Quotes of the Day:

"Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."

- Albert Einstein

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." 

- Geroge Bernard Shaw

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools." - Ernest Hemingway

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 3, 2023

2. What to know about the suspected Chinese spy balloon

3. CIA chief warns against underestimating Xi's ambitions toward Taiwan

4. Taiwan's Tsai welcomes retired US admiral for China talks

5. What China wants out of Blinken’s Beijing visit

6. How China Uses Geoengineering to Pursue a Hybrid Warfare Strategy

7. GAO Report on Contested Information Environments

8. The Free Press - A National Security Issue?

9. Scoop: Russia state propaganda alums launch new D.C. media venture

10. Pentagon detects second Chinese balloon over Latin America

11. Why Marcos Is Inviting the US Military Back to the Philippines

12. High-Flying Balloon Seen as Part of Broader Chinese Spy Program

13. Urban Combat Is Changing. The Ukraine War Shows How

14. China says ‘spy’ balloon incident ‘hyped up’

15. Suspected Chinese spy balloon drifting over U.S. has surveillance part as big as multiple school buses

16. From China to Big Sky: The Balloon That Unnerved the White House

17. Ukraine Situation Report: Kyiv Officially Getting Long-Range Rocket-Boosted Bomb

18. The Army Picked a Black Hawk Replacement — But the Fight May Have Just Begun

19. Why didn’t US shoot down suspected Chinese spy balloon? Expert explains

20. A Brief History of Spying With Balloons

21. Challenging the U.S. Is a Historic Mistake

22. Tanks and what they mean for the Ukraine War's endgame | John A. Nagl

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 3, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-3-2023

Key Takeaways

• The Biden administration announced a new $2.2 billion military aid package to Ukraine on February 3, including precision long-range missiles for HIMARS.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continued his campaign against certain opposition voices in the domestic information space while continuing to platform critical nationalist milbloggers.
• Russian officials continue to perpetuate the information operation that the war in Ukraine is a direct threat to Russian security through legislative manipulations.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line with an intensified pace of operations near Kreminna.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut.
• Russian forces did not make any confirmed territorial gains in southern Ukraine.
• Western officials reportedly estimate that Russian forces have sustained almost 200,000 casualties in the war in Ukraine.
• Russian officials continue to rely on government-organized non-governmental organizations operating in occupied territories to create the veneer of grassroots support for Russian occupation.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 3, 2023

Feb 3, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Riley Bailey, Layne Philipson, George Barros, and Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 3, 7pm 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.

The Biden administration announced a new $2.2 billion military aid package to Ukraine on February 3, including precision long-range missiles for HIMARS.[1] The package includes Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDM) that will increase the range of HIMARS to 151km from roughly 80km.[2] The package also includes Javelin anti-armor systems, two HAWK air defense firing units, regular HIMARS ammunition, and 120mm mortar and 155mm artillery rounds.[3]

Russian President Vladimir Putin continued his campaign against certain opposition voices in the domestic information space while continuing to platform critical nationalist milbloggers. Moscow authorities announced the arrest of Alexander Gusov, the alleged administrator of the Novyi Vek and VChK-OGPU Telegram channels, on charges of extortion on February 3.[4] Independent Russian outlet OVD Info claimed that Russian authorities also arrested Oleg Seliverov for charges relating to terrorism after Moscow authorities recently investigated Seliverov for ties to the Nexta Live opposition outlet.[5] Seliverov is an anti-war activist, and VChK-OGPU characterizes itself as exposing the “secrets of officials, oligarchs, gangsters, security officials.”[6] Gusov denied his affiliations with Novyi Vek and VChK-OGPU on January 26, and Seliverov denied associations with Nexta Live on January 28.[7] VChK-OGPU condemned the arrests and claimed that Rostec CEO Sergey Chemezov and Chemezov’s associates influenced the crackdowns.[8] Putin censored several large opposition outlets in late January 2023, as ISW has previously reported.[9] Putin likely aims to crack down against opposition outlets that directly oppose Putin’s regime or goals, including anti-war voices, while upholding voices such as nationalist milbloggers who support Putin’s regime and war even as the milbloggers criticize the regime for its poor execution of war aims they regard as insufficient.

Russian officials continue to perpetuate the information operation that the war in Ukraine is a direct threat to Russian security through legislative manipulations. Bryansk and Kursk oblasts announced on February 3 that they are extending the “yellow” level of terrorist threat indefinitely due to a need for enhanced measures to protect and defend Russian territory.[10] Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on January 31 that simplifies the process of implementing terror threat alerts in Russia and allows Russian regions classed as ”yellow level” of terrorist threat per Putin’s October 19 martial law decree to indefinitely introduce an elevated ”terrorist level.”[11] Bryansk and Kursk oblast officials will likely use this new ”terror level” regime to escalate law enforcement measures in order to crack down on domestic dissent, partially to present the war in Ukraine as directly threatening Russian domestic security in order to generate continued support for Russian operations.

Key Takeaways

• The Biden administration announced a new $2.2 billion military aid package to Ukraine on February 3, including precision long-range missiles for HIMARS.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continued his campaign against certain opposition voices in the domestic information space while continuing to platform critical nationalist milbloggers.
• Russian officials continue to perpetuate the information operation that the war in Ukraine is a direct threat to Russian security through legislative manipulations.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line with an intensified pace of operations near Kreminna.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut.
• Russian forces did not make any confirmed territorial gains in southern Ukraine.
• Western officials reportedly estimate that Russian forces have sustained almost 200,000 casualties in the war in Ukraine.
• Russian officials continue to rely on government-organized non-governmental organizations operating in occupied territories to create the veneer of grassroots support for Russian occupation.

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 forces conducted a limited ground attack northwest of Svatove and continued offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line on February 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Stelmakhivka (15km west of Svatove) in Luhansk Oblast.[12] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on January 2 that Ukrainian forces prepared to repel a Russian attack near the Hryanykivka-Petropavlivka-Synkivka line and that a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group operated near Kyslivka (26km northwest of Svatove).[13] The milblogger amplified a news report on February 3 claiming that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian advances into the Svatove-Kreminna area, which the news report called ”the tensest part“ of the Luhansk front.[14] The news report claimed that the Russian 488th Motorized Rifle Regiment (144th Motorized Rifle Division, 20th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) regularly fired on Ukrainian positions near the Svatove-Kreminna area.[15] Another milblogger claimed on February 2 that the 144th Motorized Rifle Division conducted successful operations in the Svatove-Kreminna area on February 1 and that Ukrainian forces committed reserves to the area overnight.[16] The milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces increased their rate of artillery fire and conducted some counterattacks, which Russian forces repelled.[17] The milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted attacks in an unspecified area along the Svatove-Kreminna line breaking through Ukrainian forces’ first line of defense.[18] The milblogger claimed that Russian forces focused on maintaining these new defensive positions and conducted reconnaissance of Ukrainian lines.[19] The milblogger claimed that the Russian 59th Tank Regiment (144th Motorized Rifle Division, 20th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) conducted successful offensive operations along the Svatove-Kreminna line.[20]

Russian forces intensified the pace of offensive operations west of Kreminna on February 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 3 that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults near Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna) and Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna) in Luhansk Oblast.[21] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesman Serhiy Cherevaty stated on February 3 that Russian forces increased their military activity in the Lyman direction and conducted a record number of artillery strikes (384) and 20 combat clashes.[22] A Russian milblogger claimed on February 2 that the 3rd Motorized Rifle Division (20th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) launched an offensive near the Balka Zhuravka gully northwest of Kreminna.[23] The milblogger also claims that the 144th Motorized Rifle Division broke through Ukrainian defenses by two kilometers toward Yampolivka (16km west of Kreminna) and that Russian assault groups advanced toward Ukrainian positions near Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna).[24] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces retreated to their second line of defense after a Russian attack in the Serebrianske forest (10km southwest of Kreminna).[25] Another milblogger claimed on February 3 that Russian forces attempted to advance near Chervonopopivka (5km north of Kreminna) from Ploshchanka (15km northwest of Kreminna) to push Ukrainian forces across the Zherebets River.[26] Various Russian sources additionally claimed that Ukrainian troops took control of Bilohorivka. Occupation Mayor of Lysychansk Andrey Skory claimed on February 3 that Ukrainian forces left their positions in Bilohorivka, a claim that other milbloggers amplified.[27] Claims on the status of Bilohorivka are conflicting, however. Another milblogger claimed on February 3 that Russian forces attacked Bilohorivka but could not take the settlement.[28] Footage posted on February 1 notably shows alleged Russian forces disguised as Ukrainian infantry attacking Ukrainian positions near Bilohorivka.[29] If Russian forces dressed in Ukrainian uniforms attacked Ukrainian positions, it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention on war crimes, which prohibits ”making improper use of... the military insignia and uniform of the enemy.”[30]

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 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself; northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamianske, Mykolaivka, Krasna Hora, and Paraskoviivka; and southwest of Bakhmut near Ivanivske and Kurdiumivka.[31] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces spokesperson Serhiy Cherevaty stated on February 3 that Russian and Ukrainian forces engaged in 23 combat clashes in the Bakhmut area over the course of a day.[32] Geolocated footage posted on February 2 confirms that Russian troops have advanced on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.[33] A Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner Group forces have expanded their control near the Siniat Plant in eastern Bakhmut.[34] Russian sources additionally continued to discuss purported Wagner advanced northeast of Bakhmut in the Mykolaivka-Rozdolivka area about 15km north of Bakhmut.[35] Former militant commander and convicted war criminal Igor Girkin noted that Russian operations northeast of Bakhmut are directed at developing an offensive towards Siversk (30km north of Bakhmut).[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner troops southwest of Bakhmut are continuing efforts to advance from the Klishchiivka area towards Ivanivske (5km west of Bakhmut) in order to cut the T0504 Kostyantynivka-Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut highway.[37]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks on the western outskirts of Donetsk City or in western Donetsk Oblast on February 3. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces attacked towards Vodiane (on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) but that the pace of hostilities in the Donetsk direction has otherwise decreased.[38] Deputy Mayor of Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City) Maksym Verbovskyi stated that Russian forces are no longer trying to break through Ukrainian defenses around Vuhledar but are instead trying to surround the city from two sides (likely from the south and the east).[39] A Russian milblogger noted that the situation around Vuhledar remains very tense and characterized by positional battles.[40]

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

Russian forces did not make any confirmed territorial gains on the southern axis on February 3.[41]Ukrainian officials continue to include a possible Russian offensive in the southern direction within their forecast cone as of February 3. Head of the Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces continue to focus their efforts in eastern Ukraine but that Russian forces have not ruled out the possibility of an “unexpected” secondary offensive in the south.[42] Ukrainian Joint Press Center of the Tavriisk Direction Defense Forces spokesperson Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to seize Zaporizhzhia City by March 31, 2023 and that Russian forces conducted operations to implement Putin’s order, likely referring to localized ground attacks in Zaporizhia Oblast in late January 2023.[43] Ukrainian officials and Russian sources did not report that Russian forces conducted ground attacks in southern Ukraine on February 3.[44] Russian sources claimed that the front line in Zaporizhia Oblast has not changed, and that Russian and Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups continue to operate along the front line.[45]

A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted limited raids near Kruhlyi and Dovhyi islands south of the Kinburn Peninsula on February 2 and 3, the first reported instance of Ukrainian forces reaching the area south of the Kinburn Peninsula since Russian forces initially captured it.[46] ISW has not observed footage or Ukrainian reporting to back up this claim, however. The source claimed that Ukrainian forces increased the number of raids across the Dnipro River since late January 2023, in order to fix Russian forces to the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast.[47]

Russian forces continued routine artillery strikes west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv oblasts on February 3.[48] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command warned on February 3 that Russian forces increased the number of Kalibr missile-carrying ships in the Black Sea and are preparing for another wave of missile strikes.[49]

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

Western officials reportedly estimate that Russian forces have sustained almost 200,000 casualties in the war in Ukraine. The New York Times reported on February 2 that US and other Western officials stated that fighting around Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast has increased an already high Russian casualty count, with hundreds of personnel reportedly dying or being injured in the Bakhmut area daily.[50] Norwegian Defense Chief General Eirik Kristofferson stated on January 22 that Russian forces had suffered 180,000 casualties in Ukraine, although he noted that there is much uncertainty regarding these estimates.[51] US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stated on November 10, 2022, that US officials estimated that over 100,000 Russian servicemembers had died or been injured in Ukraine.[52] The increase in these western estimates between November 2022 and January 2023 may reflect an overall adjustment in Western estimates of Russian casualties and not just new Russian casualties in previous months. The New York Times reported that Western officials stated that thousands of Russian convict volunteers have died in the Bakhmut area, supporting independent Russian outlet Meduza’s reporting that over 80 percent of the Wagner Group’s reported 40,000 convict volunteers are either dead or missing.[53] The high Russian casualty count for the war in Ukraine continues to have deleterious effects on the Russian military’s combat effectiveness and is likely in part prompting Russian officials to pursue a second wave of mobilization as the Russian military prepares for future offensives in Ukraine.

Russian milbloggers continue to claim that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is planning on formally integrating Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic (DNR and LNR) forces into the Russian military. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on February 2 that the Russian MoD is transforming LNR and DNR formations into regular brigades, battalions, and regiments.[54] Russian sources had previously claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presentation of battle banners to the DNR 1st Army Corps and the LNR 2nd Army Corps formations on December 31, 2022, meant that these formations had officially become parts of the Russian Armed Forces.[55] The Russian MoD may be restructuring LNR and DNR formations into new regular Russian formations to help support Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s proposed reforms to increase the number of Russian military personnel and create new maneuver divisions.[56] The possible Russian restructuring would likely require that these LNR and DNR formations pull out of frontline positions in Ukraine for a time, either indicating that the Russian military intends to replace these formations with other Russian formations or that the restructuring effort would draw forces away from certain parts of the line.

Ukrainian sources reported that Russian parallel military formations are continuing prison recruitment efforts. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 3 that an unspecified paramilitary company recruited up to 1,000 prisoners from correctional facilities in Novosibirsk Oblast over the last week.[57] ISW previously assessed that a smaller reported decrease in the Russian prison population since November 2022 may suggest that the Wagner Group’s prison recruitment campaign has slowed in recent months.[58]

Russian occupation authorities in Crimea announced that they plan to fund the provisioning of Russian servicemembers through the nationalization of Ukrainian property. Occupied-Crimea Head Sergey Aksyonov stated on February 3 that his administration will use all funds from the sale of nationalized property of Ukrainian businessmen to equip Russian personnel from Crimea who are participating in the war.[59] Crimea occupation officials’ use of these funds to support the provisioning of Russian soldiers suggests that the occupation administration may be struggling to fund its obligations to support the war effort elsewhere in occupied Ukraine.

Russian occupation officials continue to amplify claims that specific groups of foreign volunteers are serving in Russian volunteer formations to portray Russia as less internationally isolated. Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Head Yevgeny Balitsky posted photos of Russian Presidential Administration First Deputy Chief Sergey Kiriyenko meeting with volunteers of the Pavel Sudaplatov Volunteer Battalion and reiterated claims that some of the volunteers are Serbian and Turkish nationals, although ISW has not observed any confirmation of this claim.[60] Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed that volunteers from over 40 countries are ready to volunteer with Russian formations operating in Ukraine and called upon the Russian government to solve logistics issues that are supposedly preventing these volunteers from reaching Ukraine.[61] Russian officials are likely promoting these claims to signal to specific foreign countries that those countries have domestic constituencies that have pro-Russian views and to present Russia as not being internationally isolated due to the war in Ukraine.

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian officials continue to rely on government-organized non-governmental organizations operating in occupied territories to create the veneer of grassroots support for Russian occupation. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on February 3 that Russian officials have financed non-governmental organizations directly from the Russian federal budget and have instructed them to mimic humanitarian and civilian society roles in occupied territories.[62] The Resistance Center reported that the Kremlin has been funding the organization ”Volunteers of Victory” since 2015 and has tasked it with agitating the public to support Russian occupation.[63] A medical organization with links to Russian occupation officials has reportedly been sending Russian doctors to conduct medical examinations that support Russia’s ongoing medical relocation scheme for children and other residents in occupied territories.[64] The Resistance Center also reported that the Kremlin is trying to create a propagandistic network in Luhansk Oblast similar to the Soviet Komsomol through an organization called ”Representatives of the Russian Union of Youth in the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR).”[65]

Russian officials are likely trying to cement further control over banking systems in occupied territories. Russian occupation officials announced on February 3 that Russian Promsvyazbank acquired PSB Donetsk LLC Bank and PSB Luhansk LLC Bank.[66] LNR Head Leonid Pasechnik stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the acquisition through a decree.[67] Russian officials are likely trying to cement control over banking systems in occupied territories ahead of a likely increase in Russian investments associated with preferential loans and mortgages for occupied territories.

Ukrainian partisans assassinated former police officer and Russian occupation Ministry of Internal Affairs official Yevgeny Kuzmin with an improvised explosive device (IED) while Kuzmin was in his car in Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, on February 3.[68]

Russian officials are continuing to intensify measures to incorporate occupied territories into the Russian education apparatus, partially through efforts to deport Ukrainian youth to Russia. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on February 3 that Russian forces are taking high school students from occupied territories to Russia in order to sit for the Unified State Exam, a series of exams Russian high-school students must pass to enter college or university.[69] The Center reported that Russian officials took 50 eleventh graders from their homes in occupied Lysychansk, Luhansk Oblast, to Yelabuga, Tatarstan, to prepare for and sit for their annual academic exams and promised them free education at Russian universities.[70] Former Luhansk People's Republic (LNR) Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik claimed on February 3 that Russia delivered 28,000 textbooks and manuals to occupied Luhansk Oblast to support preparations for the Unified State Exam.[71]

Russian occupation authorities continue to target Ukrainian children in an effort to consolidate societal control of occupied territories. Kherson Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo stated on February 3 that his administration will establish two Suvorov cadet classes promoting military education and Russian history in occupied Skadovsk, Kherson Oblast, and noted that he is confident that other occupied settlements will follow suit despite the program supposedly not being compulsory.[72] Saldo emphasized that it is vital to provide children in occupied territories with a (Russian) military and patriotic upbringing, indicating that cadet classes are likely intended to further augment efforts to erase Ukrainian cultural identity.[73]

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.)

Russian aircraft that deployed to Belarusian airfields under the rubric of joint tactical aviation exercises in January 2023 reportedly are not returning to Russia despite the exercises’ official conclusion on February 2. Independent Belarusian monitoring organization The Hajun Project reported that Russian forces have not yet begun redeploying Russian aircraft in Belarus back to Russia as of February 2.[74] The Hajun Project also reported that large Russian military convoys with over 20 pieces of heavy equipment were observed on the M1 highway in transit from Baranavichy to Stolbtsy and from the Russian-Belarusian border to Orsha, Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, on February 2.[75] The Project reported that at least four Russian S-300/S-400 air defense systems were observed in transit near Ziabrauka, Gomel Oblast, on February 2.[76]

Belarusian maneuver elements continue conducting exercises in Belarus. A tank platoon of the Belarusian 6th Separate Mechanized Brigade conducted live fire exercises at the Gozhsky Training Ground in Grodno Oblast on February 3.[77] Unspecified motorized rifle elements of the Belarusian 120th Separate Mechanized Brigade conducted live fire exercises with BMP-2 armored personnel carriers at a training ground near Barysaw, Minsk Oblast, on February 3.[78] Unspecified elements of the Osipovichi-based Belarusian 51st Artillery Brigade deployed to an unspecified training ground for exercises on February 3.[79]

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.

[5] https://ovd dot news/express-news/2023/02/03/v-moskve-prishli-s-obyskom-k-antivoennomu-aktivistu-ego-zaderzhali; https://www.rbc dot ru/politics/03/02/2023/63dd610f9a79476c2afc01e6

[6] https://ovd dot news/express-news/2023/02/03/v-moskve-prishli-s-obyskom-k-antivoennomu-aktivistu-ego-zaderzhali; https://t.me/VCHKOGPU;

[10] https://tass dot com/defense/1571065; https://t.me/gubernator_46/2442

[22] https://suspilne dot media/373769-u-kievi-rozpocinaetsa-samit-ukraina-es-proctergamble-vnesli-u-spisok-sponsoriv-vijni-345-den-vijni-onlajn/?anchor=live_1675372635&utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=ps

[32] https://suspilne dot media/373769-u-kievi-rozpocinaetsa-samit-ukraina-es-proctergamble-vnesli-u-spisok-sponsoriv-vijni-345-den-vijni-onlajn/?anchor=live_1675372635&utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=ps

[39] https://suspilne dot media/374336-popri-tiznevij-sturm-rosiani-ne-zajsli-zastupnik-mera-pro-situaciu-v-vugledari/

[42] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/02/03/na-pivdennomu-napryamku-vorog-postijno-manevruye-ale-my-gotovi-do-bud-yakogo-rozvytku-podij-gumenyuk/

[43] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/03/uprodovzh-mynuloyi-doby-na-tavrijskomu-napryamku-rosijski-vijska-vtratyly-ponad-dvi-roty-osobovogo-skladu-vbytymy-ta-poranenymy/

[51] https://t dot co/ce8DTq1OFi

[53] https://meduz dot io/news/2023/01/23/rus-sidyaschaya-iz-50-tysyach-zaklyuchennyh-zaverbovannyh-chvk-vagnera-na-fronte-ostalis-tolko-10-tysyach-ostalnye-libo-pogibli-libo-dezertirovali ; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ukraine-russia-casualties...

[62] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/03/merezha-psevdogromadskyh-ruhiv-na-tot/

[63] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/03/merezha-psevdogromadskyh-ruhiv-na-tot/

[64] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/03/merezha-psevdogromadskyh-ruhiv-na-tot/ ; https://isw.pub/UkrWar011323

[65] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/03/merezha-psevdogromadskyh-ruhiv-na-tot/

[69] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/02/okupanty-vyvozyat-starshoklasnykiv-z-tot-do-rf-dlya-skladannya-shkilnyh-ispytiv/

[70] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/02/02/okupanty-vyvozyat-starshoklasnykiv-z-tot-do-rf-dlya-skladannya-shkilnyh-ispytiv/

[74] https://motolko dot help/en-news/belarusian-hajun-military-activity-on-the-territory-of-belarus-on-february-2/

[75] https://motolko dot help/en-news/belarusian-hajun-military-activity-on-the-territory-of-belarus-on-february-2/

[76] https://motolko dot help/en-news/belarusian-hajun-military-activity-on-the-territory-of-belarus-on-february-2/

understandingwar.org

2. What to know about the suspected Chinese spy balloon

Did China apologize?

Note a second has been detected over South America.

Excerpts:

A senior State Department official said that the US has acknowledged China’s “statement of regret” but that the presence of the balloon in US airspace was “a clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law, and it is unacceptable that this has occurred.”

Asked later Friday to respond to the postponement of Blinken’s trip, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that “this was completely an accident caused by force majeure, and the facts are very clear.”

What to know about the suspected Chinese spy balloon | CNN Politics

CNN · by Sonnet Swire · February 4, 2023

CNN —

A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in the skies over the continental United States has sparked national security and diplomatic concerns, adding to already tense Washington-Beijing relations.

The incident prompted Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his highly anticipated trip to China, saying Friday that the high-altitude Chinese balloon entering US airspace “created the conditions that undermine the purpose of the trip.”

Blinken dubbed it an “irresponsible act,” while China has said it “regrets” the “unintended entry” into US airspace.

The balloon could exit the East Coast of the United States as early as Saturday morning, based off of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather model.

Two US defense officials also told CNN that the balloon is expected to reach the East Coast and then pass out to sea in the southeast, near the Carolinas. One of the officials said it could exit the East Coast on Saturday.

Here’s the latest on the suspected Chinese spy balloon over the US:

Pentagon tracking the balloon

US officials have said the flight path of the balloon, first known to the public while over Montana on Thursday, could potentially take it over a “number of sensitive sites” and that they are taking steps to “protect against foreign intelligence collection.”

Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War.

Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer, told CNN the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon is likely collecting information on US communication systems and radars.

Retired US Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst, added that intelligence data collected by the balloon could be relayed in real time via a satellite link back to China.

Analysts have noted that Montana, over which the balloon has been spotted, and nearby states are home to US intercontinental ballistic missile silos and strategic bomber bases.

Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder has flatly denied the Chinese government’s claim that the balloon serves a civilian research purpose, saying that the US knows it is a “surveillance balloon.”

The Pentagon says it doesn’t present a current threat

The Pentagon said Friday that the balloon currently does not pose a “military or political” threat.

“Again, we currently assess that balloon does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground at this time, and we’ll continue to monitor and review options,” Ryder said Friday.

The US has not ruled out shooting it down

Officials have so far determined that the potential damage of falling debris from the balloon – its substructure is roughly 90 feet while the balloon itself is significantly larger and taller, according to a defense official – outweighs the risk of the balloon itself. But that’s not to say that it couldn’t be shot down eventually; a senior defense official said Thursday that the US has “options to deal with this balloon” if the risk assessment changes.

US Northern Command is coordinating with NASA to determine the debris field if the balloon were to be shot down, a defense official told CNN on Friday.

President Joe Biden was first briefed on the balloon Tuesday and has been receiving updates from his national security team, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. A senior US defense official previously told CNN that military officials had advised Biden not to shoot the balloon down due to fear over the debris posing a safety threat.

China’s foreign ministry has responded

On Friday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the balloon entered US airspace accidentally.

“It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure,” the statement added.

A senior State Department official said that the US has acknowledged China’s “statement of regret” but that the presence of the balloon in US airspace was “a clear violation of our sovereignty as well as international law, and it is unacceptable that this has occurred.”

Asked later Friday to respond to the postponement of Blinken’s trip, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that “this was completely an accident caused by force majeure, and the facts are very clear.”

What US lawmakers are saying

The Gang of Eight – which includes the top leaders of the House and Senate and on the intelligence committees – will be briefed next week, according to a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Montana Democrat Sen. Jon Tester, who chairs the Senate subcommittee that controls the Pentagon budget, said he plans to hold a hearing on the balloon and how it was able to violate US airspace.

Tester told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “AC360” Friday night that the panel will hold the hearing to “find out what went into the thought process” in handling the situation.

“I think any time you have China, a country that wants to replace us as the economic leader and military leader in the world, doing this kind of garbage, it requires some explanations, and to make sure if this happens again, we are very confident that there will be no good things to come out of it for China,” he said.

Meanwhile, prominent Republican leaders, including former President Donald Trump, have criticized Biden’s administration for not knocking the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon out of the sky.

A second suspected spy balloon

The Pentagon said Friday evening that there is another Chinese spy balloon transiting Latin America.

“We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America,” Ryder said in a statement to CNN. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon.”

It is unclear exactly where over Latin America the balloon is, but a US official told CNN it does not appear that balloon is currently heading to the United States.

CNN’s Beijing Bureau and Natasha Bertrand, Jennifer Hansler, Kevin Liptak, Jeremy Herb, Kylie Atwood, Jim Sciutto, Oren Liebermann, Haley Britzky, Michael Conte, Nectar Gan and Brand Lendon contributed to this report.

CNN · by Sonnet Swire · February 4, 2023

3. CIA chief warns against underestimating Xi's ambitions toward Taiwan

As Sun Tzu has told us: "Never assume the enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."

Excerpts:

Burns said that the United States knew "as a matter of intelligence" that Xi had ordered his military to be ready to conduct an invasion of self-governed Taiwan by 2027.

"Now, that does not mean that he's decided to conduct an invasion in 2027, or any other year, but it's a reminder of the seriousness of his focus and his ambition," Burns told an event at Georgetown University in Washington.

"Our assessment at CIA is that I wouldn't underestimate President Xi's ambitions with regard to Taiwan," he said, adding that the Chinese leader was likely "surprised and unsettled" and trying to draw lessons by the "very poor performance" of the Russian military and its weapons systems in Ukraine.

CIA chief warns against underestimating Xi's ambitions toward Taiwan

Reuters · by Michael Martina

WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns said on Thursday that Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitions toward Taiwan should not be underestimated, despite him likely being sobered by the performance of Russia's military in Ukraine.

Burns said that the United States knew "as a matter of intelligence" that Xi had ordered his military to be ready to conduct an invasion of self-governed Taiwan by 2027.

"Now, that does not mean that he's decided to conduct an invasion in 2027, or any other year, but it's a reminder of the seriousness of his focus and his ambition," Burns told an event at Georgetown University in Washington.

"Our assessment at CIA is that I wouldn't underestimate President Xi's ambitions with regard to Taiwan," he said, adding that the Chinese leader was likely "surprised and unsettled" and trying to draw lessons by the "very poor performance" of the Russian military and its weapons systems in Ukraine.

Russia and China signed a "no limits" partnership last February shortly before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, and their economic links have boomed as Russia's connections with the West have shriveled.

The Russian invasion had fueled concerns in the West of China possibly making a similar move on Taiwan, a democratic island Beijing says is its territory.

China has refrained from condemning Russia's operation against Ukraine, but it has been careful not to provide the sort of direct material support which could provoke Western sanctions like those imposed on Moscow.

"I think it's a mistake to underestimate the mutual commitment to that partnership, but it's not a friendship totally without limits," Burns said.

As Burns spoke, news came from U.S. officials that a suspected Chinese spy balloon had been flying over the United States for a few days, and that senior U.S. officials had advised President Joe Biden against shooting it down for fear the debris could pose a safety threat.

Burn made no mention of the episode but called China the "biggest geopolitical challenge" currently faced by the United States.

"Competition with China is unique in its scale, and that it really, you know, unfolds over just about every domain, not just military, and ideological, but economic, technological, everything from cyberspace, to space itself as well. It's a global competition in ways that could be even more intense than competition with the Soviets was," he said.

There was no immediate comment from China's Washington embassy about the remarks from Burns or the balloon flight.

Burns said the next six months will be "critical" for Ukraine, where Moscow has been making incremental gains in recent weeks.

He also said Iran's government was increasingly unsettled by affairs within the country, citing the courage of what he described as "fed up" Iranian women.

Reporting by Michael Martina, Rami Ayyub, David Brunnstrom and Phil Stewart; Editing by Christopher Cushing

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Michael Martina

4. Taiwan's Tsai welcomes retired US admiral for China talks

Taiwan's Tsai welcomes retired US admiral for China talks

AP · by HUIZHONG WU · February 2, 2023

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Thursday welcomed the former head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who had warned the island could face an invasion from China this decade, as the mainland ramps up pressure on the self-governing island.

Retired Adm. Phil Davidson, along with a group including colleagues from the U.S. think tank the National Bureau of Asian Research, arrived Monday in the capital Taipei following a string of delegate visits to Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory, since tensions with the mainland spiked in August with the visit of then-U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“I’m here to listen and learn from our hosts; thus far, I’ve done both,” he said. “I’m looking forward to continuing our discussions with President Tsai today and hearing her perspectives on the security environment and her outlook on U.S.-Taiwan relations.”

China’s People’s Liberation Army has stepped up its pressure on Taiwan in the past few years, sending navy vessels and fighter planes near the island.

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Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that 20 Chinese aircraft crossed the central line in the Taiwan Strait — a long-time unofficial buffer zone between the sides, which separated during a civil war in 1949. It sent 14 other planes in nearby airspace.

A day later, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said 17 Chinese aircraft crossed the median line Wednesday, with a total of 23 planes sent to fly around the island.

“Faced with the expansion of authoritarianism, Taiwan must strengthen our ability to defend ourselves,” she said, pointing to the upcoming extension of mandatory military service that she had just announced in December.

Tsai thanked Davidson on Thursday for his contributions to the “safety of the Taiwan Straits.”

Davidson, while still serving as the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, had warned that China’s claims over Taiwan were a rising and tangible threat.

“Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then, and I think the threat is manifest during this decade — in fact, in the next six years,” he told the Senate Armed Forces Committee in 2021.

He clarified this remark while in Japan just before his visit to Taiwan, saying that the scenario would not necessarily be an all-out war.

“In my mind, that can be many lesser things than an all-out invasion. One of those would be the threats to outer islands, and I think it’s a grave security concern of Taiwan’s,” he told the Japan Times.

___

AP senior video producer Johnson Lai contributed to this report.

AP · by HUIZHONG WU · February 2, 2023

5. What China wants out of Blinken’s Beijing visit

Excerpts:

For China, agreeing to prevent crisis is not enough. Chinese leaders, diplomats and experts have repeatedly said that a fundamental reset is necessary to repair ties. Since Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with President Biden in Bali at the G-20 summit in November, Beijing has ramped up calls for a new “fundamental framework” of the relationship based on lofty principles like peaceful coexistence or mutual respect.

“Only with principles can we have direction, and only with direction can we properly handle differences and expand cooperation,” the People’s Daily wrote on Wednesday, paraphrasing comments Xi made to Biden during that meeting.

The goal is to set a new tone for the next few decades — one where Washington would be obliged to respect China’s core interests including its claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea, crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, or its approach to human rights issues.

“That is the core thing they want because once they have those principles and framework in place they can protect their bottom line,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C. “They want to draw lines. They want to tell the Americans there are certain things you cannot do and cannot say.”

“The U.S. is much more focused on specific issues — what we can do together on specific issues — and the Chinese will say lets talk about the fundamental framework of our relations first.”

What China wants out of Blinken’s Beijing visit

The Washington Post · by Lily Kuo · February 3, 2023

Expectations are low that a visit to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will halt the downward trajectory of U.S.-China ties as the two countries seek fundamentally different objectives in the high-level meeting.

The two-day trip set to begin on Sunday also comes as new tensions emerge. Pentagon officials disclosed the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon flying above the continental United States, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning only saying they were “aware of the reports” and “checking the situation.”

“What I’d like to stress is, before we get the facts straight, speculation and sensationalizing are not going to resolve problems,” she said, adding that she had no new information about Blinken’s trip.

In China, commentators this week pointed to U.S. export controls targeting Chinese technology, expanded U.S. military access in the Philippines, and a planned visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as signs that Washington’s attitude toward Beijing is only hardening. In an editorial Wednesday, the state-run People’s Daily said the United States must drop its “obsession” with containing China.

While U.S. officials hope to establish guardrails to prevent tensions from spiraling into conflict, Beijing wants to reset the relationship on the basis of broad principles that would make issues like Taiwan or Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea off limits.

“It’s like we are using two different yardsticks,” said Rorry Daniels, managing director of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. “The two sides are agreed that it would be useful for ourselves and for the world to manage the relationship responsibly. But for the modus operandi, there’s a big gap of what the expectations are,” she said.

Here are three things that China wants out of the meeting:

Establish the red lines

For China, agreeing to prevent crisis is not enough. Chinese leaders, diplomats and experts have repeatedly said that a fundamental reset is necessary to repair ties. Since Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with President Biden in Bali at the G-20 summit in November, Beijing has ramped up calls for a new “fundamental framework” of the relationship based on lofty principles like peaceful coexistence or mutual respect.

“Only with principles can we have direction, and only with direction can we properly handle differences and expand cooperation,” the People’s Daily wrote on Wednesday, paraphrasing comments Xi made to Biden during that meeting.

The goal is to set a new tone for the next few decades — one where Washington would be obliged to respect China’s core interests including its claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea, crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, or its approach to human rights issues.

“That is the core thing they want because once they have those principles and framework in place they can protect their bottom line,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C. “They want to draw lines. They want to tell the Americans there are certain things you cannot do and cannot say.”

“The U.S. is much more focused on specific issues — what we can do together on specific issues — and the Chinese will say lets talk about the fundamental framework of our relations first.”

Show that China is back

After almost three years of severe zero covid policies that have paralyzed the economy, improved ties with the United States is a way to show that China is open again for business.

“After zero covid, this is the year for China to fight for its economy. So it’s China’s hope that the two sides can ease tensions on the trade and economic front,” said Zhao Minghao, professor at the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Since the reopening, Beijing has been keen to showcase its return to the global stage. During the visit to Beijing, Blinken is expected to meet Xi, which would make him the first U.S. secretary of state to meet the Chinese leader in years after Mike Pompeo was snubbed in 2018.

“They want to be good hosts. I wouldn’t expect big deliverables but getting Blinken meetings, including possibly Xi Jinping, sends a signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. and China are going to try to talk out their differences,” said Daniels.

At the same time, China will aim to show that its leaders are standing up to U.S. pressure on Beijing to use its influence over Russia or North Korea. “We need to remind the U.S. that it cannot demand communication and cooperation from China while interfering in China’s internal affairs and hurting China’s interests,” said Mao from the Foreign Ministry on Monday.

“The Chinese government wants to show its own public that it can be tough with the United States on areas where the U.S. and China don’t agree and that it can manage that toughness with a real open channel of dialogue,” Daniels said.

Stop those Taiwan trips

Chinese officials this week have already called on the “relevant people” to stop McCarthy’s plans to visit Taiwan later this year. China, which claims the de facto country as its sovereign territory, sees the visit as a violation of agreements between Washington and Beijing in which the United States said it would not support Taiwan independence.

McCarthy’s visit comes after that of former House Speaker Nancy’s Pelosi’s trip in August, which was followed by days of Chinese military drills surrounding the main island.

To China, such visits represent a worrying trend while to Washington, China’s saber-rattling over the visits signal looming conflict. In a memo leaked last weekend, a U.S. Air Force commander said he believed the United States would engage in a war with Beijing over Taiwan in the next two years.

“A very big problem for both sides now is that neither feels that they are misjudging the other party,” said Zhao.

“China believes that the United States wants to establish one China and one Taiwan, and the United States believes China wants to take back Taiwan by force. This is the most troublesome deadlock right now.”

Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Lily Kuo · February 3, 2023

6. How China Uses Geoengineering to Pursue a Hybrid Warfare Strategy

Excerpts:

Geoengineering refers to the large-scale manipulation of a specific process central to controlling and channeling the earth’s resources, such as those of the oceans, rivers, soil, and atmosphere. These techniques are undergoing rapid development primarily to achieve sustainable development in the fields of agriculture, water resource management, energy generation, navigation, connectivity, and climate change mitigation. Unfortunately, the use of these geoengineering techniques is not limited to such noble objectives; they can also be harnessed to dominate or subjugate other countries in a certain region.

...

Currently, there is no formal agreement or convention regarding geoengineering. Multilateral forums such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity and global institutions such as the World Meteorological Organization should come up with a set of environmental standards to shape the development of geoengineering projects. A transparent mechanism for sharing data on the overall impact of geoengineering on the environment and ecology should also be institutionalized and made accessible to all the stakeholders, including governments, scientists, activists, the private sector, and so on. This cannot be achieved without the unanimous support of the global community – and perhaps China’s neighbors should proactively lead the charge.

How China Uses Geoengineering to Pursue a Hybrid Warfare Strategy

China’s growing ability to alter and manipulate the physical environment could help advance its geopolitical ambitions.

thediplomat.com · by Kunal Sharma · January 31, 2023

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Geography plays a critical role in shaping the politics of a region. The uneven distribution of natural resources at times influences the regional political landscape enormously. But to a greater extent than ever before, these natural resources can be tweaked as per a country’s requirements over the near to medium term through various techniques of geoengineering.

Geoengineering refers to the large-scale manipulation of a specific process central to controlling and channeling the earth’s resources, such as those of the oceans, rivers, soil, and atmosphere. These techniques are undergoing rapid development primarily to achieve sustainable development in the fields of agriculture, water resource management, energy generation, navigation, connectivity, and climate change mitigation. Unfortunately, the use of these geoengineering techniques is not limited to such noble objectives; they can also be harnessed to dominate or subjugate other countries in a certain region.

China has adopted a strategy of hybrid warfare against countries that it considers hostile or potentially hostile. Geoengineering has the potential to become a game-changing tool for Beijing’s implementation of a hybrid warfare strategy, especially in China’s neighborhood. Various geoengineering techniques could amplify China’s grey zone capabilities in a given theater and shape its future strategy in regional geopolitics. There are three main geoengineering techniques that have bolstered China’s or hybrid warfare capabilities.

According to a statement from China’s State Council, the country is committed to bringing about 5.5 million square kilometers of its land area under its weather modification program by 2025. Much of this involves the process of “cloud seeding.” China claims to have developed this technology to increase agricultural productivity and prevent natural disasters such as droughts and floods. However, the impact of cloud seeding can be seen beyond China’s borders, as it may disrupt the normal monsoon in neighboring countries such as India, Myanmar, Vietnam, etc. This would have an adverse impact on the agriculture in these countries, rising potentially to a form of “rain stealing.”

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Weather medication may also be used to sabotage troop movements and logistics operations in border regions by artificially altering the rainy conditions, which would slow down the tactical movement of the adversary on a real-time basis.

River Water Obstruction

China has the advantage of being an upper riparian state for two major transboundary rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Mekong. These rivers affect the livelihoods of millions of people in South Asia and Southeast Asia, respectively. They not only provide freshwater for fisheries and agriculture but also help to bolster navigation and tourism in countries such as India, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

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China has constructed many large-scale reservoirs on the upper reaches of both rivers, with large capacities for water storage and power generation. The ability to control the water flow gives China a strategic advantage over the lower riparian countries. The sudden flow of large amounts of stored river water has the potential to destabilize the lower riparian countries, impacting their livelihoods and food security.

Construction of Artificial Islands

The South China Sea has been a subject of tension for the past two decades, primarily because of China’s illegal claims over most of the important waterway. These claims are challenged by many countries in the region that share maritime boundaries with China, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan. These countries cannot bear to lose access to their Exclusive Economic Zones, which hold large amounts of minerals and hydrocarbons. In addition, many nations are also reluctant to compromise the principle of freedom of navigation, as nearly 60 percent of the global maritime trade transits through the South China Sea.

The region’s geostrategic importance has prompted China to conduct offensive activities such as the construction of artificial islands on the reefs and other features that it controls. These artificially constructed islands are being developed as military bases for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) under its anti-access/area denial strategy. This strategy aims at preventing any external military intervention in the disputed waters. The unhindered construction of these islands in recent years highlights Beijing’s blatant disregard for the 2016 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which rejected China’s claims over the South China Sea. These islands undermine the autonomy of other countries to carry on legitimate maritime activities in the waterway, which today acts as a maritime buffer between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

China’s current and potential use of geoengineering techniques to manipulate and jeopardize the rules relevant to maintaining the international order is an issue that cannot be overlooked. In addition, such techniques could also sabotage global climate change efforts. The ambiguity in the available data regarding the environmental ramifications of China’s use of geoengineering techniques hinders the formulation of an effective climate change combat strategy that can be adopted at a regional or global level.

Currently, there is no formal agreement or convention regarding geoengineering. Multilateral forums such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity and global institutions such as the World Meteorological Organization should come up with a set of environmental standards to shape the development of geoengineering projects. A transparent mechanism for sharing data on the overall impact of geoengineering on the environment and ecology should also be institutionalized and made accessible to all the stakeholders, including governments, scientists, activists, the private sector, and so on. This cannot be achieved without the unanimous support of the global community – and perhaps China’s neighbors should proactively lead the charge.

GUEST AUTHOR

Kunal Sharma

Kunal Sharma is an independent strategic affairs analyst based in India.

thediplomat.com · by Kunal Sharma · January 31, 2023

7. GAO Report on Contested Information Environments

The 63 page GAO report can be downloaded here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23592302/gao-23-105608.pdf

GAO Report on Contested Information Environments - USNI News

news.usni.org · January 31, 2023

The following is the Jan. 26, 2023, Government Accountability Office report, Contested Information Environment: Actions Needed to Strengthen Education and Training for DOD Leaders.

From the report

What GAO Found

Department of Defense (DOD) guidance for operating in a contested information environment continues to evolve as DOD works to develop and prepare leaders to make effective decisions. The information environment––that is, the aggregate of factors that affect how humans and automated systems derive meaning from, act upon, and are impacted by information—is at risk of adversaries from anywhere attacking and contesting it to undermine DOD operations. In 2017 DOD elevated “information” as a joint function, and in 2019 it identified Globally Integrated Operations in the Information Environment as a special area of emphasis for education. As adversaries increasingly aim to distort or compromise information available to leaders, the focus on leader decision-making approaches becomes more important to minimize negative effects on military readiness and the successful execution of military operations (see figure). DOD continues to take steps—such as establishing a doctrinal, operational, and technical framework—to improve its understanding of and effective operation in increasingly contested information environments.

As part of its efforts to prepare for contested information environments, DOD offers education and training for its leaders. However, DOD components are unclear about what information environment aspects to cover in such education and training because guidance does not specify what content to include. DOD officials also reported having limited resources for their education and training efforts and cited simulation, infrastructure, and personnel limitations as further impeding these efforts. Officials stated that these limitations hinder the creation of realistic environments in which leaders can practice decision-making skills. However, DOD has not assessed or comprehensively reviewed component assessments of resources. Until DOD develops guidance and assesses its resources, it will lack assurance that it will be able to educate and train leaders to prepare them to make decisions in a contested information environment.

Why GAO Did This Study

According to DOD, our competitors and adversaries are taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the information environment to advance their national objectives and offset the U.S.’s position as the preeminent warfighting force. DOD’s military operations in the information environment play a pivotal role in engaging our adversaries.House Report 117-118 included a provision for GAO to review DOD training that prepares leaders and service members to operate and make decisions in a contested information environment. In this report, GAO (1) describes DOD guidance that supports the department’s education and training efforts to prepare leaders to make decisions in a contested information environment and (2) assesses the extent to which DOD provides education and training designed to prepare leaders to make such decisions.GAO reviewed selected DOD strategies, policies, and course syllabi; analyzed information related to the conduct of military exercises; and interviewed officials with knowledge of the department’s education and training efforts.

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends that DOD (1) develop guidance about what content to incorporate in its education and training related to decision-making in a contested information environment and (2) assess the resources necessary to meet related education and training needs. DOD generally concurred with GAO’s recommendations.

Download the document here.

Related

news.usni.org · January 31, 2023

8. The Free Press - A National Security Issue?

Yes it is.

Excerpts:

Yes, the irony of a former Google CEO pointing this out should be noted, but there you have it. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his minions are actively looking for communities where newspapers have disappeared and are filling the information vacuum with carefully crafted misinformation campaigns designed to erode our confidence in democratic institutions.

Chaos and disorder is the goal. It’s hard to imagine such a dour man as Putin “laughing with delight” but he at least cracked a smile on Jan. 6, 2021.

To be clear, this is not the trade press, of which National Defense is a member, but the community newspapers that cover city governments, courts, local schools and elections. The health of the defense trade press will be covered in a future column.

Thousands of experienced print journalists have lost their jobs and moved on to other professions. Newsrooms are being gutted.

The Free Press - A National Security Issue?

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

2/1/2023

By

iStock illustration

Despite decades in the journalism profession, it wasn’t until recently that I began to see what I do for a living as a potential national security issue: that a strong and vibrant free press in the United States strengthens the nation’s security, but a weak free press could be a vulnerability.

Yes, I wrote about national security, defense and related topics. But it was just that: the subject matter I wrote about.

A change in the way I see my profession began in September aboard the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the U.K. aircraft carrier parked in New York Harbor to host the Atlantic Future Forum.

It was there that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke during a panel about the importance of fighting foreign disinformation campaigns with the truth. Schmidt also served on the Defense Innovation Board and continues to advise the Defense Department. I will reprint his comments verbatim.

“I think one of the things we unfortunately need to recognize is a new vulnerability that exists. … I believe the best antidote to disinformation is access to better information.

“Traditional journalism has rightly been called the Fourth Estate since that phrase was coined in London centuries ago. But traditional journalism, you know, frankly, has not been treated kindly by the digital age, or frankly, by the business model innovations of the tech sector.

“And one of the things we’re able to analyze is: where is Russian propaganda being consumed the most on a per capita basis? It’s in the places where newspapers have died.

“In the United States, there’s hundreds of counties that no longer have a newspaper. Those are the places that are turning to alternative sources of news, I think out of necessity, and not with knowledge, or awareness, that what they’re reading is actually being sent to them from inside Russia.

“So, to me, part of the antidote is to recognize we need traditional news to prosper. We need to think more broadly about government and other initiatives that can help that happen.”

Yes, the irony of a former Google CEO pointing this out should be noted, but there you have it. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his minions are actively looking for communities where newspapers have disappeared and are filling the information vacuum with carefully crafted misinformation campaigns designed to erode our confidence in democratic institutions.

Chaos and disorder is the goal. It’s hard to imagine such a dour man as Putin “laughing with delight” but he at least cracked a smile on Jan. 6, 2021.

To be clear, this is not the trade press, of which National Defense is a member, but the community newspapers that cover city governments, courts, local schools and elections. The health of the defense trade press will be covered in a future column.

Thousands of experienced print journalists have lost their jobs and moved on to other professions. Newsrooms are being gutted.

The number of Americans employed in print newsrooms as of 2021 was 31,000, less than half of what it was in 2004 when there were some 71,000, according to the Pew Research Center’s annual report card on the health of U.S. newspapers.

Sixty daily newspapers and more than 1,700 weeklies have shuttered from 2004 to 2018, noted a study by the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The COVID-19 pandemic saw another 360 newspapers close their doors, said a more recent report by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

These losses have resulted in “news deserts,” particularly in poorer communities.

As for National Defense, there was a time when we advertised a job opening for a reporter and I would receive dozens of well qualified applicants.

Last fall, I advertised for an entry level reporting job and didn’t receive a single applicant for eight days. Young people — after two decades of seeing dramatic cuts to newsrooms — are not entering the profession in the numbers they once did.

Schmidt wasn’t the last commenter on the decline of the Fourth Estate this fall.

At the Halifax International Security Forum two months later, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said in a panel discussion that China and Russia continue to invest in their propaganda machines.

“We need to invest in journalism — in free media. We need to take some of the lid off of the incredible concentration of power in social media platforms. … We need to better resource our work in countering disinformation,” he said.

The U.S. government spending funds to prop up U.S. newspapers is never going to fly with most lawmakers or journalists who relish their independence, so Coons was asked at a press conference exactly what role Congress should take to help strengthen a free press and ward off foreign disinformation campaigns.

Coons said Congress does provide funding for State Department global media outreach but that is not a wholly satisfying approach.

“If content that is being provided to the world is only coming from U.S. government sources, then we’re mistaking our own core assumption, which is that independent corps of journalists is the best way to get the truth out to the people,” he said.

There is legislation introduced in Congress that would make social media companies that lean on traditional media share their revenue with content providers.

Meanwhile, malign overseas actors continue to plant misinformation in these “news deserts,” and stoke extremism — left and right — to keep Americans at each other’s throats. Divide and conquer is the strategy.

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

9. Scoop: Russia state propaganda alums launch new D.C. media venture

​I missed this report last month. But is this really a "scoop?"

Scoop: Russia state propaganda alums launch new D.C. media venture

Axios · by Lachlan Markay · January 26, 2023

Former employees of Russian propaganda broadcaster RT America have taken over its old studios in downtown D.C. and are ramping up a new media venture, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: RT was a key node in a Russian-backed media apparatus that U.S. intelligence agencies described as integral to Kremlin foreign influence operations.

• Its U.S. broadcasting arm announced it would shut down shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• This week, French authorities seized RT assets in the country, citing EU sanctions over disinformation related to the invasion.

What's happening: Former RT America employee Georgy Zalevskiy formed a new company, GlobalTek LLC, in April 2022, shortly after RT America announced its wind-down. Corporate filings list the address of RT America's old Washington office.

• In an interview, Zalevskiy confirmed his company is operating out of those studios.
• Zalevskiy described GlobalTek as a technology company that provides broadcast services to clients and does not create any editorial products itself.
• He declined to name any GlobalTek clients.

Zalevskiy also would not name any other individuals involved with the company, but confirmed: "Some people who worked for RT America work for GlobalTek."

• "RT is gone forever," he said.

Between the lines: Job listings show GlobalTek is working to build out a production staff in Washington.

• It's currently looking to hire a broadcast engineer, according to online job postings.
• An earlier job listing sought an audio operator to "set up, operate and maintain the electronic equipment used to transmit television newscasts."

The intrigue: T&R Productions, RT America's old production company, was forced to register as a foreign agent for its work with RT's Russian parent, ANO TV Novosti.

• After RT America's close, Novosti inked a new deal with a U.S. company run by an ex-Atlanta news anchor to air RT content in India, China and South America.
• That company, Rebel Media Productions, also registered as a foreign agent, and reported receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars last year to pay former RT America staffers laid off by T&R Productions.
• Zalevskiy would not say whether GlobalTek is working with Rebel Media, telling Axios: "I will not comment on that."

Rebel Media has looked to sell additional content to RT as well as state media in China and other countries, according to a booking request email sent to a potential guest last year and obtained by Axios.

• The email was sent by Mona Zughbi, a former NBC producer who co-founded the firm Petra Star Media. Its other co-founder was previously an RT booker.
• In an email to Axios, Zughbi did not address questions about Rebel Media's or Petra Star's relationship with GlobalTek.

Axios · by Lachlan Markay · January 26, 2023​

10. Pentagon detects second Chinese balloon over Latin America

I guess these "trial balloons" have shown China that this technique is probably not viable. 

Pentagon detects second Chinese balloon over Latin America

english.elpais.com · by Macarena Vidal Liy · February 4, 2023

The Pentagon has detected a second Chinese balloon that is reportedly flying over Latin America. The announcement comes shortly after American authorities identified another craft over US territory.

The second balloon is also believed to be conducting surveillance, according to statements made to the media by Department of Defense spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder.

“We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America,” the statement said. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon.”

Ryder did not specify where exactly in Latin America the balloon was located, but the Costa Rica newspaper La Nación has published that hundreds of people had spotted a white hot air balloon in the sky that looked like the one identified in US airspace over Montana.

The announcement comes just hours after the US government decided to cancel a visit to China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that had been scheduled for this weekend. The trip has been postponed and Blinken has called the presence of the spy balloon in US airspace “a clear violation of US sovereignty.”

Beijing has apologized for the first incident and acknowledged that the device belongs to it, but claims that it is merely used for scientific and weather studies and that it was blown away off its intended course. The Pentagon has ruled out this version and believes that it is a device used for espionage purposes.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

english.elpais.com · by Macarena Vidal Liy · February 4, 2023

11. Why Marcos Is Inviting the US Military Back to the Philippines

What is often overlooked is that the US knows how to leave and leave quickly. If a host nation government no longer desires a US military presence we quickly pack up and go home.

Excerpt:

5. What’s the history behind the relationship?

The Philippines has periodically reassessed its relationship with the US, which ruled the Southeast Asian nation as a territory for nearly 50 years after it was ceded by Spain. After World War War II, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, near Manila, were the largest US military outpost in the Western Pacific. The 1947 Military Bases Agreement, originally a 99-year deal, was revised several times to give the Philippines more compensation or sovereignty. An amendment was added that allowed for it to end in 1991. As the deadline approached, leaders from both countries sought to extend the pact. Yet an upswell of anti-colonial sentiment prompted the Philippine Senate to reject a fresh agreement, and the US closed all of its bases by 1992.

Why Marcos Is Inviting the US Military Back to the Philippines

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-03/why-marcos-is-inviting-the-us-military-back-to-the-philippines?sref=hhjZtX76

ByAndreo Calonzo

February 3, 2023 at 2:54 AM EST

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte made a habit of casting doubt on the future of his country’s longstanding defense ties with the US, usually in response to US concerns about his deadly drug war. Now with new presidents in both countries, the tide has turned. The two allies have paved the way for greater American presence in the Asia-Pacific region, spurred by persistent tensions with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

1. What’s the new agreement? 

An expansion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, originally signed in 2014, which allowed for a US presence at five Philippine military bases and the construction of new facilities there. The agreement, announced Feb. 2, will bring the total number of military sites the US can access to nine, and allow it to rotate its troops for prolonged stays. Three Philippine bases near Taiwan — two in the northern province of Cagayan and one in Isabela province — in addition to one in Palawan near the South China Sea, are among the new sites said to be under consideration. They also decided to substantially complete projects at the five existing military sites, including another base in Palawan province, near the disputed sea. The US has allocated over $82 million toward infrastructure investments in the five sites.

2. What’s the impetus?

President Joe Biden has sought to readjust the US force presence in the Indo-Pacific region and restore the relationship with the Philippines since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office last year. While China was not specifically mentioned in announcing the new agreement, both countries are worried about Beijing’s increasingly assertive claims to a wide swath of the South China Sea, including islands and reefs Manila sees as its own. Chinese ships have regularly been seen trailing Philippine fishing vessels, often intercepting them and forcing them to divert from contested areas. Marcos raised the issues during his meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping in January. Biden has also stepped up US assurances to defend Taiwan. The US confirmed in January that it would be moving thousands of Marines based in Japan to a reactivated facility in Guam, a move also seen as part of a wider effort to disperse American forces to help it better confront China in case of a crisis.

3. What other defense agreements are there?

There are two others:

• The Mutual Defense Treaty was signed in 1951, five years after the US granted the Philippines independence, and it has been at the center of defense relations ever since. The eight-article pact — one of seven collective defense treaties the US has globally — calls for each side to help build defense capabilities and “meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes” if either side is attacked.
• The Visiting Forces Agreement, signed in 1998, spells out the legalities for US military personnel operating in the Philippines. It covers everything from passport regulations to procedures for importing military equipment to criminal jurisdiction.

4. What were Duterte’s complaints?

He came into office in 2016 pledging to pivot Philippine foreign policy toward China and away from the US, its former colonial master. Duterte, whose term ended last year, questioned whether the US would defend the Philippines if China seizes disputed shoals and reefs in the South China Sea — skepticism that has persisted for decades. A US diplomatic cable from 1976, since declassified, states the Mutual Defense Treaty doesn’t cover disputed areas such as the Spratly Islands, although American officials have recently committed to defend the Philippines in disputed waters. Duterte also said military deals with the US haven’t helped address security threats in the Philippines, particularly the communist insurgency. He threatened to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement — then stayed the order — and frequently lashed out at the US over what he perceived as its hypocrisy and meddling on human rights. As his term wound down, promises of big-ticket projects and billions of dollars in investments from China were largely unfulfilled. Tensions over the South China Sea have flared again and oil exploration plans have stalled. This year, the International Criminal Court said it would resume its investigation into Duterte’s war on drugs.

5. What’s the history behind the relationship?

The Philippines has periodically reassessed its relationship with the US, which ruled the Southeast Asian nation as a territory for nearly 50 years after it was ceded by Spain. After World War War II, Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, near Manila, were the largest US military outpost in the Western Pacific. The 1947 Military Bases Agreement, originally a 99-year deal, was revised several times to give the Philippines more compensation or sovereignty. An amendment was added that allowed for it to end in 1991. As the deadline approached, leaders from both countries sought to extend the pact. Yet an upswell of anti-colonial sentiment prompted the Philippine Senate to reject a fresh agreement, and the US closed all of its bases by 1992.

The Reference Shelf:

• QuickTakes on Duterte and his war on drugs, how the US and China are jockeying for sway across Asia, and the Taiwan and southern Pacific flashpoints.
• Bloomberg Graphics looks at Philippine political dynasties and the silent war in the South China Sea.
• The New York Times explores China’s efforts to woo Indonesia, the biggest country in the region.
• From the archive: Bloomberg Opinion’s James Stavridis on the signals Biden should send to the Philippines, and Hal Brands sees the country as a battleground in the US-China ‘cool war.’

12. High-Flying Balloon Seen as Part of Broader Chinese Spy Program

Why did we not shoot these balloons down during the previous administration?

Excerpts;

Unique Capabilities

The makers of US spy balloons say their devices have the ability to not only capture images but intercept communications, as well as extend cellular service and the range of drones and other military assets. Experts say they expect the Chinese have similar capabilities. 

“It could work in a variety of ways,” said Greg Falco, an aerospace expert at Johns Hopkins University. “They may have developed a broad spectrum receiver to intercept a variety of bands and were trying to capture side lobes of some comms coming off of a target.”

The balloon spotted this week over Montana was not the first time the US has detected Chinese balloons over their territory – with previous incursions occurring during the Trump Administration.

High-Flying Balloon Seen as Part of Broader Chinese Spy Program

• Device spotted over Montana seems to be maneuvering around
• Similar incursions were detected in the Trump administration
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-03/high-flying-balloon-seen-as-part-of-broader-chinese-spy-program?srnd=politics-vp&sref=hhjZtX76

ByJennifer Jacobs and Jenny Leonard

February 3, 2023 at 4:48 PM EST

The high-altitude balloon now floating at 60,000 feet over the continental US is part of a broader Chinese spying program that’s seen many such devices sent over the nation, including some during the Trump administration, according to US officials.

People familiar with the matter believe the balloon is maneuverable —because they’ve detected it changing course — and anticipate it will likely remain in US airspace for several more days. Nonetheless, they’ve decided not to try to shoot it down for now, arguing that the risk to the public of falling debris is too high as its payload is the size of several buses.

They flatly dismiss China’s claim that it’s a weather-monitoring vehicle given its size, previous Chinese espionage activity in the same vein, and private acknowledgment from Chinese officials of its true nature.

New details offer fresh insight into an unprecedented espionage flap that forced US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a trip to Beijing that had been set for next week. These were given by multiple people familiar with the efforts to monitor the balloons who requested anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

READ MOREUS Postpones Blinken China Visit in Spat on Alleged Spy BalloonCanada Summons China Ambassador Over Surveillance BalloonChina Claims Balloon Accidentally Drifted Into US Airspace

Administration officials have downplayed the intelligence risk posed by the device, saying it has only limited value – and that the US took steps to further restrict intelligence that it could gather. The balloon’s flight path has taken it over areas where the US believes the Chinese already operate satellites that are better equipped to take high-resolution images of infrastructure and military bases.

They also say it poses no physical threat to military assets, US civilians on the ground, or aircraft that operate tens of thousands of feet lower in the atmosphere.

Still, officials believe that the Chinese balloons are able to photograph facilities from different angles than satellites, providing a unique advantage. The one spotted this week was lingering over Idaho and Montana, home to sensitive US nuclear missile silos and research facilities. The US also believes the Chinese have tried to buy property near the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where the government conducts sensitive military research and development.

The balloons can also be deployed unexpectedly – so that the US has less time to hide assets they are hoping to be kept secret – and often have infrared sensors that provide different information than satellites. Blinken said Friday the US wanted to keep talking to China but “job one” was getting the balloon away from the US.

“When conditions permit I plan to go to China but the most important thing right now in this moment is to see that this surveillance asset gets out of our airspace,” Blinken said.

The US is taking steps to protect against collection of sensitive information, and gaining insights by tracking the balloon and discerning what abilities it could have, one White House official said.

Unique Capabilities

The makers of US spy balloons say their devices have the ability to not only capture images but intercept communications, as well as extend cellular service and the range of drones and other military assets. Experts say they expect the Chinese have similar capabilities. 

“It could work in a variety of ways,” said Greg Falco, an aerospace expert at Johns Hopkins University. “They may have developed a broad spectrum receiver to intercept a variety of bands and were trying to capture side lobes of some comms coming off of a target.”

The balloon spotted this week over Montana was not the first time the US has detected Chinese balloons over their territory – with previous incursions occurring during the Trump Administration.

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One top national security official from the administration of former President Donald Trump said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near sensitive sites or had payloads as large as this one appears to carry. Other senior Trump national security officials said they were not personally aware of intelligence on any Chinese surveillance balloons over the United States during Trump’s four years in office and do not believe Trump was made aware.

Unlike past cases, this balloon is now lingering over the US mainland, and continuing to move eastward. The balloon initially left US airspace on Monday, only to be detected again Tuesday over northern Idaho. President Joe Biden was briefed that day, and requested his military commanders draw up options to respond.

A senior Canadian official said they and their American counterparts became aware of the balloon as far back as last weekend when it was over Alaska. It was tracked the whole way across Canada before it entered the continental US. 

There was a debate over how to respond to the balloon, but no serious discussion about shooting it down over Canada, the official said. 

The White House said it had been on touch with the Chinese government, and Blinken called Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi directly on Friday to explain his decision to cancel his trip. Despite that threat, Pentagon officials – including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley – ultimately advised Biden against shooting the balloon down.

They expressed concern that the resulting debris could pose a risk to US citizens and property, even if the balloon were downed over a rural area in the West. Biden agreed, though the military had mobilized equipment to the area to act if he had decided to shoot down the aircraft.

“The president is always going to put the safety of Americans and the security of American people first,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.

Still, the White House also refused to rule out eventually shooting the balloon out, with Jean-Pierre telling reporters that all options remained on the table. The White House began briefing lawmakers on the incident Thursday, and is working to set up additional classified sessions next week to detail what additional information they gather about the balloon. 

— With assistance by Justin Sink, Peter Martin, Katrina Manson, Brian Platt and Josh Wingrove

13. Urban Combat Is Changing. The Ukraine War Shows How

At Small Wars Journal there is a series of Urban Warfare articles by Dr. Russ Glenn. (www.sallwarsjournal.com)

Chart at the link: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2023/02/ukraine-war-shows-how-urban-combat-changing/382561/

The "four attributes:"

First, simply reaching the urban area of operations has proven difficult.

Second, the urban battles have featured multiple contested domains, including air, land, and subterranean. 

Third, urban battles in Ukraine have seen a wider mix of regular and irregular forces with better capabilities than has been the case in past decades. 

Finally, while the electronic spectrum was contested in Mosul, Ukraine constitutes the first real instance where both sides are truly fighting for control of the spectrum in urban combat, using jamming to challenge the other side’s communications and its operation of equipment like drone

Urban Combat Is Changing. The Ukraine War Shows How

Four attributes distinguish today’s city battles from those that have come before.

defenseone.com · by Sam Plapinger

How does urban warfare in Ukraine, where the adversaries are relatively balanced nation-states, differ from recent Fallujah- or Mosul-type battles between states and non-state armed groups?

It is useful to start with a list of urban warfare’s unique features and challenges, such as the one I produced in a 2019 study on urban warfare in strategic competition. In this study, a review of joint/allied doctrine, subject-matter expert discussions, historical case studies, and hypothetical vignettes suggested that most of the features and challenges present in historical battles are likely to be intensified in great power competition (today’s “strategic competition”). Strategic competition is also likely to bring four new features and challenges.

Indeed, in Ukraine we have seen all eight features and challenges of historical urban warfare identified in the 2019 study. For instance, both Ukrainian and Russian forces have been constrained by the physical terrain of cities, long a feature of urban combat. High-rise structures have shaped what weaponry and equipment can be used, demanded decentralized command and control, and generated casualties. The other seven features and challenges of historical urban warfare are also present, including the need for rapid and decentralized decision-making under uncertainty; challenges of information management; effective ISR, targeting; and expeditionary logistics and medical care; and elements of the “Three-Block War” and manpower-intensive and stressful operations.

The postulated four new features and challenges of urban warfare in strategic competition have also been observed in Ukraine.

First, simply reaching the urban area of operations has proven difficult. Unlike the United States’ experience with relatively permissive urban environments in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past twenty-plus years of counterinsurgency operations and even Azerbaijan’s experience in the fighting over Shusha in 2020, Russia has struggled mightily to gain entry to the urban areas of Ukraine. Russian forces have sustained unexpected losses and resorted to siege tactics in city after city across Ukraine as a result.

Second, the urban battles have featured multiple contested domains, including air, land, and subterranean. This stands in contrast to prominent historical examples such as Fallujah in 2004 and the more recent episodes in Mosul and Shusha, in which most of the combat was largely concentrated in the land domain.

Third, urban battles in Ukraine have seen a wider mix of regular and irregular forces with better capabilities than has been the case in past decades. Russia has used regular troops, conscripts, proxy forces, mercenaries like the Wagner Group, and even Syrians to conduct operations in urban areas with little regard for civilian lives or infrastructure. The result has been high levels of casualties and destruction. From the U.S. military’s perspective, future urban warfare can be expected to contrast with its urban fights over the past twenty years, in which opposing forces largely used irregular tactics and had lower-level capabilities (e.g., small arms and light weapons). Urban warfare in strategic competition can also be expected to involve adversaries (like Russia) that employ less restrictive rules of engagement than U.S. forces.

Finally, while the electronic spectrum was contested in Mosul, Ukraine constitutes the first real instance where both sides are truly fighting for control of the spectrum in urban combat, using jamming to challenge the other side’s communications and its operation of equipment like drones.

These findings imply three main lessons for defense policymakers and planners in the U.S. and its Western allies and partners. First, it is clear that urban warfare will continue to play a central role in armed conflict (including when nation-states clash), so both policymakers and planners should keep this in mind when preparing for military operations. Military analysts and observers of the operations in Ukraine should focus on deriving lessons from urban warfare, particularly concerning the implications of the four new features and challenges.

Second, much of the doctrine underpinning urban operations for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is outdated and has not been updated to incorporate the contemporary operating environment and adversary capabilities. The services should consider rewriting this key doctrine to reflect what has been observed in Ukraine, with a particular focus on the parts that are new.

Finally, it is not enough for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and other American allies and partners to train for urban operations using two-story sandstone “MOUT towns” in the middle of nowhere that try to approximate Middle Eastern/South Asian cities and villages. Rather, these forces need to undertake realistic urban training, going out into actual cities for exercises and training, like the 31st MEU recently did in Oahu. Only then can they get an approximation of what Russian and Ukrainian forces are experiencing in Ukraine’s cities and truly be as prepared as possible for the likely city fight to come in the future against adversaries.

Dr. Sam Plapinger is a Research Scientist at CNA, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and analysis organization in Arlington, Virginia. From 2020-2022, he served as the embedded CNA field representative to the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, conducting on-site research and analysis for the senior U.S. Navy commander in the Middle East. At CNA, his work has focused on strategic competition, irregular warfare, force design, fleet operations, and Middle East security issues. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of CNA or any of its sponsors.

defenseone.com · by Sam Plapinger

14. China says ‘spy’ balloon incident ‘hyped up’

From Sir Lawrence Freedman:

Lawrence Freedman

@LawDavF

·

17h

Anybody remember Nena (1984)?

99 red balloons

Floating in the summer sky

Panic bells, it's red alert

There's something here from somewhere else

The war machine springs to life

Opens up one eager eye

Focusing it on the sky

The 99 red balloons go by

China says ‘spy’ balloon incident ‘hyped up’

Elizabeth Law

China Correspondent

straitstimes.com · by cue · February 4, 2023

BEIJING - The threat of a Chinese balloon drifting over the United States has been overplayed by some American politicians and media to smear Beijing, China’s foreign ministry said on Saturday.

The comments come after US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing to have taken place on Sunday, in light of the incident and following an outcry from lawmakers led by Republicans who have called on the Pentagon to shoot down the balloon. The US assessed it to have been a spy balloon, while the Chinese maintains it was for meteorological research.

“We have no intention to violate and has never violated the territory or airspace of any sovereign country,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

“Some politicians and media in the US have hyped it up to attack and smear China. The Chinese side is firmly opposed to that.”

But the ministry also adopted a mollifying tone, calling for contact and communication at all levels to be maintained and adding that it is a responsibility of the diplomatic teams to be able to handle such situations.

The ministry added that no visit had been officially announced by either side, a seeming signal that it was trying to downplay the deferment of Mr Blinken’s trip. “It is the US’ own business to release relevant information, and we respect that.”

In a separate statement, the ministry also said the top diplomats of both countries had spoken on Friday night about dealing with “accidental incidents in a calm and professional manner”.

“In the face of unexpected situations, what both parties need to do is to stay focused, communicate in a timely manner, avoid misjudgments, and manage and control differences,” said the Communist Party of China’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission director Wang Yi.

A statement from the US Department of State struck a similar tone, adding that Mr Blinken would visit Beijing “as soon as conditions allow”.

Both governments have sought to play down the incident, insisting that they will continue to keep communication lines open, while China has made a rare admission of error in expressing regret the balloon drifted off course.

Beijing insists that the balloon was meteorological research equipment that has deviated from its planned route, but Washington says otherwise.

“We know that it’s a surveillance balloon,” said a Department of Defence spokesman during a media briefing.

A balloon flies in the sky over Billings, Montana, US, on Feb 1, 2023. PHOTO: REUTERS

The balloon was first spotted earlier this week and had been loitering over Montana, home to intercontinental ballistic missile silos. A Department of Defence official said the balloon posed no intelligence threat and such incursions have happened before.

The incident comes amid hopes for thawing relations between the world’s two largest economies after nearly five years of a bruising trade war and tense diplomatic ties. Mr Blinken was set to have a series of meetings in Beijing early next week, the most senior US politician to have made such a trip since 2018.

If there is any silver lining to the incident, it is that both governments appear to be soothing things over – something impossible as recently as four months ago before Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden met in Bali, said Assistant Professor Dylan Loh of the Public Policy and Global Affairs division in Nanyang Technological University.

And both sides are likely to continue to work towards guard rails in the relationship. But he expects ties to remain turbulent given an expected visit by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to Taiwan in April. A rescheduled Blinken visit could take place later in the year.

Professor Shi Yinhong, director of Centre on American Studies at the Renmin University of China, is similarly pessimistic. Given the number of confrontations in recent months, ranging from tensions over Taiwan, an increased military presence in the Philippines to restrictions on semiconductors, there is “little prospect” for any leaps in improving the US-China relation in the short term, he said.

“The increasingly bad state of US-China relations is too delicate to accommodate even a single ordinary blow. ‘Remarkable and lasting improvement’ (in the relationship) has become something that is dependent on almost (a) miracle,” he said.

straitstimes.com · by cue · February 4, 2023

15. Suspected Chinese spy balloon drifting over U.S. has surveillance part as big as multiple school buses

POTUS' gut instinct reaction not recommended by military advisors. Could this be another case (along with many cases from history) where civilian leadership had better strategic sense than the uniformed military? We will probably not be able to assess the effects of this for some time.

Or are some anonymous political advisors putting out the information about POTUS wanting to shoot it down to provide top cover to POTUS for not shooting it down and then "blaming" the military for the decision not to do so. In all cases it is not a good look.

Excerpt:

A source familiar with the situation told CBS News that, when briefed on Wednesday, Mr. Biden had initially wanted to shoot down the balloon. But as he sought military options from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Milley and others, they advised against such action because of the risk to people on the ground.

The administration was still deciding Friday what to do about the balloon when it reaches an area where it would be safe to shoot down, a U.S. official told CBS News.

Suspected Chinese spy balloon drifting over U.S. has surveillance part as big as multiple school buses

CBS News

China acknowledged Friday that a high-altitude balloon spotted this week over Montana does in fact belong to Beijing, but it referred to the airship as a civilian device "used for scientific research such as meteorology." A senior defense official told CBS News on Thursday that the Defense Department was "confident" that it was, in fact, a Chinese surveillance balloon.

The payload of the balloon — that is, the part under the balloon conducting the surveillance — is the size of two to three school buses, and the balloon itself is much larger, according to a U.S. official.

• Blinken postpones China trip following balloon discovery

According to a statement by the Chinese foreign ministry, the airship was "affected by the westerly wind" and its ability to control its direction "is limited." The statement also says that the balloon "seriously deviated from the scheduled route" and expressed regret that "the airship strayed into the United States due to force majeure."

By Friday morning, the balloon was no longer over Montana but had moved over the Midwest and is now over "the middle of the country," according to a U.S. official. A Chinese balloon has never been over the middle of the country before. The only other time a Chinese balloon has flown over the continental U.S. was during a brief overflight of Florida. There have been overflights of Hawaii and Guam. In previous instances, the Chinese have been able to recover the balloon. Although it can maneuver, it will still travel in the direction it is carried by the jet stream.

The balloon was flying at an altitude of about 66,000 feet, according to a U.S. official. It can be maneuvered but it is also subject to the jet stream, which could eventually push it out of U.S. airspace, the official said.

Later in the day, the National Weather Service in Kansas City tweeted that it had received "several reports across northwest MO of a large balloon visible on the horizon," and noted, "We have confirmed that it is not an NWS weather balloon.

The balloon is expected to be over the U.S. for the next few days, according to Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder. It is heading east, and U.S. officials suggested that meteorologists could offer some guidance on its direction.

Meteorologist Ryan Truchelut estimated the balloon's trajectory based on NOAA models that simulate the the trajectory of substances transported through the atmosphere. The balloon's future path, he tweeted, is "highly dependent on altitude, which is unknown." At an altitude of 15 km (about 49,000 feet), the balloon "races east out-to-sea," he wrote. At 20 km (over 65,000 feet), it "heads towards Southeast coast." And at 25km (over 82,000 feet), it "hooks back west."

He noted his projections assumed the balloon "is a passive tracer, not being controlled (or 'derelict')."

There has been some discussion of trying to somehow capture the balloon, but a U.S. official says that this is not possible.

Ryder declined to describe the specific dimensions of the balloon, "other than to say that it is big enough that, again, in reviewing our approach, we do recognize that any potential debris field would be significant and potentially cause civilian injuries or deaths or significant property damage."

The U.S. views the Chinese explanation of the balloon's purpose with "a fair amount of skepticism," and it is still trying to figure out what China's intent was.

On Friday evening, yet another balloon was apparently sighted, this one further south, in Latin America.

"We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America," Ryder said in a statement. "We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken had been expected to travel to China this weekend for a diplomatic trip, but as the Biden administration weighs a broader response to the discovery of the first balloon, his trip was postponed, two diplomatic sources told CBS News. However, the U.S. does not believe it was timed to scuttle Blinken's trip.

The balloon is not going to run out of fuel, since it has solar panels. The official also said that the balloon steers by rudder and is corkscrewing around to slow its progress over land, but the jet stream continues to move it on a trajectory across the U.S. The Pentagon is still considering ways to "dispose" of it but has "grave concerns" about the damage it would cause if it fell to Earth.

Although it's difficult to find a precise definition of how high sovereign air space extends, government lawyers regard this as a violation of U.S. air space.

The U.S. engaged with Chinese officials "urgently," and President Biden was briefed on the situation, a senior defense official said. On Friday morning, a senior U.S. official said that Washington had communicated directly with Beijing about the situation at multiple levels. A Chinese official was summoned to the State Department for a formal U.S. complaint.

Answering a question in Beijing on Friday during a regular briefing, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry said the country "regrets that the airship strayed into the United States," which they attributed to a "westerly wind" and the device's limited "control ability."

• As China builds nukes and ties with Russia, NATO seeks new "friends"

The spokesperson said China would "continue to maintain communication with the U.S. to properly handle the unexpected situation."

Former national security adviser backs general's warning on possible war with China 08:29

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley recommended not taking "kinetic action" to bring down the balloon because of the danger of debris hitting the ground, the defense official told CBS News, adding that the U.S. government had determined the balloon does not pose a threat.

A source familiar with the situation told CBS News that, when briefed on Wednesday, Mr. Biden had initially wanted to shoot down the balloon. But as he sought military options from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Milley and others, they advised against such action because of the risk to people on the ground.

The administration was still deciding Friday what to do about the balloon when it reaches an area where it would be safe to shoot down, a U.S. official told CBS News.

Pentagon spokesman Brigadier 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."

A U.S. official told CBS News on Friday that the balloon was "not moving very fast."

A balloon flies in the sky over Billings, Montana, on February 1, 2023, in this picture obtained from social media. Chase Doak via Reuters

Canada's Department of National Defence (DND) said in a statement late Thursday that the balloon had been "detected" and that Canada was "taking steps to ensure the security of its airspace, including the monitoring of a potential second incident," but didn't elaborate on what that incident might be.

However, CBS News has learned the U.S. hasn't been able to confirm the possible second balloon mentioned in the Canadian release.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command was "actively" tracking the first balloon, the Canadian DND said.

Silos that can house intercontinental ballistic missiles are located in Montana — and jet fighters were scrambled to be in a position to shoot the balloon down.

While incidents like this have happened before, they've never lasted this long, according to a defense official. The U.S. has been tracking the balloon "for quite some time" as it entered U.S. continental airspace a couple of days ago, the official said.

The Pentagon's best assessment at the moment is that the balloon's surveillance capabilities are not a significant step up from what China is likely able to collect through other means like satellites in low Earth orbit, according to a senior defense official. Out of an abundance of caution, the Pentagon has taken additional mitigation steps to protect certain sites.

There are other ways to deal with it other than shooting it down, such as electronic jamming of the signals it is sending back, a U.S. official pointed out to CBS News.

Ryder said the U.S. government will continue to "track and monitor it closely."

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday tweeted that "China's brazen disregard for U.S. sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed, and President Biden cannot be silent."

"I am requesting a Gang of Eight briefing," he wrote, referring to the bipartisan group of eight congressional leaders who are tasked with reviewing national intelligence information.

China’s brazen disregard for U.S. sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed, and President Biden cannot be silent.

I am requesting a Gang of Eight briefing. https://t.co/KarTCUzbOS

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) February 3, 2023

A U.S. official told CBS News on Thursday evening the administration briefed Gang of 8 staff members in the afternoon "to get this information to Congress expeditiously and offered additional briefings."

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte said Thursday in a statement that he had "received an informational briefing" Wednesday "on the situation involving a suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana," and added that he was "deeply troubled by the constant stream of alarming developments for our national security."

David Martin, Eleanor Watson and Margaret Brennan contributed reporting.

• In:
• China
• Canada

CBS News

16. From China to Big Sky: The Balloon That Unnerved the White House

So did the White House attempt to keep this a secret to prevent an impact on the SECSTATE visit and was the balloon made public due to social media and local newspaper reporting? Note a previous article from today's news asked if local newspapers were a national security issue. Here is an example of one having national and international impact. 

The president ultimately decided to let the balloon continue on its way as the US sought answers from the Chinese embassy in Washington, but they struggled to obtain satisfactory responses. US officials said they were baffled by China, which itself appeared to be caught off-guard by the bizarre incident. 

For now, the White House opted not to inform the American public. Events, however, soon forced Biden’s hand. 

On Thursday afternoon, the Billings Gazette, a local Montana paper, published a photo of the balloon – meaning it was only a matter of time until national media would pick up on the report and the Biden administration would have to face questions. 

The pace of discussions in the White House quickened. 

In a call starting at 5:15pm on Thursday, the administration finally went public. That spurred a rush to brief lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The Biden administration will hold a briefing next week for the “Gang of Eight,” a group of lawmakers including the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. 

From China to Big Sky: The Balloon That Unnerved the White House

• The mysterious white object entered US airspace on Jan. 28
• Its existence derailed a top US-China meeting in Beijing

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-04/from-china-to-big-sky-the-balloon-that-unnerved-the-white-house?sref=hhjZtX76

ByPeter Martin, Jenny Leonard and Jennifer Jacobs

February 3, 2023 at 9:04 PM EST

Star gazing is nothing unusual in Montana, where skies go on forever. But as Chase Doak left work on a Wednesday and looked up on a cold winter day he saw a mysterious round white object that was clearly neither the moon or a star. 

He began to film something that could come straight out of a movie where science fiction meets the Wild West. Within 48 hours the strange thing that went on to confound the residents of Billings was revealed to be a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon. 

A high altitude balloon floats over Montana on Wednesday.Photographer: Larry Mayer/The Billings Gazette/AP Photo

“Not gonna lie,” tweeted Doak as his video went viral. “First, I thought this was a #ufo. Then, I thought it was @elonmusk in a Wizard of Oz cosplay scenario. But it was just a run-of-the mill Chinese spy balloon!”

Its journey across the ocean has gripped the world’s attention and forced the top US diplomat to cancel his trip to Beijing. Its fate, as it wafts 10 miles above ground, remains uncertain — as do the delicate relations between two superpowers grasping for ways to deescalate tensions and get talks back on track.

This account of how a balloon burst diplomacy just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken was set to travel to China and meet with President Xi Jinping is based on conversations with several officials briefed on the matter who asked to stay anonymous to discuss intelligence matters.

As it turns out, US authorities were well aware of the unidentified object that had entered American airspace on Jan. 28, that had then left and re-entered over North Idaho on Tuesday. But with such a high-profile trip at stake, keeping it on the down-low was key.

By the time the thing became visible in Montana, President Joe Biden had already been briefed and the White House was scrambling to decide whether to blast it from the sky.

The gravity of the situation was only exacerbated by Montana being home to Malmstrom Air Force Base, which houses a large portion of the US’s Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

Antony BlinkenPhotographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg

The Biden administration knew it had to exercise extreme caution especially in what was a heated political environment ahead of 2024 elections, with Republicans agitating on which party could strike a harder or tougher line on China.

As the balloon continued to hover over the Big Sky state on Wednesday, Biden huddled with his national security team to receive a detailed briefing on the balloon. The president argued for shooting the object down, but was urged against doing so by his most senior military advisors. 

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley insisted that such a move would put civilians at risk.

The president ultimately decided to let the balloon continue on its way as the US sought answers from the Chinese embassy in Washington, but they struggled to obtain satisfactory responses. US officials said they were baffled by China, which itself appeared to be caught off-guard by the bizarre incident. 

For now, the White House opted not to inform the American public. Events, however, soon forced Biden’s hand. 

On Thursday afternoon, the Billings Gazette, a local Montana paper, published a photo of the balloon – meaning it was only a matter of time until national media would pick up on the report and the Biden administration would have to face questions. 

The pace of discussions in the White House quickened. 

In a call starting at 5:15pm on Thursday, the administration finally went public. That spurred a rush to brief lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The Biden administration will hold a briefing next week for the “Gang of Eight,” a group of lawmakers including the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. 

In an effort to keep things calm, administration officials stressed this was not the first such incident and that similar activities had been observed over the past several years, including during the prior administration.

The Pentagon’s announcement prompted an outcry from Republicans. Former President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social website to “shoot down the balloon.” Others, from former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, framed the decision not to shoot down the balloon as a sign of weakness by Biden. 

The biggest question was how would China respond to all the furore that was unfolding at a rapid pace as Asia was asleep.

After earlier calling on the US to refrain from “hyping” the incident, China finally commented on the balloon directly in a statement Friday morning Washington time, attributing it to a “force majeure” for which it was not responsible. 

China said the balloon blew off course and entered US airspace by accident, adding that it is “regretful” over the incident and that the balloon’s purpose was climate research. 

Administration officials are privately dismissive of Beijing’s explanation, as are former American intelligence analysts. The official Chinese explanation mirrored a well-worn excuse for aerial espionage. 

“I do not know of anyone who constructs a meteorological balloon the size of three school buses,” said Dennis Wilder, the Central Intelligence Agency’s former deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific.

US officials, who had spent hours debating whether Blinken should scrap a long-planned trip to Beijing, finally felt they had no choice but to postpone the first high-level US visit to China in five years. A delay was not a cancellation. It sent a signal that the US had no desire to escalate matters.

The sentiment among those in the room was that the trip wasn’t worth the potential domestic political costs of going, given that Blinken’s talks in China were not expected to yield much in the first place. 

Biden’s team worried that the incident would serve as more fodder for Republicans who believed the administration is weak on China, especially if the balloon crashed and hurt someone while Blinken was in Beijing. 

“A split screen of a spy satellite over the United States when Secretary Blinken lands in Beijing would not have been tenable,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia on the National Security Council. 

Meanwhile, the balloon continued its voyage eastward across the continental US, heading toward Washington. “The balloon is not going away,” said Wilder, the former CIA officer. 

The problem, he said, is that “China has no way to take it back so it will drift over the continental US for an unknown time frame before coming down.”

Until then, Americans will keep taking pictures of it and Biden will have to keep defending the decision not to just shoot it down. 

— With assistance by Iain Marlow, Brian Platt and Lindsey Rupp

17. Ukraine Situation Report: Kyiv Officially Getting Long-Range Rocket-Boosted Bomb

Ukraine Situation Report: Kyiv Officially Getting Long-Range Rocket-Boosted Bomb

The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb will enable Ukraine to hit targets at twice the distance of any weapon currently provided.

BY

HOWARD ALTMAN

|

PUBLISHED FEB 3, 2023 6:24 PM

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · February 3, 2023

The Pentagon on Friday officially confirmed that the U.S. will include an undisclosed number of Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) in the latest $2.17 billion tranche of aid to Ukraine.

The munition - officially listed on the aid package as "precision-guided rockets," will provide a major boost to Ukraine’s efforts to take back territory from Russia by giving its troops the capability to hit targets at distances much further than longest-range munitions already provided to Kyiv.

The recently developed GLSDB, an adaptation of the widely used air-launched Small Diameter Bomb, or SDB, has not previously found a customer but would provide a significant boost to Ukraine’s capacity to strike in Russian rear areas. The GLSDB has a range of around 94 miles, or 150 kilometers.

That's roughly over double the range of the guided munitions fired by the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), and variants thereof, and the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).

Ukraine will now receive munitions that have twice the range of those fired by the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) (U.S. Army photo)

You can read more about how GBSDB will help Ukraine in our deep dive here.

The GLSDB gives Ukraine “long-range fires capability that will enable them to conduct operations in defense of their country and to take back their sovereign territory - Russian occupied areas,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s top spokesman during a press briefing Friday.

The bombs won't likely reach Ukraine for several months, Marine Lt. Col. Garron Garn, a Pentagon spokesman, told The War Zone Friday evening.

Asked if the GLSDB could be used to targets in the Crimean peninsula Russia has occupied since 2014, Ryder deferred to the Ukrainians, but did not indicate any preclusions against doing so. A Pentagon official back in July told The War Zone that Russian forces in Ukrainian territory, are “fair targets.” That includes Crimea and Vladimir Putin's $4 billion prized Kerch Bridge linking the peninsula with Russia. Though still too far out of range at the moment of any Ukrainian weapon, including the GLSDB still to be delivered, the bridge was attacked Oct. 8 and portions several damaged.

“Clearly, that is their decision, Ryder said of the Ukrainians, who have made no secret about their intent to liberate Crimea and the rest of the occupied land. “They're on the lead for those so I'm not going to talk about or speculate about potential future operations.”

Ukrainian troops now in Kherson Oblast are the closest to Crimea. Fired from there, the GLSDB would enable Ukraine to hit targets in roughly the northern third of Crimea, including an ammunition storage facility in Dzhankoi, which has previously been hit by what the Russians claimed was a sabotage attack. The GLSDB would also give Ukraine some increased measure of fire control of the land bridge to Crime through the areas of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts now controlled by Russia.

The official announcement of the GLSDB, the provision of which was first reported by Reuters on Tuesday and confirmed Wednesday by The War Zone, comes on a day when Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov flat-out stated a well-known assumption. That Ukraine was going to use the promised influx of western tanks - like the 31 U.S. M1A2 Abrams, 14 U.K. provided Challenger 2 tanks and Leopard 2 and Leopard 1 variants (the latter suggested today) promised by NATO allies - for counteroffensives. Depending on how soon some of them can arrive, with many being months or even years out, some may be included in a looming operation of this kind that may occur as early as this spring.

“We need a ‘tank coalition’ with the main tanks of NATO countries for a counteroffensive,” Reznikov said Friday at a joint press conference with the Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of National Defense of the Republic of Poland Mariusz Blaszczak. “We will use them as a ‘steel fist’ to break through their defense line when these hulls are ready. Our General Staff will decide in which place to do it.”

Ukraine is using its domestic drones, artillery, and missiles to hit targets in Russia. But in what seemed like another pitch for the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missile, Reznikov on Thursday promised that Ukraine would not use longer-range weapons Russian territory. The ATACMS have a range of nearly 200 miles.

The U.S. has been reluctant to send Ukraine ATACMS out of fear of broadening the conflict.

“If we get the opportunity to hit targets at a distance of up to 300 km (186.4 miles), the Russian army will not be able to prevail and will be forced to retreat," Reznikov said at a joint meeting of the Government of Ukraine and the European Commission in Kyiv on Thursday. "Ukraine is ready to give any guarantees that your weapons will not be used to shell the territory of the Russian Federation. We have many targets on temporarily occupied Ukrainian land, and we are ready to coordinate the selection of targets with our partners.”

Before we head into the latest news from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can get caught up with our previous rolling coverage here.

The Latest

In addition to the GLSDB, the latest tranche of aid to Ukraine provides a wide range of other weapons and systems to Ukraine, like more 155mm artillery rounds, 120mm mortar rounds, machine guns to counter drones, shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile systems, and air defense systems and integration equipment. It comes from separate sources - $425 million worth of arms and equipment from DoD inventories under Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), as well as $1.75 billion in additional support under DoD’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI).

This is the 31st PDA and all told, the Biden administration has provided Ukraine with $30 billion in military assistance, the vast majority of it after Russia launched its full-on invasion nearly a year ago.

Capabilities in the $475 million PDA package are expected to include:

• Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
• Additional 155mm artillery rounds;
• Additional 120mm mortar rounds;
• 190 heavy machine guns with thermal imagery sights and associated ammunition to counter Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• 181 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles;
• 250 Javelin anti-armor systems;
• 2,000 anti-armor rockets;
• Claymore anti-personnel munitions (configured to be compliant with the Ottawa Convention);
• Demolitions munitions;
• Cold weather gear, helmets, and other field equipment.

Capabilities in DoD’s February 2 $1.75 billion USAI package are expected to include:

• Two HAWK air defense firing units;
• Anti-aircraft guns and ammunition;
• Equipment to integrate Western air defense launchers, missiles, and radars with Ukraine's air defense systems;
• Equipment to sustain Ukraine's existing air defense capabilities;
• Air defense generators;
• Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• Four air surveillance radars;
• 20 counter-mortar radars;
• Spare parts for counter-artillery radars;
• Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• Precision-guided rockets;
• Secure communications equipment;
• Medical supplies;
• Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment.

Neither the Pentagon nor State Department would provide any additional details to The War Zone about the types of equipment being sent to Kyiv to integrate Western air defense systems with Ukraine's existing systems, the equipment to sustain it, the counter-unmanned aerial systems or radars.

Stitching together all those systems and air defense munitions Ukraine has received into an integrated air defense system is quite an undertaking, but does seem to be the goal, at least on some level.

When it comes to air defense munitions, past packages have included, for instance, an undisclosed number of radar-guided RIM-7 Sea Sparrow surface-to-air missiles, which will be integrated onto the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ existing Soviet-era Buk air defense systems.

The U.S. has previously provide Ukraine with RIM-7 Sea Sparrow surface-to-air missiles to use with its existing Soviet-era air defense systems.

Ukraine has also received a wide assortment of systems, like the U.S.-made Patriot air defense system, National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missiles Systems, or NASAMS, and the German-made IRIS-T SLM and Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG). It has also been promised the Aster SAMP/T by Italy and France, among other international systems. During the briefing, Ryder said he would not discuss "operationally sensitive matters" but gave a general sense of how the air defense equipment in today's packages would be used.

"First of all, it's important to recognize that Ukrainians already have done a fairly remarkable job of deploying the air defense capabilities that they have," he noted. "That said, we do recognize that as they take these new pieces and parts are integrated into their system, continued support is required. And so we consult regularly with the Ukrainians and our international allies and partners in how they can best integrate those systems. That is ongoing work. But again, they've been doing a pretty remarkable job of intercepting Russian missiles and drones."

Beyond any new counteroffensives it may be planning, Ukraine continues to sound the alarm over what Kyiv says is a looming new Russian attack.

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence directorate (GUR) on Friday reiterated its assertion that the ongoing Russian push in the Donbas is a reaction to Vladimir Putin’s order to recapture the entire territory by March.

"We expect very active events in February-March,” GUR spokesman Adriy Yusov said Friday, according to the GUR Telegram channel. “Putin's task is to seize Donbas by March. Nothing will work. These dates have already been postponed many times. The intensity that we are currently observing in Donbas is an attempt to implement these plans.”

During his joint press conference today, Reznikov warned of a new Russian offensive in the south and east and said that Ukraine will use its available resources to counter it, primarily 155mm artillery.

"That's why we say today that the priority on the battlefield remains 155 mm artillery and shells for it," he said.

The Kremlin on Friday rejected as a "hoax" media reports that U.S. CIA Director William Burns had traveled to Moscow with a secret peace proposal that involved Ukraine ceding a fifth of its territory to Russia, Reuters reported Friday.

The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung's report, which said Burns had made a secret trip to Moscow last month to put forward the plan on behalf of the White House, has also been dismissed by Washington.

We reached out to Ukrainian officials for comment and will update this story with any information they provide.

A senior Russian lieutenant who fled after serving in Ukraine told The Guardian on Thursday how his country’s troops tortured prisoners of war and threatened some with rape.

Konstantin Yefremov left Russia in December after spending three months in the parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia oblast that were occupied in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I have personally seen our troops torture Ukrainian soldiers,” Yefremov, who is the most senior soldier to speak out against the war, told the Guardian in a phone call from Mexico, where he currently is. “I feel relieved that I can finally speak out about the things I have seen.”

Those who collaborate with Russians remain a target for violence, like this former Ukrainian policeman Yevhen Kuzmin, whose car was reportedly blown up in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Another Russian T-80 tank was spotted burning in Ukraine.

But the crew of a Russian T-72 tank apparently got a little luckier, as you can see in this video below.

Ukrainian forces apparently captured a Russian MT-LB amphibious tracked armored vehicle variant near Vuhledar in Donetsk Oblast, according to the Ukraine Weapons Tracker OSINT group. Of particular interest was that it was up-gunned with a 2M-7 naval turret with two KPV 14.5mm heavy machine guns, normally used on Russian military vessels.

Russia's rare 9A331MDT Tor-M2DT air defense systems are having bad luck in Ukraine. The Ukraine Weapons Tracker OSINT group posted that for the second time in as many days, Ukrainian forces destroyed one. The first was destroyed yesterday. The systems were only recently brought into Ukraine from Arctic regions.

That's it for now. We will update this story if there is anything major to add.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · February 3, 2023

18. The Army Picked a Black Hawk Replacement — But the Fight May Have Just Begun

The Army Picked a Black Hawk Replacement — But the Fight May Have Just Begun

Sikorsky and Boeing are protesting the service choosing a Bell-made tiltrotor, and lawmakers are angry.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

Lawmakers are demanding answers as non-partisan auditors review a U.S. Army decision to replace its Black Hawk helicopter with a new tiltrotor design.

The prize: a decade of orders for the service’s utility aircraft of the future, with more than $70 billion set to flow to the prime contractor, its hundreds of suppliers, and their thousands of workers.

In December, the Army chose Textron’s Bell V-280, which can hover like a helicopter and fly like a fixed-wing plane. That incensed lawmakers in Connecticut, home to Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky. The maker of the venerable Black Hawk teamed with Boeing to pitch the Defiant X, a new-design helicopter whose stacked rotors and “pusher prop” enable it to fly much faster than the Black Hawk.

Right now, the public doesn’t know why the Army chose the V-280 over the Defiant X in its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA. It’s common practice for the military not to say while losing bidders challenge the decision, which Sikorsky and Boeing did in late December.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has until April to decide whether the contract was awarded fairly, whether bids should be re-evaluated, or a different course of action should be taken.

That puts the project on hold. But it hasn’t stopped ticked-off lawmakers from making their opinions known.

“Despite our delegation’s repeated requests, the Army unreasonably & irresponsibly has refused to provide us—or the public—with any information about why Sikorsky’s bid to build Future Long Range Assault Aircraft was rejected,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., tweeted Thursday.

“FYI yesterday the Army denied Congress's request for a briefing - for the 4th time,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “Is this because the price of the Bell helicopter is sky high compared to the Sikorsky bid? Why doesn't the Army want Congress to know this?”

Last week, Doug Bush, the Army’s top acquisition official, said the service built time for a protest into the project’s schedule.

“The Army's confident, but you know, GAO will do its job and we'll go from there,” he said.

But if the pro-Sikorsky-Boeing lawmakers choose, they could push for Congressional hearings or limit the project’s funding, which could ultimately delay the Black Hawk replacement. Or if any of the companies don’t like GAO’s recommendations, they could take their battle to court.

The Army briefed Sikorsky and Boeing about its decision in mid-December. This week, an industry source spoke about what the losing team considers flaws in the service’s acquisition process. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail the company’s concerns, said the Army was too subjective and inconsistent.

Sikorsky contends that its smaller Defiant X would be cheaper to operate and would not require the Army to pay to improve airfields to accommodate Bell’s larger aircraft.

“Sikorsky’s whole idea was to mimic what the Army does [now] to drive down the cost, to leverage the supply chain, to leverage the supply base, and give them something that's affordable,” the source said.

They say their helicopter would also be cheaper to maintain over the long-term,

“​When you make something transformational, make it fit into that footprint the absolute best you can,” the source said.

They argue that pilots of the V-280 tiltrotor would need more training than regular helicopter pilots since they would have to learn how to fly fixed-wing planes, helicopters, and tiltrotors, like new Marine Corps V-22 Osprey pilots.

But another industry source said new and more realistic flight simulators could reduce that timeline and price tag by allowing training to be done more cheaply on the ground. This second source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said a so-called compound helicopter like the Defiant X also uses new technology that would require Army pilots to get, at least some, specialized training as well.

Sikorsky and Boeing pitched a helicopter with compound rotors, which do away with the need for a tail rotor. The tail rotor was replaced by a pusher prop that allows the helicopter to fly at the high speeds the Army desires. The Bell V-280 is a tiltrotor, an aircraft with a fixed-wing with movable rotors on the tips that allow it to take off and land like a helicopter, but fly fast like a traditional plane.

“You have two different technologies that you’re trying to compare,” the first source said.

Because of that, the source said, the Army used subjective criteria.

“The criteria were applied subjectively, and we felt they were not applied consistently,” the source said.

The company is pushing for the Army to reevaluate the bids with less subjective criteria, the source said. They say the hypothetical mission that Army officials evaluated was not representative of the types of missions flown by Army pilots.

The source noted that Lockheed Martin rarely protests procurement decisions. The company believes the Army’s decision didn’t give “the best value to the Army to the taxpayer, for a lot of reasons.”

Both Sikorsky and Bell have a lot to lose. Sikorsky makes the Black Hawk, a helicopter used by dozens of militaries around the world.

“Sikorsky is the incumbent manufacturer for the Army's utility transport role as is the Black Hawk manufacturer,” said Ray Jaworowski, an analyst with Forecast International. “Losing what's essentially the eventual Black Hawk replacement is certainly a blow to the company.”

The Army plans to continue flying that helicopter well into the next decade and allies are still likely

“They'll still be building Black Hawks for the Army, at least into the late 2020s, maybe even into the early 2030s,” Jaworowski said. “Beyond that, they'll still be building Black Hawks for export customers.”

While Sikorsky also makes CH-53 heavy-lift helicopters for the Marine Corps, smaller Black Hawk orders could lead Sikorsky to shrink its workforce.

“The Army’s FLRAA decision puts the defense industrial base at great risk by essentially scrapping decades of vertical flight experience,” wrote Rocco Calo, principal officer of Teamsters Local 1150, the union that represents Sikorsky workers. “This stagnates helicopter development in the defense industry for the next 40-plus years, because these Teamster workers ARE the industrial base.”

The Army files more than 2,000 Black Hawks. Sikorsky has built more than 5,000 over four-plus decades for the U.S. military and 35 allies.

“If the selection of the V-280 stands…the export market likely becomes increasingly important to them [and] they'll have to reorient their product line a bit,” Jaworowski said.

But the Defiant X isn’t necessarily dead even if GAO upholds the Army’s choice of the V-280. Jaworowski said it could become an attractive option for U.S. allies, especially in Europe, where NATO is eyeing what it calls the Next Generation Rotorcraft Capability in the mid-to-late 2030s.

“It's likely they'll probably go to the European platform, but you could definitely see a teaming opportunity there for Sikorsky [and Boeing] to get involved…with technology from the Defiant X,” he said.

Bell is in a similar situation. It is expected to wrap production of the V-22 Osprey, a larger tiltrotor used by the Marine Corps and the Air Force, in the coming years. To date, Japan is the only foreign buyer of the V-22. That means without the new Army V-280 orders, the future of Bell’s military business would be in question.

“I would think the export opportunities would certainly be more numerous for the V-280 as the winner of the FLRAA program than they were for the V-22,” Jaworowski said.

Sikorsky and Bell are also competing to build the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, a scout helicopter that would replace Bell’s OH-58 Kiowa, which the Army no longer flies. The service is expected to choose later this decade. The Army is expected to buy fewer aircraft for this compared to FLRAA.

defenseone.com · by Marcus Weisgerber

​19. Why didn’t US shoot down suspected Chinese spy balloon? Expert explains

Video at this link: https://www.newsnationnow.com/on-balance-with-leland-vittert/why-didnt-us-shoot-down-suspected-chinese-spy-balloon-expert-explains/

Why didn’t US shoot down suspected Chinese spy balloon? Expert explains

newsnationnow.com · by Caitlyn Shelton · February 3, 2023

(NewsNation) — The Pentagon is monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon hovering over the U.S.

Federal officials say the balloon does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground. But many have questioned why the U.S. is not taking action against the suspected spy balloon that has been spotted over Montana, home to one of the country’s three nuclear missile silo fields.

Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Ret. Gen. Philip Breedlove, believes one reason could be that the U.S. does not want to begin shooting things that may be in areas considered contentious.

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“The first thing that comes to mind is, you know that if we shoot something down Chinese because it’s in our airspace, we fly in a lot of places in the South China Sea with our aircraft and things where China claims that as their airspace. There may be a consideration out there that we don’t want to start a process of shooting things that are in these kinds of contested areas,” Ret. Gen. Breedlove told NewsNation host Leland Vittert in an interview.

Ret. Gen. Breedlove says if the U.S. decided to bring down the balloon, the likelihood that it would strike anything of value is pretty low. He says it’s a little hard to understand how the Pentagon came to the conclusion that the balloon carries no risk at this time. He thinks it could potentially be able to gather new data.

“This is not the first time this has happened. It is flying in a place where they may actually be able to collect better, some of the intelligence they’re collecting from their satellites,” Ret. Gen. Breedlove said. “So there is marginal value to some, but what we don’t know is all the sensors that are in this package. There may be sensors that are not usable from satellites, so they might actually be collecting some new data.”

While there are several unanswered questions surrounding the balloon, Ret. Gen. Breedlove says, perhaps, the most interesting is: Why now?

“There’s two answers. This could be a mistake. We’re not always positive about how these upper-level winds move. Maybe the Chinese intended for this thing to come and go and not be a problem at this particular time. Maybe that that wind pattern has caused them a problem,” he said. “On the other hand, maybe this is exactly what they wanted, all of these events about to happen, and maybe they are then signaling, hey, we’re here and we have the capability to look at you and we can get into your most sensitive spaces.”

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Whether it’s a mistake or contrived to happen ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address and before Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to travel to China, Ret. Gen. Breedlove says we just don’t know yet.

Pentagon officials say it’s not unprecedented for these kinds of surveillance aircraft to be in the U.S. but pointed out that this one has been here longer than usual and came into our airspace a few days ago.

newsnationnow.com · by Caitlyn Shelton · February 3, 2023

​20. A Brief History of Spying With Balloons

A Brief History of Spying With Balloons

The New York Times · by Amanda Holpuch · February 3, 2023

A Chinese balloon seen floating over the northwestern United States this week was a reminder of how governments have used balloons for reconnaissance for more than a century.

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A military base in Kabul where one of several US aerial surveillance balloons were based in 2012.Credit...Bryan Denton for The New York Times

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Feb. 3, 2023

A Chinese balloon seen hovering over Montana this week has been described as an “intelligence-gathering” airship by the Pentagon and a stray civilian research airship by China.

Whatever its intended use, the balloon offers a reminder of how for more than a century, governments have used balloons for surveillance and observation, most often during times of war.

Thomas Paone, the curator for the lighter-than-air collection at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which includes balloons, blimps, and airships, said that while balloon technology has changed over that time, the mission of observation has been a constant.

Here’s a look at this history.

Both sides deployed them in the U.S. Civil War.

The Confederate and Union armies used tethered balloons to observe troop movements in what Mr. Paone said was the first organized military effort in the United States to use balloons for observation.

The Union had better balloon resources than the Confederates, including a boat to which a balloon was tethered, in what amounted to an early version of an aircraft carrier. One of the Confederates’ most-used balloons was eventually captured.

“By mid war, both sides basically give up on balloons because of the logistical challenges that they posed,” Mr. Paone said.

Those logistical challenges were evidenced during the siege of Yorktown in April 1862, when Union General Fitz John Porter decided to do some surveillance using only one tether rope, instead of the three or four recommended, according to the National Park Service.

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The rope snapped. General Porter drifted over Confederate lines with no way to control the balloon. Enemy soldiers took a few unsuccessful shots at him, but the general and his balloon eventually floated back over to the Union side.

General Porter was close to General George B. McClellan. After the accident, McClellan wrote to his wife, “You may rest assured of one thing: you won’t catch me in the confounded balloon nor will I allow any other Generals to go up in it!”

Balloon operators in World War I were early adopters of the parachute.

Hydrogen-filled balloons were crucial during World War I to help direct artillery fire, spot troop movements and note enemy positions like depots and trenches.

“As a result, balloons become a prized target of the enemy,” Mr. Paone said. Some of the earliest uses of airplanes were missions to destroy them. “When an observation balloon goes up, now everything that you’ve done or everything you’re trying to hide from the enemy can be seen.” And the launch of one was often quickly followed by artillery fire, he added.

Enemy fire could cause a balloon to explode, forcing American balloon observers who saw an attack coming to jump out. They were among the early adopters of parachutes.

Silk parachutes were attached to the side of the balloon basket in cone-shaped devices. After jumping over the side of the basket, the observer’s weight would cause the parachute to come out as they descended, Mr. Paone said.

“There are tales of observers who jumped two or three times in one day,” Mr. Paone said. “They would get attacked again, they jumped.”

Japan sent 9,000 balloons with bombs over the United States in World War II.

The only people to die in an attack on the continental United States during World War II were six people who encountered a Japanese balloon bomb, known as a Fu-Go, during a picnic in Oregon in May 1945.

The victims, Elsie Mitchell and five children from a Sunday school class, were killed when they found the bomb and it exploded.

From November 1944 to April 1945, Japan launched around 9,000 balloons carrying bombs to travel more than 6,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to the United States, according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force. There were 285 balloons found in states, including Michigan, Wyoming and Texas.

In Europe, Americans used untethered blimps called K-Ships for observation and in a few cases for attacks.

“K-Ships become a critical aspect of anti-submarine warfare because they can hover and go slow and you can have a whole bunch of people with binoculars looking in all directions at the sea from a pretty good height,” Mr. Paone said. “And they’re able to see periscopes or other changes in the water that can point to a submarine.”

On D-Day, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, an African American unit, became the first barrage balloon battalion to land in France.

Barrage balloons were large, unmanned tethered balloons whose cables created a hazard for aircraft, forcing them to fly higher and reducing the effectiveness of strafing and bombing, according to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

In this century, surveillance balloons were equipped with video cameras and sensors.

American surveillance balloons equipped with infrared and color video cameras, known as aerostats, were a constant presence in Afghanistan during the war. The helium balloons were first used in Iraq in 2004 and have also been used to monitor the United States’ southern border.

Some Afghans said that the balloons were an intrusion into their private lives and a sign of American oppression, while others complained they did not do enough to fend off violent threats.

Video from one of the surveillance balloons was also used in the trial of Robert Bales, a soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians, most of whom were women and children, in March 2012. The video showed Mr. Bales as he returned to a military outpost in the Kandahar Province after the attack and was apprehended by other soldiers.

The New York Times · by Amanda Holpuch · February 3, 2023

​21. Challenging the U.S. Is a Historic Mistake

Excerpts:

Modern Chinese thinking is not so different. China’s leadership sees further growth, power and expansion as necessary to its survival. They believe that the U.S. and other powers seeking to constrain China are bent on its destruction—or, more specifically, on the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party. The goal of the U.S. and its allies, Mr. Xi told a party conference early in his tenure, is “to vie with us for the battlefields of people’s hearts and for the masses, and in the end to overthrow the leadership of the CCP and China’s socialist system.”

Ideology is now also a major obstacle to China’s further “unification.” China’s crackdown on democratic institutions and forces in Hong Kong has greatly increased Taiwan’s hostility to the idea of One China, just as U.S. support encourages the Taiwanese to resist Beijing’s pressures. The two together are a disaster for Chinese ambitions.

Can Xi Jinping reconcile himself to these limits, to a world that will continue to be defined by the liberal hegemony of the U.S.?

The Japanese faced just this dilemma in 1941. By that point, leading Japanese military officials believed ultimate victory against the U.S. was unlikely. Yet the option of backing down and accepting “Little Japan” was too humiliating. It meant giving up the dream of a new Japanese-led Asian order. For Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, as for other Japanese leaders in 1940 and 1941, war was more honorable than accepting an American-imposed peace, even a losing war.

As Tojo put it, “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes and”—in the Japanese expression for taking the plunge—“jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu [temple].” Xi Jinping, too, may decide to take the leap. If so, he is likely to join Vladimir Putin, the Soviets, and the Axis leaders of World War II in bringing a tragedy upon his people and the world.

• THE SATURDAY ESSAY

Challenging the U.S. Is a Historic Mistake

Like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, today’s China is a rising power determined to dominate its region and convinced that American strength is waning. It runs the risk of experiencing a similar fate if it attacks Taiwan.

By Robert Kagan

Feb. 3, 2023 11:19 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/challenging-the-u-s-is-a-historic-mistake-11675441152?utm_source=pocket_saves

Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping rests on certain basic assumptions: that in a just world, China should be hegemonic in East Asia, the center of a system in which the other regional powers pay their respect and take direction from China, as was the case for two millennia prior to the 19th century; that regions once considered by Beijing to have been part of China should be “reunified” with it; and that a revived China should have at least an equal say in setting the norms and rules of international life. These goals are achievable, Mr. Xi asserts, because the world is undergoing “great changes unseen in a century,” namely, the “great rejuvenation” of Chinese power and the decline of American power. “Time and momentum are on our side,” according to Mr. Xi.

There is no denying that China has acquired substantial global power and influence in recent decades. Even if this is “peak China,” as some suggest, it is already East Asia’s economic hegemon and, were it not for the U.S., would likely become the region’s political and military hegemon as well (though perhaps not without a conflict with Japan). Left to itself, a modernizing China could one day dominate its neighbors much as a unified, modernizing Germany once dominated Europe and a modernizing Japan once dominated China and the rest of East Asia. Those powers also believed that “time and momentum” were on their side, and in many respects they were right.

Yet those examples should give Chinese leaders pause, for both Japan and Germany, while accomplishing amazing feats of rapid expansion for brief periods of time, ultimately failed in their ambitions for regional hegemony. They underestimated both the actual and potential power of the U.S. They failed to understand that the emergence of the U.S. as a great power at the beginning of the 20th century had so transformed international circumstances that longstanding ambitions of regional hegemony were no longer achievable. At this moment of high tension over Taiwan and the Chinese spy balloon detected this week over the U.S., Xi Jinping runs the risk of making the same historic mistake.

Chinese President Xi Jinping stands on a jeep while inspecting army troops, July 2017.

PHOTO: LI TAO/XINHUA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The world entered a new phase when the U.S. emerged as a great power at the beginning of the 20th century. As Theodore Roosevelt observed in 1900, the U.S., due to its “strength and geographical situation,” had become “more and more the balance of power of the whole globe.” This was no metaphor. As Germany discovered in World War I, the U.S. could determine the outcome of any major regional conflict by bringing its vast wealth, population and productive capacity to bear on one side or the other. Although the Germans correctly calculated their military and economic superiority over their neighbors, the additional millions of fresh American troops and billions of American dollars’ worth of supplies quickly made their situation untenable. As one top German general put it, “We cannot fight the whole world.”

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In World War II, Germany and Japan may have correctly judged their chances of success against their regional opponents. By early 1942, well over half the planet’s productive capacity was under the control of the Axis powers—Germany, Japan and Italy. Yet even then the entry of the U.S. into the war marked the beginning of the end for all three powers and their regimes. As an exasperated Hitler observed, the Americans and British together had “the world at their disposal.” In addition to America’s size, wealth and productive capacity, it enjoyed something close to invulnerability from foreign invasion. Hitler once remarked that Germany had as much a chance of conquering America as America had of conquering the moon, and he admitted soon after the U.S. entered the war that he had no idea how to defeat it.

Victims of aggression, especially those with liberal regimes, came to expect sympathy and eventual support from America.

The problem was not just America’s power and relative invulnerability. Prior to the emergence of the U.S., regional hegemons could generally count on their weaker neighbors to accommodate their rising power. But the arrival of the U.S. as a power with global influence at the start of the 20th century changed the equation. Would-be victims of aggression, especially those with liberal regimes, came to expect sympathy and eventual support from liberal America. As Winston Churchill put it after Dunkirk, the British would fight on until “in God’s own time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

The expectation of eventual American support proved a critical factor in Europe before and during World War II. As Hitler remarked ruefully to his generals in January 1941, hope for America’s help “keeps Britain going.” In 1934, Tokyo blocked any further Western assistance to the Chinese, correctly believing that it discouraged the Chinese from accepting Japanese rule. Let Asia be for the Asians, was the Japanese slogan, which in practice meant letting Japan manage relations with its neighbors without American interference. Hitler, too, promised to leave “America for the Americans” if the U.S. would just leave “Europe for the Europeans,” which was to say, for Germany.

The critical role the U.S. played in the decision-making of others was best demonstrated over the course of the 1920s and ‘30s. For the first decade and a half after the end of World War I, as the U.S. stepped away from direct involvement in Europe, the European powers did indeed try to settle their own problems in the only way left to them—by accommodating the rising power and growing ambitions of Germany. America’s policy of deliberate disinterest—codified in the neutrality laws of the mid- and late-1930s—played a critical part in convincing Britain’s Neville Chamberlain to pursue appeasement. The agreement at Munich to give parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany was the result of a domino effect that began with the U.S.: The Czechs, though prepared to fight the Germans, could not do so without the support of Britain and France, but the British and French would not offer their support if they could not count on the U.S. to back them up.

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German leader Adolf Hitler (right) and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (left) shake hands at the Munich Conference, September 1938.

PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Appeasement ended after 1938 not just because Hitler reneged and took the rest of Czechoslovakia but because it became clear to everyone that the Americans, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were finally changing their minds about the importance of Europe. Even this flicker of hope was enough to make them resist. Hitler blamed the U.S. both for Poland’s rejection of his territorial demands in 1939 and for Britain and France’s decision to declare war after he invaded Poland that year.

In both world wars, the aggressors believed that the U.S. would not try to stop them.

America’s unpredictability itself posed a problem for would-be aggressors, for in each crisis the aspiring hegemonic powers badly misjudged both American capabilities and, perhaps more importantly, American intentions. In both world wars, the aggressors believed that the U.S. would not try to stop them and that, even if it did try, it lacked the wherewithal to make a difference in time.

Such miscalculations were understandable. The American military in both 1917 and after 1939 was not remotely prepared for industrial warfare on a global scale. In 1917 the Americans could not deploy more than 25,000 troops abroad for any length of time and lacked a navy capable of operating with effect in both the Pacific and the Atlantic theaters at the same time. In 1939 the Luftwaffe had 8,000 new aircraft; the U.S. Army Air Force had 1,700 mostly outdated planes. The German army had 2,000 new tanks; the U.S. had 325, many of World War I vintage. Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese Navy had more and better warships than anything the Americans could put in Pacific waters, especially once the war in the Atlantic heated up.

Nor did the U.S. in 1939 possess the industrial plant required to boost weapons production quickly. Arms manufacturers, hounded by congressional investigations and starved of government contracts, had shut down production lines. Any significant buildup would require retooling factories and a transformation of the national economy that would take at least two years.

B-24 bombers come off the production line at Ford’s Willow Run plant in Michigan, March 1943.

PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

It was not just that the Americans were physically unprepared for war. They also insisted they would not, in fact, go to war. The neutrality legislation that barred the U.S. from even embargoing an aggressor persisted well into 1939. As late as 1941, Roosevelt was still promising not to send American soldiers overseas. It was clear to foreign observers like the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels that, while Roosevelt might be prepared for war, the American public still wanted peace. “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?” Hitler remarked, while the great Japanese naval strategist, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, regarded the American people as “self-indulgent weaklings.”

Neither could imagine that the U.S. of 1939 would become the U.S. of 1942, producing weapons and materiel at a rate that defied all past experience. Between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1945, American shipyards produced 141 aircraft carriers, eight battleships, 807 cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, and 203 submarines. American auto manufacturers and other industries converted their assembly lines to produce 88,410 tanks and self-propelled guns, 257,000 artillery pieces, 2.4 million trucks, 2.6 million machine guns and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. The budding American aviation industry eventually produced 170 aircraft per day for a total of 324,750 over the course of the war.

And who could have anticipated the furious blood lust that seized Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor? Walter Lippmann once observed that Americans were “too pacifist in time of peace and too bellicose in time of war.” The racially charged hatred for the “Japs,” compounded by the “infamy” of the attack on Pearl Harbor, turned a generally pacifist America into a bloody-minded America. The would-be hegemons of Europe and Asia, looking at the U.S. in peacetime, could not imagine the powerful fury of which Americans were capable in wartime.

A U.S. Navy destroyer explodes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Chinese leaders today may be making the same error as past aspiring hegemons. And China, for all its growing might, starts from a less formidable position. At their peak in 1941, the Axis powers had a combined GDP larger than that of the U.S. and only a little smaller than the combined GDP of the U.S. and Britain. Today the U.S. and its allies and partners (which includes most of Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia and others) produce over 50% of the world’s wealth, while China and Russia together produce a little over 20%.

The Chinese military, though large and growing, also remains untested by battle. On paper Vladimir Putin’s military looked formidable—more formidable than China’s—yet its performance has not matched its reputation. Despite billions of rubles spent on modernization, Russian technology still lags behind that of the U.S. and its allies. Nor have Russia’s nuclear weapons been of any real use in this conflict, except as a bluff. One of the great myths today is that nuclear weapons have changed all military calculations, but as the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated, conventional war involving nuclear powers is still very possible.

China has begun its drive for regional hegemony from a much weaker starting point than past would-be hegemons.

China has also begun its drive for regional hegemony from a much weaker starting point than past would-be hegemons. By the time the U.S. began to rouse itself to deal with the German challenge in World War I or with the aggressions of Germany and Japan in World War II, those great powers had already acquired both military and economic hegemony in their respective regions. Even the Soviet Union started the Cold War with hegemony over half of Europe, though in the end it could not preserve it.

China, on the other hand, does not even control all the territory in the region it regards as its own: notably, Taiwan and some islands in the East and South China Seas. It is surrounded by powerful neighbors—an India that is about to surpass China in population; a Japan that has the third largest economy in the world and could become a powerful nuclear state overnight if it chose; a South Korea that wields substantial economic and military power; and, of course, Australia. All of these countries are fearful of China’s rising power and are either allied to the U.S. or look to it to help defend themselves.

An artificial island built by China in the South China Sea, October 2022.

PHOTO: EZRA ACAYAN/GETTY IMAGES

Mr. Putin, facing similar obstacles in Europe, has discovered the resilience of the American-led system and his neighbors’ willingness to resist superior Russian power when protected by it. Would the people of Ukraine, for all their courage and heroism, still be fighting Russia today without the support of the U.S. and its allies? Or would they have had to accept their fate as the neighbor of a powerful, aspiring hegemon, as the Czechs did in 1938? Who knows how well the Czechs might have fared against an untested German military had they been given the minimal support they needed? And who knows what might have become of Hitler if he, like Mr. Putin, had failed to achieve a rapid success?

Beijing faces a parallel problem in Taiwan. For most of the past three decades governments in Beijing have hoped that the people of Taiwan would gradually yield and agree to unification with the mainland. Instead, the Taiwanese have been able to defy Chinese pressure because of the support and commitments they receive from the U.S. The Chinese are bitter about this. They believe that the “One China” policy, dating from the Nixon administration, was supposed to reduce American support for Taiwan to the point where the Taiwanese would feel they had to accept Beijing’s offer of union. Things have not turned out that way. Nazi Germany defeated France, the strongest land power in Europe at the time; China has not been able to compel a small, isolated island less than one-fiftieth its size to knuckle under.

That the Germans and Japanese achieved more, and by force, does not mean they were more inherently aggressive than the Chinese might be, or than Mr. Putin has proven himself to be. They found themselves in a temporarily permissive environment when the U.S. turned inward after World War I. China’s environment has not been as accommodating because of the strength of the American-led liberal world.

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Even if the Chinese did succeed in forcing Taiwan to “reunite,” either by military assault or naval blockade, would China then be in a position to exercise hegemony across East Asia? Or might that be the beginning of the end for this Chinese regime? The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent destruction of American forces in the Philippines and the western Pacific were astonishing victories over the U.S., but they were also the beginning of the end for Imperial Japan. Beijing may well be able to take Taiwan, and the U.S., typically slow to prepare and respond, may not be able to prevent it. But what then?

Perhaps Mr. Xi believes that the U.S., Japan and the other powers in the region will simply adjust to the new reality. Many Americans may now think the same. There would certainly be voices in the U.S. calling for restraint. But while an attack on Taiwan would not have the same effect on Americans as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. is already very anxious about the threat of China, even when an attack on Taiwan is only prospective. It would be foolish for the Chinese to assume that such an attack would not prompt the American public to support a far more aggressive approach.

Whether the ensuing conflict is hot or cold, China would have to expect to face the full weight of the American-led liberal world order. Japan, which has already modified its pacifist constitution to allow greater military cooperation with the U.S., would likely militarize further and might even start producing nuclear weapons. India would become more concerned about China, as would all of China’s neighbors other than Russia. Even Europe is likely to view a Chinese act of aggression as yet another threat to the democratic order they are defending in Ukraine. And all will look to the U.S.

Xi may believe American power has declined dramatically, but as Putin has discovered, the contrary is true.

Mr. Xi may believe American power has declined dramatically, but as Mr. Putin has discovered, the contrary is true. The ability of the American-led order to defend itself is far greater than it was in the first half of the 20th century. In 1917 and 1939, the U.S. had no overseas allies; today it has more than 50 allies and strategic partners across the globe. Prior to 1945, the U.S. had no significant overseas military presence outside the Western Hemisphere; now it has the world’s only true blue-water navy and military bases throughout the world. In the 1930s the American peacetime military was incapable of taking on other great powers; now it has a large, highly equipped and battle-tested force superior to all other militaries. And it exercises, with its rich allies, a remarkable degree of control over the global economy, with sanctions and other financial weapons that did not exist until the last three decades—as Mr. Putin has also discovered.

Is the U.S. still able to outproduce an adversary as it did in the two world wars and during the Cold War with the Soviet Union? We don’t know what a more fully mobilized 21st-century America would look like, but there is reason to think it would be formidable. This year the U.S. will spend less than 4% of its GDP on defense. That is a peacetime military budget and a comparatively low one. In Dwight Eisenhower’s last budget in 1960, the U.S. spent 9% of GDP on defense; in the Reagan years it spent just under 7%. If the U.S. spent 7% of GDP on the military today, it would amount to annual defense spending of almost $1.6 trillion, compared with the slightly over $800 billion it currently spends.

The U.S. could return to spending 7% of GDP on defense, a level not seen since the Reagan years.

PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

As for the technological competition, the Chinese have certainly kept up with and perhaps even rivaled the U.S. in some areas of weapons development. But would a U.S. fully geared for confrontation and possible war not be able to match China? Today, the technological superiority of American weaponry on the battlefield is evident in Ukraine. It’s possible that the Chinese could surpass the U.S. in innovation and development in an all-out, head-to-head competition, but it seems unlikely.

Are Americans as a people up to a major confrontation with another great power, whether in immediate conflict or a protracted Cold War-like struggle? It would be dangerous for a potential adversary to assume they are not. Whatever condition the American political system may be in, it is not appreciably worse than it was during the 1930s. That, too, was a deeply polarized America, including on the question of whether to intervene in the world’s conflicts. But once the U.S. found itself at war, dissent all but disappeared. If ever there could be a cure for American political polarization, a conflict with China would be it.

Can it possibly be worth it for Xi Jinping to bring on such a confrontation? Consider Mr. Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine. Even if Russia were to prevail—which looks increasingly unlikely—Ukraine’s neighbors would arm themselves to the teeth, the U.S. would increase its forward presence, and a new iron curtain would fall along the western borders of Ukraine. Mr. Putin’s overall objective of regaining Russian hegemony in eastern and central Europe would still be far off and likely unreachable. The U.S.-led liberal world order would still be intact and capable of blocking further Russian advances. Mr. Putin has made a very expensive investment for what in the best of circumstances must be a relatively small payout.

A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would pose the same problems. Beijing might achieve a significant strategic victory, but it would come at the price of alarming the whole world, pushing American allies into a closer embrace with Washington and frightening the American public into an all-out effort to contain and weaken China.

A man in Taipei, Taiwan, holds a sign in support of democratic protesters in Hong Kong, 2019.

PHOTO: ALBERTO BUZZOLA/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES

China’s fundamental problem, after all, is not Taiwan’s continuing de facto independence. It is the unfavorable configuration of power in the world, of which Taiwan’s defiance is only a symptom. The Chinese will likely always chafe at the liberal global hegemony that American power sustains. They will be uncomfortable relying for the security of their shipping on the goodwill of the U.S. Navy. They will be unhappy having their historic ambitions frustrated. China is the latest “have not” great power. Like Germany and Japan in the years leading up to World War II, it wants vast wealth and power, a large sphere of influence, control of the seas and a seat at the head table setting the rules of international affairs.

But what Xi Jinping’s China wants and what it can have are two different things. China is succumbing to a common malady of rising powers—an inability to be satisfied with “good enough.” The unification of Germany in 1871 was analogous to China’s recovery and success during the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. The German-speaking population spread across central Europe had been weak and divided among its many small states and principalities. For Otto von Bismarck and his generation, unification was an immense, historic achievement. The Germany they created was big, rich and relatively secure—more so than at any time in the history of the German-speaking people.

Under Bismarck, Germany was a satisfied power, likely to become the hegemon of Europe simply by being the continent’s biggest economy and most populous nation. Indeed, he feared that any further German expansion or signs of ambition would lead the other European powers to gang up against it. His strategy was to balance Germany’s competitors against one another, and he was content to let Britain rule the seas and to preserve a rough balance of power in Europe with Russia and France.

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The next generation of German leaders had greater ambitions, however, commensurate with their greater power. And they feared that they would be prevented from their fair share of global influence by Britain, France and Russia. Fear of being contained and denied drove Germany to precisely the end it most feared. As the historian Michael Geyer describes it, “a catastrophic nationalism” led Germans into a “real-life disaster in order to avoid mythical catastrophe.”

Japan pursued much the same tragic course. The Japanese had accomplished amazing feats by the end of the 19th century. From a position of near complete isolation, Japan emerged after the Meiji revolution in the late 19th century as the strongest power in East Asia, defeating China in 1895 and Russia a decade later. The old oligarchs of the day warned that it would be dangerous to seek more. As the respected Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi put it in the late 1880s, “The high tree encounters strong wind.”

But younger generations of Japanese leaders were not satisfied. The Japan that emerged from World War I was stronger than ever but uncomfortably dependent on the two Anglo-Saxon powers. Many Japanese believed that their country could not keep up in the competition, win the respect it deserved and acquire the land it needed to expand unless it became an empire. Japan’s ambitions were not unreasonable for a rising power; it just turned out that those ambitions could not be accomplished without conflict with the U.S.

Modern Chinese thinking is not so different. China’s leadership sees further growth, power and expansion as necessary to its survival. They believe that the U.S. and other powers seeking to constrain China are bent on its destruction—or, more specifically, on the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party. The goal of the U.S. and its allies, Mr. Xi told a party conference early in his tenure, is “to vie with us for the battlefields of people’s hearts and for the masses, and in the end to overthrow the leadership of the CCP and China’s socialist system.”

Ideology is now also a major obstacle to China’s further “unification.” China’s crackdown on democratic institutions and forces in Hong Kong has greatly increased Taiwan’s hostility to the idea of One China, just as U.S. support encourages the Taiwanese to resist Beijing’s pressures. The two together are a disaster for Chinese ambitions.

Can Xi Jinping reconcile himself to these limits, to a world that will continue to be defined by the liberal hegemony of the U.S.?

A 1940s photo of Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during most of World War II.

PHOTO: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The Japanese faced just this dilemma in 1941. By that point, leading Japanese military officials believed ultimate victory against the U.S. was unlikely. Yet the option of backing down and accepting “Little Japan” was too humiliating. It meant giving up the dream of a new Japanese-led Asian order. For Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, as for other Japanese leaders in 1940 and 1941, war was more honorable than accepting an American-imposed peace, even a losing war.

As Tojo put it, “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes and”—in the Japanese expression for taking the plunge—“jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu [temple].” Xi Jinping, too, may decide to take the leap. If so, he is likely to join Vladimir Putin, the Soviets, and the Axis leaders of World War II in bringing a tragedy upon his people and the world.

Mr. Kagan is the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. His new book, published last month by Knopf, is “The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941.”

Appeared in the February 4, 2023, print edition as 'Challenging the U.S. Is a Historic Mistake When America Rose To Defend Democracy'.

22. Tanks and what they mean for the Ukraine War's endgame | John A. Nagl

Tanks and what they mean for the Ukraine War's endgame | John A. Nagl - Pennsylvania Capital-Star

penncapital-star.com · by Capital-Star Guest Contributor · February 3, 2023

The impact of the Abrams and Leopard tanks from the U.S. and Germany should hasten the end of the fighting, at least in the east

February 3, 2023 6:30 am

KYIV, UKRAINE – JANUARY 22: Civilian participants in a Kyiv Territorial Defence unit train on a Saturday in a forest on January 22, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Across Ukraine thousands of civilians are participating in such groups to receive basic combat training and in time of war would be under direct command of the Ukrainian military. While Ukrainian officials have acknowledged the country has little chance to fend off a full Russian invasion, Russian occupation troops would likely face a deep-rooted, decentralised and prolonged insurgency. Russia has amassed tens of thousands of troops on its border to Ukraine. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

By John A. Nagl

The news that the United States and Germany are providing tanks to the brave defenders of Ukraine is a significant development in that now almost yearlong war.

A friend who knows that I spend more time than I should thinking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine asked about the impact of the delivery of tanks on the likely course of the war. While predictions are difficult, especially about the future, as a longtime driver of tanks and student of war, I offered some predictions.

The first is that tanks are offensive weapons that provide Ukraine with the ability to retake territory in the east of the country that has been captured, not just in the past year, but since the war began in 2014. Tanks offer a combination of mobile protected firepower that no other combat system can match.

They are most effective as part of a combined arms team with mechanized infantry to clear danger areas and when supported by artillery to suppress enemy fighters.

Without tanks, the Ukrainian military has been very effective in a largely defensive role with anti-tank missiles to defeat Russian armor, but tanks will allow them to break through defensive enemy lines and rapidly exploit any gains; think about the German advance through the Ardennes, forming a “bulge” in American lines that Patton’s Third Army struggled to seal. This time, it will be the Russians who face a break though that may well end by restoring Ukraine’s prewar border with Russia in the east.

American hesitation to provide Ukraine with M1 Abrams tanks, named after the tank battalion commander who led Patton’s Third Army in the Battle of the Bulge, involved both depleted uranium armor in our old M1’s and the thirsty turbine engines that propel them; German Leopards are propelled by more economical and easier to maintain diesel engines and have no depleted uranium to complicate things.

The Russia-Ukraine War ends when Russia quits | Opinion

There are also plenty of them available across Europe with which to equip the Ukrainian army. Their employment will have a significant impact on the war.

In fact, the impact of the Abrams and Leopards should hasten the end of the fighting, at least in the east. The real challenge will come when the eastern border between Russia and Ukraine has been restored. Ukrainian attention will turn to the south, to the Crimean peninsula, rightfully theirs but of immense and intense interest to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Much as he will hate giving up the Donbas region of Ukraine, it is unlikely that Putin will actually use nuclear weapons to prevent its recapture.

Crimea is another issue entirely. Putin personally opened the multi-billion dollar Kerch Strait Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea and views it as one of his greatest accomplishments.

With counter-offensive, a change of momentum in Ukraine | Opinion

While Putin has threatened to use weapons of mass destruction many times in the face of reversals of fortune during the course of the war, only to back off in the face of Western promises of significant reprisals, Crimea could truly be a bridge too far. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that Putin would use a nuclear weapon against Kiev in response to a significant Ukrainian attack on Crimea that was likely to succeed.

The destruction of Kiev and the loss of the Ukrainian government would be a heavy blow indeed. While Western reaction would be severe—likely the sinking of the Russian Black Sea Fleet by American airpower after a severe warning to Russia not to engage the American planes delivering the missiles, even if Russia had the ability to do so—that would not bring back Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or the extraordinary leadership he has provided to the Ukrainian cause. It is impossible to predict the second and third order effects of only the second time a country has used nuclear weapons in war, but they are unlikely to be good for anybody.

And so, even as the arrival of tanks in Ukraine promises the prospect of regaining territory in the east of the country and restoring the prewar border there, caution is in order regarding Crimea. Regaining that territory may have to wait until Putin is no longer leading Russia, an eventuality that may be hastened by the increasing effectiveness of Western sanctions. His departure will mark both the end of the war and the best chance for Ukraine to regain possession of the Crimean Peninsula.

John A. Nagl is a retired Army officer who now teaches at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. This article is his opinion and does not reflect the views of the Army War College, the United States Army, or the Department of Defense. His work appears frequently on the Capital-Star’s Commentary Page.

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penncapital-star.com · by Capital-Star Guest Contributor · February 3, 2023

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com