chancellor’s international reputation, but Germany’s domestic politics account for that.

Game Changer?

The decision to upgrade the Ukrainian military’s combat power with these tanks has an immediate effect, but not in the way many anticipate (or if the decision had been made months ago). The tread heads in the tank community will point to the heavy metal. But there is a psychological impact that comes with all this hardware too.

The first shock is for Moscow, which now discovers that its saber-rattling no longer paralyzes decisions in Berlin or Brussels. Augmenting that, the government in Kyiv is now reinforced, belatedly, with the West behind it, with a high-quality armor upgrade. The signal being sent with up to perhaps three hundred heavy tanks is that the democracies are committed not only to the near-term fight but to Ukraine’s postwar security. Even that fact will seep into the Kremlin’s dull decision calculus.

Second, at the operational level, the Ukrainian military gets a psychological boost knowing that the Western armor and munitions are coming. While Ukraine’s forces may be tired or worried about the upcoming spring offensives, they now realize they not only will have the tools needed to deflect a Russian thrust, but now will have the capability to execute offensive maneuvers of their own to regain territory. This extra component, a mailed fist, will allow them to initiate their own offensive with greater confidence and lethality. Combined with the fighting vehicles previously approved, they can anticipate decreased operational losses and greater maneuver capacity.

Finally, the Russian troops in the front line, whether they are sitting in a trench or in a T-72 from the 1st Guards Tank Army, realize what is now coming. They sit there now in the cold in Ukraine or just across the border, realizing that the chances of operational success in gaining more territory this year just went down appreciably. That reality may not ever sink in for Putin and his circle of sycophants in the warm halls of Moscow, but it will be much clearer to the average Russian soldier in Luhansk or Crimea that the chances of survival (much less success) just got slimmer. The Russian morale is brittle given the length of the conflict to date, and the revolving military leadership team is going to find the task of motivating the next cohort thrown into the meat grinder that much more difficult.

One of the chief lessons of the war so far is that human factors remain paramount. Technology is important, but what mattes more is the ability to apply it effectively. Americans have a strong bias toward technology and hardware, and overlook what Michael C. Davies and I termed the human domain. The Ukrainians have clearly demonstrated a competitive edge in morale, will to fight, and improvisation. It is possible that Russia’s mobilization, including the convicts being released to fight in Ukraine with the Wagner Group, will finally offset Kyiv’s manpower advantage. However, it is extremely unlikely that it will offset the qualitative superiority of those Ukrainians committed to defending their homeland. For that reason, the prospects for Ukrainian operational success this summer just got better.

In sum, the tanks themselves are not a game changer but they provide a competitive edge in both the materiel and moral dimensions of this war.

Russian Reconstitution?

Russia’s past performance in this theater raises a lot of questions about its agility and endurance, despite the efforts to mobilize fresh troops and put the economy on a war footing. A number of questions have to be answered. Will the hastily mobilized conscripts of Putin’s regenerated force be any better? Unlikely. Can the Russian military overcome its overly centralized command structure, limited communications, and poor troop quality? Also unlikely. Will Russia adapt its force design and its crude tactics to overcome their limitations? Possibly. Will it continue to simply batter the Ukrainians with massive amounts of artillery or will it employ the next generation of drones in more creative ways, perhaps targeting the Ukrainian military’s now larger and hence more vulnerable logistics tail? Not likely at all.

As the analysis team at the Institute for the Study of War notes, Russia should be expected to be more careful about heavy losses with this next cohort of conscripted soldiers than it was with convicts and Wagner mercenaries over the winter. As the team’s report observed, “The Russians’ ability to execute large-scale rapid offensives on multiple axes this winter and spring is thus very questionable.” Time will soon tell. Both sides could introduce surprises, possibly in the air or in electronic warfare, that tip the balance one way or another.

Net Assessment

As Columbia University professor and landpower scholar Steve Biddle has argued, offensive maneuver remains necessary in warfare, and the next campaign should reinforce that fundamental reality. We can expect that tanks, in both the offense and defense, will also show that the tank is not obsolete, even if it is increasingly vulnerable. The open terrain in the east and an adversary without the modern loitering munitions and antiarmor systems employed to date favor success with the armor the Ukrainians have asked for. The only doubt is how much time will be needed to absorb them and integrate them into the operational and logistics systems supporting Kyiv’s forces. Some well-informed analysts think armored fighting vehicles may be more valuable than the slower tanks, combining greater mobility and speed for offensive operations while bringing Ukraine’s infantry into positions of advantage. Moreover, as Mike Kofman has noted, true combined arms warfare requires airpower as well as steel on the ground. For Kyiv to be successful, it will have to demonstrate that it can exploit the air domain in some form.

The stalemate I projected last April came to pass, until the success of Ukraine’s surprising sweep into Kharkiv against thin defenses last September. Ukraine has doggedly extended that success by pushing Russia backward in the south into more defensible positions, again with selective strikes on command-and-control posts and the aggressor’s key logistics nodes. To press their attack further and unhinge the Russian line, Ukrainian forces will have to upgrade the maneuver component of their campaign and integrate their fires better at the operational level. In addition to shortfalls in offensive air and air defense, Kyiv remains short on long-range artillery as shown by an recent valuable report by the Polish Institute for International Affairs.

All told, the Leopards, Challengers, and Abrams are clearly not an instant game changer given the balance of forces in the battlespace. The tanks are not without problems. They present new training and logistics challenges, as noted in these pages. The Ukrainian people, however, have proven quite agile at absorbing and adapting Western tech to their needs. The advanced training to operationally apply this hardware is ongoing already at a base in Grafenwoehr, Germany. In contrast, Russia has proven surprisingly inept at learning, giving the edge in the battle of adaptation to Kyiv so far. The anticipated campaigns of this spring and summer will be the final test of Gerasimov’s and the Russian General Staff’s badly tattered credibility.

Nine months ago, I wrote here that Ukrainians would be hard pressed to conduct combined arms maneuver to regain lost ground. That is now an outdated judgment. This time, with nearly a year of grueling combat experience under their belts and the reinforcements they are getting, we should be much more optimistic. It will not be mass, but maneuver and moral factors that will dominate. Better employment of materiel, not just raw quantity, will serve the Ukrainians well in the face of the mindless attrition we’ve seen from the Russian machine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy needs military success to increase his bargaining position at any subsequent negotiations. Regaining the four occupied oblasts is key to convincing Putin he’s lost. Success will not happen in the near term, regrettably. But it is looking more likely over the course of this year.

Dr. Frank Hoffman is a retired Marine Reserve infantry officer and former DoD official. He currently works at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Marco Dorow, Allied Joint Force Command Naples

mwi.usma.edu · by Frank Hoffman · February 3, 2023

23. Is China poised to help other unaligned powers usurp the dollar?

The key view of the Quincy Institute is expressed in the subtitle. It is the US that is in the wrong and is supposedly conducting malign activities in Quincy's views.

BUt the more important point is that the dollar as the reserve currency is one of the superpowers of the US and we must protect that status otherwise our economic instrument of power will be severely weakened which in turn will undermine our military instrument.

Is China poised to help other unaligned powers usurp the dollar? - Responsible Statecraft

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Amir Handjani · February 2, 2023

Beijing and Riyadh have been watching the US weaponize it’s currency as a blunt instrument of international statecraft.

February 2, 2023

Written by

Amir Handjani

Is China poised to help other unaligned powers usurp the dollar?

At the recent annual gathering of global elites in Davos, Saudi Foreign Minister Mohammad Al-Jaddan suggested that the kingdom was open to selling its energy exports to China in Renminbi.

This got the attention of petroleum economists and central bankers alike as both know that, for the last 48 years, Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf Arab states have been pricing and selling their crude exports exclusively in U.S. dollars.

Indeed, it was Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary William Simon who struck what was then a secret plan with the Saudis to essentially bankroll America’s widening trade deficits by pricing their oil sales in greenbacks and thereby increasing the amount of dollars in circulation and enhancing the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency. In return, Saudi Arabia would have unique access to U.S. military assistance and equipment.

This bargain made a lot of sense when the United States was the world’s largest importer of Saudi crude. This is no longer the case today, however, as it has been supplanted by China. In fact, China is not only the largest importer of crude and petrochemicals from the kingdom, it is also the largest purchaser of crude and petroleum products from all the Persian Gulf countries.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise if at some point in the future, Saudi Arabia and China move away from the dollar and trade in a currency that is more in line with their national interests.

China and Saudi Arabia, as is the case with many oil-exporting countries, share similarities in how they govern. They have been watching for years as the United States has been weaponizing the dollar and wielding it as a blunt instrument of international statecraft. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ability of the Western alliance to freeze virtually overnight Russia’s foreign currency reserves, estimated at $300 billion, would make any government whose policies don’t always align with that of the United States take note.

Over the last year, Russia started pricing its crude exports in rubles to countries it deems as “unfriendly” (meaning Europe) and renminbi for Chinese customers. It is also trying to persuade the other members of BRICS (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) to develop and trade with each other using a common currency. Just this past week Russia and Iran expanded their banking relationship as they continue to work around Western led sanctions on both countries

China has the most to gain from dethroning the dollar. So long as the dollar reigns supreme, unilateral U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies and banks will inhibit Beijing’s rise. China has been at work for years trying to develop its own version of SWIFT, the Belgian based messaging service that lets banks around the world talk to each other and confirm cross-border transactions. SWIFT has long deferred to the United States and generally complies with secondary U.S. sanctions against foreign commercial entities and countries. China calls its new system CIPS, which stands for Cross-Border Interbank Payment System.

If China wants to make the Yuan a reserve currency it could insist on countries and banks with which it conducts large volumes of trade to settle those transactions on their payment CIPS. China is currently the largest trading partner of most of the world’s nations.

The dollar’s demise has been predicted often in the past, and yet the currency has almost always proved naysayers wrong. It has several structural advantages that currently other currencies don’t enjoy.

First of all, according to the International Monetary Fund, the greenback still accounts for 60 percent of global reserve currency (although that is down from 70 percent in 2000). Second, China tightly controls the yuan and doesn’t allow it to be fully convertible to all currencies. Third, U.S. credit markets and government-backed bonds (or treasuries) are deeper and more liquid than any other government-backed bond in the world.

Finally, it has the full faith and credit of the U.S. government behind it, a status which gives it credibility and reliability that other central banks and asset managers around the world count on.

But that credibility is now under threat due to a confluence of forces. First, U.S. debt is now $31 trillion and rising. After averting a disastrous default in 2011, Republicans in Congress are flirting with the idea of not raising the debt ceiling. This would risk defaulting on the government’s financial obligations and thereby invalidating Washington’s “full faith and credit.”

This could have a ripple effect whose ultimate consequences are unknowable but very likely disastrous for the future of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency as it would shake investor and central bankers’ confidence in the U.S. economy to an unprecedented extent.

Continued polarization in the U.S. body politic and political instability in Washington will also make central banks around the world question the long-term viability of the dollar as a reserve currency for the simple reason that Democrats and Republicans will not be viewed as capable of putting aside their political differences in the best interests of the country.

The continued weaponization of the dollar as a blunt instrument of statecraft is giving U.S. adversaries an opening to look for alternative payment and settlement mechanisms. This will only accelerate a bipolar or multipolar world whereby reserve currencies such as the dollar are only used by allies of Washington and middle powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa will have more choices in what reserve currencies to hold. This will only diminish a huge source of U.S. economic and soft power and make the world more unstable.

Written by

Amir Handjani

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Amir Handjani · February 2, 2023

24. What is an OSINT Tool - Best OSINT Tools 2023

I am not familiar with any of these tools.

What is an OSINT Tool - Best OSINT Tools 2023

hackread.com · by byWaqas · February 2, 2023

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) tools are an invaluable resource for companies, organizations cybersecurity researchers and students. In this article, we will explore the 15 best OSINT tools that you can use for your investigations and education purposes.

OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence, refers to the practice of gathering information from publicly available sources. In the information and digital age, there are countless tools and resources available for OSINT practitioners to use, making it easier than ever to collect and analyze information. Here are the 15 best OSINT tools that you can use for your investigations:

Maltego

Maltego is a powerful and sophisticated OSINT tool for gathering data from public sources. Developed by Paterva, Maltego OSINT allows users to quickly uncover relationships between large amounts of disparate data which can then be used to build intelligence profiles.

With Maltego OSINT, users are able to extract information from multiple online sources using simple graphic representations. This includes the ability to map out social networks, capture contact details and business data, track domain names and IP addresses, uncover digital evidence such as documents or images stored on websites, find related news articles and more.

Furthermore, by automating the process of gathering publicly available data in this way, Maltego OSINT enables users to quickly discover hidden connections that would otherwise remain undetected. Visit the official website of Maltego here.

Shodan

Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and an OSINT tool that is used to uncover vulnerable and exposed devices connected to the Internet, otherwise known as smart devices.

Shodan was created by John Matherly in 2009 and is considered to be the world’s first computer search engine. Shodan can be used to detect security vulnerabilities on public websites, as well as provide detailed information about each web server it finds.

Shodan has become increasingly popular among cybersecurity and IT security professionals who use it for vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and network mapping. Shodan also helps them identify insecure services such as misconfigured cloud databases, FTP servers, telnet servers, and SSH servers that are exposed on the internet without authentication or encryption.

Additionally, Shodan provides detailed technical information about each device it finds including IP address, operating system type, open ports, running software programs and associated vulnerabilities. That is why Shoden is a perfect OSINT tool out there. Visit the official website of Shodan here.

TheHarvester

TheHarvester is a powerful OSINT tool used to find information related to domains and email addresses. It can be used by security professionals, IT administrators, and hackers alike to collect information from different sources on the internet.

TheHarvester was created as an alternative for doing research on public resources such as search engines, PGP key servers, and social networks. It allows users to quickly gather large amounts of data from sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Dogpile, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more.

All of the gathered data can be exported into several formats such as HTML/XML or even saved as a text file. Additionally, it includes an API that allows users to customize their searches according to their specific needs. Visit the official TheHarvester page on Kali here.

Recon-ng

Recon-ng is an OSINT tool used for reconnaissance and data gathering. It is a full-featured web application that can be used to gather subsets of public information related to a target, such as usernames, names, email addresses, domain names and other relevant details.

Recon-ng has been designed to automate the process of gathering intelligence about a given target as quickly and efficiently as possible. The Recon-ng OSINT tool provides users with access to multiple resources such as Google, Bing, Twitter, Shodan and more.

The platform also allows users to interact with each resource using the same interface which simplifies the data-gathering process significantly compared to traditional methods. It enables users to quickly collect comprehensive information on a target without having to manually search multiple online sources or databases. Visit the official Recon-ng page on Kali here.

Spiderfoot

Spiderfoot is an excellent OSINT tool designed to automate the process of gathering information about a specific target. Spiderfoot enables users to have quick and easy access to a wide range of data sources.

It is capable of collecting information from over 200 sources, such as DNS records, WHOIS information and public resources like Shodan, VirusTotal, Google and others. Spiderfoot can be used for reconnaissance, investigative research and even threat hunting by allowing users to quickly identify potential threats or vulnerabilities in their environment.

The tool works by scanning the internet for publicly available data from various sources based on the user’s input query parameters. The collected data can then be mapped out into an interactive graph with various visual indicators which make it easier to interpret the gathered information.

This feature makes it much easier for security professionals to recognize trends or anomalies within their networks which can help them detect malicious activities or threats early on. Visit the official website of Spiderfoot here.

OSINT Framework

OSINT Framework is a website and information-gathering tool used by security professionals for investigative purposes. It is a collection of free and publicly available tools that can be used to conduct online investigations.

OSINT Framework provides users with an easy-to-use platform to quickly search, collect and analyze data from various sources such as social media platforms, websites, forums, blogs and more. By using this framework, security professionals are able to gather a wealth of information in order to identify potential threats or anomalies on the web.

The OSINT Framework enables users to access public records and other sources of information quickly and efficiently. It utilizes specialized search engines and databases such as Google Hacking Database (GHDB) as well as several other open-source intelligence tools such as Recon-ng, Maltego and Shodan. Visit the official website of OSINT Framework here.

Foca

Foca (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives) is an OSINT tool used by cybersecurity professionals to collect data from the internet. It can be used to find information on any subject, including people, companies, and other organizations. The tool gathers data from a variety of sources such as social media platforms, websites, and search engines.

The tool helps users to collect information quickly and efficiently by providing them with a set of tools for searching, collecting and analyzing the collected data. It provides users with advanced filtering options that allow them to narrow down their searches and find relevant information easily.

Foca also has features such as keyword analysis which enables users to analyze text-based content or images in order to identify patterns or trends in the collected data. Additionally, it offers other features like automated report generation which allows users to generate reports quickly without having to manually gather all the necessary data themselves. Visit the official GitHub repository of FOCA here.

Metagoofil

Metagoofil is a powerful OSINT tool used for gathering publicly available information about a particular target. It is especially useful for penetration testers, security professionals, and researchers who need to collect data from websites in order to perform reconnaissance on their targets.

Metagoofil was developed by Edge Security in 2006 as part of the framework for its security consulting services. This tool can be used to scan websites, search engines, and public document archives such as PDFs and Microsoft Office documents. It then searches for specific keywords related to the target and collects the relevant information from these sources.

With its easy-to-use interface, Metagoofil allows users to quickly find files containing sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, email addresses, IP addresses, etc., which can then be used in further attacks or research projects. Visit the official Metagoofil page on Kali here.

GHunt

GHunt is a new OSINT tool that lets users extract information from any Google Account using an email. The information that GHunt extracts include:

Google ID
Owner’s name
Public photos (P)
Phones models (P)
Phones firmware
Installed Softwares
Google Maps reviews
Possible physical location
Possible YouTube channel
Possible other usernames
Events from Google Calendar
If the account is a Hangouts Bot
Last time the profile was edited
Activated Google services (YouTube, Photos, Maps, News360, Hangouts, etc.)

Visit GHunt’s GitHub repository here.

Yandex Images

The Russian counterweight to America’s Google, Yandex has been extremely popular in Russia and offers users the option to search across the internet for thousands of images. This is in addition to its reverse-image functionality which is remarkably similar to Google.

A good option included within is that you could sort images category wise which can make your searches more specific and accurate.

Tip: In my personal experience; Yandex image search results are far more accurate and in-depth than Google Images. Visit Yandex here.

N2YO.com

Allowing you to track satellites from afar, N2YO is a great tool for space enthusiasts. It does so by featuring a regularly searched menu of satellites in addition to a database where you could make custom queries along the lines of parameters such as the Space Command ID, launch date, satellite name, and an international designator.

You could also set up custom alerts to know about space station events along with a live stream of the International Space Station(ISS)! Visit the official website of N2YO here.

TinEye

TinEye is the original reversed image search engine, and all you have to do is submit a proper picture to TinEye to get all the required information, like where it has come from and how it has been used.

Instead of using keyword matching, it uses a variety of approaches to complete its tasks, including picture matching, signature matching, watermark identification, and numerous other databases to match the image.

In conclusion, these 15 OSINT tools are among the best available for conducting investigations using publicly available information. Whether you are a professional investigator or a curious individual, these tools can help you gather and analyze information more efficiently and effectively. Visit the official website of TinEye here.

Have I Been Pwned

Have I Been Pwned is an online service that helps people determine if their personal data has been compromised. It works by using email addresses to track data breaches, allowing users to know whether their information has been leaked or stolen due to a hack or other incident.

Have I Been Pwned was created in 2013 by Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director and security expert. The site provides users with detailed information about the source of any breach affecting their personal data, as well as the types of data that may have been leaked. This allows them to take appropriate steps to protect themselves from future attacks.

Have I Been Pwned or HIBP currently tracks more than 12 billion accounts across over 600 major data breaches, providing one of the most comprehensive databases for checking if your account details have been exposed online. Visit Have I Been Pwned here.

Conclusion

In conclusion, OSINT tools are an invaluable resource for anyone looking to stay ahead of the curve in the world of digital intelligence. The 15 Best OSINT tools outlined in this article provide an excellent overview for any user, from the novice to the professional, to get started. By using these tools and understanding their functions, users can empower themselves to become better researchers and find valuable data more quickly.

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What is an OSINT Tool - Best OSINT Tools 2023

Maltego

Shodan

TheHarvester

Recon-ng

Spiderfoot

OSINT Framework

Foca

Metagoofil

GHunt

Yandex Images

N2YO.com

TinEye

Have I Been Pwned

Conclusion

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