Quotes of the Day:

“Through research, we benefit from the insights of those within and beyond our special operations community. Research enables us to better understand the issues facing our world and explore what changes must be made across domains and capabilities to adapt for the future.” 

- CSM Shane Shorter and General Bryan Fenton, USSOCOM, Special Operations Research Topics 2024 (Download HERE)

"Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less."

 – C.S.Lewis

“The good man does not grieve that other people do not recognize his merits. His only anxiety is lest he should fail to recognize theirs.” 

– Confucius

1. At least 6 Kurdish fighters are killed in a drone attack on a Syrian base housing US troops

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 4, 2024

3. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 4, 2024

4. Special Operations News - February 5, 2024 | SOF News

5. The 5 best books about Special Forces — according to Green Berets

6. Iran issues warning to US over suspected spy ships in the Mideast

7. Army Still Weighing Combat Awards for Soldiers Hit by Deadly Drone Attack at Jordan Base

8. US intends further strikes against Iran-backed groups, White House says

9. Red Sea attacks (Graphics)

10. The Shadowy Backroom Dealer Steering Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’

11. Opinion | Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the ‘day after’ may doom Israel’s war effort

12. Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon?

13. "You Americans, You're Fascinated By Power"

14. China’s PLA plots robot drones, 'Jame Bonds' for covert military operations

15. Quantum Talent: An American Civil-Military Fusion

16. Russia’s Adaptation Advantage

17. The Counterinsurgency Trap in Gaza

18. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February

19. Israel’s Untold Gaza Progress

20.The invasion of Ukraine created a rare opportunity for the CIA to recruit Russian spies

21. SOCOM is after new tech to help special operations forces spot, track, and take out urban threats without being seen

22. Engaging at Home: Foreign Policy for the American PeopleEngaging at Home: Foreign Policy for the American People

23. Claims that Jan. 6 rioters are 'political prisoners' endure. Judges want to set the record straight

24. A New Strategy Can Save Ukraine

1. At least 6 Kurdish fighters are killed in a drone attack on a Syrian base housing US troops

At least 6 Kurdish fighters are killed in a drone attack on a Syrian base housing US troops

AP · February 5, 2024

BEIRUT (AP) — A drone attack on a base housing U.S. troops in eastern Syria killed six allied Kurdish fighters late Sunday, in the first significant attack in Syria or Iraq since the U.S. launched retaliatory strikes over the weekend against Iran-backed militias that have been targeting its forces in the region.

The U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Monday the attack hit a training ground at al-Omar base in Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour, where the forces’ commando units are trained. No casualties were reported among U.S. troops.

An umbrella group of Iran-backed Iraqi militias, dubbed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, released a video claiming responsibility for the attack and showing them launching a drone from an unspecified location.

In late January, a drone attack by the same group killed three U.S. troops and wounded dozens more at a desert base in Jordan. The U.S. military launched dozens of retaliatory strikes targeting Iran-backed militant groups in western Iraq and eastern Syria and also struck the Houthis in Yemen.

The SDF initially accused “Syrian regime-backed mercenaries” of carrying out Sunday’s attack but in a second statement blamed “Iran-backed militias” after investigating the attack.

The umbrella group has launched dozens of drone attacks on U.S. military bases and troops in Iraq and Syria, and has called for the withdrawal of American soldiers from both countries.

The attack comes as tensions flare across the Middle East amid the Israel-Hamas war, which was sparked by Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Meanwhile, Britain-based opposition war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least seven SDF fighters were killed in the attack on Sunday and at least 18 others wounded, some in critical condition.

The attack late Sunday came two days after the U.S. military carried out strikes against militant targets linked to Iran in Syria and Iraq.

The SDF said it has the right to respond to the attack.

The U.S. military said it struck four anti-ship missiles on Sunday that were prepared to be fired at vessels in the Red Sea from Houthi rebel-controlled areas in Yemen.

In a statement early Monday, the U.S. Central Command said the strikes were in self-defense and came after forces determined the missiles “presented an imminent threat to U.S. Navy ships and merchant vessels in the region.”

Sunday’s strikes came a day after the U.S. and Britain launched a second wave of strikes against the Houthis, meant to degrade the Iranian-backed group’ capabilities to attack vessels in the Red Sea. The U.S. and Britain said they hit 36 Houthi targets.

___

Associated Press reporter Samy Magdy contributed to this report from Cairo.

AP · February 5, 2024

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 4, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-4-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russia's reported reserve concentrations throughout Ukraine largely align with Russia’s assessed priorities along the front, although they are not necessarily indicative of future Russian operations.
• The Russian defense industrial base (DIB) is unlikely able to fully support Russia’s reserve manpower despite Russia’s ability to sustain its current tempo of operations and ongoing efforts to expand the Russian DIB.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the frontline near Robotyne, Zaporizhia Oblast and the Ukrainian Eastern Air Command in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on February 4.
• Russian milbloggers continued to criticize Russian authorities’ failure to properly equip Russian forces with drones and electronic warfare (EW) systems in response to a recent unsuccessful Russian mechanized assault near Novomykhailivka, Donetsk Oblast.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to face the authoritarian’s dilemma, whereby his authoritarian regime is itself systematically preventing him from receiving accurate information about military-political realities in Russia.
• Russian forces made confirmed advances near Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Marinka amid continued positional engagements along the entire frontline.
• Kremlin newswire TASS reported on February 4 that Vladimir Oblast will be a patron of the new Knyaz Pozharsky Borei-A class nuclear submarine.
• Ukrainian officials continue international efforts aimed at returning Ukrainian citizens whom Russian authorities illegally deported to Russia.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 4, 2024

Feb 4, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 4, 2024

Christina Harward, Nicole Wolkov, Angelica Evans, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Fredrick W. Kagan

February 4, 2024, 6:45pm ET

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

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:30pm ET on February 4. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the February 5 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russia's reported reserve concentrations throughout Ukraine largely align with Russia’s assessed priorities along the front, although they are not necessarily indicative of future Russian operations. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that Russian forces currently have 17 regiments, 16 battalions, and two regiment-battalion level tactical detachments in reserve.[1] Mashovets stated that there are about 60,000-62,000 total Russian personnel in reserve units, but Russian forces have only equipped about 20,000 tactical and operational-tactical level reserve personnel with weapons and equipment. Mashovets stated that Russia’s reserves are concentrated in the greatest numbers in the operational zone of the Southern Grouping of Forces, followed by the Western Grouping of Forces, Dnepr Grouping of Forces, the Zaporizhia Grouping of Forces, the Eastern Grouping of Forces, and the Central Grouping of Forces. The Southern Grouping of Forces is responsible for the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions, and Mashovets noted that the reserve concentration in this area aligns with the areas where Russian forces are concentrating their offensive efforts. Mashovets observed that it is not surprising that the Dnepr Grouping of Forces — which operates in occupied Kherson Oblast — has the third highest number of reserves given that Russian forces may be concerned over a Ukrainian threat in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast. Ukrainian officials have recently indicated that Russian forces have more than 70,000 personnel on the east bank of the Dnipro River in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts, but that many are concentrated deeper in the rear.[2] The Dnipro Grouping of Forces’ reserves would likely be able to easily move to the Zaporizhia direction if circumstances so required. Mashovets assessed that the Central Grouping of Forces, which is responsible for the Lyman direction, has the lowest concentration of reserves due to its smaller operational zone that requires fewer troops.[3] ISW additionally assesses that the Central Grouping of Forces has a lower concentration of reserves because Russian operations in the Lyman direction are likely meant to support the Western Grouping of Forces’ operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove line, as ISW will soon outline in an upcoming operational analysis of the Russian offensive on the Kharkiv-Luhansk axis. Russian forces will be able to move their reserve concentrations freely between different sectors of the front as long as Russia holds the strategic initiative across the theater. ISW continues to assess that an active Ukrainian defense throughout the theater in 2024 would cede the strategic initiative to Russia allowing Moscow to determine where, when, and at what scale fighting occurs in Ukraine and to allocate Russian resources appropriately while forcing Ukraine to respond.[4] Ukraine would be able to deny Russia this ability, however, if Ukraine were able to contest the initiative.

The Russian defense industrial base (DIB) is unlikely able to fully support Russia’s reserve manpower despite Russia’s ability to sustain its current tempo of operations and ongoing efforts to expand the Russian DIB. Mashovets stated that the operational and strategic reserves are generally not combat-ready, yet the Russian command tends to view its reserve component as a “bottomless barrel.”[5] Mashovets stated that the Russian DIB is able to produce about 250-300 “new and thoroughly modernized” tanks per year. Mashovets stated that Russian forces can also overhaul about 250-300 tanks that have been in long-term storage or sustained battlefield damage per year. Mashovets stated that the situation is similar for armored combat vehicles, suggesting that the Russian DIB can more or less cover Russian forces’ annual vehicle losses. Mashovets stated that the Russian DIB, however, cannot produce enough materiel to equip large Russian reserves should the need suddenly arise. The Latvian Defense Ministry’s State Secretary Janis Garisons stated on December 13 that Russia can “produce and repair” about 100-150 tanks per month.[6] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev claimed in March 2023 that Russia’s DIB could produce 1,500 main battle tanks in 2023, which suggests an average production of 125 tanks per month.[7] Even with these higher estimates the Russian DIB remains unlikely able to support a larger mobilization of manpower and would likely need to expand dramatically to support larger offensive operations that would require the use of more manpower reserves. ISW continues to assess that Russia would have the opportunity to expand its DIB and amass resources if it maintains the theater-wide initiative throughout 2024 although not likely to an extent sufficient to supply great masses of mobilized reservists or conscripts this year.[8]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the frontline near Robotyne, Zaporizhia Oblast and the Ukrainian Eastern Air Command in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on February 4. Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces Commander Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi and Ukrainian Commander of the Zaporizhia Group of Forces Brigadier General Volodymyr Horbatyuk reported to Zelensky about Ukrainian defensive operations in the Avdiivka direction, the situation near Robotyne and other areas of the front, and the arrangement of Ukrainian defensive lines.[9] Zelensky also visited the Ukrainian Eastern Air Command and discussed measures to strengthen mobile fire groups and electronic warfare (EW) systems to repel Russian drone strikes, the use of Western and hybrid (Western-Ukrainian) air defense systems, and prospects for strengthening the capabilities of Ukrainian Eastern air defense groups.[10]

Russian milbloggers continued to criticize Russian authorities’ failure to properly equip Russian forces with drones and electronic warfare (EW) systems in response to a recent unsuccessful Russian mechanized assault near Novomykhailivka, Donetsk Oblast. Russian milbloggers claimed on February 4 that Russian drone production is poorly managed, limiting Russia’s ability to innovate.[11] One milblogger claimed that poor management leads to unjustified Russian losses and will be the “scourge” of Russia’s victory against Ukraine.[12] Moscow Duma Deputy Andrei Medvedev previously criticized Russia’s mass production of drones as leading to the production of a large number of drones that lack the technological adaptations necessary to compete with Ukrainian drones on the battlefield.[13] Another Russian milblogger responded to the January 30 footage of Ukrainian drones striking advancing Russian armored vehicles and tanks near Novomykhailivka by claiming that it was “negligent” for Russian commanders to allow Russian armored vehicles to go into battle without proper EW equipment.[14] The milblogger claimed that Russian forces should “abandon” the idea of deep mechanized breakthroughs until Russian forces are adequately equipped with EW systems and should conduct small infantry-led assaults with drone support in the meantime.[15] Russian milbloggers have recently fixated on this event as indicative of the Russian military’s struggle to innovate and break out of the current positional warfare in Ukraine.[16]

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to face the authoritarian’s dilemma, whereby his authoritarian regime is itself systematically preventing him from receiving accurate information about military-political realities in Russia. A prominent Russian milblogger — who previously appeared on state media outlets and was temporarily detained in March 2022 — published a rant accusing the Russian bureaucracy and the Ministry of Defense (MoD) of deliberately withholding information from Putin, likely in response to recent Russian propagandists’ efforts to conceal Russian military failures near Novomykhailivka.[17] The milblogger claimed that Russia has a culture in which local authorities closely work with regional media outlets to censor and conceal from the Kremlin any negative reports. The milblogger argued that Putin created a consultative civil society institution called the Russian Civic Chamber in 2004 whose members would monitor local governments' activities in order to provide negative, but accurate, information “to the top,” but the chamber failed to do so because the chamber’s representatives decided to remain silent — just like the officials that they were elected to monitor. The milblogger observed that Putin then created the All-Russian People’s Front in 2011 to target the same problem and that the initiative was successful until representatives began to follow in the Russian Civic Chamber’s footsteps. The milblogger argued that the Russian MoD engages in similar, secretive efforts to those of regional officials to conceal its failures from Putin and resents voices that undermine these efforts. The milblogger stated that the Russian MoD made it nearly impossible for milbloggers and government officials to visit frontlines and claimed that there are rumors that the Russian military command deploys generals to Syria if they start to have frequent communication with Putin. The milblogger argued that the Kremlin can only see honest discussions about Russia’s battlefield realities from the milblogger and volunteer accounts outlined in its media monitoring reports and noted that the lack of transparency is a systematic problem among Russian government structures. The milblogger later forecasted that bureaucrats will attempt to block Telegram and arrest milbloggers following the Russian presidential election in March 2024 in response to another milblogger’s observation that Russian Telegram channels remain the only source of constructive opposition in Russia.[18]

Putin’s recent efforts to address milbloggers’ concerns over Russian drone shortages and failures to repel Ukrainian forces from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast indicate that he continues to see value in having milbloggers serve as a constructive opposition that checks Russian government and military officials.[19] Putin’s past creations of the All-Russian People’s Front and the Russian Civic Chamber, and his relatively lenient treatment of milbloggers throughout the full-scale invasion, indicate that he is unlikely to decisively censor the milblogger and volunteer communities because he likely values the ability to check on his government. Putin is unlikely to pursue a mass censorship campaign against milbloggers on his own unless select factions within the Kremlin successfully convince him that milbloggers pose an immediate threat to his regime’s stability. Kremlin officials appear to have been successful in convincing Putin to eliminate and neutralize some milbloggers and information space actors such as former Russian officer Igor Girkin and media networks affiliated with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin. Kremlin officials, however, have likely been unsuccessful in turning Putin against a vast community of milbloggers that criticizes the bureaucracy while avidly supporting Putin and his war effort in Ukraine.

Key Takeaways:

• Russia's reported reserve concentrations throughout Ukraine largely align with Russia’s assessed priorities along the front, although they are not necessarily indicative of future Russian operations.
• The Russian defense industrial base (DIB) is unlikely able to fully support Russia’s reserve manpower despite Russia’s ability to sustain its current tempo of operations and ongoing efforts to expand the Russian DIB.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the frontline near Robotyne, Zaporizhia Oblast and the Ukrainian Eastern Air Command in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on February 4.
• Russian milbloggers continued to criticize Russian authorities’ failure to properly equip Russian forces with drones and electronic warfare (EW) systems in response to a recent unsuccessful Russian mechanized assault near Novomykhailivka, Donetsk Oblast.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to face the authoritarian’s dilemma, whereby his authoritarian regime is itself systematically preventing him from receiving accurate information about military-political realities in Russia.
• Russian forces made confirmed advances near Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Marinka amid continued positional engagements along the entire frontline.
• Kremlin newswire TASS reported on February 4 that Vladimir Oblast will be a patron of the new Knyaz Pozharsky Borei-A class nuclear submarine.
• Ukrainian officials continue international efforts aimed at returning Ukrainian citizens whom Russian authorities illegally deported to Russia.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

A Russian sabotage and reconnaissance group reportedly unsuccessfully attempted to cross the international border in Sumy Oblast on February 3. Ukrainian Joint Forces Commander Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev reported on February 4 that Ukrainian forces engaged in a small arms and artillery engagement with a group of 10 Russian servicemen on the outskirts of the Hlukhivska hromada on the Ukrainian-Russian international border in Sumy Oblast and successfully pushed the group back into Russia.[20]

Positional engagements continued along the Kupyask-Kreminna line on February 4 and did not result in confirmed changes on the battlefield. Russian forces continued offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka and Ivanivka, and southeast of Kupyansk in and near Tabaivka.[21] Positional engagements also continued northwest of Kreminna near Makiivka; west of Kreminna near Terny, Torske, and Yampolivka; southwest of Kreminna near Dibrova; and south of Kreminna near the Serebryanske forest area and Bilohorivka.[22] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces made a “serious breakthrough toward a key [Ukrainian] logistics point” in the direction of Terny and seized unspecified heights around Krokhmalne (southeast of Kupyansk) over the past week and that control over Tabaivka remains contested.[23]

Spokesperson for the Ukrainian “Steel Border” border detachment Ivan Shevtsov observed that Russian forces have nearly doubled their artillery fire along the Kupyansk-Lyman line since late 2023 because weather conditions on the frontline allowed for the intensive use of artillery and drones.[24] Shevtsov added that Russian forces are unlikely to be experiencing ammunition shortages given the increase in shelling and are largely attacking in the Kupyansk direction with infantry. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Captain Ilya Yevlash, however, stated on February 2 that Russian forces have almost halved their daily rate of artillery fire in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions due to poor weather conditions and other unspecified issues.[25]

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

Russian forces recently marginally advanced southwest of Bakhmut amid continued positional engagements near Bakhmut on February 4. Geolocated footage published on February 3 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced north of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[26] Russian milbloggers claimed on February 4 that Russian forces advanced near Bohdanivka (northwest of Bakhmut) and captured unspecified positions north of Klishchiivka.[27] Positional engagements continued northeast of Bakhmut near Fedorivka, northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka, west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske, and southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Pivdenne.[28] The spokesperson for a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Bakhmut direction stated that Russian forces have advanced five to seven kilometers closer to Chasiv Yar over an unspecified time period and that Russian forces recently began conducting mechanized assaults in the area.[29] Elements of the Russian 98th Guards Airborne (VDV) Division and the Russian “Sever-V” Volunteer Brigade (Russian Volunteer Corps) are reportedly operating near Bakhmut.[30]

Russian forces recently advanced east of Avdiivka amid continued positional fighting in the area on February 4. Geolocated footage published on February 3 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced along the H-20 highway east of Avdiivka.[31] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced near the Avdiivka Coke Plant on Avdiivka’s northwestern outskirts.[32] The spokesperson for a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Avdiivka direction stated that Russian forces have not advanced near Stepove (northwest of Avdiivka) or the Avdiivka Coke Plant, however.[33] Positional engagements continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka and Stepove, near the Avdiivka Coke Plant on Avdiivka’s northwestern outskirts, near the “Tsarska Okhota” restaurant area on Avdiivka’s southeastern outskirts, west of Avdiivka near Tonenke and Sieverne, and southwest of Avdiivka near Opytne, Pervomaiske, and Nevelske.[34]

Russian forces recently marginally advanced northwest of Marinka amid continued positional engagements west and southwest of Donetsk City on February 4. Geolocated footage published on February 4 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced northwest of Marinka (just west of Donetsk City).[35] Positional engagements continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Novomykhailivka.[36] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces may be conducting a “tactical pause” southeast of Novomykhailivka.[37] Elements of the Russian 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps) are reportedly operating northwest of Marinka.[38]

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

Positional engagements continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on February 4, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional engagements continued southeast of Velyka Novosilka near Zolota Nyva and southwest of Velyka Novosilka near Pryyutne.[39] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced north of Pryyutne, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[40]

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast on February 4, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional engagements continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne).[41] Elements of the Russian 35th Combined Arms Army ([CAA], Eastern Military District [EMD]) are reportedly operating in the Zaporizhia direction, elements of the 7th Airborne (VDV) Division are reportedly operating near Verbove, and elements of the 71st Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th CAA, Southern Military District [SMD]) are reportedly operating near Robotyne.[42]

Positional engagements continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, including in Krynky, on February 4.[43] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces are conducting glide bomb strikes on Krynky.[44] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that elements of the Russian 337th VDV Regiment (104th VDV Division), elements of the 144th Motorized Rifle Brigade (40th Army Corps, 18th CAA, SMD), and elements of the 17th Tank Regiment (70th Motorized Rifle Division, 18th CAA, SMD) unsuccessfully attacked Ukrainian positions in Krynky in the past few days.[45] Mashovets stated that Russian forces simultaneously attacked Ukrainian positions, conducted artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions in west (right) bank Kherson Oblast, and conducted electronic and aerial reconnaissance, suggesting that Russian forces have improved their command and control (C2) and coordination between units in this area.

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

The Ukrainian General Staff clarified on February 4 that Ukrainian forces destroyed 10 Shahed-136/131 drones and a Kh-59 missile on February 3.[46] The Ukrainian Air Force reported as of 0300 local time on February 3 that it shot down nine Shahed drones and one Kh-59 missile, and the February 4 report suggests that Ukrainian forces shot down one more drone later in the day on February 3.[47] Ukrainian state electricity transmission operator Ukrenergo stated that Russia’s February 3 strikes against energy infrastructure in Kryvyi Rih in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast were one of the most massive strike series on the Ukrainian energy sector in 2024.[48] Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated during a visit to Ukrainian East Air Command in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast that Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is the main target of Russian drone and missile campaigns because of the oblast’s enterprises and economic potential.[49]

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

Kremlin newswire TASS reported on February 4 that Vladimir Oblast will become a patron of the new Knyaz Pozharskiy Borei-A class nuclear submarine.[50] Vladimir Oblast’s Ministry of Regional Security reported that it met with the Russian Northern Fleet’s leadership to establish its patronage of the Knyaz Pozharskiy and discuss deepening cooperation with the Northern Fleet.[51] Vladimir Oblast officials attended the ceremony of the Knyaz Pozharskiy leaving the boathouse in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk Oblast.[52] TASS reported on January 10 that the Russian military would receive the Knyaz Pozharskiy at an unspecified date in 2024.[53]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell stated on February 3 that the EU maintains strong support for Ukraine following the Gymnich meeting of EU foreign ministers and expressed hope that the EU will agree upon the Ukraine Assistance Fund within the framework of the European Peace Facility within the next several days.[54] Borrell also stated that the EU still needs to decide how to implement its military support bilaterally and through the European Peace Facility framework.[55] The Gymnich meeting also discussed Borrell’s proposal to create a 20-billion-euro (about $21.5 billion) aid fund for Ukraine for the next four years within the framework of the European Peace Facility, implying 5 billion (about $5.4 billion) annual aid allocations.[56]

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

Ukrainian officials continue international efforts aimed at returning Ukrainian citizens whom Russian authorities illegally deported to Russia. Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin, Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, and Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova participated in a meeting of the US Helsinki Commission on January 31 and discussed Russia’s forced deportation of Ukrainian children and illegal detention and torture of civilians.[57] Participants discussed the “Oleksandr’s Act,” which is proposed US legislation aimed at helping to introduce sanctions to counter Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children. The US Helsinki Commission stated that the Ukrainian government has documented about 20,000 cases of deported children and estimates that Russian authorities may have subjected up to 10,000 citizens to detention or forced labor.[58] The BBC’s Russian Service reported on January 8 that Russian authorities are illegally deporting Ukrainian civilians to Russia and holding them in penal colonies and pre-trial detention centers without charges, investigations, trials, access to lawyers, or designated release dates.[59]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

A Russian occupation official resumed a false Kremlin narrative on February 4 that Poland is preparing to seize western Ukraine after a potential Russian victory in Ukraine. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov told Russian state news agency Ria Novosti that Poland is preparing to lay claim to lands belonging to “Western Rus” in a “post-Ukrainian space,” citing Polish President Andrzej Duda’s recent statement about Crimea as evidence for his claim.[60] Duda stated on February 2 that he was not sure about Ukraine’s ability to liberate Crimea because of Russia’s “historic” control over the region, before reiterating his condemnation of Russian aggression against internationally recognized Ukrainian borders on February 3.[61] Rogov argued that Poland is trying to establish similar historic ties to western Ukraine to seize Ukrainian territories and compare it to Crimea’s “return” to Russia — a phrasing that Russian propagandists use to misrepresent Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Rogov similarly discussed the partition of Ukraine with Russian state-run Komsomolskaya Pravda radio.[62]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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.

3. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 4, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-february-4-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Negotiations: Unspecified officials familiar with the hostage negotiations told the Wall Street Journal that divisions between Hamas’ leadership in the Gaza Strip and its exiled political leadership are impeding negotiations.
• US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that approving a hostage release deal is “up to Hamas,” but that he is not able to give a precise timetable on a hostage release deal.[10] He added that a deal is not imminent.
• Hamas’ political leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, may calculate that a six-week pause would slow Israel’s momentum sufficiently enough to permanently end fighting and secure Hamas’ rule in the Gaza Strip. An interim pause leading to less intense Israeli ground operations or an end to Israeli operations would likely ensure Hamas’ survival as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip.
• Sinwar also likely seeks a pause in fighting to secure short-term military advantage. A six-week pause would enable Sinwar to reorganize his military forces, accelerate their infiltration into areas previously cleared by Israeli forces, and continue the reconstitution of Hamas’ military organization in the northern Gaza Strip free from Israeli interference.
• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian fighters continued their efforts aimed at disrupting Israeli operations in the northern Gaza Strip, primarily in the al Sinaa area of southwestern Gaza City, on February 4.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces have “intensified” fighting in al Amal area of western Khan Younis in recent days.
• Yemen: The United States and the United Kingdom conducted strikes targeting 36 Houthi military positions and assets in 13 locations across Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen on February 3.

IRAN UPDATE, FEBRUARY 4, 2024

Feb 4, 2024 - ISW Press

Iran Update, February 4, 2024

Brian Carter, Andie Parry, Annika Ganzeveld, and Alexandra Braverman

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

CTP-ISW will publish abbreviated updates on February 3 and 4, 2024. Detailed coverage will resume Monday, February 5, 2024.

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

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

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

Unspecified officials familiar with the hostage negotiations told the Wall Street Journal that divisions between Hamas’ leadership in the Gaza Strip and its exiled political leadership are impeding negotiations. The officials said that Hamas’ political leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, is prepared to accept a six-week pause in fighting and hostage exchange, but that Hamas’ exiled political leadership is calling for more concessions and a permanent ceasefire.[1] Egyptian officials added that Hamas’ political leadership is also demanding the release of 3,000 Palestinian prisoners—including some who took part in the October 7, 2023 attacks—in return for 36 Israeli civilian hostages.[2] Beirut-based senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said on February 3 that Hamas and its allies rejected the six-week pause in fighting in a “united decision.”[3] Hamdan added that Hamas and its allies are committed to a permanent ceasefire. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader demanded that any negotiations guarantee a “comprehensive ceasefire,” an Israeli withdrawal from and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, and a “clear political solution.”[4]

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that approving a hostage release deal is “up to Hamas,” but that he is not able to give a precise timetable on a hostage release deal.[5] He added that a deal is not imminent. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel will not release “thousands” of prisoners in a hostage deal and that a permanent ceasefire will not be part of any hostage release deal.[6]

Sinwar may calculate that a six-week pause would slow Israel’s momentum sufficiently enough to permanently end fighting and secure Hamas’ rule in the Gaza Strip. The Wall Street Journal reported on January 31 that US officials are seeking a six-week pause in fighting to “stall Israel’s military momentum and potentially set the stage for a more lasting truce.”[7] US and Arab officials “familiar with the negotiations” told the Wall Street Journal that Israel would find it “difficult to resume the war at its current intensity.”[8] An interim pause leading to less intense Israeli ground operations or an end to Israeli operations would likely ensure Hamas‘ survival as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip.

Sinwar also likely seeks a pause in fighting to secure short-term military advantage. A six-week pause would enable Sinwar to reorganize his military forces, accelerate their infiltration into areas previously cleared by Israeli forces, and continue the reconstitution of Hamas’ military organization in the northern Gaza Strip free from Israeli interference. An IDF military correspondent reported on February 4 that Hamas’ Gaza City Brigade commander is still alive and a “major factor in Hamas’ reconstitution efforts” in the northern Strip.[9] This commander, free from the threat of Israeli strikes during a pause, could accelerate these efforts.

Key Takeaways:

• Negotiations: Unspecified officials familiar with the hostage negotiations told the Wall Street Journal that divisions between Hamas’ leadership in the Gaza Strip and its exiled political leadership are impeding negotiations.
• US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that approving a hostage release deal is “up to Hamas,” but that he is not able to give a precise timetable on a hostage release deal.[10] He added that a deal is not imminent.
• Hamas’ political leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, may calculate that a six-week pause would slow Israel’s momentum sufficiently enough to permanently end fighting and secure Hamas’ rule in the Gaza Strip. An interim pause leading to less intense Israeli ground operations or an end to Israeli operations would likely ensure Hamas’ survival as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip.
• Sinwar also likely seeks a pause in fighting to secure short-term military advantage. A six-week pause would enable Sinwar to reorganize his military forces, accelerate their infiltration into areas previously cleared by Israeli forces, and continue the reconstitution of Hamas’ military organization in the northern Gaza Strip free from Israeli interference.
• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian fighters continued their efforts aimed at disrupting Israeli operations in the northern Gaza Strip, primarily in the al Sinaa area of southwestern Gaza City, on February 4.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces have “intensified” fighting in al Amal area of western Khan Younis in recent days.
• Yemen: The United States and the United Kingdom conducted strikes targeting 36 Houthi military positions and assets in 13 locations across Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen on February 3.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Palestinian fighters continued their efforts aimed at disrupting Israeli operations in the northern Gaza Strip, primarily in the al Sinaa area of southwestern Gaza City, on February 4.[11] CTP-ISW assessed on February 3 that Palestinian fighters infiltrated southwestern Gaza City.[12] Hamas and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist militia aligned with Hamas in the current war, claimed four separate attacks targeting Israeli forces in al Sinaa on February 4.[13] Hamas fighters also targeted Israeli armor with rocket-propelled grenades in the al Sabra area, southwest of Gaza City.[14] The 401st Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) killed seven Hamas fighters in the northern Gaza Strip.[15]

Palestinian fighters targeted Israeli infantry and armor with small arms fire and RPGs in Khan Younis City on February 4.[16]

Israeli forces have “intensified” fighting in al Amal area of western Khan Younis in recent days.[17] The IDF said al Amal neighborhood is a Hamas stronghold.[18] The 35th Paratroopers Brigade (assigned to the 98th Division) raided Hamas military infrastructure in the neighborhood.[19]

The Givati Brigade raided the main headquarters of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade in the southern Gaza Strip on February 4.[20] The IDF said that Hamas used the facility to train fighters for the October 7 attacks and to military direct operations.[21] Mohammad Sinwar, the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade and brother of Hamas political leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar, had a main office in the compound.[22] Israeli forces also raided a ”combat management” building in western Khan Younis used by a senior Khan Younis commander on February 4.[23] The forces killed Palestinian fighters and captured weapons warehouses and weapons manufacturing equipment in the raid.[24]

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian militias eight times across the West Bank on February 4.[25] Israeli forces detained four wanted individuals and confiscated weapons in overnight raids across the West Bank on February 4.[26]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Iranian-backed militias, including Lebanese Hezbollah, conducted at least eight attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel on February 4.[27]

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

The United States and the United Kingdom conducted strikes targeting 36 Houthi military positions and assets in 13 locations across Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen on February 3.[28] The targets included “multiple underground storage facilities, command and control, missile systems, UAV storage and operations sites, radars, and helicopters.”[29] US Central Command said that the strikes targeted facilities used by the Houthis to attack international shipping and US Navy ships in the region.[30] Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Sarea claimed that the United States and the United Kingdom conducted 48 strikes and warned that the strikes will not go “without response and punishment.”[31]

US Central Command (CENTCOM) conducted preemptive strikes targeting seven Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles prepared to launch toward ships in the Red Sea on February 3.[32] CENTCOM determined in both instances that the cruise missile presented an “imminent threat” to commercial vessels and US Navy ships in the Red Sea.

IRGC-controlled media claimed on February 3 that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian backed Iraqi militias—conducted two rocket attacks targeting US forces at Conoco Mission Support Site in northeastern Syria.[33] CTP-ISW cannot verify these claims. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq did not claim responsibility for either of the attacks on its Telegram account.

4. Special Operations News - February 5, 2024 | SOF News

Special Operations News - February 5, 2024 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · February 5, 2024

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: A B-1B Lancer assigned to the 28th Bomb Wing, Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., descends after conducting air refueling operations with a KC-135R Stratotanker assigned to the Utah Air National Guard’s 151st Air Refueling Wing, Sept. 30, 2019, over central Utah. The Utah Air National Guard’s KC-135R fleet is capable of refueling a variety of fighters, bombers and heavy cargo aircraft in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps inventory. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. John Winn)

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U.S. Strikes Back

U.S. Strikes in Iraq and Syria. On Friday, February 2, 2024, the United States conducted numerous airstrikes against targets in the Middle East in response to the deaths of three U.S. soldiers killed in a drone attack (SOF News, 29 Jan 2024) by Iranian-backed militants. According to a Central Command press release the air attacks occurred in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups. Seven facilities, which included 85 targets, were struck by aircraft delivering 125 precision munitions. Two of the aircraft were B1B bombers that flew without stopping from the U.S., conducting a midair refuel while in flight. The facilities struck included command and control operations centers, intelligence centers, rockets, missiles, logistics sites, and more. According to U.S. officials, the timing of the attack had a lot to do with favorable weather. Additional attacks will take place in the future.

The U.S. has assessed that the drone that killed three U.S. soldiers was manufactured by Iran. (Reuters, 1 Feb 2024) Most of the drones used in the Middle East by militants are of Iranian origin. Iran supplies a lot of drones to Russia for use in the Ukraine conflict.

SOF News

Triad Partnership. The Army’s top generals for cyber, space and special operations forces met to discuss the Triad partnership and how they can further develop, operationalize and institutionalize the collaboration. The meeting of the “Triad 3-Star General Officer Steering Committee” took place at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, on January 31, 2024. “Top Army’s generals for cyber, space, and special operations convene for Triad partnership”, DVIDS, February 2, 2024.

Vickers at Princeton. Former Green Beret and CIA operative Michael Vickers spoke at the Center for International Security Studies at Princeton University on January 29, 2024. This article presents a detailed background of Vickers and then summarizes Vicker’s presentation at the event. He shared insights on his career as well provided commentary on past and present U.S. foreign policy. “From ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ to Princton Lecture Hall”, by Linda Sipprelle, TAPinto Princton, January 31, 2024.

Rangers and Green Berets. Joshua Skovlund tells us how U.S. Army Special Forces and the 75th Ranger Regiment are different. “What’s the difference between Army Rangers and Green Berets”, Task & Purpose, February 2, 2024.

GB is Congressional Candidate. Colby Jenkins, a former U.S. Army Special Forces colonel and combat veteran is running as a Republican for the U.S. House of Representatives in Utah. Deseret News, February 3, 2024.

NSW Training and Sewage. San Diego congressional members are asking the Navy to shed light on how much training has been cancelled or postponed due to sewage coming from Tijuana. “Is sewage crisis affecting Navy SEALs training in Coronado?”, The San Diego Union-Tribune, February 2, 2024.

Books on SF. Green Berets know a thing or two about what makes a good story. Read “The 5 best books about Special Forces – according to Green Berets”, by Joshua Skovlund, Task & Purpose, February 1, 2024.

International SOF

Belgian SOF Engineers. Belgium has a SOF engineer unit that comprises specific engineering capabilities within 3 Parachute Battalion (3Para) and 2 Commando Battalion (2Cdo). The unit has divers, boats, a search, clearance, and breaching section, and military sniffer dogs. “Belgian Special Operations Engineer Detachment”, Joint-Forces.com, January 29, 2024.

SOF Units Around the World. Shannon Corbell has presented a list of the 10 most lethal special operations units. Almost all the usual suspects are mentioned, in no particular order. We Are The Mighty, January 31, 2024.

ROK and US SOF Conduct Training. U.S. Navy Naval Special Warfare Command and U.S. Army Special Operations Command personnel partnered with their Republic of Korea counterparts, participating in various special operations forces-unique training events that enhanced both nations’ capacity to respond to a variety of complex situations in January 2024. “ROK-US demonstrate enduring SOF relationship with first combined training of 2024”, DVIDS, January 31, 2024.

Tet Offensive and a Vietnamese Ranger Bn. 56 years ago Keith Nightingale was the senior advisor to the 52nd Vietnamese Ranger Battalion during the Tet offensive. “One Team. One Fight”, Small Wars Journal, February 1, 2024.

SOF History

193rd SOW. One year ago, on February 2, 2023, the 193rd Special Operations Wing received its first MC-130J Commando II. This signaled the wing’s transition to a new aircraft and a new mission.

https://sof.news/afsoc/193rd-sow-mc-130j/

Battle of Lang Vei. On the evening of February 6, 1968, a U.S. Special Forces camp in South Vietnam came under attack. The members of the 5th SFG(A) detachment and indigenous Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) forces were overrun. Some of the SF team were able to make their way to the Khe Sanh Combat Base held by the U.S. Marines. Battle of Lang Vei, Wikipedia.

History of the Rangers. There are some in the special operations community that celebrate February 1, 1969, as the birthday of the 75th Rangers. The U.S. Army seems to have chosen a different date. Kenn Miller explains the heritage and confused history of the U.S. Army Rangers. “A Tangled Lineage”, Sentinel.

Backpack Nukes and SF. Read up on the Special Forces mission to insert behind enemy lines with backpack nuclear weapons. “Red Menace, Black Ops, Green Light”, The Highside, February 1, 2024.

Conflict in Israel and Gaza

10% of UNRWA Have Ties to Militant Groups. According to intelligence reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, around 10% of all the Gaza staff of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency have ties to Islamist militant groups. The UNRWA is the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency. There are about 12,000 on the UNRWA staff in Gaza. (WSJ, Jan 29, 2024, subscription) The United States and several other nations have suspended funding for the UNRWA. The U.S. is likely the largest donor to the UNRWA; Hamas is still holding at least six Americans hostage. The UN agency warns that it will likely have to halt operations in the region by the end of the month due to the suspended funding (CNN, 1 Feb 2024) See also an overview of the UNRWA by the Congressional Research Service, February 2, 2024, PDF, 4 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12316

Gaza Residents Homeless. More than half of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip are displaced, and many are gathered together in a small part of southern Gaza in the area of the Egyptian border. They are becoming more at risk due to disease and hunger as well as the combat operations taking place near the refugee centers. Things will get worse once Israel intensifies military operations in the vicinity of Rafah – the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.

• References:
• Map Gaza Strip (2005), and more maps of Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Israel.
• Israel-Hamas War: Insights from RAND

Ukraine Conflict

Russia’s Deep Defense. There were many observers of the Ukraine conflict looking forward to Ukraine’s late fall – winter offensive. The results were disappointing. There were Ukrainian successes on the Black Sea but not so much on land. Limited territory gains by Ukraine were bought at great cost in personnel and material. Throughout the later part of 2023 the Russians had adopted a policy of deep and prepared defenses. Stephen Biddle examines this in detail in “How Russia Stopped Ukraine’s Momentum”, Foreign Affairs, January 29, 2024.

Russia in the Offense. The static nature of the conflict on the ground in eastern Ukraine continues. There are indications that Ukraine is now in a defensive posture in the face of continued Russian offensive attempts. Some observers believe that Russian forces have regained the initiative along most of the front lines with the exception of Kherson Oblast. Russian forces are suffering less from artillery barrages due to an acute shortage of ammunition on the Ukrainian side. “They Come in Waves: Ukraine Goes on Defense Against a Relentless Foe”, The New York Times, February 4, 2024. (subscription)

Maritime Success for Ukraine. The Russian Black Sea fleet continues to suffer losses. This past week the Russian corvette Ivanovets was sent to the bottom of the sea after being attacked by six seaborne surface drones. The small missile carrying warship sank with an estimated 40 Russian sailors.

SOF Medics and Medical Evacuation. The Ukrainian special operations forces that conduct missions deep behind enemy lines do not enjoy medical evacuation by helicopter. Instead, they rely on each other for medical treatment and movement back to a medical facility in friendly held territory. Read how medics of the elite 73rd Naval Centre of Special Operations provide medical assistance in extremely difficult conditions. “I’m a special forces medic – this is how troops fighting Putin stay alive”, Metro, February 3, 2024.

Disinformation Battle. A recent paper outlines the ways that Ukraine combats the disinformation campaigns of Russia. It outlines ten lessons that the West could learn from the unique Ukrainian experience. How Ukraine fights Russian disinformation: Beehive vs mammoth, Hybrid CoE Research Report 11, January 2024, PDF, 48 pages.

Interactive Map. Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine by the Insitute for the Study of War and Critical Threats.

On storymaps.arcgis.com

Commentary

Silent Killer of GWOT Vets. Cancer is striking the veterans of the Global War on Terror at rates that recall Agent Orange. “A silent killer is stalking veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan”, Defense One, February 1, 2024.

Cordesman – an Icon Passes Away. A highly respected commentator of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan died on January 29, 2024. Anthony Cordesman was a former intelligence analyst turned author and commentator. He was not shy in pointing out the many missteps of the U.S. in the GWOT conflicts around the world, especially in Afghanistan. “Anthony Cordesman, security analyst who saw flaws in U.S. policy, dies at 84”, The Washington Post, January 31, 2024. (subscription)

National Security

Defeating Drones. Quadcopter drones are small, maneuverable, hard to detect, and cheap to buy. They are good for reconnaissance as well as carrying munitions that can target individuals, vehicles, command posts, air defense equipment, and more. Although inexpensive to purchase they are expensive to shoot down. In enough numbers, defending against drones can exhaust your budget. “The challenge of cheap drones: finding an even cheaper way to destroy them”, by Bradley Perrett, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, January 29, 2024. See also an article about how drones have become the weapon of choice for military ‘underdogs’ and terror groups. (Sky News, 3 Feb 2024)

PRIME sUSV. The Department of Defense is envisioning future fleets of low-cost drone boats for the U.S. Navy. The Production-Ready, Inexpensive, Maritime Expeditionary (PRIME) Small Unmanned Surface Vehicle (ssUSV) project is similar to a capability demonstrated by the Houthi militants of Yemen and the Ukrainian military. “Drone Boat Swarm Vision Laid Out by DoD”, The WarZone, February 1, 2024.

Border Crisis. The Senate is headed for a crucial test vote on new border policies and Ukraine aid. (AP News, 1 Feb 2024) A bipartisan border deal that pairs migration deterrents with Ukraine funding has been negotiated in the Senate. However, the $118 billion package faces opposition from lawmakers on the left and right. The speaker of the house has called it “dead on arrival”. “Senate negotiators release sweeping border and military aid bill”, The Washington Post, February 4, 2024. (subscription) One version is posted here.

Strategic Competition

“Plan Red” – Russia’s Invasion of the Baltics. What would Russia’s war on NATO look like? This is how the Kremlin’s generals might do it. “Code Red: How Russia Conquers the Baltics”, by Jan Kallberg, Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), January 30, 2024.

Baltic Defense Line. Three nations bordering on Russia are joining efforts to build a Baltic defense line. The hope is that this defensive effort, along with NATO presence and increasing Baltic preparedness will deter Russia from invading Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia. Lukas Milevski provides some details. “The Baltic Defense Line”, Foreign Policy Research Initiative, February 2, 2024.

Russia in Africa. The Kremlin is now moving to compete directly with the West in Africa – especially in the Sahel region. “Russia Steps Up the Competition in Africa”, by Raphael Parens, Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 11, 2024. See also “The New Wagner? Africa Corps in Burkina Faso Outlook”, by Joseph Balodis, Grey Dynamics, February 4, 2024.

Asia

Drones for India. One of the world’s most deadly remotely piloted vehicles (RPV) will soon be sold to India through the Foreign Military Sale (FMS) route. The country is purchasing 31 of the ‘Sky Guardian’ variant of the MQ-9B. The Sky Guardians will be equipped with AGM-114R Hellfire air-surface missiles that can be used for precision drone strikes. The MQ-9s can also perform ISR and serve as communication nodes and relay centers between sensors and shooters. (The EurAsian Times, 2 Feb 2024)

Myanmar at War. For the last few years, the conflict in Myanmar has intensified. In 2023 there were over 2,000 civilian casualties – including over 700 fatalities. Most of these were caused by the Myanmar government forces. Millions of people have been displaced yet the conflict between the government forces and rebel forces receives very little international attention. “Myanmar: three years of a devastating, under-reported war”, Action on Armed Violence, February 2, 2024. See also “Military Abuses Against Civilians Intensify”, Human Rights Watch, January 30, 2024.

Afghanistan

Ambassador to Iraq Nomination. “The woman who failed to rescue U.S. friends from the Taliban is Biden’s nominee for ambassador to Iraq”. According to a recent news article, the person in charge of the SIV Taskforce during the fiasco of late summer 2021 is going to be an ambassador. “Tracy Jacobson Abandoned Our Afghan Allies. Now She’s Getting a Promotion”, The Free Press, January 31, 2024.

Legal Standing of Taliban Regime. An Afghan legal scholar argues that the Taliban cannot be formally recognized as Afghanistan’s government under international law in light of its abysmal rights record. “The Taliban’s Approach to International Law Could Determine the Legal Status of Their Regime”, by Haroun Rahimi, Jurist.org, February 2, 2024.

AAA in the Border Security Bill. The national security supplemental proposed by Senate leadership includes provisions of the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan effort years in the making that would create a pathway to residency for Afghans who worked alongside U.S. soldiers in America’s longest war. https://www.sinema.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-Border-Act-2024-Section-by-Section-1.pdf

Afghan Passports. Leaving Afghanistan is difficult. Some Afghans have managed to be relocated to Europe, the United States, and elsewhere by other countries due to their work relationship over the past twenty years with foreign militaries or government agencies. But one stumbling block is getting an Afghan passport. “The Daily Hustle: Mission impossible – the quest for passports and visas in Afghanistan”, Afghanistan Analyst Network, February 4, 2024.

Video – HFAC Roundtable on Taliban Reprisals. The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a conference on current events in Afghanistan and the plight of Afghans who worked for the U.S. during the 20-year involvement of the U.S. in the Afghan conflict. Among those giving testimony is former Green Beret Justin Sapp. HFAC, YouTube, January 31, 2024, 2 hours. (video starts at the 19 min mark) https://www.youtube.com/live/lznK1DhShqg?si=my72EYruOilarWW2&t=1140

Take the edge off of winter. Head south for some warm water adventure.

Middle East

More U.S. Attacks on Yemen. A new wave of airstrikes against 36 Houthi targets across 13 locations in Yemen (map NSI) took place on Saturday, February 3, 2024. The United Kingdom participated in the attacks against the Houthis. Targets included weapons storage facilities, missile systems and launchers, air defense systems, and radars. The Iranian-backed Houthi militants have launched more than 30 attacks on commercial shipping vessels and U.S. warships since mid-November 2023. (DoD, 3 Feb 2024) According to CENTCOM, additional strikes took place on Sunday, February 4, 2024, in morning (Sanaa time).

• “Red Sea Attacks”, Reuters, February 2, 2024. Reuters has produced an excellent report with maps and graphics on how Houthi militants in Yemen are attacking ships in one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes.
• Yemen: Conflict, Maritime Attacks, and U.S. Policy, Congressional Research Service, CRS IF12581, February 1, 2024, PDF, 3 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12581
• Houthi Attacks in the Red Sea: Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, CRS IN12301, January 31, 2024, PDF, 3 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12301

SOF News Book Shop

View our selection of books about special operations forces at the SOF News Book Shop.

Upcoming Events

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April 12-14, 2024

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April 24-25, 2024

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Defense Strategies

Podcasts, Journals, and Videos

Ranger Reading List. The Three Rangers Foundation has posted a listing and biography of authors who are Rangers. https://www.threerangersfoundation.org/ranger-reading-list

Podcast – Armed Politics. General Sir Nick Carter and Dr. Joe Felter (retired SF colonel) are the guests on this podcast that focuses on a theory of armed politics. According to Carter, those engaged in war today need to deeply understand every level of politics – as neglecting this understanding can have catastrophic effects. Irregular Warfare Initiative, January 26, 2024, 52 minutes. https://irregularwarfare.org/podcasts/armed-politics/

Sentinel. The Journal of the Quiet Professionals has posted its February 2024 monthly issue online. Some interest articles about U.S. Army Rangers, leadership, the holocaust, and more. PDF, 20 pages.

Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 1, January-February 2024, PDF, 131 pages. This issue’s focus is on Thailand.

Movie Trailer – The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. During World War II Winston Churchill took a strong interest in the use of espionage and commandos that operate behind enemy lines. YouTube, 2 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvwDen1Wrx8

Video – I Barely Survived the Navy SEAL Obstacle Course. Austen Alexander tries out the BUD/S obstacle course at the Naval Special Warfare training center in Coronado, California. Austen Alexander, YouTube, May 19, 2023, 18 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVwtsNOtqjA

Video – The Korean War: The First Year, Army University Press, YouTube, January 22, 2024, 25mins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oTKKzrkkxQ

sof.news · by SOF News · February 5, 2024

5. The 5 best books about Special Forces — according to Green Berets

I note Dick Couch's book on Special Forces is on the list. I am reminded of this quote from him:

“Some Army and Marine Corps senior officers believe that with a little training, experience, and funding, they can cover the Special Forces mission. I couldn't disagree more strongly. I personally had no idea of just how difficult the SF mission was, nor the intensive skill set required to do the job. It took me 10 months at Fort Bragg and Camp MacKall to appreciate what it takes to be really proficient at foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare.” – Dick Couch, former Navy SEAL

The 5 best books about Special Forces — according to Green Berets

Green Berets know a thing or two about what makes a good story.

BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED FEB 1, 2024 3:49 PM EST

taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · February 1, 2024

The U.S. Army Special Forces have established a long-standing tradition of being the go-to force for irregular warfare, no matter the environment or obstacles, earning the nickname ‘Snake Eaters’ along the way as well as the distinctive green beret.

But what distinguishes them on the battlefield is not just their prowess with weapons or tactics, but their intelligence. It’s no surprise that many Green Berets are avid readers, and many great books have come out of the Special Forces community over the years.

We spoke with both active duty and veteran Green Berets to see what books they would personally recommend about Special Forces.

Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins

Annie Jacobsen authored one of the most highly recommended books from the Special Forces veterans we spoke with. Though the title doesn’t mention Special Forces, it unpacks the difficult and often covert missions Green Berets were tasked with while working alongside their CIA teammates.

“This book had jaw-dropping moments for me, which surprised me. There is history in this book that almost no one knows unless they were specifically read on or they were there personally,” said Tyr Symank, a Special Forces soldier with over two decades of service.

Symank describes this book as a “must-read” for anyone seeking a career in Special Forces.

Hunting the Jackal – Special Forces & CIA Soldier’s Fifty Years on the Frontlines of the War Against Terrorism

William “Billy” Waugh is legendary in all things related to special operations. He’s often called the “godfather” of Special Forces and went above and beyond to serve his country, including fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at 71 years old.

Waugh’s book tells his story, covering 50 years of service in some of the most secretive areas of America’s national security apparatus.

“It is the autobiography of an imperfect yet legendary soldier,” Symank said. “Sometimes, amid evaluations and career progression and disciplining the ranks, we forget that there are personality traits that we look for in SOF that are more important than a PT score.”

Pucker Factor: Stories of MACV-SOG Vol.1, ISSUE 2

Jason Collins put together a dynamic compilation of stories based on the first-hand accounts of MACV-SOG Green Berets. Never before seen photos accompany the declassified operations after 20 years of secrecy.

The book dives into impossible missions Green Berets were tasked with during the Vietnam War. Their legendary feats in some of the most hostile terrain inspired every generation of snake eaters that followed.

“The GWOT kicked off while I was earning my beret, and because of that, my SF heroes were Vietnam vets,” Symank said. “Vietnam belonged to the Green Berets the way the 90s belonged to SEALs and fingerless gloves.”

Five Years to Freedom: The True Story of a Vietnam POW

Symank described this story as “heartbreaking and inspiring.” Col. James “Nick” Rowe tells his story, breaking down five years of captivity as a POW during the Vietnam War, everything from torture to disease to the murder of his friends.

During the Special Forces Q-course, Symank said Rowe’s story drove him through the difficult parts of training and put any “little ruck march into perspective.”

Subscribe to Task & Purpose today. Get the latest military news and culture in your inbox daily.

“The SOF community has suffered more losses per capita in the last 20 years than the rest of the forces. Because that’s so personal and connected to so many of us, we’ve lost a little connection to the POW situation from the previous generations,” Symank said. “Five Years to Freedom is a solid reminder that we still have brothers unrecovered.”

As many in the special operations community believe, always saying their names and remembering they are still out there is how they continue the fight to recover their missing comrades.

Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior

This is the book for those seeking the legendary long tab. If you want to eat snakes and free the oppressed, this story will show you the first steps. Former Navy SEAL Dick Couch unpacks the year he spent embedded with Special Forces in this ultimate guide on how soldiers are molded in training to become masters of unconventional warfare.

The latest on Task & Purpose

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taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · February 1, 2024

6. Iran issues warning to US over suspected spy ships in the Mideast

Cool video of aircraft taking off at the link: https://apnews.com/article/iran-houthis-yemen-us-airstrikes-e15f86446be67ec2a44b36a9a6f7e88f?utm

Iran issues warning to US over suspected spy ships in the Mideast

BY JON GAMBRELL AND TARA COPP

Updated 4:51 PM EST, February 4, 2024

apnews.com

Iran issues warning to US over suspected spy ships in the Mideast | AP News

World News

After US strikes in Yemen, Iran issues a warning about suspected spy ships in the Mideast

The United States and Britain struck 36 Houthi targets in Yemen on Saturday in a second wave of assaults meant to further disable Iran-backed groups that have relentlessly attacked American and international interests in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. (Feb. 04)

By JON GAMBRELL, LOLITA C. BALDOR and TARA COPP

Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] 

JERUSALEM (AP) — Iran issued a warning Sunday to the U.S. over potentially targeting two cargo ships in the Mideast long suspected of serving as forward operating bases for Iranian commandos. The warning came just after the U.S. and the United Kingdom launched a massive airstrike campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

The statement from Iran on the Behshad and Saviz ships appeared to signal Tehran’s growing unease over U.S. strikes in recent days in Iraq, Syria and Yemen targeting militias backed by the Islamic Republic.

Those strikes were in retaliation for the killing of three U.S. soldiers and wounding of dozens of others in Jordan, attacks that stem back to Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has escalated tensions across the wider Middle East and raised fears about a regional conflict breaking out.

The U.S. strikes overnight Sunday struck across six provinces of Yemen held by the Houthi rebels, including in Sanaa, the capital. The Houthis gave no assessment of the damage but the U.S. described hitting underground missile arsenals, launch sites and helicopters used by the rebels.

“These attacks will not discourage Yemeni forces and the nation from maintaining their support for Palestinians in the face of the Zionist occupation and crimes,” Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said. “The aggressors’ airstrikes will not go unanswered.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned the Houthis after the strikes that “they will continue to bear further consequences if they do not end their illegal attacks on international shipping and naval vessels.” That message was echoed by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who said: “The Houthi attacks must stop.”

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, also warned the strikes may continue.

“We are prepared to deal with anything that any group or any country tries to come at us with,” Sullivan told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “And the president has been clear that we will continue to respond to threats that American forces face as we go forward.”

The Behshad and Saviz are registered as commercial cargo ships with a Tehran-based company the U.S. Treasury has sanctioned as a front for the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. The Saviz, then later the Behshad, have loitered for years in the Red Sea off Yemen, suspected of serving as spy positions for Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia described the Saviz as a maritime base and weapons transfer point for the Guard, staffed by men in military fatigues. Footage aired by Saudi-owned television channels showed the vessel armed with what appeared to be a covered machine gun bolted to the ship’s deck.

In the video statement Sunday by Iran’s regular army, a narrator for the first time describes the vessels as “floating armories.” The narrator describes the Behshad as aiding an Iranian mission to “counteract piracy in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.” However, Iran is not publicly known to have taken part in any of the recent campaigns against rising Somali piracy in the region off the back of the Houthi attacks.

Just before the new campaign of U.S. airstrikes began, the Behshad traveled south into the Gulf of Aden. It’s now docked in Djibouti in East Africa just off the coast from a Chinese military base in the country.

The statement ends with a warning overlaid with a montage of footage of U.S. warships and an American flag.

“Those engaging in terrorist activities against Behshad or similar vessels jeopardize international maritime routes, security and assume global responsibility for potential future international risks,” the video said.

The U.S. Navy’s Mideast-based 5th Fleet declined to comment over the threat.

The Saviz, which is now in the Indian Ocean near where the U.S. alleges Iranian drone attacks recently have targeted shipping, has come under attack before. In 2021, a likely mine explosion blew a hole through the hull of the Saviz, forcing Iran to bring the ship home. That attack, suspected to have been carried out by Israel, is part of a wider shadow war between Tehran and Israel after the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal.

___

Baldor and Copp reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, and Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.

JON GAMBRELL

Gambrell is the news director for the Gulf and Iran for The Associated Press. He has reported from each of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Iran and other locations across the world since joining the AP in 2006.

apnews.com

7. Army Still Weighing Combat Awards for Soldiers Hit by Deadly Drone Attack at Jordan Base

Why does this always become an issue after we lose someone? Are we trying to tell the public these soldiers are not in a combat zone? Are we not paying the hazardous duty or combat pay? Are we trying to save money? Let's not dishonor these soldiers.

Of course the argument is that then every soldier in the area of operations would be eligible for combat badges which would seem to dilute their value.  But I have seen casualties receive specific combat awards (e.g. purple hearts), while the soldiers serving in the same AO who were not harmed did not receive combat badges.

Army Still Weighing Combat Awards for Soldiers Hit by Deadly Drone Attack at Jordan Base

military.com · by Steve Beynon,Konstantin Toropin · February 2, 2024

It was still unclear Friday whether Army soldiers killed and injured in the drone attack by an Iran-backed militia on a logistics base in Jordan will be awarded combat accolades.

All three soldiers killed in the strike were from the same Georgia reserve unit, and at least 40 Army National Guardsmen and airmen were injured, just the latest in a growing tally of troops wounded amid increasing violence in the Middle East. But the service is still mulling whether the soldiers are eligible for combat badges and Purple Hearts.

The Army awards those badges to soldiers who are engaged by the enemy under certain circumstances, but the policy for the awards is vague. Purple Hearts and combat badges serve as key receipts for troops and veterans seeking care and compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and are often the easiest way to prove a service member was in harm's way.

"Jordan meets [the] criteria for locations in which troops are eligible for [combat badges]," an Army spokesperson told Military.com in a statement. "Individual awards are considered on a case-by-case basis and processed commensurate with approval authorities."

On Tuesday, Military.com asked the Pentagon's top spokesman, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, whether the troops in Jordan qualified for combat awards. Ryder said he didn't know and would look into it.

As of Friday, the Pentagon had not yet provided an answer.

Sgt. Kennedy Sanders, Sgt. Breonna Moffett and Staff Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, all Army reservists, died in Sunday's attack in Jordan, which in the past was generally not considered a dangerous assignment for troops.

The three soldiers were posthumously promoted this week, and their remains arrived Friday at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware with President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in attendance.

The Guardsmen injured in the attack were from the Arizona National Guard's 1-158th Infantry Battalion; the California Guard's 40th Infantry Division; the Kentucky Guard's 138th Field Artillery Brigade; and New York's 101st Expeditionary Signal Battalion.

An additional 12 airmen were also injured, from that service's National Guard and reserve.

What qualifies for action eligible for a combat badge under Army policy is muddy, vague and somewhat contradictory.

The policy, which was updated in January, notes the engagement must be "ground combat," but doesn't include a clear definition of that, or whether aerial attacks count. It also notes soldiers must be executing an "offensive or defensive act," but does not outline what that means.

Soldiers must also be receiving so-called imminent danger or hostile fire pay, a bonus of up to $225 per month for service members serving in an area where enemy contact is possible -- a bonus troops in the base attacked in Jordan were receiving.

Meanwhile, more than 100 other troops have been injured in attacks by Iran proxy groups in Iraq and Syria since Israel launched a war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in October following a surprise attack on Israeli civilians.

Two months after the attacks began, Military.com reported that just five Purple Hearts had been awarded. Since then, Military.com has repeatedly asked the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command for an updated total, but they have declined to comment.

Most of the wounds appear to be traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs. One of the earliest attacks on the al-Tanf garrison in Syria left 17 injured -- of that total, 15 were diagnosed with TBI. Chief Warrant Officer 4 Garrett Illerbrunn was critically wounded during a drone attack in Iraq on Christmas when a piece of shrapnel hit his head and damaged his brain.

Defense officials haven't offered a total figure of TBIs to reporters recently. The Pentagon has said almost all of those troops have since returned to duty.

Some officials have made remarks that seem to downplay the severity of the brain injuries, which studies and evidence show can lurk in the shadows but lead to increased risks for illnesses such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease, and also of death by homicide, accidents and suicide.

John Kirby, the spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, told ABC's "Good Morning America" in late January after an attack that troops were "being seen for traumatic brain injuries, with some symptoms of concussions, but no serious physical injuries other than that."

In years past, awards have sometimes been kept from injured troops when officials dismissed the severity of the wounds. One senior defense official said that, while most of the injuries were "from concussive events," they were "not necessarily wounds."

It wouldn't be the first time the Pentagon has not taken TBIs seriously. Military.com has reported that the struggle to recognize the condition goes back to the earliest years of the Global War on Terror and that dithering cost many troops their lives.

As recently as 2020, then-President Donald Trump downplayed injuries after an Iranian missile barrage against Al Asad Air Base in Iraq that eventually led to 109 troops being diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

"I heard they had headaches and a couple of other things," Trump told reporters at the time. "But I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious. Not very serious."

The dismissal led to a two-year delay in National Guardsmen receiving their Purple Hearts. Military.com interviewed some of them, who said the injuries have been debilitating.

military.com · by Steve Beynon,Konstantin Toropin · February 2, 2024

8. US intends further strikes against Iran-backed groups, White House says

US intends further strikes against Iran-backed groups, White House says

By Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali, Mohammed Ghobari and Timour Azhari

February 4, 20247:20 PM ESTUpdated 2 hours ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/yemens-houthis-vow-response-after-us-british-strikes-2024-02-04/?utm

0 seconds of 30 secondsVolume 0%

Summary

• After two days of strikes, U.S. indicates more to comeU.S. hit militias in Iraq, Syria in response to Jordan attackIran not interested in direct conflict - analyst

WASHINGTON/ADEN/BAGHDAD, Feb 4 (Reuters) - The United States intends to launch further strikes at Iran-backed groups in the Middle East, the White House national security adviser said on Sunday, after hitting Tehran-aligned factions in Iraq, Syria and Yemen over the last two days.

The United States and Britain unleashed attacks against 36 Houthi targets in Yemen, a day after the U.S. military hit Tehran-backed groups in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Jordan.

"We intend to take additional strikes, and additional action, to continue to send a clear message that the United States will respond when our forces are attacked, when our people are killed," White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told NBC’s "Meet the Press" program on Sunday.

The strikes are the latest blows in a conflict that has spread into the Middle East since Oct. 7, when the Iran-backed Palestinian militant group Hamas stormed Israel from the Gaza Strip, igniting war.

The Biden administration's diplomatic efforts to stem the fallout from the war also continued with top diplomat Antony Blinken departing for the region on Sunday afternoon.

Tehran-backed groups declaring support for the Palestinians have entered the fray across the region: Hezbollah has fired at Israeli targets at the Lebanese-Israeli border, Iraqi militias have fired on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis have fired on shipping in the Red Sea and at Israel itself.

Iran has so far avoided any direct role in the conflict, even as it backs those groups. The Pentagon has said it does not want war with Iran and does not believe Tehran wants war either.

Sullivan declined to be drawn on whether the United States might attack sites inside Iran, something the U.S. military has been very careful to avoid.

Speaking to CBS' "Face the Nation" program moments earlier, he said Friday's strikes were "the beginning, not the end, of our response, and there will be more steps - some seen, some perhaps unseen".

"I would not describe it as some open-ended military campaign," he said.

Saturday's strikes in Yemen hit buried weapons storage facilities, missile systems, launchers and other capabilities the Houthis have used to attack Red Sea shipping, the Pentagon said, adding it targeted 13 locations.

The Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Sarea said the strikes "will not pass without a response and consequences".

Another Houthi spokesperson, Mohammed Abdulsalam, indicated the group would not be deterred, saying Yemen's decision to support Gaza would not be affected by any attack.

Residents described being shaken by powerful blasts. "The building I live in shook," said Fatimah, a resident of Houthi-controlled Sanaa, adding that it had been years since she had felt such blasts in a country that has suffered years of war.

[1/10]Houthi tribesmen parade to show defiance after U.S. and U.K. air strikes on Houthi positions near Sanaa, Yemen February 4, 2024.REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah Acquire Licensing Rights, opens new tab

The Houthis did not announce any casualties.

Secretary of State Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and Israel in the coming days on his fifth trip to the region since October, which will focus on advancing talks on the return of hostages taken from Israel by Hamas in exchange for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza.

He will also make a push on a U.S.-brokered mega deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize ties, which hinges on bringing an end to other Gaza conflict and steps toward a future Palestinian state.

IRAN SEEN AVOIDING DIRECT CONFRONTATION

The Yemen strikes are running parallel to the unfolding U.S. campaign of retaliation over the killing of three American soldiers in a drone strike by Iran-backed militants on an outpost in Jordan.

On Friday, the U.S. carried out the first wave of that retaliation, striking in Iraq and Syria more than 85 targets linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and militias it backs, reportedly killing nearly 40.

Mahjoob Zweiri, Director of the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University, did not expect a change in Iran's approach even after the latest U.S. strikes.

"They keep the enemy behind the borders, far away. They are not interested in any direct military confrontation which might lead to attacks on their cities or their homeland. They will maintain that status quo," he told Reuters.

Iran's foreign ministry said the latest attacks on Yemen were "a flagrant violation of international law by the United States and Britain", warning the continuation of such attacks was a "worrying threat to international peace and security".

While the Houthis say their attacks are in solidarity with Palestinians, the U.S. and its allies characterize them as indiscriminate and a menace to global trade.

Major shipping lines have largely abandoned Red Sea shipping lanes for longer routes around Africa. This has increased costs, feeding worries about global inflation while denying Egypt crucial foreign revenue from use of the Suez Canal.

Hundreds of people attended a Baghdad funeral procession for 17 members of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) killed in the U.S. strikes. The PMF is a state security force containing several Iran-backed armed groups.

Hadi al-Ameri, a senior Iraqi politician close to Iran, said it was time to oust U.S. forces, 2,500 of whom are in Iraq in a mission to help prevent a resurgence of Islamic State. "Their presence is pure evil for the Iraqi people," he said.

Iraq and the United States last month initiated talks about ending the U.S.-led coalition's presence in the country.

Additional reporting by Andrew Mills in Doha and Tala Ramadan in Dubai, Doina Chiacu, Arshad Mohammed and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington, Tom Perry in Beirut; Writing by Tom Perry and Simon Lewis; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Diane Craft

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Phil Stewart

Thomson Reuters

Phil Stewart has reported from more than 60 countries, including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and South Sudan. An award-winning Washington-based national security reporter, Phil has appeared on NPR, PBS NewsHour, Fox News and other programs and moderated national security events, including at the Reagan National Defense Forum and the German Marshall Fund. He is a recipient of the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the Joe Galloway Award

Idrees Ali

Thomson Reuters

National security correspondent focusing on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Reports on U.S. military activity and operations throughout the world and the impact that they have. Has reported from over two dozen countries to include Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the Middle East, Asia and Europe. From Karachi, Pakistan.

9. Red Sea attacks

Extensive and detailed graphics and imagery of the attacks and activities at this link:https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/SHIPPING-ARMS/lgvdnngeyvo/?v=2&utm

RUSSIA

TURKEY

CHINA

SAUDI

ARABIA

INDIA

Red Sea

Shipping

density

YEMEN

Indian

Ocean

INDONESIA

Atlantic

Ocean

Red Sea attacks

How Houthi militants in Yemen are attacking ships in one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes

By Simon Scarr, Adolfo Arranz, Jonathan Saul, Han Huang and Jitesh Chowdhury

Published Feb. 2, 2024  09:30 AM EST

Iranian-backed Houthi militants, who control swathes of Yemen, have used an array of sophisticated weapons - including ballistic missiles and “kamikaze” drones - in their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea in support of Palestinian militant group Hamas in its war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

The attacks began on Nov. 19 when Houthi commandos landed a helicopter on the Galaxy Leader cargo vessel as it was passing through the southern Red Sea. They redirected it toward Hodeidah port in Yemen and seized the crew, who are still being held.

Since then, 29 more ships have been attacked in the area, with 13 of those suffering direct strikes from missiles or drones. The attacks have caused major disruptions to global trade, some 12% of which passes through the Red Sea.

Reuters has cataloged the ships attacked so far and examined how Houthi militants are using a combination of weapons to target commercial ships. The analysis shows how Houthi drone and missile activity has escalated since the Gaza war began, and has continued despite Western military airstrikes on their bases in Yemen, which began on Jan. 11.

Missile

Drone

Houthi attacks on ships

near Yeman since Nov. 19

Hit

Miss

Nov. 19, 2023

Galaxy Leader

Vehicle carrier

Nov. 27

MV Central Park

Chemical tanker

Dec. 3

Unity Explorer

Bulk carrier

Dec. 3

Number 9

Container ship

Hijacked

Hijack, rescued, missile

Dec. 3

AOM Sophie II

Bulk carrier

Dec. 10

Centaurus Leader

Vehicle carrier

Dec. 11

Strinda

Oil/chemical tanker

Dec. 13

Ardmore Encounter

Oil/chemical tanker

Dec. 14

Maersk Gibraltar

Container ship

Dec. 15

Al Jasrah

Container ship

Dec. 15

Palatium III

Container ship

Dec. 18

Magic Vela

Bulk carrier

Attempted Hijack

Dec. 18

Swan Atlantic

Oil/chemical tanker

Dec. 18

MSC Clara

Container ship

Dec. 23

Blaamanen

Oil/chemical tanker

Dec. 23

Sai Baba

Oil tanker

Dec. 25

Navig8 Montel

Oil tanker

Dec. 25

MSC United VIII

Container ship

Dec. 30

Maersk Hangzhou

Container ship

Jan. 2, 2024

CMA CGM TAGE

Container ship

Jan. 9

Federal Masamune

Bulk carrier

Jan. 12

Khalissa

Oil tanker

Jan. 15

MV Gibraltar Eagle

Bulk carrier

Jan. 16

MV Zografia

Bulk carrier

Jan. 17

MV Genco Picardy

Bulk carrier

Jan. 18

Chem Ranger

Chemical tanker

Jan. 24

Tomahawk

Bulk carrier

Jan. 24

Maersk Detroit

Container ship

Jan. 24

Maersk Chesapeak

Container ship

Jan. 26

Marlin Luanda

Oil tanker

Graphic depicting all ships known to be targeted by Houthi attacks since November 19. Shows which ships were hit by missiles and drones and which had near misses.

Houthi attacks have targeted ships in the southern Red Sea and the neighboring Gulf of Aden, which are joined by the Bab al-Mandab strait, a chokepoint between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

In Arabic, Bab al-Mandab means "Gate of Tears", a reference to the strait's precarious navigation. The narrow waterway lies between Djibouti and Eritrea on the coast of east Africa and western Yemen, much of which is under Houthi control.

Bab al-Mandab is a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean: exports to the Western markets from the Gulf and Asia must pass through before entering the Suez Canal.

At only 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, shipping traffic is limited to two channels for inbound and outbound shipments, leading to occasional congestion.

Passing the "Gate of Tears"

Known locations of attacks on ships since Nov. 19

SAUDI ARABIA

Attacks

on ships

Houthi

control

ERITREA

Red Sea

YEMEN

Sanaa

Asmara

Al Hudaydah

Shipping

traffic

Bab

al-Mandab

Strait

Aden

ETHIOPIA

Djibouti

Gulf of Aden

DJIBOUTI

Map and satellite image of the southern Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab strait, showing shipping routes and highlighting locations of attacks.

Satellite image: NASA, Terra/MODIS

The Houthis, who control the most populous regions of Yemen, say they will continue their attacks until Israel halts its “siege” of Gaza. The Israeli government has pledged to continue its offensive in Gaza until it has secured the release of hostages seized in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and destroyed the Palestinian militant group.

A Reuters analysis of reported incidents shows how Houthi drone and missile strikes have escalated since the Gaza conflict erupted, and have continued since Western airstrikes began against land targets inside Yemen on Jan. 11. In the past week, the pace of those airstrikes has slowed, while interceptions of missiles and drones by U.S. and allied naval forces in the area has increased.

Fabian Hinz, open source analyst and research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a military think-tank based in London, said it was unclear how far Western airstrikes had depleted the Houthis’ capabilities. “I would say in general it's almost impossible to degrade an arsenal like that 100%,” he said.

The Houthis have said the airstrikes have had no effect on their capabilities. A spokesman for the group did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Interceptions of missiles or drones

Israel, the U.S. and allies, have been shooting down Houthi missiles and drones since the conflict broke out in Gaza. Many targets were unknown or heading towards Israel but as time progressed, many were suspected to be targeting naval or commercial ships. Incidents on the chart may have involved multiple missiles or drones.

Target: Ships Unknown

Gaza

conflict

begins

Unknown or

heading to Israel

1

15

1

15

1

15

1

15

31

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Jan. 2024

Chart showing allied interceptions of Houthi drones and missiles since October.

Houthi shipping attacks

Attacks began to break through naval overwatch with some ships being struck directly with missiles or drones and others targeted but missed.

Ship: Struck Missed

Hijack

1

15

1

15

1

15

1

15

31

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Jan. 2024

Chart showing Houthi attacks on ships since October with 13 suffering direct hits and the rest missing their target.

Days with allied air strikes

The U.S., UK and allies started to carry out strikes on Houthi land targets.

1

15

1

15

1

15

1

15

31

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Jan. 2024

Chart showing the number of days with airstrikes increasing in January.

Many of the Houthi attacks have been on container vessels and dry bulk carriers. However, on Jan. 26, the Marlin Luanda oil tanker - operated on behalf of international commodity trader Trafigura - was hit by a Houthi anti-ship missile in the Gulf of Aden, causing a fire that lasted several hours.

While no casualties were reported, the incident was the most destructive of the crisis so far, shipping and insurance sources said.

“The recent strike on the Marlin Luanda highlights the ongoing risk to vessels and the likelihood that the current crisis will impact shipping and commodity markets for the foreseeable future,” data and analytics group Kpler said in a Jan 30 report.

Smoke rises from the Marlin Luanda after the vessel was struck by a Houthi anti-ship missile. Jan. 27, 2024. @indiannavy via X/Handout via REUTERS

The Houthi arsenal

In a show of strength in September, the Houthis paraded thousands of troops and trucks carrying weaponry in the capital Sanaa, including cruise and ballistic missiles as well as long-range armed drones. Armored vehicles and speed boats displayed signs that read: "Death to America, death to Israel!"

The Houthis, who emerged in the 1990s as an armed group in opposition to Saudi Arabia’s religious influence in Yemen, have long received funds, arms and training from Iran, according to regional and military experts.

Despite voicing support for the Houthi campaign, Iran has denied it provides the Yemeni group with weapons and intelligence. The Houthis have insisted they manufacture their own weapons and do not receive arms or take orders from Iran, even if they maintain a close relationship.

September’s military parade showcased Iranian-made weapons, including a surface-to-surface Iranian Toofan missile, which has a range of 850 to 1,200 miles (1,350-1,950 km), making it capable of reaching Israeli territory, according to a report from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), an Israel-based think-tank that researches Islamist groups and militias.

TOP: A view shows a military parade held by the Houthis to mark the anniversary of their takeover in Sanaa, Yemen September 21, 2023. Houthi Media Office/Handout via Reuters

BELOW: Still frames from a video showing Toofan and Quds Z-0 missiles displayed in a military parade in Sanaa on Sept. 21, 2023. REUTERS

The parade also featured new shore-to-sea missiles capable of hitting vessels in the Red Sea, among them Tankil missiles, which have an estimated range of about 300 miles (500 km), and Quds Z-0s, which are cruise missiles capable of hitting targets both on land and at sea, ITIC said.

Anti-ship missiles

Range

Unknown

450km

500km

140km

Unknown

Unknown

80km

40km

300km

800km

800km

Unknown

Likely

BALLISTIC MISSILES

CRUISE MISSILES

Sayyad

Mohit

Asef

Tankil

Faleq

Al Bahr Al Ahmar

Mayun

Al-Mandab 1

Al-Mandab 2

Quds Z-0

Sejil/Sahil

Rubezh

All electro-optical/infrared guided

Radar homing/

infrared

Radar

homing

Radar

homing

Radar

homing

Electro-optical/

infrared

Unknown

An illustrated graphic shows some of the anti-ship missiles in the Houthi arsenal.

When the Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, ousting the Saudi-backed government, they also inherited military equipment and staff with know-how from the previous government, notably short-range ballistic missiles as well as surface-to-surface and cruise missiles, some deployed on patrol craft, according to a specialist with Universal Defence and Security Solutions, a UK-based consultancy.

Their new Iranian-made weapons include Qasef-1 and Qasef-2K reconnaissance and attack drones, said the specialist, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue. While cheap and basic, these drones have a 50-60 mile range with a small warhead of around 30-40 kgs.

Other drones included the Sammad 1, 2 and 3, which are similar to the Qasef with a longer range of around 300 miles and smaller 18 kg warheads, he said.

Drones used by Houthis

1,700km

1,300km

500km

Range

Samad-1

2,500km

2

3

35km

15km

150-200km

The Samad-3 aircraft has a top-mounted external fuel tank

Rased

Hudhud-1

Qasef-1/Qasef-2K

Samad variants

Shahed-136

An illustrated graphic shows some of the drones in the Houthi arsenal.

The defence specialist said that supplies of weapons systems and parts from Iran meant the Houthis should be able to sustain the near-daily rate of attacks in the Red Sea. In addition, the Houthis were able to produce some of their own munitions for basic rockets and drones, he said.

“It’s not particularly important that many of the fired weapon systems do not cause any significant damage: the disruptive impact on maritime trade, which relies on insurance, is quite easy to maintain, causing significant financial impact and operational complexity,” he said.

The Pentagon and the British Department of Defence did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One-way attack drones

Western military and shipping companies have shared little information publicly on the types of drones used in recent Red Sea shipping attacks.

On Nov. 29, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) - which covers the Middle East, Central and South Asia - said that the destroyer USS Carney shot down an Iranian-produced KAS-04 drone - the U.S. designation for the Samad drone - launched from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.

A report commissioned by the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF), an association of petroleum firms focused on promoting safer and cleaner shipping, identified the Shahed-136 as the “loitering munition” most commonly used against merchant ships operating in the Middle East. These types of drones can circle in an area before a final target is determined.

The Shahed was employed for the first time by the Houthis in Yemen’s war between September and December 2020, according to the report, published in August and produced by global risk analysts Sibylline.

The Shahed-136 - which has been extensively used by Russian forces in Ukraine - can be fired from truck-mounted containers at a slightly upward angle. A small rocket booster helps propel the drone into the air before being jettisoned. Its main piston engine then takes over to power the flight.

Main engine of the drone starts to power propeller.

Small rocket under the drone gives initial boost.

Shahed-136

Truck converted into a drone launcher.

Samad

Rack with five drones

An illustration shows how the Shahed-136 is launched from a trailer using a small rocket for initial boost before its engine starts.

The drone will travel towards coordinates it has been assigned. Loitering munitions usually have a navigation system to calculate their speed and position, and sometimes possess sensors connected to commercial satellite networks.

Images released in November 2022 of a Shahed-136 used to attack the MV Pacific Zircon off the coast of Oman indicated a satellite receiver on board, which could enable real-time navigation, according to the OCIMF paper. This technology might also allow Houthi operators to manually alter target coordinates in-flight.

Wingtip stabilizers

Propeller

Loud piston engine

Shahed-136

Simple navigation system

Aileron

Some models constructed with hexagonal honeycomb material inside.

Explosive

warhead

Qasef-2K

Samad-3

An illustration shows the Shahed-136 and other drones flying in the air.

Once the drone has passed any obstacles and cleared the coast it can take a lower flight path to try to avoid radar. The delta-wing design of the Shahed-136 gives it a low radar signature. Combined with its ability to travel at low-altitude, this makes detection by commercial radar difficult.

Low altitude flight

Launch site

Yemeni coast

Target

Red Sea

An illustration shows how drones can take a low-altitude flight profile towards targets.

As the noisy drone approaches target areas, the distinctive sound of its small piston engine can be heard, resembling the noise of a moped. They are also relatively slow.

Target area

An illustration shows rear views of the Shahed-136 and other drones with emphasis on the propeller and engine.

Taimur Khan, regional head of operations in the Gulf for Conflict Armament Research, an investigative organization that tracks weapons used in conflicts, said Houthi drones documented during the civil war were designed to hit static targets by using GPS coordinates. But the shipping attacks appeared more sophisticated.

“In order to reliably hit a moving target such as a cargo ship, even a relatively slow-moving one, there would need to be some kind of terminal guidance,” he said.

Once a target has been acquired, loitering munitions can adjust trajectory, and attack from the top-down, detonating upon impact.

Common loitering patterns

Drone flight paths if awaiting target

Runway

Figure

of eight

Can loiter

above target

Descent towards the target

An illustration shows a loitering munition attacking a container ship from above.

Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah - another member of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ in the Middle East - has provided military training and assistance to the Houthis, military and regional experts say.

The Houthis have denied this. Hezbollah has not commented.

Eyal Pinko, a former senior official with Israel's intelligence services until 2017 who now works at Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said Hezbollah had in particular helped the Houthis to build their naval capabilities.

These include seven naval bases and 30 control posts along Yemen’s coast that have radar and electro-optical directors for better control of missile launches, said Pinko, who has studied the Houthis since 2004.

“It's a massive coastal defense line for detection, and they're also using AIS (ship tracking) systems, and also intelligence from Iran,” Pinko said. Automatic identification system, or AIS, is a transponder system that allows maritime authorities and companies to publicly track commercial shipping and identify vessels.

Among the unused weapons in the Houthis arsenal are Iranian-made Sadaf floating mines. While such munitions are relatively unsophisticated and easy to deploy, their impact on merchant shipping would be considerable if they were used in the Red Sea, said Pinko, who also consults on private-sector security.

Floating mines have been placed with great effect in the Black Sea during the war in Ukraine, sowing alarm amongst shipping companies and their insurers.

Pinpoint strikes

The United States, Britain, and other allied nations, have carried out strikes from the air and sea against Houthi military targets in Yemen in response to the attacks on shipping.

The first wave of strikes were conducted on Jan. 11: overnight attacks by the U.S. and Britain targeting almost 30 different locations in Yemen. Strikes continued throughout January. The Pentagon says it has struck anti-ship missiles on the ground, as well as coastal radar and Houthi air surveillance capabilities and weapon storage sites.

Satellite images taken by Maxar Technologies the day after the Jan.11 strikes show the aftermath. In a compound on the Yemeni coast, bordering the southern Red Sea, craters and scorched earth can be seen. A similar image from Google Earth, taken by Airbus, shows structures in the same location in July last year.

Before strikes - July 2, 2023

Small

structure

COMPOUND

Structures

Satellite image: Google © 2023 Airbus

After strikes - Jan. 12, 2024

Damage

Crater

Crater

Satellite image: Maxar Technologies

One kilometer north along the coast, a similar compound was struck during the same wave of attacks on Jan.11. Images from Maxar Technologies show scattered debris and structures missing, when compared to a July 2 Airbus image.

Before strikes - July 2, 2023

Twin

structures

Structures

COMPOUND

Satellite image: Google © 2023 Airbus

After strikes - Jan. 12, 2024

Damage

Debris

Debris

Crater

Debris

Satellite image: Maxar Technologies

Maxar also published images of locations on the outskirts of Sanaa airport showing what appears to be damage when compared to older images. One was described by Maxar as a radar facility, while the other location was unspecified.

Reuters was unable independently to determine the use of the sites or whether they were hit by Western missiles. However, both appear to have been targeted with accuracy.

Radar site

Before strikes - Nov. 13, 2023

After strikes - Jan. 12, 2024

Charred area

Curved radar

Burned radar

Near Sana’a airport

Before strikes - Nov. 13, 2023

After strikes - Jan. 12, 2024

Structure

Crater

Satellite image: Maxar Technologies

CENTCOM has said U.S. strikes have hit a number of Houthi anti-ship missiles that were about to be launched.

"This is quite difficult from an intelligence and targeting perspective because you need to know where the missile is, where it's moving, where they want to fire it from," said Hinz, the IISS research fellow.

"That indicates that the Americans are having some success,” he added. “We still don't know to what degree they've degraded the (Houthi) arsenal."

Global Shipping Disruptions

Shipping companies have been re-routing some sailings via Africa's southern Cape of Good Hope as the attacks continued. The disruption threatens to drive up delivery costs for goods, raising fears it could stoke global inflation. Container shipping, which transports consumer goods, has been the segment most impacted by the attacks in the Red Sea due to fixed routes through the waterway. In the period from the start of December last year to Jan. 30, 373 container ships are estimated to have re-routed around Africa, according to analysis from supply chain platform project44. The number of container vessels sailing through the Suez Canal has fallen by about 65% since the attacks began, project44 data showed.

Because of the high risks, seafarers are signing agreements to receive double pay when entering the high-risk zones around Yemen, according to contract agreements viewed by Reuters and union officials.

“There is a fair degree of trepidation from the seafarers because quite a few ships are being hit,” said Stephen Cotton, General Secretary of the International Transport Workers' Federation, the leading union for seafarers.

“The feedback from the captains is, certainly on the container trades, they’re much happier to go around the Cape.”

Vessel re-routing

An example of re-routing from Singapore to Rotterdam.

Usual refueling ports

Emerging refueling ports

EUROPE

Through the Suez Canal

Around 8,500 nautical miles

in a 26-day trip

Rotterdam

ASIA

Suez Canal

AFRICA

Singapore

Cape Town

Around the southern tip of Africa

Around 11,800 Nautical miles

in a 36-day trip

The Suez Canal is used by roughly one third of global container ship cargo. Redirecting ships around the southern tip of Africa is expected to cost up to $1 million in extra in fuel for every round trip between Asia and northern Europe.

Worries about potential disruption to Middle Eastern supply after the latest Red Sea attack drove oil prices higher in the first trading session of 2024.

Notes

Tallies of attacks, interceptions and air strikes are collated from MSCHOA, ACLED, UKMTO, CENTCOM, and news reports. Interception incidents may include multiple drones or missiles being shot down. Data is current as of Feb. 1.

Sources

The Maritime Security Centre – Horn of Africa (MSCHOA); International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS); Conflict Armament Research; World Bank; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM); Janes; Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED); The Oil Companies International Marine Forum; United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO); Middle East Institute; United States Institute of Peace; U.S. Naval Institute; Maxar Technologies; LSEG; Shoei Kisen Kaisha.

Edited by

Dan Flynn

10. The Shadowy Backroom Dealer Steering Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’

Dear Media,

Please do not allow Iran and the others to co-opt "resistance." Let us not legitimize or romanticize their activities. let's refer to them by what better describes them: the axis of totalitarians.

The Shadowy Backroom Dealer Steering Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’

Esmail Qaani, in control of the paramilitary Quds Force, is under pressure to avert a direct confrontation with Washington

By Sune Engel RasmussenFollow

Feb. 5, 2024 6:00 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-shadowy-backroom-dealer-steering-irans-axis-of-resistance-733a4d6f?mod=hp_lead_pos7&utm

Four years ago, the U.S. launched a drone strike to kill the man who headed up Iran’s covert paramilitary operations. Qassem Soleimani had an almost cultlike following as the Middle East’s perhaps most recognizable military commander, and had placed his Quds Force atop a web of regional militias that over two decades had extended Iran military influence across the Arab world. His funeral procession drew such huge crowds that more than 50 people were killed in a stampede.

The man who succeeded him is very different, an unassuming backroom dealer who now faces a difficult new task—using this patchwork of armed groups to expand Iran’s footprint without provoking a devastating reprisal from the U.S.

Since taking over the Quds Force, Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani has quietly worked to consolidate the various militias working under Iran’s direction from Baghdad to the Red Sea, where they have created what the U.S. government calls the most volatile situation in the Middle East in decades.

A commemoration ceremony for Soleimani in Tehran last month. PHOTO: MORTEZA NIKOUBAZL/ZUMA PRESS

From the Houthi rebel movement in Yemen to Shia paramilitaries in Syria and Iraq, Qaani’s militia clients have the potential to inflame a cascading series of conflicts triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, and draw the U.S. further into the morass by targeting American bases, such as the drone strike that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan more than a week ago. When the U.S. responded with strikes on Iran-backed militias across Syria and Iraq at the weekend, it was a message directed squarely at Qaani: Back off.

Whether Qaani will be able to put a lid on the militias, freshly galvanized by Israel’s war in Gaza and stung by the American attacks, is perhaps the greatest source of uncertainty across the region.

The U.S.’s killing of Soleimani was a specific attempt to dislocate the chain of command running from Tehran to its armed allies operating from Syria and Iraq to Yemen, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. But it didn’t degrade their ability to upend the region; it just made them more freewheeling, disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, attacking Israel and posing a growing threat to American forces.

“If the aim was to diminish Iran’s control of these groups, the United States achieved that. That’s where the problem comes from,” said Hamidreza Azizi, visiting fellow and expert on Iran’s regional policies at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP.

Qaani, on the right in uniform, attended Soleimani’s funeral in 2020. PHOTO: SALAMPIX/ZUMA PRESS

Indeed, the Quds Force commander has spent weeks since Hamas’s attack on Israel shuttling between the militias to tell them to make sure their attacks against Israel and U.S. bases aren’t so severe that they end up triggering a broader regional war, according to a Western security official, a senior Lebanese official and an adviser to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned last week that “we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that,” referring to the year of the Yom Kippur War.

Soleimani had been instrumental in arming and training Iran’s alliance of nonstate actors. He was arguably the region’s most recognizable commander, with an almost mythical aura among his followers and a public image cultivated by the Iranian leadership as evidence of its growing influence in the Middle East.

“Soleimani was thought about as a once-in-a-lifetime figure, a generational player. They don’t come down the pike so often,” said Ray Takeyh, an expert on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank. “Qaani is a more understated figure.”

Born in the late 1950s, Qaani has revealed few biographical details to the public. A bureaucrat, he spent much of his career overseeing Iran’s interests in Afghanistan and spoke little to no Arabic. Unlike other senior figures in Tehran, he doesn’t appear to have played an active role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, joining the Revolutionary Guard, formed to defend the new rulers, a full year later, in 1980.

President Ebrahim Raisi at a Revolutionary Guard base in Bandar Abbas, southern Iran, on Friday. PHOTO: IRANIAN PRESIDENCY OFFICE/SHUTTERSTOCK

He befriended Soleimani in the early 1980s on the southern front during Iran’s war with Iraq, and later said the fighting forged a deep friendship between them. 

“We are all war kids,” he said in a 2015 interview, cited by Ali Alfoneh, an expert on the Revolutionary Guard. “Those who become friends at times of hardship have deeper and more lasting relations than those who become friends just because they are neighborhood friends.”

In the 1990s, following the war, Qaani rose in the ranks and as deputy chief of the Guard’s ground forces turned his attention to Afghanistan, where he fought drug smugglers and later supported the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which worked with the U.S. to topple the Taliban in 2001. When Soleimani mobilized tens of thousands of fighters to defend the Syrian government against Islamic State forces during the civil war there, Qaani helped recruit Afghan Shiites to join their ranks.

As the wars in Iraq and Syria waned, the role of Iran’s militia network changed. Many became part of the political fabric—in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is both a political party and viewed as a deterrent against attacks from Israel, and in Yemen, where the Houthis have captured the capital and are viewed as the de facto government.

Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis: Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance,’ Explained

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Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis: Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance,’ Explained

Play video: Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis: Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance,’ Explained

Iran-backed groups form a land bridge across the Middle East and connect in an alliance that Tehran calls the “Axis of Resistance.” Here’s what to know about the alliance that includes Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Photo Illustration: Eve Hartley

In Iraq, the militias integrated deeper into the country’s political and security system, gaining power to influence national politics, while remaining outside state control.

Receiving funding and arms from Iran, the groups all operated within an overall framework established by Tehran, but with the autonomy to pursue their own domestic agendas. The groups’ growing self-sufficiency relieved Tehran of some of the economic burden of financing them, but also lessened its ability to restrain them.

This is a problem for Iran.

Whereas Soleimani used his charisma to mobilize what he called “the axis of resistance,” Qaani has sought to tie Iran’s disparate allies closer together at an operational level, Takeyh said.

“And that requires more of a backroom conversation than a cult of personality like Soleimani,” he said.

Arash Azizi, a historian at Clemson University, S.C., and the author of a biography on Soleimani, said that is especially true for the Iraqi militias, perhaps the most volatile of all the pieces in the Quds Force network.

“Soleimani had built a relationship with them over the years and was respected by them tremendously,” he said. “Qaani lacks the charisma and history of relationship with these Iraqi and other Arab groups…As a result, Qaani struggles much more in keeping the Iraqi groups in check and in line with the broader axis. Same problem exists in relation to Houthis who are more independent-minded.”

Members of a Shiite militant group attend a funeral in Baghdad at the weekend for fellow members killed in a U.S. airstrike aimed at deterring further attacks on American forces. PHOTO: HADI MIZBAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

With the Middle East on the brink of what could be a broader conflict, Qaani and other Iranian officials are working to ensure that their militias don’t provoke further attacks.

After the drone strike in Jordan, Iranian officials traveled to Iraq to tell its allies there that the attack had crossed a line by killing American troops, according to a senior adviser to the Iranian government who participated in the meetings. 

U.S. officials say they have yet to see evidence that Iran ordered the attack, and Iran wouldn’t gain anything from killing American troops, Azizi of SWP said.

“The aim since October 7 has been to keep the other fronts busy to provide some breathing space for Hamas, but without inviting broader conflict or a U.S. attack,” he said. “It doesn’t fit into the Iranian pattern of escalation, and wouldn’t serve any of Iran’s strategic aims at the moment.” 

The question now is whether the militias will listen.

Costas Paris contributed to this article.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com

11. Opinion | Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the ‘day after’ may doom Israel’s war effort

Excerpts:

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has tense relations with Netanyahu (the prime minister tried to fire him last year), has laid out his own day-after plan, one that is adamantly opposed by the right-wing ministers. Under the Gallant plan, the IDF would retain long-term military control of Gaza, but Israel would not administer the territory as it did until 2005. Gallant imagines local Palestinian administrators, not affiliated with Hamas, functioning under the oversight of the United States, European nations and moderate Arab regimes.

There’s only one problem: There is no chance that any other countries would take responsibility for Gaza without any Israeli commitment to Palestinian statehood. Yet Netanyahu has ruled out a two-state solution and even a Palestinian Authority role in Gaza. If Netanyahu went along with these demands from Israel’s international partners, his right-wing allies would turn on him and he would lose power. That, in turn, would leave him in a weaker position to defend himself in his ongoing corruption trial — and in any future commission of inquiry about the failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack.

Tragically, Netanyahu’s personal and political incentives are to allow military operations to continue indefinitely without making any hard decisions about what comes next. Thus, when the prime minister speaks of the “day after” in Gaza, he limits himself to vapid generalities — such as saying on Jan. 18 that “total victory requires that Gaza be demilitarized, under Israel’s full security control.” Note that he does not even broach the all-important question of who will exercise political power in Gaza.

Opinion | Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the ‘day after’ may doom Israel’s war effort

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · February 5, 2024

It’s been nearly four months since Israel launched Operation Swords of Iron in response to the horrific Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still has failed to articulate a viable “day after” strategy for what happens if and when the guns fall silent. His latest dereliction may consign the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip to failure despite the bravery and dedication of ordinary Israeli soldiers.

While much of the media coverage focuses on the heavy casualties suffered by the Palestinian civilians that Hamas uses as human shields, the Israel Defense Forces are also inflicting heavy losses on Hamas fighters. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. intelligence estimates that the IDF has killed 20 percent to 30 percent of Hamas’s prewar strength of roughly 30,000 combatants and wounded roughly another 30 percent. (Israel’s figures for Hamas casualties are slightly higher.)

Any conventional military force that has suffered such heavy casualties would be rendered “combat ineffective.” But Hamas is continuing to wage guerrilla warfare against Israeli forces, and its command structure remains intact. While Israel has killed many lower-level commanders, it has not yet located Hamas’s senior leaders, including Yehiya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack who is believed to be hiding in the tunnels under his hometown, Khan Younis. The IDF has discovered that Hamas’s tunnel network is even more extensive than suspected — and as much as 80 percent of the tunnels remain intact despite months of bombardment.

There are even reports of Hamas militants returning to areas in northern Gaza where Israel has reduced its forces in the past month. Hamas could actually wind up inadvertently benefiting from Israel’s heavy bombardment: The terrorist group has figured out how to turn unexploded Israeli ordnance into its own bombs and missiles.

“Israel has been highly successful in degrading Hamas militarily and must complete the work in the two remaining areas of Gaza: Khan Younis and Rafah,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, told me. “It has been far less successful in undermining Hamas’s control as the ruling body in Gaza.”

So where does the Israeli operation go from here? Retired Israeli army Col. Michael Milshtein, a former head of Palestinian affairs for military intelligence, told me Israel is at a crossroads: “It must either promote a broad deal regarding the hostages, which means the end of the war and probably withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, or implement the strategic goal of erasing Hamas military capacities, which demands full control over Gaza.” The “in-between strategy,” he added, “isn’t successful.”

Yet that neither-fish-nor-fowl strategy is just what Netanyahu is pursuing. While Israeli forces continue to fight in Gaza, the Israeli government is deep in talks in Paris in the hope of reaching another hostage release deal with Hamas. The two sides are discussing a cease-fire of at least one to two months and the release of many convicted Palestinian terrorists in Israel in return for the return of all the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. Hamas is demanding that Israel end its offensive altogether, while Netanyahu’s right-wing cabinet allies are opposed to any extended pause. Netanyahu is trying to square that circle.

Whatever happens with the cease-fire, the Israeli end game in Gaza remains as opaque as when the war began. Quite simply, Netanyahu refuses to lay out any day-after strategy because to do so is too politically risky for him. The United States and its Arab allies are urging Israel to involve the Palestinian Authority in governing Gaza and to create a road map for Palestinian statehood. But the far-right parties that keep Netanyahu in power are dead-set against a two-state solution or any role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s right-wing allies prefer an Israeli military government — i.e., another Gaza occupation that would be anathema to Palestinians and the rest of the world. They are even agitating to expel many, perhaps all, Palestinians from Gaza and to bring back Israeli settlements (which were evacuated in 2005). Israel will not carry out this monstrous ethnic-cleansing plan, which has no mainstream support, but an Israeli military government remains a distinct possibility.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has tense relations with Netanyahu (the prime minister tried to fire him last year), has laid out his own day-after plan, one that is adamantly opposed by the right-wing ministers. Under the Gallant plan, the IDF would retain long-term military control of Gaza, but Israel would not administer the territory as it did until 2005. Gallant imagines local Palestinian administrators, not affiliated with Hamas, functioning under the oversight of the United States, European nations and moderate Arab regimes.

There’s only one problem: There is no chance that any other countries would take responsibility for Gaza without any Israeli commitment to Palestinian statehood. Yet Netanyahu has ruled out a two-state solution and even a Palestinian Authority role in Gaza. If Netanyahu went along with these demands from Israel’s international partners, his right-wing allies would turn on him and he would lose power. That, in turn, would leave him in a weaker position to defend himself in his ongoing corruption trial — and in any future commission of inquiry about the failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack.

Tragically, Netanyahu’s personal and political incentives are to allow military operations to continue indefinitely without making any hard decisions about what comes next. Thus, when the prime minister speaks of the “day after” in Gaza, he limits himself to vapid generalities — such as saying on Jan. 18 that “total victory requires that Gaza be demilitarized, under Israel’s full security control.” Note that he does not even broach the all-important question of who will exercise political power in Gaza.

Israel is in dire danger of ignoring one of the most enduring lessons of counterinsurgency: Namely, victory requires not just tactical military success but a viable political end-state. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how many insurgents you kill — more will simply spring up to replace them. That is a lesson the United States learned at high cost in Afghanistan and Iraq.

David Petraeus, retired general and former U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me: “We experienced in 2003 following the fight to Baghdad and the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime what the lack of adequate post-conflict planning can bring. Our vision and organization were inadequate, and the shortcomings were then compounded by seriously counterproductive decisions such as firing the Iraqi military. … In so doing, we created hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with an incentive to oppose the new Iraq rather than to support it and sowed the seeds of the insurgency that would plague us for at least four subsequent years.”

Petraeus hopes “Israel can determine and convey a vision that will enable them to avoid what we experienced.” But it seems increasingly unlikely the Israeli government will ever come up with a viable postwar plan as long as Netanyahu remains in power and at the head of a far-right government.

If elections were held today, polls indicate that Netanyahu would lose by a large margin to his more centrist war-cabinet partner, retired Gen. Benny Gantz. But while Bibi is terrible at governance, he is very good at politics. He has become known as “the magician” for his ability to retain office. Thus, he could very well cling to power as Israel drifts into a costly quagmire. That would be a tragedy for both Israelis and Palestinians. Unless there is a postwar administration in Gaza that has some legitimacy and addresses the needs of its people, Hamas — or some other radical group — will simply spring from the rubble left by the Israeli offensive.

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · February 5, 2024

12. Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon?

Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon?

A decade ago, the Pentagon paid a team of experts to study the possibility of an entrepreneur or private company building and selling bombs. Their worrisome conclusions are even more relevant today.

https://www.wsj.com/business/could-a-rogue-billionaire-make-a-nuclear-weapon-cd8bfde2?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1

By Sharon Weinberger

Follow

Feb. 2, 2024 9:00 pm ET

I first learned of a secretive Pentagon-funded study about rogue nuclear entrepreneurs more than five years ago from Stephen Lukasik, a former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

We were talking about the Office of Net Assessment, the long-term analysis division of the Pentagon, famous in Washington policy circles for its predictions about the Soviet Union’s military capabilities and then later China’s rise. Lukasik mentioned that he had led several studies for the office, including one that looked at whether a private company or wealthy entrepreneur could produce nuclear weapons.

“We worked out what a private organization would do if it wanted to build and sell nuclear weapons,” Lukasik told me. “It turned out to be a fairly profitable business.”

Intrigued, I asked if he would share a copy. A few days later Lukasik, whom I had known for two decades, sent me all four volumes of the study, which was completed in 2013. The report laid out in exquisite detail, including staffing levels and cash flow projections, how such an enterprise could operate.

It would take as little as a billion dollars’ investment and five years to produce the first bomb, the study concluded. 

The report read like background notes for an airport thriller: A Bond-villain-like corporation would set up shop as a legitimate business, managing a series of nominally independent subsidiaries responsible for different parts of weapons production in locations around the world. One company, for example, would be responsible for designing the centrifuges; another would produce the highly enriched uranium; a third would do the chemical processing. A company could even work directly with a rogue nuclear power. “Would our hypothesized enterprise ever go into partnership with North Korea? Or perhaps with Iran?” the report asks.

When I first read the study in 2018, it struck me as a fascinating premise, but implausible. Nuclear weapons are the domain of nations for a reason: They require huge facilities, big budgets and technical expertise you can’t exactly advertise for on LinkedIn. 

But now, just five years later—and more than a decade after the study was completed—much has changed in the world. Private companies have long been involved in building weapons, including nuclear weapons, but the federal government has traditionally been the one funding and controlling the technologies. Now, even the Pentagon acknowledges that private capital is the dominant source of funding for key technologies.

Billionaires like Elon Musk control technologies they’ve developed outside of federal contracting, like Musk’s network of Starlink satellites, that can change the course of wars. Venture capitalists are flocking to the defense sector with the Pentagon’s encouragement. Abroad, the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary firm whose global empire stretches from Europe to Africa, has shown the ability to threaten regimes. 

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gestures toward the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, which could be armed with a nuclear warhead, in a 2017 photo; North Korea was among the countries analyzed as potential partners for entrepreneurs in the Pentagon-funded report. PHOTO: KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Today, the idea of entrepreneurs and privately funded companies changing the military balance sounds less fanciful, and I wondered what the participants in this study would now make of its conclusions. 

Lukasik died in 2019, and two of the others—Fritz Ermarth, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and Barry Wessler, regarded as one of the godfathers of the Internet—have also died. But most of the other contributors were eager to talk about it, even if they sometimes disagreed with the conclusions.

There’s no mention of Musk or any other U.S.-based entrepreneur—the study specifically excludes American citizens in its tracking of billionaires who could finance such an operation—but Brian Michael Jenkins, a contributor to the study and a senior adviser to the president of Rand Corp., said that a Musk-like figure was precisely the type of scenario the contributors had in mind. 

Military development has changed dramatically since the Manhattan Project, the secret World War II-era effort to develop the first nuclear bomb. Building nuclear weapons no longer requires the scope and cost depicted in last summer’s blockbuster “Oppenheimer.”

Entrepreneurs like Musk are able to build on the massive government investments in rockets and nuclear technology, rather than starting from scratch. The study, Jenkins said, was intended to see what might happen when the barrier to entry to developing military systems is so much lower. 

“What could you achieve with a billion? What could you achieve with $10 billion? And is that really beyond the reach of some individuals?” he said. “Well, in the case of an Elon Musk, it means you can put rockets into space without NASA. And that’s the point of this.”

Miles Townes, who left graduate school to work on the study, told me he still thinks about it every day. He said the study was sparked by the way gas centrifuges had lowered the bar to entry when it came to nuclear weapons.

In the movies, spies turn over detailed designs for a nuclear weapon. But nuclear experts argue that what is truly secret is not necessarily how to design the weapon—much of that exists on the Internet or in the public domain—but the processes necessary to make the critical materials, like highly enriched uranium.

Countries seeking to enrich uranium, whether for nuclear energy or weapons, are increasingly turning toward gas centrifuges, and those “basic centrifuges appear to be rather easy to make—perhaps so simple that they are within the reach of nearly any developing country,” wrote Scott Kemp, then a graduate student at Princeton, in a dissertation that caught Lukasik’s eye.

Kemp’s thesis led Lukasik to question whether such centrifuges were also within reach of a private company, or perhaps a Silicon Valley billionaire. (Kemp, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me in an email that he was not aware his thesis sparked a Pentagon-funded study.)

The actual study consisted of monthly meetings at Lukasik’s suburban Washington, D.C., home. Approximately 10 participants took on the parts of two opposing forces—a red team made up of nuclear entrepreneurs and a blue team representing governments trying to detect and stop them.

In between meetings, members were assigned to research the technical and political issues that might allow a private nuclear proliferator. “My best friend was the Alibaba website, because I can find anything on it—(like) mass quantities of nitric acid,” recalled Katie Leach, a chemist whom Lukasik recruited into the project.

Andrew Marshall, former director of the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, in August 2018. PHOTO: LEXEY SWALL

When the study was done, Lukasik relayed the findings to its sponsor, Andrew Marshall, a legendary figure in the Pentagon, who headed the Office of Net Assessment for decades. The study was never released, or even discussed publicly, in part because those who contributed believed the final report was classified. Two of the participants I interviewed said they were told to remove any copies from their computers. “I knew that Andy treated it as classified,” Lukasik said of Marshall back in 2018. Marshall died in 2019.

A Pentagon spokesman said the report itself was unclassified, but “contains sensitive material” that confined its distribution “to a limited audience of senior national security officials within the Department of Defense.” The office commissioned the study as part of analyzing “key trends and dynamics impacting the international system,” the spokesman added. “The pursuit of nuclear weapons and the proliferation of technology enabling that pursuit has been one such trend.”

Not everyone I spoke with about the study agreed that billionaires could—or would want to—operate a nuclear weapons business. After all, Musk’s grandiosity led him to buy Twitter, not a uranium mine in Kazakhstan, and the Wagner Group, whose ultimate fate remains unclear, doesn’t appear to be pursuing nukes.

Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the study, questioned its premise, arguing that private companies wouldn’t want the risk of exposure that bomb-making entails. “The business case would not be for buying finished weapons, right? The business case would be for buying the production capabilities.”

Lewis pointed to the Pakistan-based A.Q. Khan network of the 1980s and ’90s, which used a series of shell companies to sell the equipment and know-how needed for nuclear enrichment, sort of like a starter kit for a nuclear bomb. “That’s a much safer, more reasonable line of business,” Lewis said.

Then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inspects gas centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz facility in 2008. PHOTO: HANDOUT/REUTERS

But in a sense, that’s precisely the business case the study examines: Building bombs exposes you to detection because it’s difficult to hide the facilities. The same fear of exposure that might make a private company hesitate to build and sell bombs also could give countries a powerful incentive to buy finished bombs rather than produce their own. The question is really about who wants to shoulder the risk, and the reward.

The report hypothesized that the potential customer might want to avoid the international pressure that comes with having those production capabilities, and a private company would be motivated to take on the risk for profit. It posits a scenario involving Saudi Arabia responding to a suspected Iranian weapons program. Not wanting to risk the exposure of the large facilities involved in nuclear weapons production, Riyadh might, the study suggests, find the idea of buying the finished product more attractive. “The project would remain deniable,” the report states.

Ultimately, the study’s worth shouldn’t be measured by how well it meshes with current events, Jenkins told me. “It wasn’t intended to be a prediction,” he said.

The point, he said, was to get national security institutions thinking about potential threats that come from the commercial availability of technology, and not just those linked to nuclear weapons. Jenkins suggested that biological weapons could be privatized more easily than nukes because fewer facilities are involved and they’re harder to detect.

“I think in the 10 years since, there’s certainly nothing that has occurred that I would say that makes what we were thinking about less likely,” Jenkins said. “If anything, if we’re talking about the privatization of war-making and waging wars through deniable proxies and private parties, I think the trajectory supports that thinking.”

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the February 3, 2024, print edition as 'Could a Rogue Billionaire Make a Nuclear Weapon?'.

13. "You Americans, You're Fascinated By Power"

:-) 

Literature still has value in national security affairs.

"You Americans, You're Fascinated By Power"

By John J. Waters

February 03, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/03/you_americans_youre_fascinated_by_power_1009387.html

In most places around the country, the point of acquiring power is to do something with it. Your state’s legislators pass a corporate tax cut to attract new business. Or, your mayor deploys city funds to repair streets damaged by winter’s snow and ice, paving the way for a smooth commute.

But D.C. is different.

More than other places, in D.C., the best use of power is not to discharge it toward solving some real or concrete problem that exists in the world, but to use power to create even more power. Whether that’s a better committee assignment, a bigger office, deeper donor pool, or a bigger professional network, there’s an urgency to spend what you have in furtherance of your ambition for more, to apply all of one’s tools in a strategy that (swiftly) generates more and greater power.

It’s a unique environment, and one in which military historian Eliot Cohen has thrived for more than 30 years. He’s advised presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals and diplomats. “In government and out,” writes David Petraeus, “Eliot Cohen has consistently been one of the shrewdest observers of the exercise of power.” In his new book The Hollow Crown, Cohen finds in Shakespeare the characters and stories that illustrate what he has learned about the ebb and flow of power in the real world, and it’s on this theme that we pick up our conversation. I talked with the author about military leadership, Coriolanus, and the Henry plays in part one of our conversation, which you can find here. Now, on to part two …

What is the state of “power” in 2024?

Power is more diffuse today than in previous periods of history.

As a group, elites don’t have the same voice as they once did because the number of elites has expanded, so you don’t have groups that have a high level of authority. For example, you once had senior clerics in this country who had a profound moral voice. I grew up in Boston and I’m Jewish but if Cardinal Richard Cushing said something, then people would really pay attention. Presidents of the great university played a role in our national debate that they do not play right now. Because power has gotten very diffuse, it’s sometimes in the hands of people who are irresponsible. Look at Congress. Our committee chairs are not powerful anymore. The Speaker of the House once was powerful. We’ve watched several of them get defenestrated. The elites lost their moral authority and there is no coherent leadership group rising in its place.

What concerns you about the state of politics in our country?

I am concerned that power is being separated from character. What one hears in Washington, DC is that someone is “smart.” That’s the least important thing to have in a leader. It’s very easy to rent smart or hire smart people—it’s much harder to find people with good judgment and good character. I don’t think we’re living in a world that cares about honesty, loyalty, consistency, willingness to sacrifice or give of themselves. And, on the judgment side, do our leaders have an ability to understand enough what is happening to decide what ought to be done? The absence of that quality is how you get into trouble. I make reference in the book to George Washington, who was far from being the smartest but had the strongest character and best judgment. As a counter-example, Richard II was a brilliant talker … and he’s the last guy on earth you want running something.

But Machiavelli separated politics from ethics some 500 years ago, and so I wonder if this phenomenon you observe of an absence of character in politics is really that new at all …

Yes, but first, we don’t have to accept that Machiavelli was necessarily right! Also, Machiavelli had his own conception of virtue, or virtú, that is very different from ours, but still involved some qualities of character that we don’t have much of.

What is Shakespeare’s first lesson on power?

I take away from Shakespeare that all power is dangerous. It’s dangerous when you inherit it because you may not be suited to its exercise. I mention Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt, how that plan for succession at General Electric didn’t work out despite all of Welch’s great processes for identifying high performing executives, something he devoted himself to for some 20 years. Acquiring power by manipulation means you’re dealing people at the top who are very slippery. Go to the Federalist Papers. The genius of the American Constitution is that ambition will counter ambition—it’s not set up for a constant flow of brilliant statesmen. I was just in Israel with a delegation of national security people and was in a discussion with an old friend, and this person was saying all we need are honest judges and good people in charge. I disagree. You simply cannot count on those people always being there …

Michael Ledeen said the best government is a good czar. The worst government is a bad czar. There are more bad czars than good czars, so democracy becomes a very good alternative.

Yes, sooner or later, you’re going to end up with bad people in those positions and the system must carry on anyway. I had a professor who was a refugee from Europe during World War II. She said there are two reasons to study political science: either you’re fascinated by power or you’re afraid of power. “You Americans, you’re fascinated by it. I’m afraid of it.”

Shakespeare filled his plays with Machiavellian archetypes, people like Lady Macbeth and Iago who ultimately fail to control the outcomes of their schemes for power. What did Shakespeare think of Machiavelli?

He certainly knew about him, because Richard III, before he becomes king, makes reference to him. But his picture of human beings is far more subtle and nuanced than Machiavelli’s. Lady Macbeth, for example, is consumed with guilt and eventually goes mad; Iago arranges the ruin of Othello for no particular purpose, because he can never replace him. These are not Machiavellian characters like, for example, Cesare Borgia.

You note that Machiavelli believed there’s more “virtú” in a Republic because you have so many people striving. We’re in an election year. Politicians across the country will scheme, deceive and strive in hopes of acquiring power. We should see this “virtú” in abundance. What do you suppose Machiavelli would think about our politics in 2024?

I suspect that he would think that we are a pretty pathetic lot. A lot of politicians whine, a lot of them are cowardly, a lot fear their own followers. Whatever that is, it’s not virtú.

Let’s end with a few brief questions.

Okay.

Which Shakespeare play has become too popular?

Macbeth. Macbeth and Richard III are my favorites but, if there’s someone you don’t like, then you say they’re like Macbeth or Richard. Both are wonderful plays but they are overdone.

Which Shakespeare play should be more popular?

The Henry VI plays should be read much more widely, all three of the Henry VI plays. There is no strong king or strong leadership. There’s a bunch of squabbling courtiers and politicians. Some people are villainous, others are naïve and both come to bad ends. You have demagogues interested in turning things upside down but don’t have an idea of what they want to accomplish. It’s something worth thinking about.

Finally, who is your favorite character from Shakespeare?

Prospero. He’s a flawed human being. He was oblivious as to how he was overthrown. In the first parts of The Tempest, he could be cruel. He has a short fuse and could be arbitrary and is tempted to be vengeful, but at the end he makes a decision to renounce his power. He becomes human because he can walk away from power without illusions. He knows he’s coming to the end but he can relinquish it. He uses power well but also knows he’s got to give it up if he wants to be a normal human being, and that’s a very rare thing.

John J. Waters is the author of the postwar novel River City One (Simon and Schuster), and a former deputy assistant secretary of homeland security.

​14. China’s PLA plots robot drones, 'Jame Bonds' for covert military operations

China’s PLA plots robot drones, 'Jame Bonds' for covert military operations

interestingengineering.com · by Christopher McFadden · February 5, 2024

China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has made public its desire to develop robotic, artificial intelligence special operations agents by 2035, reports the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

If ever developed, such machines would replace human agents on dangerous missions that would put human agents in extreme danger. The use of machines would also limit the risk to military planners should such assets be found and captured.

Robo-James Bond

A branch of the People's Liberation Army has announced that it is collaborating with a team of scientists to develop drones that can replace humans in complicated overseas missions in the next decade. Envisaged as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the new drone should have the ability to fly long distances, dive deep underwater, and remain hidden for extended periods. Upon receiving a command, it can swiftly emerge from the water, move towards its target, and deliver a fatal strike before disappearing beneath the waves again.

See Also

The call for the robot-special ops machine came from the PLA's unit 78092, which recently published details of a hypothetical overseas special operations plan in the Fire Control & Command Control journal. They argued that disclosing this theoretical plan would assist Chinese companies, engineers, and scientists in researching and developing new UAVs better to comprehend the military's requirements and strategic objectives.

According to the scenario, in 2035, a minor conflict broke out between China and one of its neighboring countries. Both sides agreed to use only small arms, such as small boats, drones, and anti-aircraft guns, to keep the expenses low and prevent escalating. The scenario does not specify the other country's name but refers to a river that flows along the border between the two nations.

The river has an average depth of 98 feet (30 meters) and a maximum depth of 131 feet (40 meters). China shares multiple rivers with its neighboring countries that could meet this criteria, such as the Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra River, which is vast and deep and runs from Tibet into India.

In this scenario, the Chinese military has been assigned a special mission. They must launch a swift, silent attack on vital installations deep behind enemy lines. The target is a crucial command and supply hub for the opposing forces. It is hidden along a river, around 25 miles (40km) from the front line.

The scenario demands the sole use of drones. They must be designed for special operations, operate alone or in swarms, navigate river depths, evade detection, and launch torpedoes at enemy boats. The PLA also suggests they require the drones to have advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems to hover over the battlefield, assess damage, and determine if further action is necessary after the initial attack.

If the enemy forces attempt to flee, the drones must also be capable of pursuing and eliminating them, ensuring complete victory before returning to Chinese territory—quite a shopping list.

More to come

Whatever the outcome of this scenario for potential developers is yet to be seen, but the Chinese military, the SCMP reports, aims to dominate the UAV industry through superior technology and numerical superiority, which could lead to financial crises for competitors. China has successfully launched its special ops drone project and is planning to introduce more innovative equipment to meet its growing defense needs, according to PLA's unit 78092.

interestingengineering.com · by Christopher McFadden · February 5, 2024

15. Quantum Talent: An American Civil-Military Fusion

Excerpts:

This is the American version of the Chinese civil-military fusion, a strategy to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world. Instead of a dictatorial strategy where the Chinese government builds back doors into commercial technology companies, however, we can embrace a bottom-up approach. This starts with two practical changes.

First, technology companies should expand their outreach to the military reservist community through programs such as SkillBridge and the Defense Ventures Program. There are over 770,000 reservists around the country, with thousands more entering each month. These reservists are highly motivated, with relevant experience that will immediately improve team performance while also providing key insights into military needs and initiatives.

Second, the military should embrace more flexible talent policies tied to strategic efforts. Increase the benefits of reserve duty while decreasing the costs. This is critical to retain the best and brightest who want to continue serving the nation. The Army, National Guard, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps are trying to address friction points, yet the reserves are largely ignored in strategic planning. An example is the new National Defense Industrial Strategy, which talks a lot about recruiting and workforce development for the companies building our military systems but never mentions reservists.

If a quantum talent approach is successful, military organizations will better retain talent that provides access to critical skills they can’t produce on their own. Commercial companies get proven leaders who can identify and pursue opportunities to support the government.

Quantum Talent: An American Civil-Military Fusion

By William Treseder

February 05, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/02/05/quantum_talent_an_american_civil-military_fusion_1009547.html?mc_cid=20992350f9&mc_eid=70bf478f36

There is a small but growing movement of reservists behind the deployment of new capabilities in support of national security. Think of these reservists as “quantum talent,” occupying a role in both the military and commercial worlds. These tech-savvy reservists bring an enormous amount of critical experience to the table, whether they’re working with cutting-edge companies or running their own startups.

Think what could happen if we truly harnessed the skills and passion of these reservists. They could be game-changers for the U.S. economy, accelerating the development of new capabilities that enhance America’s technological dominance, deterring our adversaries and strengthening our allies. 

Calling in the reserves

In the last few decades, the defense industrial base has drifted far apart from commercial industries. The intertwined communities of researchers, engineers, and technicians from previous eras are now split apart into distinct communities with little overlap. They work on different problems, for different organizations with different values and goals, instead of pulling together in the nation’s interest. 

Attempts to address this split haven’t worked well. The infamous Google Maven insurrection, when over 4,000 employees forced the company to exit a contract supporting the U.S. Defense Department is a notable case in point. There are many examples of commercial technology companies walking back from defense, and even avoiding it all together. 

One strategy to bridge the gap is gaining traction, however. The Defense Department is realizing how valuable reservists with high-demand / low-density skill sets – so called “quantum talent” – can be. The reserve community could be a strategic tool to close the many skill gaps facing the military, including areas such as cybersecurity, product management, and data science. 

Quantum talent emerged when the first few reservists trickled in to support the Defense Innovation Unit. Thousands have since formed a movement with the Army’s 75th Innovation Command, the Air Force’s ARCWERX, the Marine Innovation Unit, the Office of Strategic Capital, and soon inside the Navy’s innovation command, NavalX. These reservists have been responsible for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy new capabilities in support of the mission.

Unlike those who completely separated from the military – becoming veterans – these reservists maintain a commitment to the armed forces and regularly activate for administrative and operational purposes. In the language of quantum computing, they are not forced to choose between binary 1s and 0s. Thousands of these reservists occupy the “superposition” that joins the civil and the military – quantum talent, if you will. 

The military cannot afford to pay these highly successful professionals for the work they do in the civilian world. In their civilian jobs, these reservists command remarkably high salaries well beyond the reach of the federal government. Through their reserve status, however, the nation can leverage the same skills, experience, and network at a fraction of the price. 

Changing the system

Tapping into quantum talent requires some painful rebuilding of Human Resource systems and processes. The existing systems are set up to focus entirely on military-relevant data such as rank, job/billet, time in service, etc. In many cases there isn’t even a place to include meaningful information about each person’s civilian experience. Early results to get around these challenges are encouraging, however. Tools such as the Army’s IPPS-A and GigEagle appear to offer commanders more flexibility for recruiting, developing, and retaining personnel. 

Commercial companies can also see the benefits. Many cutting-edge companies with reservist employees tap into their experiences when pursuing opportunities to sell into the federal government. In some cases, the reservists themselves are founding companies that blend the best of Silicon Valley technology and the Defense Department mission. Startups such as Shield AI, Reveal Technologies, Swarmbotics AI, and Saronic Technologies include reservists in their founding teams as they deliver the next generation of capabilities in autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and data analytics.

This is the American version of the Chinese civil-military fusion, a strategy to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world. Instead of a dictatorial strategy where the Chinese government builds back doors into commercial technology companies, however, we can embrace a bottom-up approach. This starts with two practical changes.

First, technology companies should expand their outreach to the military reservist community through programs such as SkillBridge and the Defense Ventures Program. There are over 770,000 reservists around the country, with thousands more entering each month. These reservists are highly motivated, with relevant experience that will immediately improve team performance while also providing key insights into military needs and initiatives. 

Second, the military should embrace more flexible talent policies tied to strategic efforts. Increase the benefits of reserve duty while decreasing the costs. This is critical to retain the best and brightest who want to continue serving the nation. The Army, National Guard, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps are trying to address friction points, yet the reserves are largely ignored in strategic planning. An example is the new National Defense Industrial Strategy, which talks a lot about recruiting and workforce development for the companies building our military systems but never mentions reservists.

If a quantum talent approach is successful, military organizations will better retain talent that provides access to critical skills they can’t produce on their own. Commercial companies get proven leaders who can identify and pursue opportunities to support the government.

William Treseder is co-founder and senior vice president of enterprise services at the innovation company BMNT Inc. and Chief Strategy Officer at the Marine Innovation Unit of the USMC. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DoD or its components.

16. Russia’s Adaptation Advantage

Excerpts:

The West must also, of course, continue arming Ukraine with advanced weapons. But although increased overall Western provisions are important, it is crucial that the West focus on producing and sending the arms most likely to provide Kyiv with a strategic advantage. It must therefore create a stronger connection between Ukrainian tactical learning and industrial production. Combat lessons must pass quickly from the battlefield to manufacturers, making it easier for soldiers to influence the production of equipment and munitions. (Ukraine and its allies should, simultaneously, try to interfere with Russia’s ability to use tactical lessons to improve defense production, including by meddling with Moscow’s supply chains.)

Finally, Ukraine must generally increase the speed at which it deploys new adaptations. One of the Russian military’s remaining key weaknesses is that it is “a structure that becomes better over time at managing the problems it immediately faces, but also one that struggles to anticipate new threats,” as a recent Royal United Services Institute report stated. This is a significant chink in Russia’s strategic armor. It means that although Russia’s ability to respond to challenges has improved it can still be caught on the back foot. To capitalize on this disadvantage, Ukraine must introduce and systematize its new adaptations quickly, so it can inflict as much damage as possible before Russia learns how to react.

Making these improvements will not be easy. All institutions possess limited capacity to absorb change over a short period of time—what the political scientist Michael Horowitz calls “adoption capacity”—and the Ukrainians have already undertaken an enormous range of adaptations in this war. It does not help that to truly work, adaptation needs to be multifaceted and comprehensive. “Emerging technology is vital to each capability,” the military historian and analyst T. X. Hammes wrote in an April report. “But, like the development of the blitzkrieg or carrier aviation, these transformational capabilities can only be realized by combining several technologies effectively and implementing them in coherent, well-trained operational concepts.” This requires good leadership, rapid experimentation, and the humility to learn from one’s mistakes.

Ukraine has no time to waste in implementing these measures. Russia has significantly improved its ability to learn and adapt in Ukraine. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more Moscow will improve its strategic adaptation. The most convincing justification for improving Ukraine’s strategic adaptation and hindering Russia’s is to ensure that Ukraine does not lose the war. Russia currently holds the strategic initiative—so unfortunately, defeat is still a possible outcome.

Russia’s Adaptation Advantage

Early in the War, Moscow Struggled to Shift Gears—but Now It’s Outlearning Kyiv

By Mick Ryan

February 5, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Mick Ryan · February 5, 2024

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Kyiv and Moscow have waged an adaptation battle, trying to learn and improve their military effectiveness. In the early stages of the invasion, Ukraine had the advantage. Empowered by a rapid influx of Western weapons, motivated by the existential threat posed by Russia’s aggression, and well prepared for the attack, Kyiv was able to develop new ways of fighting in remarkably short order. Russia, in contrast, fumbled: a big, arrogant, and lumbering bear, overconfident of a rapid victory. The institutional shock of Russia’s lack of success, in turn, slowed its ability to learn and adapt.

But after two years of war, the adaptation battle has changed. The quality gap between Ukraine and Russia has closed. Ukraine still has an innovative and bottom-up military culture, which allows it to quickly introduce new battlefield technologies and tactics. But it can struggle to make sure that those lessons are systematized and spread throughout the entire armed forces. Russia, on the other hand, is slower to learn from the bottom up because of a reluctance to report failure and a more centralized command philosophy. Yet when Russia does finally learn something, it is able to systematize it across the military and through its large defense industry.

These differences are reflected in the ways the two states innovate. Ukraine is better at tactical adaptation: learning and improving on the battlefield. Russia is superior at strategic adaptation, or learning and adaptation that affects national and military policymaking, such as how states use their resources. Both forms of adaptation are important. But it is the latter type that is most crucial to winning wars.

The longer this war lasts, the better Russia will get at learning, adapting, and building a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will absorb new ideas from the battlefield and rearrange its tactics accordingly. Its strategic adaptation already helped it fend off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and over the last few months it has helped Russian troops take more territory from Kyiv. Ultimately, if Russia’s edge in strategic adaptation persists without an appropriate Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat.

THE LONG GAME

After struggling during its early military operations in Ukraine, Russia adapted its command-and-control structure. In April 2022, the country appointed a single commander to oversee its full-scale invasion, jettisoning the dysfunctional, fractured system through which Moscow had run the war to that point. The result was a more unified effort, one that shifted the Russian invasion from multiple separate and uncoordinated campaigns in the north, east, and south of the country to a more synchronized approach—with the main effort clearly being the ground operations in eastern Ukraine. This led to Russian advances and the capture of cities such as Severodonetsk, in mid-2022.

Russia also changed how it conducted close combat. Early in the war, Russia employed combined arms, battalion-sized ground units that were often not strong enough and that demonstrated a limited capacity to integrate air and land operations and carry out ground combined-arms operations. But over the last 12 months, the Russians evolved away from such battalions. They are now integrating elite forces and conventional forces—and buttressing that combination with what many Ukrainians deride as a “meatstorm”: waves of poorly trained, disposable forces who can overwhelm and exhaust Ukrainian soldiers before more talented Russian troops arrive.

Some of this tactical innovation has been driven by military necessity, including the lack of time Russia had to train mobilized troops to high levels of proficiency. But some of it was informed by strategic top-down directives. The Wagner paramilitary company’s leaders helped promote the “meat tactics” approach by using convicts who signed up with the militia as disposable bullet catchers during the successful campaign to take Bakhmut. After seeing Wagner’s success with this grotesque strategy, Moscow’s forces adopted similar approaches for other battles. Russian infantry tactics have shifted from trying to deploy uniform battalion groups as combined arms units of action to creating a stratified division by forming into assault, specialized, and disposable “meat” troops.

Russian forces have adapted on defense, as well. After only lightly fortifying its positions early in the war—and thereby opening itself up to Ukrainian offensives—Moscow constructed deep defensive lines in the south during late 2022 and early 2023. Coupled with Russian improvements in shortening the time between target detection and the carrying out of battlefield strikes, the Ukrainians faced an adversary in the second half of 2023 that was very different from the one it faced in 2022. To overcome this evolved enemy, Ukraine was forced to adapt its tactics, technology, and operations, in part by sending some troops to Poland and other European countries for additional combined arms training before the counteroffensive began. But Kyiv’s efforts were still insufficient to the task of retaking more of the south.

The quality gap between Ukraine and Russia has closed.

The Russian military has also become better at protecting its vehicles. In the early days of the war, Ukraine used drones and precision missiles to successfully destroy many of Moscow’s tanks and trucks, leading to multiple embarrassing Russian defeats. But in response the country’s troops began creating improvised armor. After large quantities of Russian logistical vehicles were attacked during the advance on Kyiv, the troops began adding improvised armor on these trucks. This makeshift armor eventually gained greater sophistication with what have come to be called “cope cages”—slat armor or cage armor. Such armor first appeared on German tanks in World War II. But it has also been used in modern conflicts, including by coalition forces deployed in the 2003 Iraq war and now on Russian tanks and self-propelled artillery. These cages have helped either crush the fuses of Ukrainian antitank weapons before they hit a vehicle’s main armor or forced antitank weapons to denotate before they can penetrate the vehicle. Together, the cages have provided another layer of physical protection to Russia’s tanks and trucks, and they appear to have given their crews more confidence to operate in places where there is a high risk of drone or loitering munition attacks.

This defensive approach may have started as a tactical innovation. But eventually, the adoption of cages was systematized. The Russian Army had its units, en masse, use cages as a systemic approach to defeating loitering munitions, top-attack missiles (such as the Javelin), and drones. In 2023, Russian commanders even issued formal direction on how to construct and mount cope cages to trucks, artillery, and armored vehicles. Moscow now offers such cages on export versions of its armored vehicles.

Moscow, meanwhile, has gotten significantly better at deploying drones itself—reversing an earlier dynamic. At the start of the war, Ukraine helped pioneer new ways of using remote controlled, semiautonomous, and autonomous drones to do everything from conducting reconnaissance to dropping bombs. The country’s self-proclaimed drone army, a collaboration of government, industry, and citizen crowdfunding, gave Kyiv an especially impressive early drone advantage. But although Russia was slower in adopting drones for a wide array of purposes, it has now overtaken Ukraine with the quantity of drones and loitering munitions and its ability to use them. Moscow has done so by mobilizing its indigenous defense industry and sourcing critical technologies from overseas, despite Western sanctions. Now, it outproduces Ukraine when it comes to drone and loitering munitions. This gap will probably continue to widen.

Modern war is almost impossible without deploying large numbers of unmanned aerial vehicles while actively countering enemy drones. Russia’s use of UAVs—in concert with its defensive lines, large amounts of artillery, attack helicopters, loitering munitions, and more responsive reconnaissance and surveillance systems—was a key reason for Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive. And as Russia learns more and continues to increase its drone production, it will gain more of an advantage.

REVVING UP

Drones are not the only weapon with which Russia has flipped the script. Ukraine was an early adopter of precision weapons, or weapons that use GPS or other guidance systems to strike targets more accurately than older systems. Kyiv had to be; given the disparity in artillery and munitions at the beginning of the war, Ukraine could not afford to waste rockets and shells. But Moscow has since learned and adapted to reduce the effect of precision weapons. It has done so by better dispersing its combat forces, artillery, and logistics. It has also complicated Ukrainian targeting by using more secure means of electronic communications, including encrypted networks and older, wired tactical-communications systems.

Traditionally a strength of the Russians, electronic warfare appeared to play a minor role in the early days of the invasion. But it has returned with a vengeance. The Russian military has collaborated with its strategic defense industry to develop and deploy a range of new and evolved vehicle- and personnel-based electronic warfare systems. These jam Ukrainian communications to break unit cohesion and slow down the country’s ability to launch attacks. Electronic warfare also cuts the link between drones and their operators, helps Russia find drone operator stations, makes it hard for Ukraine to pinpoint the location of Russia’s headquarters, and importantly, jams or degrades the effectiveness of Ukrainian precision weapons (including High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS). Although Ukraine and its partners have worked hard to keep up, they still lag behind Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities, a point made by Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi in late 2023.

Perhaps the most telling area where Russia has adapted and generated a strategic advantage is in its defense-industrial complex. The country’s September 2022 partial mobilization and other government initiatives have dramatically increased military output. Moscow has gained further arms through the contributions of North Korea, and it has bolstered its sophisticated weapons manufacturing by increasing trade with China—which has allowed Russia to acquire dual-use technologies it can no longer purchase from the West. As a result, Russia now has far more weapons and munitions than Ukraine.

Electronic warfare has returned with a vengeance.

To be sure, Russia is not better at adapting in every domain. When it comes to new ways of conducting long-range strikes, Kyiv has improved more than Moscow. Ukraine, for example, has developed the ability to undertake additional long-range strikes against Russian airfields, defense factories, and energy infrastructure over the past year. Where it was largely helpless to respond to the Russian strikes against its civil infrastructure over the winter of 2022, it now has a sophisticated capacity to respond in kind (albeit with United States–imposed limitations on using Western weapons to strike within Russia). Kyiv has used this capacity by judiciously hitting Russia, particularly in the wake of Moscow’s massed attacks on Ukraine during Christmas and New Year.

Ukraine has also developed an effective maritime strike capability using military and civilian sensors, long-range missiles, and successive generations of unmanned maritime drones. These sea drones are now able to fire missiles in addition to plowing into targets and detonating their warheads. As a result, Ukraine has destroyed multiple Russian warships and created a new maritime export corridor in the western Black Sea.

But these advantages may not last. As it has in other domains, Russia is likely to adapt around these Ukrainian developments. Russia, for example, is changing the composition and timing of its complex and massed-drone and missile attacks to identify weaknesses in Ukraine’s air defense system. And it has adapted some of its cruise missiles, such as the Kh-101, to fire flares as a protective mechanism against Ukrainian strikes.

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

The Russian military complex has developed an enhanced, constantly improving adaptation cycle that links battlefield lessons to Russia’s industry and strategies. This may confer on the Russians a significant military edge in the year ahead. Left unaddressed, it could become a war-winning advantage. Russia could wind up with an improved ability to strike from the sky, overwhelming a Ukrainian air defense system that is being denied sufficient interceptor missiles and making it easier for Russia to advance and terrorize Ukrainian citizens. It could, relatedly, lead to further Russian gains on the ground, with Moscow seizing more territory in the east, in particular, but possibly also in the south. Capturing Kyiv is unlikely in the short term. But ultimately, Moscow looking more to change the political calculus in Kyiv to be more favorable to Russia, rather than to physically take it.

To avoid this fate, Ukraine must construct its own strategic approach to learning and adaptation—one that can complement its remarkable history of combat adaptation. Ukrainian units can start by sharing successful adaptations with other Ukrainian units at a faster pace. Although Ukrainian units do often send lessons to brigades, which then send them to higher headquarters, the military must also emphasize lateral sharing. Exchanging lessons across units not only cuts the time needed for troops to learn; it also assists in standardizing tactics. Still, to create a better system of lateral learning (and to standardize tactics), top commanders must get involved. The highest levels of the Ukrainian armed forces will need to order troops to exchange more information.

To become better at strategic adaptation, Ukraine must also remove the institutional and timing obstacles that stand between tactical learning and doctrinal innovation and training. A key lesson from the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive, for example, is that the combined-arms doctrine that NATO taught to Ukrainian troops is out of date. As a result of this failure, Ukrainian individuals and units lacked the intellectual armor needed to conduct offensive operations under modern conditions. It is imperative that NATO and Ukraine speed up their sharing of combat lessons and connect them to doctrine and training institutions, so that the alliance and Kyiv can rapidly come up with better doctrines and better forms of training. NATO should, in particular, use its vast analytical capacity to help the Ukrainians quickly figure out what works. By better linking tactical lessons with strategic changes, the West could remake how this war is fought in a way that makes it much easier for Ukraine to adapt its overall war strategy.

Russia currently holds the strategic initiative.

The West must also, of course, continue arming Ukraine with advanced weapons. But although increased overall Western provisions are important, it is crucial that the West focus on producing and sending the arms most likely to provide Kyiv with a strategic advantage. It must therefore create a stronger connection between Ukrainian tactical learning and industrial production. Combat lessons must pass quickly from the battlefield to manufacturers, making it easier for soldiers to influence the production of equipment and munitions. (Ukraine and its allies should, simultaneously, try to interfere with Russia’s ability to use tactical lessons to improve defense production, including by meddling with Moscow’s supply chains.)

Finally, Ukraine must generally increase the speed at which it deploys new adaptations. One of the Russian military’s remaining key weaknesses is that it is “a structure that becomes better over time at managing the problems it immediately faces, but also one that struggles to anticipate new threats,” as a recent Royal United Services Institute report stated. This is a significant chink in Russia’s strategic armor. It means that although Russia’s ability to respond to challenges has improved it can still be caught on the back foot. To capitalize on this disadvantage, Ukraine must introduce and systematize its new adaptations quickly, so it can inflict as much damage as possible before Russia learns how to react.

Making these improvements will not be easy. All institutions possess limited capacity to absorb change over a short period of time—what the political scientist Michael Horowitz calls “adoption capacity”—and the Ukrainians have already undertaken an enormous range of adaptations in this war. It does not help that to truly work, adaptation needs to be multifaceted and comprehensive. “Emerging technology is vital to each capability,” the military historian and analyst T. X. Hammes wrote in an April report. “But, like the development of the blitzkrieg or carrier aviation, these transformational capabilities can only be realized by combining several technologies effectively and implementing them in coherent, well-trained operational concepts.” This requires good leadership, rapid experimentation, and the humility to learn from one’s mistakes.

Ukraine has no time to waste in implementing these measures. Russia has significantly improved its ability to learn and adapt in Ukraine. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more Moscow will improve its strategic adaptation. The most convincing justification for improving Ukraine’s strategic adaptation and hindering Russia’s is to ensure that Ukraine does not lose the war. Russia currently holds the strategic initiative—so unfortunately, defeat is still a possible outcome.

• MICK RYAN is a military strategist, retired Australian Army major general, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by Mick Ryan · February 5, 2024

17. The Counterinsurgency Trap in Gaza

Excerpts:

Put simply, applying Petraeus’s vision of counterinsurgency to Gaza would be a disaster for the IDF. Palestinians and others would credibly accuse Israel of reestablishing its occupation of the territory. Raids and checkpoints would further radicalize civilians in Gaza. And Hamas would exploit the situation to further marginalize moderate Palestinian voices, inspire a far-reaching uprising that would claim the lives of more IDF troops and even more Palestinian civilians, and galvanize other members of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance to launch attacks on targets in Israel and elsewhere. Rather than bringing the violence closer to an end, a counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza would produce a forever war.

...

If the IDF does adopt a counterinsurgency approach in Gaza, it will be directly at odds with the policy recommendations of the Biden administration, which, from the beginning of the conflict, has warned Israel not to occupy Gaza after the war or to make mistakes similar to those committed by the U.S. military after 9/11. Washington has been pressuring Netanyahu to scale back Israel’s military campaign, concerned about the more than 26,000 Palestinians killed—many of them women and children. “In this kind of fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin remarked in early December. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

...

If Israel adopts that strategy, it had better prepare for a long haul. Along with a number of researchers at RAND Corporation, I have examined every insurgency from the end of World War II through 2009 (71 in total) and found that the median length of these conflicts was ten years. When insurgents enjoy the external support of a state sponsor, as Hamas does with Iran, this often prolongs the insurgency because the sponsor is able to provide weapons, equipment, training, and intelligence to the groups fighting. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China provided support to communist-backed insurgents in Angola, Greece, South Africa, and Vietnam, just to name a few examples. For its part, the United States worked with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. In most of these cases, external support was crucial to the insurgents’ ability to continue fighting much longer than they would have otherwise and, in many of these instances, prevail.

...

If the Israeli military feels compelled to remain in Gaza for the indefinite future, as some Israeli political leaders have intimated, then the IDF needs to adopt a light footprint that can respond to various security contingencies without further inflaming the local population in Gaza, a scenario that seems implausible given the IDF’s current objectives, force posture, and risk tolerance for the safety of its own troops. Making peace with one’s enemies is difficult, especially after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attack. But without a negotiated settlement, Gaza in 2024 could begin to look even more like Lebanon in 1982: a war without end.

The Counterinsurgency Trap in Gaza

Why Israel Cannot “Clear, Hold, and Build” Its Way to Victory

By Colin P. Clarke

February 5, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Colin P. Clarke · February 5, 2024

In early January, the Israeli military announced it would begin drawing down some of its forces in the Gaza Strip. Five brigades, made up of several thousand troops, were expected to leave Gaza over the next several weeks. But rather than signaling an end to combat, the move was more likely a foreshadowing of a new phase in Israel’s struggle against Hamas. What began as an essentially conventional war may be morphing into something altogether different: a counterinsurgency campaign.

In place of the features that have defined the war to this point, such as brigade-level troop deployments, major airstrikes, and full-scale combat, a counterinsurgency approach would rely more on special operations forces, precision strikes, and targeted raids. The idea would be for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to hold territory after clearing it of Hamas fighters. Retired U.S. Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus has urged Israel to adopt this strategy in Gaza. “Don’t clear and go on,” he said in a November 30 speech. Repeating the slogan that defined the U.S. counterinsurgency effort that he oversaw in Iraq, Petraeus drove home a simple message: “Clear, hold, and build.”

That, however, is easier said than done. Research on past counterinsurgency campaigns suggests that such an approach in Gaza would produce a quagmire that could stretch on for years for the IDF. Hamas would adapt to its new reality by relying on its underground tunnel network, using destroyed infrastructure to its advantage, and leveraging the vast mounds of rubble now found throughout Gaza’s cities to conceal its movements and explosive devices. Hamas, along with other terrorist groups inside Gaza, could also begin deploying suicide bombers against Israeli soldiers on foot patrol.

Put simply, applying Petraeus’s vision of counterinsurgency to Gaza would be a disaster for the IDF. Palestinians and others would credibly accuse Israel of reestablishing its occupation of the territory. Raids and checkpoints would further radicalize civilians in Gaza. And Hamas would exploit the situation to further marginalize moderate Palestinian voices, inspire a far-reaching uprising that would claim the lives of more IDF troops and even more Palestinian civilians, and galvanize other members of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance to launch attacks on targets in Israel and elsewhere. Rather than bringing the violence closer to an end, a counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza would produce a forever war.

MIA: POLITICAL OBJECTIVES

Israel’s endgame in Gaza is still unknown, but there are signs that an extended occupation paired with a counterinsurgency approach could be the next chapter in the fighting. Statements from Israeli leaders hint at a sustained Israeli presence in Gaza with an open-ended timetable for leaving. Speaking on January 30 in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the war against Hamas will not end until Israel achieves all of its objectives. “We will not withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip, and we will not release thousands of terrorists,” he said. “None of this will happen. What will happen? An absolute victory.” On January 4, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the IDF’s military campaign “will continue for as long as is deemed necessary.” And Herzi Halevi, the IDF’s chief of staff, said in December that the war in Gaza would continue “for many months.” But if Israel adopts a counterinsurgency approach, months could easily turn into years.

Even without deliberately making that choice, Israel could find itself backing into it. That is what happened to the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where mission creep allowed limited objectives to give way to murkier, more ambitious goals. For example, in Afghanistan, the United States started the war intending to destroy al Qaeda but eventually found itself trying to do nation-building. In the end, Washington failed to achieve either outcome. The morass facing Israel in Gaza today could turn out the same way—or come to resemble what Israel itself encountered in southern Lebanon, when a campaign that began in 1982 with the goal of eliminating fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization stretched on for nearly two decades, with Israel ultimately withdrawing unceremoniously in 2000 without removing the threat posed by Palestinian militants. To boot, Israel’s nearly two-decade occupation of Lebanon helped give rise to a new foe, Lebanese Hezbollah, a threat the Israelis are still grappling with today.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu also has a personal incentive to prolong the war; it has become clear that many Israelis want new political leadership as soon as the conflict in Gaza is over. In a Christmas Day op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu declared that the prerequisites for peace between Israel and the Palestinians were that “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.” Achieving even one of those objectives, let alone all three, would require a multiyear commitment of troops in both Gaza and the West Bank, and even that would not ensure success.

Four months into the war, some members of Israel’s military brass are losing patience with the lack of a coherent political endgame. In January, Gallant expressed frustration that there was no plan for what the conflict looks like beyond “destroying Hamas,” saying, “it is the duty of the cabinet and the government to discuss the plan . . . and to determine the goal.”

TACTICAL VICTORY, STRATEGIC DEFEAT

If the IDF does adopt a counterinsurgency approach in Gaza, it will be directly at odds with the policy recommendations of the Biden administration, which, from the beginning of the conflict, has warned Israel not to occupy Gaza after the war or to make mistakes similar to those committed by the U.S. military after 9/11. Washington has been pressuring Netanyahu to scale back Israel’s military campaign, concerned about the more than 26,000 Palestinians killed—many of them women and children. “In this kind of fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin remarked in early December. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”

After almost four months of fighting in Gaza, it has become clear that Israel has no defined political strategy for what happens next. Netanyahu has voiced his opposition to the idea that the Palestinian Authority would retake control of Gaza, a position at odds with the Biden administration. And Arab states remain reluctant to commit any troops to a peacekeeping force, which means Israel will likely end up patrolling Gaza while Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups prepare for a drawn-out, low-intensity conflict. In this scenario, Israel would face Palestinian insurgents conducting hit-and-run attacks, staging deadly ambushes, and employing snipers operating from the rubble of demolished buildings. The IDF has razed much of Gaza, pulverizing its infrastructure with relentless airstrikes. This ruined terrain creates an environment that would favor insurgents, providing them with new places to conceal fighters and weapons. Complementing these new hiding places is Hamas’s vast, labyrinth-like subterranean tunnel system that runs underneath Gaza.

And yet if the IDF occupies Gaza and transitions to a counterinsurgency mission, it will be playing into the hands of Hamas. The group’s leaders would like nothing more than an opportunity to prolong the fighting, continue killing Israeli soldiers, and highlight the death toll of Palestinian civilians in its propaganda. Hamas’s strategy would be “death by a thousand cuts,” an effort to slowly wear down IDF troops until the Israeli public demands a withdrawal, at which point Hamas would declare victory. The conflict could play out similarly to the United States’ experience in Afghanistan, where the Taliban patiently waited for two decades for the United States to withdraw and then quickly recaptured control of the country. In Gaza, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group operating there, would detonate improvised explosive devices and utilize a range of antitank weaponry and homemade rockets to neutralize Israeli armored patrols. By blending in with the civilian population, Hamas would invite attacks that would inevitably lead to Palestinian women and children being caught in the crossfire.

A counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza would produce a forever war.

Hamas may already be transitioning to plan for an insurgency—the group is apparently attempting to rebuild a system of governance, with militants performing both administrative and policing functions throughout parts of Gaza. At the same time, acting on orders from IDF commanders, some soldiers have been setting fire to abandoned homes in Gaza, making them uninhabitable and demonstrating that Israel has no intention of attempting a “hearts and minds” campaign to accompany its military approach. With IDF troops clustered in small garrisons throughout Gaza, making no effort to engage with locals, Israeli forces will become an irresistible target for Hamas to attack. Israeli officials, especially Netanyahu but also his far-right allies, ignore the political aspects of this conflict at their own peril. Israel, by completely ignoring legitimate Palestinian grievances, will offer Hamas a chance to step into the power vacuum and further entrench the group in Gaza.

These are lessons Israel has already learned: from its experience in Lebanon and even from its previous occupation of Gaza, which inevitably led to Israel’s withdrawal in 2005. But far-right elements in Israel’s government currently wield outsized influence and are pushing Netanyahu to consider occupying Gaza indefinitely. They argue that Israel must do so in the absence of any suitable Palestinian government.

NO END IN SIGHT

If Israel adopts that strategy, it had better prepare for a long haul. Along with a number of researchers at RAND Corporation, I have examined every insurgency from the end of World War II through 2009 (71 in total) and found that the median length of these conflicts was ten years. When insurgents enjoy the external support of a state sponsor, as Hamas does with Iran, this often prolongs the insurgency because the sponsor is able to provide weapons, equipment, training, and intelligence to the groups fighting. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China provided support to communist-backed insurgents in Angola, Greece, South Africa, and Vietnam, just to name a few examples. For its part, the United States worked with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. In most of these cases, external support was crucial to the insurgents’ ability to continue fighting much longer than they would have otherwise and, in many of these instances, prevail.

To date, Israel claims that it has killed approximately 9,000 Hamas fighters out of a force estimated at 30,000, although these numbers are unverified. As of early February, Hamas still retains the ability to launch rockets into Israel. What this means is that, despite its no-holds-barred approach in Gaza, Israel is nowhere close to achieving its goal of eliminating Hamas. Moreover, reports now suggest that Hamas is regrouping in northern Gaza to prepare for a new offensive. The Israeli government may be tempted to leave the IDF in Gaza until it can make further progress. But the way Israel fights also matters. In our research on counterinsurgency, my RAND colleagues and I found that militaries that adopted what we called an “iron fist” counterinsurgency approach—defined as focusing almost exclusively on killing insurgents—was successful in less than one-third of all cases analyzed, far less than approaches that also focused on assuaging the grievances of the civilian population.

For Israel, counterinsurgency is an attractive option because it allows the country’s leaders to postpone difficult political decisions and instead focus on short-term military wins. But one of the reasons Israel finds itself in its current predicament is precisely because Israeli politicians, chief among them Netanyahu, have consistently delayed and, in most cases, denied momentum for any negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.

Hamas’s strategy would be “death by a thousand cuts."

Counterinsurgency-style warfare may seem like an attractive option, but it will not achieve the IDF’s goal of completely eliminating Hamas. With pressure from the Biden administration growing, the clock is ticking for the IDF to make headway in weakening Hamas's military infrastructure. Mounting IDF casualties will continue to place additional pressure on the Netanyahu government, which is already under fire for its handling of the hostage situation. To date, 221 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat.

The Israelis must find a way to transition to a postconflict setting that does not involve an occupation or the continued presence of large numbers of Israeli troops in Gaza. Bringing the conflict to a close will require a coherent political endgame, something Israel’s political leaders have eschewed so far. If Israel refuses to allow a Palestinian entity to govern Gaza, the Israelis themselves will be forced to govern it—or, at the very least, provide security, which in turn will necessitate a long-term presence and occupation-like force.

If the Israeli military feels compelled to remain in Gaza for the indefinite future, as some Israeli political leaders have intimated, then the IDF needs to adopt a light footprint that can respond to various security contingencies without further inflaming the local population in Gaza, a scenario that seems implausible given the IDF’s current objectives, force posture, and risk tolerance for the safety of its own troops. Making peace with one’s enemies is difficult, especially after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attack. But without a negotiated settlement, Gaza in 2024 could begin to look even more like Lebanon in 1982: a war without end.

• COLIN P. CLARKE is Director of Research at the Soufan Group and a Senior Research Fellow at the Soufan Center.

Foreign Affairs · by Colin P. Clarke · February 5, 2024

18. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February

Read the foreign policy tracker at this link: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/02/02/biden-administration-foreign-policy-tracker-february-3/

February 2, 2024 | FDD Tracker: January 11, 2024-February 2, 2024

Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

Listen to analysis

2 min

Trend Overview

By John Hardie

Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.

After initially restricting itself to playing defense against Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the administration struck back. U.S. forces, in cooperation with the United Kingdom and other allies, conducted a series of strikes against Houthi military assets. So far, however, the Houthis do not appear ready to stop their attacks.

Meanwhile, an Iran-backed militant group killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens more in a drone strike near the Syrian-Jordanian border. President Joe Biden has vowed a military response, but it remains unclear exactly what U.S. forces will strike or whether it will convince Tehran to rein in its proxies.

U.S. aid for Ukraine remains stuck in limbo thanks to congressional obstruction. Some Republicans, under pressure from former President Donald Trump, have all but killed a bipartisan Senate effort to reach a compromise deal that would pass Ukraine aid in exchange for border security measures.

In the Indo-Pacific, Beijing suffered setbacks as Taiwan’s pro-sovereignty ruling party won a third presidential term and Chinese authorities reported middling economic growth in 2023. While China’s economic slowdown could offer Washington a strategic opportunity, the administration for now seems more concerned with stabilizing U.S.-China relations.

Check back next month to see how the administration addresses these and other challenges.

Trending Positive

Trending Neutral

Trending Negative

Trending Very Negative

Gulf

Indo-Pacific

Turkey

China

Cyber

Europe and Russia

International Organizations

Latin America

Defense

Israel

Sunni Jihadism

Syria

Iran

Korea

Lebanon

Nonproliferation and Biodefense

19. Israel’s Untold Gaza Progress

Conclusion:

Winning the war doesn’t guarantee winning the peace afterward, but it is essential for a secure Israel and a chance for Palestinians to have a normal life in

Israel’s Untold Gaza Progress

The Israel Defense Forces are winning against Hamas but need more time.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-untold-gaza-progress-hamas-war-4bc62196?mod=editorials_article_pos2

By The Editorial Page

Feb. 4, 2024 5:29 pm ET

Israeli soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip, Feb. 4. PHOTO: ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES/REUTERS

You may have missed it amid the media defeatism, but Israel is winning its war in Gaza. Hamas’s losses are mounting, and support for the Israeli war effort has endured around the world longer than Hamas expected.

The war is far from over, but Hamas’s southern stronghold of Khan Younis is falling. Civilians have streamed out and Hamas’s remaining forces in the city’s west are encircled. They face an Israeli advance on all sides, and Israel is now fighting below ground in force.

Biden Administration restrictions and Israeli caution have slowed the war, but consider that the 2016-17 battle of Mosul against ISIS took nine months. “Mosul,” writes John Spencer, chief of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, “was one battle, in one city against 3 to 5k militants with limited defenses. Israel is fighting multiple battles in 7 cities against 30k militants with military grade underground cities built under civilian areas.”

Israel needs time to achieve victory, and Hamas is counting on Western powers to deny it that time. The 2009 Gaza war was brought to an end after three weeks, the 2014 war after six weeks. The “CNN strategy” of using human shields to gain media sympathy has worked every time for Hamas.

So far not this time. Oct. 7 was too brutal. This war has passed 120 days, and the U.S. and Europe refuse to call for a cease-fire.

Israel says it has killed, incapacitated or arrested some 20,000 of Hamas’s 30,000 men and dismantled 17 of Hamas’s 24 Gaza combat battalions. The losses have prevented Hamas from mounting military maneuvers and quieted its rocket fire, down more than 95% from the war’s early days.

Israel has freed 110 hostages, but its leaders are under pressure at home while 132 are still captive. The Biden Administration is using that domestic pressure as diplomatic leverage to promote a hostage deal and long pause in the war that it hopes will become a cease-fire. Never mind that leaving Hamas in control of territory is the definition of Israeli defeat. No matter the length of the pause, Israel would likely have to resume fighting afterward.

That may be why Hamas has resisted the U.S. pause and hostage-deal proposal and instead demands a cease-fire guarantee that Israel can’t give. Recall that Hamas consented to the first hostage deal after Israel took Gaza City faster than anticipated. An Israeli advance now could push the terrorists to Rafah, Hamas’s last major refuge, at the edge of Gaza.

Once Hamas’s last brigades are defeated, it will take time to sweep Gaza for terrorist cells and infrastructure. Israel is clearing urban terrain and tunnels at a “historic pace,” Mr. Spencer writes, but the tunnels are vast and soldiers find munitions in home after home.

Israel’s task for 2024 is to finish the job, but will U.S. political support hold? The Biden Administration, despite its second-guessing, continues to provide munitions and diplomatic cover that it would have a hard time withdrawing. The latest Harvard CAPS-Harris poll finds that large majorities of Americans support Israel and its war aims.

Europe’s elected leaders are also holding the line, and no Arab state has quit the Abraham Accords. Only Iran, which has escalated its regional war against the U.S., applies pressure. Even the United Nations International Court of Justice balked at ordering a cease-fire.

Winning the war doesn’t guarantee winning the peace afterward, but it is essential for a secure Israel and a chance for Palestinians to have a normal life in Gaza.WSJ Opinion: Hits and Misses of the Week

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Appeared in the February 5, 2024, print edition as 'Israel’s Untold Gaza Progress'.

20. The invasion of Ukraine created a rare opportunity for the CIA to recruit Russian spies

The invasion of Ukraine created a rare opportunity for the CIA to recruit Russian spies

NPR · by Elissa Nadworny · February 4, 2024

The CIA says the war in Ukraine has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to recruit spies in Russia. NPR's Elissa Nadworny talks to former CIA officer Douglas London about recruitment.

ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:

The CIA says that the war in Ukraine has created a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the U.S. to recruit Russian spies. The agency has released several videos on its social media channels, directly appealing to Russian intelligence officials to switch sides.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, speaking Russian).

NADWORNY: In the latest installment, we hear from a fictional Russian patriot who has come to realize that his country's soldiers are going hungry while a corrupt elite flourish.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFED ACTOR: (As character, speaking Russian).

NADWORNY: "Do I have the courage to confront this betrayal?" he asks. To understand this moment, we turn to Douglas London, who was a senior operations officer in the CIA for more than 30 years. His many postings include being stationed in the former Soviet republics. London is also the author of "The Recruiter: Spying And The Lost Art Of American Intelligence," and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.

DOUGLAS LONDON: Thanks. Good to be with you today.

NADWORNY: So what's kind of extraordinary right now is the CIA is trying to recruit Russian spies super openly. Why do you think that's happening?

LONDON: I think it is a generational opportunity, as Director Burns says. The last time I think the CIA had such a great opportunity to recruit Russians was during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the '90s, but today it's quite different. And I think as your audience looks and hears at the video, you'll see an appeal to history, to patriotism, to family and to injustice. That is a resonating issue with Russians, particularly these days.

NADWORNY: Putin's war in Ukraine - you're kind of hinting that it's just corroded support at home. What's happening in this war that opens up this opportunity?

LONDON: Putin has ruled since late '99. And over those years, I think the Russians were content to accept a strong man and make certain compromises when it comes to democratic freedoms and social opportunities. But what Putin brought is a strong man with stability, and he brought an ability for Russians to enjoy some economic progress going forward. That is eroding as things are going with the war. And not only is it a question of economic challenges, but also Russians have to think, is my family going to be directly impacted by loss? Are we going to lose our sons or daughters to this war?

NADWORNY: You've recruited many people during your time at the CIA. How did you go about it?

LONDON: Well, the translated version of the video brings chills to me because it actually is reminiscent of pitches I've made. Particularly for a Russian, you want to really appeal to them to stand up and right the wrongs and basically confronting them with, well, you really can't complain if you're not willing to do something about it, and here's your opportunity, because it's only going to get worse for your family, to kind of appeal to that melancholy and darkness.

NADWORNY: Can you give us some examples of when things didn't quite go according to that plan?

LONDON: Well, there are always occasions where in the dynamics of human relationships, you miss something. You don't get something right. I once had a case of an official that I was pitching, and I thought everything was going great, and this person had already been sharing secret information, accepting financial remuneration. And when I actually pitched him, he almost acted shocked and said finally, well, you know, I have to ask my wife. So I mean, it's not something I really thought because he came across, this person, as very macho, and I'm in charge. And, you know, it's not something I was ready for, but something I was able to deal with on the fly.

NADWORNY: So technology is a huge part of espionage these days. You're talking about this kind of human relationship. Explain to us why human intelligence is so important still.

LONDON: What people can provide in terms of the secrets they offer goes beyond what technology can give. You can take a look at imagery from the most expensive satellites, and you could listen to conversations or read emails. But what you don't appreciate is the context. What are really the plans and intentions? What's driving a plan? People who sit in the meetings, who are part of the discussions, part of the plan, and who actually write and read the documents - they bring a depth to the intelligence that really brings it to life, and much better informs decision-making when you have to make critical choices in moving forward or putting people's lives at risk or moving troops and such like that. So human intelligence is always going to have a great value.

NADWORNY: If it hasn't already been perfectly clear, the CIA is essentially asking Russians to commit a crime, right? An American found to be doing the same for a foreign government would be in a lot of trouble. Are there any qualms about what you're asking?

LONDON: Well, at the end of the day, it's about doing what's right. And what's right goes beyond the criminal statutes of a government that in this case is very much in the wrong. So there's a contract, if you would - right? - you can go back to philosophy - between people and their leadership. And I think the idea is showing Russians their leadership has broken that contract. Their leadership is not serving in the best interest of their country. And it's talking about loyalty to country as opposed to loyalty to leadership.

NADWORNY: You know, I think it's worth acknowledging that these people are also taking great, great risk to enter into these relationships.

LONDON: Absolutely. And the relationship only works if it's very clear what those risks are and what's going to be done in managing the cooperation to mitigate the risk. There's never a rejection of, oh, everything's going to be fine, and you have nothing to worry about, but that you're doing something that's so important, it warrants taking those risks, and you're working with a professional and an organization that has the capabilities to help you mitigate those risks to achieve your goals, which is serving your nation.

NADWORNY: As well as ours.

LONDON: Well, serendipity in that case, yes.

NADWORNY: That's Douglas London, a former senior operations officer in the CIA. Thank you so much for joining us.

LONDON: Thanks again.

NPR · by Elissa Nadworny · February 4, 2024

21. SOCOM is after new tech to help special operations forces spot, track, and take out urban threats without being seen

SOCOM is after new tech to help special operations forces spot, track, and take out urban threats without being seen

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

Military & Defense

Stavros Atlamazoglou

2024-02-01T12:15:01Z

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Read in app

A Special Forces soldier assigned to 10th Special Forces Group transitions from his rifle to his pistol during a live-fire range at Panzer Kaserne.

US Navy photo by Lieutenant Robert Kunzig

• US Special Operations Command is looking for the kind of gear it needs to fight future battles.
• Urban combat is expected to be a major focus, just as it has been in past and current fights.
• SOCOM is looking at a non-line-of sight targeting system that would allow operators to track and eliminate threats without being detected.

Consider a hypothetical. China has invaded Taiwan. After a few tense hours of deliberation, the US decides to come to the island's defense, prioritizing freedom and the rule of law in the Indo-Pacific.

Beijing gambles on a rapid seizure of Taiwan and throws everything it has at it. The Chinese military manages to achieve temporary air superiority over the battlefield and launches a large-scale amphibious assault. Soon, Chinese tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are rolling onto Taiwanese soil.

US special operations forces on the island join their Taiwanese comrades in major urban centers, getting ready for intense urban combat.

Although a fictional scenario, this is something US commandos could be facing in the future. It is, after all, a situation they've trained for, along with other high-intensity conflict scenarios. Looking toward potential future fights like this, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is after new tech that would help its special operators survive and thrive in urban warfare.

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A futuristic sight

In October, SOCOM released a solicitation for a non-line-of sight targeting system for urban combat. The system would allow commandos to track, target, and even engage enemy fighters without exposing themselves directly.

Working with SOFWERX, a technology testing and innovation platform, SOCOM will facilitate a series of feasibility studies and rapid prototype events to explore and test technology with the goal of creating a piece of gear that will "enable rapid, precise, operator-controlled Non-Line of Sight (Non-LOS) targeting in urban, surveilled environments."

Green Berets with the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), maneuver through a building while conducting room clearing and close quarters battle training.

US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Justin Moeller

As the solicitation mentions, recent battlefield advancements, such as autonomous systems and remotely placed sensors, have made it difficult for ground troops to access and operate in "static, fixed locations with line-of-sight of opposing positions."

The system will rely heavily on artificial intelligence and will use a lot of data and machine learning to understand different scenarios and give the operator on the ground the right picture. Essentially, SOCOM is looking for a sensor that will be able to tell a special operator exactly where an enemy fighter is during urban combat and allow him to target the threat from a position of safety.

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The program focuses on four areas: sensors, data networking, data processing, and data analytics and artificial intelligence.

As with most of the Pentagon's new programs, SOCOM requires that the system have an open architecture to allow for the insertion of new technology as it becomes available.

Modern Urban Warfare

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has shown that urban warfare remains as deadly as ever.

The Kremlin, for example, lost more than 100,000 Russian soldiers and Wagner Group mercenaries, counting killed and wounded, during its 2022-2023 winter offensive, much of which was focused on the siege of Bakhmut in the Donbas. The proliferation of drones and electronic warfare systems has amplified the classic dangers of urban combat, such as snipers, artillery, and close-quarters fighting.

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"When I hear the words 'urban warfare' I think of buildings, close ranges, challenges in fires support, CAS [close air support], or MEDAVACs [medical evacuations]. These are the things that concern me going into an urban setting," a retired Delta Force operator told Insider.

To be sure, American commandos aren't new to urban combat.

Green Berets with the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), maneuver through a building while conducting room clearing and close quarters battle training.

US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Justin Moeller

"Wherever you look, there is combat in urban settings. Afghanistan was really the exception to that with engagements at longer distances," added the retired commando, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his ongoing work with the government.

During the industrial counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Iraqi insurgency, US special operations forces got a good taste of urban warfare and its complexities. Despite world-class training, elite units like the Delta Force lost commandos that this new sensor might have saved. In the fighting against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, US commandos fought once more in a brutal urban warfare setting in Mosul.

"We train extensively in close-quarters battle, but even the best training isn't always enough. A non-line of sight such as the one described can definitely help guys on the ground better navigate the urban battlefield and see threats before they see them. We already have some gadgets that help us," the retired Delta Force operator said.

But with the rapid advances in technology, new systems are necessary to stay ahead of the competition.

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

22. Engaging at Home: Foreign Policy for the American PeopleEngaging at Home: Foreign Policy for the American People

​The 12 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PL-Annual-Report-Final-013024.pdf

Engaging at Home: Foreign Policy for the American People

REPORT

OFFICE OF PUBLIC LIAISON

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

HTTPS://WWW.STATE.GOV/2023-ENGAGING-AT-HOME-REPORT/?UTM

The report shows the many ways our diplomats connected with Americans from all 50 states, including by sharing their experiences, discussing how domestic and foreign policies are inextricably linked, and clarifying how the Department’s work contributes to peace, stability, and prosperity both around the world and at home in the United States. With outreach through people-to-people events and programs, the Department connects with civil society groups, the private sector, state and local governments, community organizations, and students, among other groups – not only raising awareness about the Department’s work, but also gathering diverse perspectives that directly shape it.

 DOWNLOAD REPORT (PRINT VERSION)  [9 MB]

Please email GPA-PublicLiaison@state.gov to request an accessible alternative version of this report.

​The 12 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PL-Annual-Report-Final-013024.pdf

Engaging at Home: Foreign Policy for the American People

REPORT

OFFICE OF PUBLIC LIAISON

FEBRUARY 1, 2024

HTTPS://WWW.STATE.GOV/2023-ENGAGING-AT-HOME-REPORT/?UTM

The report shows the many ways our diplomats connected with Americans from all 50 states, including by sharing their experiences, discussing how domestic and foreign policies are inextricably linked, and clarifying how the Department’s work contributes to peace, stability, and prosperity both around the world and at home in the United States. With outreach through people-to-people events and programs, the Department connects with civil society groups, the private sector, state and local governments, community organizations, and students, among other groups – not only raising awareness about the Department’s work, but also gathering diverse perspectives that directly shape it.

 DOWNLOAD REPORT (PRINT VERSION)  [9 MB]

Please email GPA-PublicLiaison@state.gov to request an accessible alternative version of this report.

23. Claims that Jan. 6 rioters are 'political prisoners' endure. Judges want to set the record straight

Apply the law.

Claims that Jan. 6 rioters are 'political prisoners' endure. Judges want to set the record straight

BY MICHAEL KUNZELMAN AND ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

Updated 2:26 PM EST, February 4, 2024

AP · by ALANNA DURKIN RICHER · February 4, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — While sentencing a North Carolina man to prison for his role in the U.S. Capitol riot, a Republican-appointed judge issued a stark warning: Efforts to portray the mob of Donald Trump’s supporters as heroes and play down the violence that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, pose a serious threat to the nation.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth condemned the depiction by Trump and Republican allies of Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” and “hostages.” Lamberth also denounced attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the justice system for punishing rioters who broke the law when they invaded the Capitol.

“In my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream,” Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, wrote in a recent ruling. The judge added he “fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”

As Trump floats potential pardons for rioters if he returns to the White House, judges overseeing the more than 1,200 Jan. 6 criminal cases in Washington’s federal court are using their platform to try to set the record straight concerning distortions about an attack that was broadcast live on television. A growing number of defendants appear to be embracing rhetoric spread by Trump, giving defiant speeches in court, repeating his false election claims and portraying themselves as patriots.

During a recent court hearing, Proud Boys member Marc Bru repeatedly insulted and interrupted the judge, who ultimately sentenced him to six years in prison. “You can give me 100 years and I’d do it all over again,” Bru said.

At least two other rioters shouted “Trump won!” in court after receiving their punishment.

Some people charged in the riot are pinning their hopes on a Trump victory in November.

Rachel Marie Powell, a Pennsylvania woman who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for smashing a Capitol window, told a CNN reporter that the 2024 presidential election is “like life or death” for her. She said she believes she will get out of prison if Trump is elected.

The rhetoric resonates with the strangers who donate money to Jan. 6 defendant’s online campaigns, but it isn’t earning them any sympathy from the judges. Judges appointed by presidents from both political parties have described the riot as an affront to democracy and they repeatedly have admonished defendants for not showing true remorse or casting themselves as victims.

Over more than three years, judges have watched hours of video showing members of the mob violently shoving past overwhelmed officers, shattering windows, attacking police with things such as flagpoles and pepper spray and threatening violence against lawmakers. In court hearings, officers have described being beaten, threatened and scared for their lives as they tried to defend the Capitol.

Before sentencing a Kentucky man, who already had a long criminal record, to 14 years in prison for attacking police with pepper spray and a chair, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta admonished the man for propagating “the lie that what’s happening here in Washington, D.C., is unfair and unjust.”

“You are not a political prisoner,” Mehta, who was nominated by President Barack Obama told Peter Schwartz. “You’re not Alexei Navalny,” the judge said referring to the imprisoned Russian opposition leader. “You’re not somebody who is standing up against injustice, who’s fighting against an autocratic regime. ... You’re somebody who decided to take the day into his own hands, much in the same way that you have used your hands against others for much of your life.”

Lamberth’s scathing remarks came in the case of James Little, a North Carolina man who was not accused of any violence or destruction during the riot and pleaded guilty only to a misdemeanor offense. Lamberth didn’t name the people responsible for what the judge called “shameless” attempts to rewrite history. But Trump has closely aligned himself with rioters during his presidential campaign. He has described them as “hostages,” called for their release from jail and pledged to pardon a large portion of them if he wins the White House in November.

Roughly 750 people charged with federal crimes in the riot have pleaded guilty and more than 100 others have been convicted at trial. Many rioters were charged only with misdemeanor offenses akin to trespassing while others face serious felonies such as assault or seditious conspiracy. Of those who have been sentenced, roughly two-thirds have received some time behind bars, with terms ranging from a few days of intermittent confinement to 22 years in prison, according to data compiled by The Associated Press.

Lamberth had originally sentenced Little in 2022 to 60 days behind bars, followed by three years of probation. But Washington’s federal appeals court sided with Little on appeal, ruling he could not be sentenced to both prison time and probation. When Little’s case returned to Lamberth’s court, the judge resentenced him to 150 days — with credit for time already served in jail and on probation — citing the man’s claims of persecution and efforts to downplay the Jan. 6 attack.

“Little cannot bring himself to admit that he did the wrong thing, although he came close today,” Judge Lamberth wrote. “So it is up to the court to tell the public the truth: Mr. Little’s actions, and the actions of others who broke the law on Jan. 6, were wrong. The court does not expect its remarks to fully stem the tide of falsehoods. But I hope a little truth will go a long way.”

An attorney for Little declined to comment on Lamberth’s remarks.

In other cases, judges have said their sentence must send a message when rioters have promoted the notion that they are being unfairly prosecuted for their political views. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper told Richard “Bigo” Barnett, the Arkansas man who propped his feet on a desk in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in a widely circulated photo, that he seemed to enjoy the notoriety of becoming one of the faces of the Jan. 6 attack.

“You have made yourself one of the faces of J6 not just through that photo but using your platform and your notoriety to peddle the misconception that you and other J6ers are somehow political prisoners who are being persecuted for your beliefs as opposed to your conduct on Jan. 6,” Cooper, an Obama appointee, told Barnett before sentencing him to more than four years in prison.

“So to all those folks that follow Bigo, they need to know that the actions of Jan. 6 cannot be repeated without some serious repercussions,” the judge said.

____

Richer reported from Boston.

ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

Alanna is a legal affairs reporter

twittermailto

AP · by ALANNA DURKIN RICHER · February 4, 2024

24. A New Strategy Can Save Ukraine

A New Strategy Can Save Ukraine

Kyiv should focus on defense, depend less on foreign aid, and threaten Russia more in Crimea.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-strategy-can-save-ukraine-war-with-russia-c46a7abe?utm

By Stephen J. Hadley and Matthew Kroenig

Feb. 4, 2024 11:48 am ET

Ukrainian troops conduct military exercises in the Zhytomyr region of Ukraine, Jan. 30. PHOTO: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The war in Ukraine has reached a critical point. The goal remains for it to emerge as an independent, prosperous country within internationally recognized borders and able to defend itself. That will require accelerating the delivery of advanced weapons and technology and pursuing a new military and diplomatic strategy to defend Ukrainian territory, increase Ukraine’s defense production, enhance its air defenses, and step up attacks against Russia’s supply lines and vulnerable military position in Crimea. If the Biden administration embraces this approach, it could address congressional reluctance to provide more aid to Ukraine absent a clear strategy.

Ukraine’s 2023 spring counteroffensive was less successful than many had hoped, giving Russian forces time to dig in behind trenches and minefields. New tactics, such as using drones to spot armored vehicles and precision weapons to destroy them, have offered the Russian invaders a defensive advantage. The West’s willingness to aid Ukraine isn’t guaranteed, especially in the face of gridlock in Washington. The war of attrition favors Russia, given its advantages in industry and manpower and Vladimir Putin’s high tolerance for casualties.

To account for these realities, Ukraine and its supporters should pursue an adapted strategy with five major elements.

First, Ukraine’s military effort should focus more on defense. Kyiv needs to maintain the territory it still controls even as it prepares for counteroffensives. This includes Odesa, which provides access to the Black Sea—vital to Ukraine’s economy, which depends on exporting grain to international markets. Ukrainian forces should establish fortified defensive lines and use advanced sensors and drones to prevent future Russian land grabs.

Second, Ukraine needs to reduce its dependence on foreign assistance. Ukraine has a robust defense industry that is producing more weapons than before Russia’s 2022 invasion. Kyiv has signed more than 20 agreements with foreign partners for joint maintenance and production of weapons, giving it increased industrial capacity domestically and abroad. The German company Rheinmetall and Turkish firm Baykar plan to build facilities in Ukraine to produce tanks and drones, respectively. But the U.S. lags behind. Washington should foster joint ventures with Ukraine’s defense industry by helping U.S. defense firms mitigate the risks of doing business in a war zone and reducing regulations, including restrictions on technology transfers under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Third, the U.S. and others should help Ukraine build an enhanced air- and missile-defense network. Ukraine needs to defend itself from Russia’s brutal air campaign. Western allies should reallocate Patriot batteries from other parts of Europe to Ukraine and cooperate with Kyiv to develop low-tech, low-cost defenses against drones and other battlefield weapons.

Fourth, Ukraine should target Russian supply lines in eastern Ukraine and western Russia. This would disrupt Russian logistics and complicate Moscow’s effort to consolidate its territorial gains. The U.S. and Europe should let Ukraine use the weapons they supply to target Russian forces in Russia that are attacking Ukraine. The same should apply to Russian supply lines and logistics.

Fifth, Ukraine should step up the threat to Russia’s vulnerable military position in Crimea. This should include long-range strikes as well as special operations against Russian forces, bases and supply lines. Why the Kerch Bridge to Russia remains standing is a mystery.

To enable these strikes, the U.S. and Western supporters should provide Ukraine longer-range weapons with larger payloads and lift their prohibitions against using these arms for attacks on forces and logistics inside Russian territory. Germany should immediately provide the Taurus missile, and the U.S. should deliver the 190-mile-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS. That wouldn’t meaningfully deplete U.S. stockpiles, as America has a substantial inventory and an active production line and is phasing out the system in favor of the more sophisticated, longer-range Precision Strike Missile. In addition, Western supporters should provide Ukraine with F-16 aircraft armed with high-speed antiradiation missiles to suppress Russian integrated air and missile defenses and allow Ukrainian missiles to reach their targets.

Crimea may be the most important center of gravity in this war. Mr. Putin can afford to cede villages in the Donbas, but losing the peninsula would be a major blow. It may be the only way to persuade him to wind down the conflict.

We doubt this approach would result in a negotiated peace treaty or even a formal cease-fire agreement. It could nevertheless result in a de facto stalemate with an active but static line of contact between the two militaries and far less combat. This would save lives and give Ukraine breathing space.

Many in Ukraine and the West would object that this would also give Russia breathing space, which it could use to prepare its next effort to subdue and absorb Ukraine. The multiyear defense commitments to Ukraine being developed by the U.S. and other Western countries would reduce this risk.

Ukraine still recalls the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Kyiv surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for bilateral U.S. and U.K. security assurances. That failed to deter Russia from invading. Given that unhappy experience, Kyiv can be forgiven for wanting more today—namely, membership in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO membership is off the table at least until there is a stable line of separation between Ukrainian and Russian forces and reduced conflict. It would have to be clear that incorporation into NATO wouldn’t put the alliance instantly at war with Russia or commit it to any Ukrainian military effort to recover territory occupied by Russia. But the international community would continue to recognize such territory as Ukrainian under international law.

These are sensitive issues, but analogous ones were overcome when West Germany joined NATO in 1955. In our view, only the prospect of NATO and EU membership would give President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people the assurance that Russia would be deterred from taking over more of Ukraine. It also would furnish the political cover needed to accept an outcome that leaves Russian forces temporarily in possession of Ukrainian territory.

NATO membership for Ukraine must reflect complete consensus within the alliance. Noticeable divisions at Bucharest in 2008 suggested to Mr. Putin that NATO wouldn’t come to Ukraine’s defense, inviting his 2014 invasion.

Supporting Ukraine isn’t an act of philanthropy. If Ukraine and the West falter, Russia may succeed in conquering Ukraine. Mr. Putin wants to restore the Russian empire—a revanchist ambition that may drive him to invade a NATO member. The result would be war with NATO and the U.S., something no one should want.

Mr. Hadley chairs the Atlantic Council’s international advisory board. He served as White House national security adviser, 2005-09. Mr. Kroenig is vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the U.S.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

​