Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind."

- Theodore Roosevelt

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.”

- Robert Heinlein

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

- Ray Bradbury

1. Gen. Glen VanHerck, Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and United States Northern Command, Holds an Off-Camera, On-The-Record Briefing on the High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon Recovery Efforts

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12. US military failed to detect previous spy balloons from China

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14. Opinion | The frenzy over China’s spy balloon is dangerous and unwarranted

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16. Is the U.S. Over-Militarizing Its China Strategy?

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18. Alexander Vindman and the Road to World War III

19. Flexible Enmeshment: The Philippines’ New Approach to China-US Competition

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For all the armchair quarterbacks out there. But they will not believe the General and will tell us they know better.

GEN. VANHERCK: Yes, so I'm not going to talk about any ongoing operations that occurred, such as attempts to use non-kinetic effects. Those are things that I need to go to Congress to talk about, I need to talk about with the department before we move forward.

What I will tell you is we took maximum precaution to prevent any intel collection. I was in close coordination with the Commander of the United States Strategic Command, and we provided counterintelligence messages out of our intelligence shop across the entire Department of Defense and the interagency so that we could take maximum protective measures while the balloon transited across the United States.

Again, this is on record previously. We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actionable technical means from the Chinese.

And with that said, you always have to balance that with the intel gain opportunity. And so there was a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons, and so I would defer to the intel community, but this gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed, and I think you'll see in the future that the -- that time frame was well worth it's value to collect,over.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and United States Northern Command, Holds an Off-Camera, On-The-Record Briefing on the High-Altitude Surveillance Balloon Recovery Efforts

defense.gov

STAFF: Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure to introduce General Glen VanHerck, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, who will provide an update on the ongoing recovery operations following the takedown of the Chinese high-altitude balloon that violated U.S. airspace.

Today's discussion is on the record. Please note that the focus of the discussion is on NORAD and NORTHCOM's current operations as they relate to the recovery effort, so I appreciate you keeping your questions focused there. I'll turn it over to General VanHerck for some brief opening comments, and then we'll open it up to your questions.

General VanHerck, over to you, sir.

GENERAL GLEN VANHERCK: Hey, thanks a lot, Pat, and thanks a lot to the entire team here for the opportunity to get together and talk a little bit about the operations that ongoing right now to salvage as much as we can of the Chinese high-altitude balloon primarily for the safety and security of -- of folks in the local area, but also to recover and exploit that in any way that we can.

So let me just walk through a few things that are -- that are ongoing for you here. We continue to -- to focus on safe execution of a recovery while effective recovery so that we can exploit that, and to provide as much information as we can to the media, the public, Congress -- everybody that has an interest in what we're actually finding.

So the USS Carter Hall, a U.S. Navy ship under the command and control of NORTHCOM through my Navy component, now the North, Navy North, led by Admiral Daryl Caudle, they're on station in the vicinity of the splashdown, and they've been collecting debris, category -- categorizing the debris since arrival. The U.S. Navy Ship Pathfinder is also on station. The Pathfinder is a ship that conducts survey operations using sonar and other means to map out the debris field. It's capable of conducting oceanographic, hydrographic, bathymetric surveys of the bottom of the ocean to do that. And they'll eventually produce us a map -- they're in the process of doing that, and I expect to have much more today -- of the full debris field. But we expect the debris field to be of the rough order of magnitude of about 1,500 meters by 1,500 meters, and so, you know, more than 15 football fields by 15 football fields. But we'll get a further assessment of that today.

Yesterday's sea states did not allow us to conduct some of the operations that we would have liked to have conducted such as underwater surveillance. And so those forces that provide the explosive ordnance disposal to make sure the scene is safe, they're out today, this morning, and they went out in what's called a rigid hull inflatable boat this morning, Eastern time approximately 10:00 o'clock, to proceed to the -- the area to utilize unmanned underwater vehicles using side scan sonar to further locate sunken debris. And so we expect them to get on there and to do some additional categorization of potential threats such as explosives that may be on, hazardous materials that could be in batteries, et cetera, so we're working very hard.

I'd remind you, this is a effort that's in the open ocean ongoing in approximately 50 feet of water, and so we have to be very cognizant of the sea states, currents, et cetera, so we continue to -- to move forward.

Very proud to have a -- a Coast Guard support. We have cutters, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Venturous, the Cutter Richard Snyder, the Cutter Nathan Rectanual, or -- so excuse me -- Bruckenthal -- I -- I got that one right finally. Those are out of the Coast Guard. We have air station support out of Elizabeth City and Savannah, Georgia, as well, and response boats from Georgetown, South Carolina, all providing security and safety to ensure not only the safety of the men and women of the military forces conducting operation, but the general public as well, so we keep it safe in the area.

As a quick note, I would remind you that due to ocean currents, it's possible that there may be some debris that does float ashore. And so what we would ask of the public, and you can help me with this, is avoid contact. Contact local law enforcement immediately to take care of any of that debris.

The FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents are working closely. They're embedded with us, with authorities to make sure that we collect that debris, and the FBI is embedded with us on our salvage operations as we collect this under counterintelligence authorities.

I don't know where the debris' going to go for a final analysis, but I will tell you that certainly the intel community, along with the law enforcement community that works this under counter intelligence, will take a good look at it. So we look forward to moving forward there.

Okay, so I'm happy to talk about the ongoing operations or potentially some of the operations that we conducted on Saturday, and I look forward to your questions.

I'd also like to thank one more thing is -- before we go forward. This was truly an inter-agency effort. The FAA was tremendous, and I know you're all aware that we closed airports in the area, Charleston, Myrtle Beach, as well as some others. They were tremendous.

This was all for the public safety to ensure we could accomplish this operation safely and effectively, and that's exactly what happened. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was able to reach out to the local law enforcement communities in near real time of making this happen to ensure that folks were aware and that we made as safe and effective as an operation as possible.

And so thanks for your time, and I look forward to your questions.

STAFF: Thank you very much, General VanHerck. We'll go ahead and start with Associated Press, Tara Copp.

Q: Hi, thank you for doing this. My first question is as the balloon was still transiting across the U.S., what sort of protective measures did you take to make sure that it did not collect any U.S. intelligence such as -- were you able to block the balloon from transmitting anything?

And then I have a follow-up. Thanks.

GEN. VANHERCK: Yes, so I'm not going to talk about any ongoing operations that occurred, such as attempts to use non-kinetic effects. Those are things that I need to go to Congress to talk about, I need to talk about with the department before we move forward.

What I will tell you is we took maximum precaution to prevent any intel collection. I was in close coordination with the Commander of the United States Strategic Command, and we provided counterintelligence messages out of our intelligence shop across the entire Department of Defense and the interagency so that we could take maximum protective measures while the balloon transited across the United States.

Again, this is on record previously. We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actionable technical means from the Chinese.

And with that said, you always have to balance that with the intel gain opportunity. And so there was a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons, and so I would defer to the intel community, but this gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed, and I think you'll see in the future that the -- that time frame was well worth it's value to collect,over.

Q: Thank you. And on the prior balloons, was NORTHCOM involved in tracking the balloon that was at the early stage of the Biden Administration and also the three that transited during the Trump Administration, and what can you tell us about those that were different?

Thank you.

GEN. VANHERCK: So those balloons, so every day as a NORAD commander it's my responsible to -- responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that's a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out. But I don't want to go in further detail.

The intel community, after the fact, I believe has been briefed already, assess those threats to additional means of collection from additional means and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America. I hope that answers your question.

STAFF: All right, thank you, sir. Let's go to Jeff Schogol Task & Purpose.

Q: Thank you. Can you say the F-22 that shot down the balloon, will it get a balloon decal to signify the victory?

GEN. VANHERCK: Hey, Jeff, I'll differ to the first fighter wing. I -- I will say I'm really incredibly proud of everybody that took place in this. But the F-22 was remarkable. I'd remind everybody that the call sign of the first flight was Frank 01. The secondly flight of F-22s was Luke 01; a flight of two.

Frank, Luke; Medal of Honor winner, World War I for his activities that he conducted against observation balloons. So how fitting is it that Frank 01 took down this balloon in sovereign air space of the United States of America within our territorial waters.

STAFF: Thank you, sir. Let's go to Natasha Laguerre from Myrtle Beach.

Q: Hello, I see that you guys still have ships out here. Is that should be a concern for people in this area? And you also mentioned that you guys yesterday could not use the sonar panels to collect the debris under the ocean. What was it that caused it to have a stop there compared to today?

GEN. VANHERCK: Yes, so those are under current -- underwater currents and sea states, which were -- that exceeded the safety parameters for the -- the forces that come out of the EOD and the multiple unit two to provide that.

The area we have set up there is about a 10 mile -- 10 by 10 mile area to -- for safety purposes, from air traffic and a smaller area that we're providing for security and safety on the surface. But the primary reason was absolutely for the safety of our military and our interagency partners supporting us. The sea states just didn't allow that.

Q: And I have a follow-up question. Could you give us an estimate of how big the balloon was? We saw that it had solar panels and it could also potentially had a recording device on it.

GEN. VANHERCK: Yes, so the balloon assessment was up to 200 feet tall for the actual balloon. The payload itself, I would categorize that as a jet airliner type of size, maybe a regional jet such as a ERJ or something like that. Probably weighed in access of a couple thousand pounds. So I would -- from a safety standpoint, picture yourself with large debris weighing hundreds if not thousands of pounds falling out of the sky. That's really what we're kind of talking about.

So glass off of solar panels potentially hazardous material, such as material that is required for batteries to operate in such an environment as this and even the potential for explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon that -- that could have been present.

So I think that would give you an idea of the perspective of the balloon and the decision-making process along the way.

STAFF: Thank you, sir.

Q: Thank you.

STAFF: Let's go to -- let's go to Jennifer Griffin, Fox.

Q: Thanks, General VanHerck. Can I just ask you, on the record again, because there's been a lot made in recent days still about why this was not shot down after it crossed or neared the Aleutian Islands? Can you just explain what you were watching then, what you were thinking then? What the decision-making process was. And why it -- you didn't have enough time to do so, if that was the case?

GEN. VANHERCK: Thanks, Jennifer. It wasn't time. It -- the domain awareness was there as it approached Alaska. It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical military threat to North America, this is under my NORAD hat. And therefore, I could not take immediate action because it was not demonstrating hostile act or hostile intent. From there, certainly, provided information on the status of the whereabouts of the balloon. And moving forward, kept the department and the governor -- the government of Canada in the loop as my NORAD, I have a boss in Canada as well. Over.

Q: And just to follow up, is it true you had U-2 spy planes around the balloon as it crossed the continental U.S. and that was another way that you could collect on the balloon?

GEN. VANHERCK: So, I'm not going to get into details of the operation, what planes. What I'd tell you, Jennifer, is that we utilized multiple capabilities to ensure we collected and utilized the opportunity to close intel gaps. I'll defer to the department, I don't want to get in front of my discussions with Congress or others about specific details for collection.

I would point out and I think it's important to talk about is, day to day we do not have the authority to collect intelligence within the United States of America. In this case, specific authorities were granted to collect intelligence against the balloon specifically and we utilized specific capabilities to do that, Jennifer. And I'm sorry I can't give you further detail.

Q: Thank you.

STAFF: Let's go to David Martin, CBS.

Q: Two questions. Can you give us the names of some of the sensitive military sites that were in range of the balloon's censors as it crossed the U.S.? And that debris field you're describing is radically smaller than the predicted debris field that was 20 miles by 20 miles. What accounts for that? Was there -- were your models off? Was there -- did you figure out a different way to shoot it down? Was it -- was there a warhead in that missile?

GEN. VANHERCK: Okay, thanks, David. I'm not going to get in front of the department on specific locations, flight path. I would just tell you we took every precaution to ensure any sites in the way were covered and that we minimized any collection. So, let's -- let us talk to Congress and provide those specific details.

As far as the actual site, the 20 by 20 was a -- that's a site -- and area that we cleared out from the maritime -- or the notice to mariners for safety. We wanted to clear that box out. I cleared another box out that was 150 miles by 150 miles for air traffic to ensure that there was no air traffic that was potentially involved, to minimize risks to all personnel and infrastructure.

The analysis -- and oh, by the way, we were able to get significant analysis throughout this process, as a cross, that enabled us to make this a much more safe and effective operation. So, in partnership with NASA, who gave us an assessment that would potentially be up to six or seven miles of debris. That's where -- that's where we decided to make the engagement six miles off the coast so that no debris would go back over the coast.

Now, with that said, David, I think it's important to point out, there was debris that's expanded out further, we have collected the majority of that debris that fell in the ocean and other places. Now, what we're talking about, is really that superstructure below that fell down and limited itself to this 1,500 meter by 1,500-meter box that we're talking about. Does that clarify?

Q: Yeah. And could you answer the question about whether there was a warhead in the missile?

GEN. VANHERCK: Yeah, absolutely. There was a warhead in the missile. You can see that explosion on TV as it goes through the lower part of the balloon and right there through the superstructure.

STAFF: All right, thank you, Gentlemen.

Let's go to Alex Horton of Washington Post.

Q: Hey, thanks for doing this. I was curious if you can get a little bit more detail about those other balloons, and I think the four others. You know, you had mentioned that you weren't aware of them. So how are you aware of them now? Was it through different agencies that are helping you in review since this incident? And can you also tell us something about their location and postures? We've heard some states like Florida and Texas, but those are pretty large, where they appeared interested in military bases. Were they interested in military installations like this one? Thank you.

GEN. VANHERCK: I don't have that detail. I'd have to defer the intel community. They'll have additional fidelity at this time.

STAFF: Thank you, sir. Let's go to Phil, Reuters.

Q: Hi, there. Was there ever any thought or planning to try and potentially capture the balloon as opposed to using a -- you know, a Sidewinder? And how was that munition chosen? And lastly, you know, at what point did you learn about these other balloons if you weren't detecting them at the time? Was it all kind of retrospective upon the discovery of this one? Thank you.

GEN. VANHERCK: So, I'm not going to get into the technical details, I will just tell you there were multiple options considered and asked for at multiple levels. The decisions that were made were based on safety first, and then effectiveness and being able to take the balloon down within our sovereign airspace and territorial waters. Again, I'll go back -- I'm going to reserve that till I talk to Congress, till I talked to others who have interest in the specific details.

STAFF: Thank you very much. Let's go to Jon Harper, Defense News.

Q: Right. Thank you. Can you give us some more details about this UUV you're using, you know, what specific type of platform it is? You know, what capabilities it has to perform this underwater detection mission? And will the UUV itself be involved in lifting debris up from the undersea domain?

GEN. VANHERCK: Yeah, great question, and I'm not the expert. Maybe we can get that, and Pat, you can provide some additional details through my Navy component, through me I can get you that. What I can tell you is I'm sure -- I can assure you that it has photographic capabilities. It'll have capabilities to in place things such as inflatable devices, and mapping sonar, those types of things. But I can't give you further details beyond that, because I physically don't know.

Q: Okay. And are there multiple UUVs involved in this or is it just one single platform that you're using?

GEN. VANHERCK: Yes, I don't have that. I'm a -- I'm going to make the assumption, but you can't -- I can't guarantee this info, that they have multiple platforms and they likely can utilize multiple or single ones, depending on the scenario. But I'll have to give you the facts on that from my Navy component.

Q: Thanks. And just to clarify, did you say that yesterday the C-states wouldn't allow you to deploy these UUVs, but that activity just started today?

GEN. VANHERCK: That's exactly what I said. There was safety concerns yesterday that prevented us from employing the EOD teams with their UUVs. And today they're on scene as of 10 o'clock Eastern this morning.

Q: Great. Thank you.

STAFF: John. Let's go to Annie, Canadian Television News.

Q: Hi, thank you very much for taking the question. As you mentioned, right after the balloon passed through Alaska it did enter Canadian airspace. I'm wondering if you can tell us who in Canada was notified when it crossed into the airspace. And what type of communication you've had with the Canadian officials?

GEN. VANHERCK: -- Annie. So, I'm not going to give you specific details on who or speculate in Canada had information or what the Canadian decision-making process is. My boss is General Wayne Eyre, the Chief of Defense staff on the Canadian side. And I can assure you that General Eyre was kept in the loop.

Q: Thank you. And I'm wondering if you have any more information you can provide about how the balloon came into Canadian airspace. Whether you think that this was something done on purpose or it just sort of veered off course as it was going through the U.S.? And was this also the only balloon you're aware of that entered Canadian airspace or were there others as well?

GEN. VANHERCK: In my domain awareness tells me that there was one balloon. I don't have any indications that there was a second. There was some speculation about a second one. I launched NORAD fighters, Canadian CF-18s and we were not able to corroborate any additional balloon. I do think their path was purposely built. And they utilized the winds and it's a maneuverable platform as well, but their utilize their maneuverability to strategically position themselves to utilize the winds to traverse portions of countries that they want to see for collection purposes.

STAFF: Thank you. Let's go to Oren, CNN.

STAFF: A quick follow-up and another question. In response to Jennifer Griffin, you had said you didn't as you watched the balloon that it was a posed a military or kinetic threat. Did you, at first, believe this was a weather balloon or did you believe all along it was a surveillance balloon?

And then I was just wondering what you can say about the condition of the -- of the wreckage, of the debris? Is it in relatively good condition? Is there an estimate on how many pieces it's in? And is there an estimate on weight or mass of what there is to collect from this?

GEN. VANHERCK: On your second question, I can't give you that right now. I don't know the numbers and until we get down there today, I expect later on today we'll have additional fidelity on what debris looks like, size of pieces, weights of pieces, those kinds of things. On your first question, with regards to that, you know, my job as the Commander of NORAD's to identify everything that approaches North America.

In this case, I would tell you, we had a good indication that it was a surveillance balloon from the beginning. I was able to corroborate that with my domain awareness capabilities and provided the -- an assessment as such.

STAFF: Thank you.

Q: Thank you.

STAFF: Let's go to Mike Glenn, Washington Times. --

Q: Thanks, sir. I was wondering, when are you planning to go (inaudible) --

STAFF: Hey, Mike, you're breaking up really bad.

Q: I am?

STAFF: Can you repeat that? Yeah, you broke up really bad.

Q: Yeah. When are you going to Congress -- God damn it.

Q: Yeah, when are you going before Congress to talk?

GEN. VANHERCK: All of that's being worked, and I'm -- I'm going to preserve their decision space, the department's decision space, the president's decision space. I -- I -- when I testified for confirmation, you know, conveyed to them that when asked, I will provide any testimony, and whenever they ask, I'll be ready with the support of the department.

STAFF: Thank you. I've got time for just a couple more questions. Let's go to Lara Seligman, Politico. Lara, are you there?

Q: Hey, Pat, it's Lara. Did you call on me?

STAFF: I did. I did. Go ahead, Lara.

Q: Oh, okay, thank you. Sorry about that.

Hi, General, sir. Thanks -- thanks so much for doing this. I just wanted to clarify. You said that the balloon potentially carried explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon. Can you just be -- can you just clarify those comments? What -- what exactly was the nature of those explosives? Were they to destroy itself? And then if it carried explosives, why -- what was the assessment based on that it was not a threat?

GEN. VANHERCK: Yeah, so I can't confirm whether it had explosives or not. Anytime you down something like this, we make an assumption that that potential exists. We did not associate the potential of having explosives with a threat to dropping weapons, those kinds of things, but out of a precaution, abundance of safety for not only our military people and the public, we have to make assumptions such as that. I hope that answers your questions.

Q: So -- so just important clarification here: You didn't have a reason to think there were explosives. You just -- this was out of an abundance of caution, and you thought it might potentially have them, so you had to be careful. Is that correct, or did you have reason to believe there were explosives?

GEN. VANHERCK: I would say it was the prior. I did not have any corroboration or confirmation of explosives on this platform. That was an -- an assessment that we wanted just to make sure for safety purposes.

STAFF: Thank you. And final question will go to Brian Everstine, Aviation Week.

Q: Hi. Thank you so much for doing this. I was hoping you could take a little bit more about the planning for the shot itself. We had talked about the modeling for the debris, but the planning, modeling for why you went with an AIM-9 versus an AIM-120. And can you talk a little -- do you know if the AIM-9 has been fired at this altitude in test before?

GEN. VANHERCK: So on the last question there, I'd have to go talk to the Air Force and their Weapon System Evaluation Program. I don't know that they've tested an AIM-9 at that altitude. I'm not aware of any engagements against a high-altitude bull… -- high-altitude balloon such as this. We -- we did not have the weapons data, so I -- I can't confirm that.

Can you remind me of your first question?

Q: I just was hoping you'd talk a little bit more about the planning, and why you went with an AIM-9 versus an AIM-120.

GEN. VANHERCK: Yeah, again, it goes back to safety considerations and effectiveness. You know, the AIM-120 has a significantly-larger range, a significantly-larger missile warhead, and the effectiveness of the AIM-9 here from a safety standpoint was going to be more safe, and we assessed from an effectiveness standpoint that it was going to be highly-effective, and that was proven on Saturday.

STAFF: All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have available today. General VanHerck, thanks so much for taking a moment to update us. Everyone else, have a great day. Out here.

defense.gov

2. U-2 Spy Planes Snooped On Chinese Surveillance Balloon

I would bet we collected every electronic emission from the balloon.

U-2 Spy Planes Snooped On Chinese Surveillance Balloon

U-2 Dragon Ladies had the ability to actually fly above the balloon and gather multiple types of intelligence about it from its perch.

JOSEPH TREVITHICK, TYLER ROGOWAY

PUBLISHED FEB 6, 2023 3:12 PM

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway · February 6, 2023

The U.S. Air Force's U-2S Dragon Lady spy planes were among the assets tapped to monitor and collect intelligence on a Chinese government surveillance balloon during its recent trip across parts of the continental United States and Canada. An F-22 Raptor stealth fighter finally shot down the balloon with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, and efforts are now underway to recover the wreckage from the Atlantic Ocean. Readers of The War Zone can first get up to speed on what we already know about this incident, and its conclusion, in our past reporting here.

A U.S. defense official confirmed the use of the U-2S as part of the broader response to the Chinese spy balloon to The War Zone today. It's not immediately clear all the points along the balloon's voyage that U-2s were present.

A U-2S Dragon Lady. USAF

The Pentagon said over the weekend that the balloon had first entered U.S. national airspace over the Aleutian Islands on January 28. It then passed into Canadian airspace two days later and returned to U.S. airspace, over northern Idaho, on January 31. The balloon then followed a broadly southeasterly track across the contiguous United States before moving out over the Atlantic off South Carolina, where it was ultimately shot down.

The War Zone has separately learned that at least two U-2Ss helped monitor the balloon while it was over the Midwest, using the callsigns Dragon 01 and Dragon 99. At least one Dragon Lady was also in contact at times with the Air Force's Eastern Air Defense Sector (EADS), also referred to by the callsign Huntress. EADS is part of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and is responsible for safeguarding the airspace over roughly the eastern half of the contiguous United States.

While we can't say with certainty exactly what the roles of the U-2Ss in monitoring the balloon were, their employment makes good sense. The Dragon Lady is the only aircraft in U.S. military inventory, at least that we know, that can fly persistently at altitudes even higher than where the balloon was soaring, which was between roughly 60,000 and 70,000 feet throughout its trip across the United States and Canada.

A view from the cockpit of a U-2 flying at 71,000 feet. Note the pilot's flight suit is more akin to a space suit due to the altitudes at which the Dragon Lady typically flies. USAF

On top of that, each U-2S can be configured to collect multiple types of intelligence simultaneously, as you can read more about here. One common sensor loadout for the Dragon Lady consists of the Senior Glass signals intelligence suite, components of which are spread between bays in the fuselage and two underwing 'Super Pods' when it is installed, together with either the Senior Year Electro Optical Reconnaissance System-2 (SYERS-2) or Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System-2 (ASARS-2) in the nose. SYERS-2 is a multi-spectral camera system that can produce high-resolution imagery of a target, even at night. ASARS-2 also produces images, but by using a radar operating in a synthetic aperture mode, giving it an all-weather capability.

A graphic showing various sensor and other payload options for the U-2-series. USAF

An example of imagery taken using the SYERS-2. UTAS (Now Collins Aerospace)

With any array of sensors like this, a U-2S could gather high-quality visuals of the balloon, as well as soak up any electronic emissions that it might have been pumping out. The Dragon Lady can further carry robust data links that allow for sharing the information it gathers with personnel on the ground in near-real-time.

The ability of the U-2 to get above the balloon is critical for a number of reasons. Just surveilling it from a top-down perspective using various sensors could provide additional intelligence as to its design and capabilities. Even what could have been hidden within its envelope would have been important to find out. But most importantly, it would provide a way to intercept directional satellite communications from the balloon with greater reliability. This is a critical form of intelligence collection on such a long-range and sensor-laden device like this.

Finally, the U-2 possesses a highly capable electronic warfare suite. Flying in relatively close proximity to the balloon, and especially above it, it's possible it may have been able to jam any communications being sent to satellites above.

Once again, no aircraft disclosed in the Air Force's inventory is capable of these high-flying, long-loitering operations.

U-2 Dragon Lady has been an indispensable national asset for over six decades. USAF

What electronic emissions they might have been able to collect from the balloons remains unclear, as does what intelligence-gathering capabilities it might have had. It would not be hard for such a lighter-than-air platform to carry its own cameras, radars, and especially signals intelligence payloads.

Yesterday, Politico reported that the U.S. Intelligence Community had previously assessed that smaller balloons detected off the coast of Virginia in 2020 were carrying some kind of radar-jamming payload.

In 2019, The War Zone laid out a detailed case for how previous reports of sightings of cubes with spheres inside off the eastern coast of the United States could have been balloons with radar reflectors and electronic surveillance payloads that could be used to gather critical intelligence about U.S. military capabilities. There is a historical precedent for this, as you can read more about here.

At that time, the 'cube-in-sphere' sightings had been labeled as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), more colloquially known as unidentified flying objects (UFO). The Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the United States and the disclosure that multiple incidents have happened previously over U.S. territory, including over the continental United States, has prompted renewed questions about whether other sightings of balloon-like objects may have been foreign intelligence assets, too. The War Zone has presented an in-depth analysis in the past of how some UAP sightings of various kinds are likely instances where people have spotted intelligence-gathering platforms belonging to foreign adversaries, usually operating in highly sensitive test and training areas.

A view of the Chinese surveillance balloon and the solar-powered payload handing beneath it. Tyler Schlitt Photography / LiveStormChasers.com

In January, the Pentagon’s newly formed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's (ODNI) National Intelligence Manager for Aviation (NIM-A) jointly published an unclassified annual report on UAP-related activity in 2022. This included mention of 366 newly cataloged UAP incidents, including older ones that were not previously known to AARO or NIM-A. Of those 'new' incidents, 163 were assessed to be "balloon or balloon-like entities."

In addition, while the Pentagon says that prior Chinese balloon incidents stretch back to President Donald Trump's time in office, U.S. officials only determined within the last two years or so that they were linked to the Chinese government. Details about how these assessments were made remain unclear, but this does seem to corroborate statements from various Trump administration officials that they were unaware of this during their tenure.

"I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that's a Domain Awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don't want to go into further detail," Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), told The War Zone and other outlets at a press conference earlier today. "The intel community, after the fact, I believe, as has been briefed already, assessed those threats to additional means of collection from additional means, and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transited North America."

President Joe Biden and his administration are being roundly criticized in many corners for the response to this balloon and why it was not shot down earlier. The Biden administration has countered by highlighting the potential risks of doing so while the balloon was overland and the ability to gather further intelligence on the balloon once risks posed by its own capabilities were mitigated. That data could be exploited to learn more about the balloon and its capabilities, as well as provide further evidence to connect it to the Chinese government.

"So there was a potential opportunity for us to collect Intel where we had gaps on prior balloons. And so I would defer to the intel community but this gave us the opportunity to assess what they were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities existed," Gen. VanHerck himself stressed at the press conference today. "And I think you'll see in the future that that timeframe was well worth its value to collect."

"I would point out, and I think it's important to talk about, is day-to-day we do not have the authority to collect intelligence within the United States of America," VanHerck added. "In this case, specific authorities were granted to collect intelligence against the balloon specifically and we utilized specific capabilities to do that."

Altogether, this underscores the value of using U-2Ss, among the many platforms that were likely involved in the monitoring and intelligence exploitation of the balloon as it passed over the United States.

If nothing else, with this disclosure now that U-2Ss helped in the response to the balloon's presence, it will be interesting to see what other details about the U.S. military's monitoring efforts might be released.

Howard Altman contributed to this report.

Author's note: The incredible image at the top of this article was taken by photographer Tyler Schlitt of LiveStormChasers.com. Make sure to check out his work, including on his awesome Facebook page linked here.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway · February 6, 2023

3. China’s Balloon May Have Taught Pentagon More Than Beijing Learned From It, General Says

This will be downplayed by pundits.

China’s Balloon May Have Taught Pentagon More Than Beijing Learned From It, General Says

Still, NORAD’s chief says the U.S. military took “precautions,” including “non-kinetic effects.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

The recently-downed Chinese spy balloon may have sent more useful information to the Pentagon than to Beijing, U.S. military officials said Monday.

The weather balloon presented “a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons,” and that could help NORAD more quickly detect future spy attempts, NORAD and NORTHCOM head Gen. Glen David VanHerck told reporters at the Pentagon.

Both the Pentagon and U.S. President Joe Biden drew much online outrage as they waited to fire on the balloon until it had safely passed over the United States and moved over open ocean.

On Monday, VanHerck reiterated what other officials said last week: the sensor package on the balloon offered China no better intelligence capabilities than their satellites and other means already possess.

“We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actual technical means from the Chinese,” he said.

Simple physics explains why. Imaging satellites, whether hovering in geostationary orbit or zooming by in low earth orbit, can carry much larger telescopes than can a payload affixed to a balloon. While both a balloon and a satellite might be able to pick up radio transmissions from a sensitive military site, such as Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, that communication would likely be encrypted anyway, James A. Flaten, an aerospace engineer at the University of Minnesota, told NPRs Geoff Brumfiel.

Since these sites are already visible to passing satellites and the balloon wasn’t able to stay overhead long enough to observe patterns of life, it’s hard to say what useful information it might have collected.

Still, VanHerck said, the Defense Department took “maximum protective measures while the balloon transited across the United States” to prevent intelligence collection.

That suggests the use of lasers or other forms of directed energy to essentially blind, or dazzle, the camera lens on the balloon. VanHerck said he would not comment on the “non-kinetic effects” they used to limit intelligence collection until he had spoken to Congress.

The decision to delay shooting down the balloon while it was crossing over the United States was met with anger from some lawmakers and right-wing pundits. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called it a “disastrous projection of weakness by the White House,” in a statement.

But VanHerck said the wait was worth it, not only for the sake of safety but also to gather more intelligence about the balloon itself.

“You always have to balance [the act of shooting down] with the intel-gain opportunity,” he said. “And so there was a potential opportunity for us to collect intel where we had gaps on prior balloons. And so I would defer to the intel community, but this gave us the opportunity to assess what [the Chinese] were actually doing, what kind of capabilities existed on the balloon, what kind of transmission capabilities exist on it and I think you'll see in the future that that timeframe was well worth its value to collect.”

The recovery mission now moves ahead off the U.S. coast—specifically, the vicinity of the splashdown near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. On station are the dock landing ship Carter Hall, the oceanographic survey ship Pathfinder, Coast Guard vessels, and several unmanned underwater vehicles. VanHerck said that the underwater debris field was perhaps 1,500 meters square. The balloon itself was 200 feet tall with a payload the size of a regional jet and weighing perhaps 2,000 pounds, but the vast majority of that payload was solar panels to power the equipment on board, he said.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

4. Eisenhower, Dulles, and USIA: can the past provide lessons for the present?

Important historical perspective from Matt Armstong, one of our nation's true experts on public diplomacy, influence , psychological warfare, psychological operations, military information support operations, and propaganda.

I love this footnote.

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For goodness sake, get your history right. This statement at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, accessed today (7 Feb ‘23), is utter nonsense, a reality revealed by even the tiniest inquiry and Gullion’s own words: “As coined in the mid-1960s by former U.S. diplomat Edmund Gullion, public diplomacy was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term propaganda, which had acquired pejorative connotations.” For a brief discussion on the term, see my chapter Operationalizing Public Diplomacy (2020).

Eisenhower, Dulles, and USIA: can the past provide lessons for the present?

https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/eisenhower-dulles-and-usia-can-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=773227&post_id=101387881&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

The "rhyming" nature of history and US "public diplomacy"

Matt Armstrong

6 min ago

I started to write a different article that opened with this question: Can a term represent both a symptom and cause of a dumpster fire? Yes, unequivocally. The term in question is “public diplomacy,” and it was adopted – it was not “coined,” please stop writing it was “coined”

1 – in 1965 as part of a public relations campaign to further segregate and elevate the activities of one bureaucracy to be at least on par with another. The US Information Agency operated for more than a decade without this term, and the State Department had managed to run more than USIA’s relatively small portfolio for nearly a decade prior. Despite this, there is surprisingly little serious inquiry let alone understanding into why “public diplomacy” emerged in 1965 as part of a name at a center established at Tufts University. I don’t want, nor do I really have the time right now, so read my chapter on Google Books that discusses the common use of the term before 1965. For now, it is easy to stipulate the confusion around what is, and is not public diplomacy, and who does, and does not, “do” public diplomacy, derives from its original application to an agency and not to activities, methods, or outcomes. The result has been catastrophic programmatically, conceptually, and organizationally.Due to other priorities, what followed that opening began to take more time and energy than I have, so that’s on hold.

2 In place of that, below is a version of a post published on mountainrunner.us back in September 2018. Besides correcting some misinformation – and, arguably, disinformation – around the Smith-Mundt Act, it may provide some relevant forgotten history for those interested in “public diplomacy,” information warfare, etc. today.

On Friday morning, January 18, 1957, Arthur Larson gave a lengthy and wide-ranging presentation on the United States Information Agency to President Eisenhower’s cabinet. After a 22-month stint as undersecretary at the Labor Department, and now one month as USIA Director, Larson used charts, maps, and film clips to describe the agency, then a little more than three years old. The nearly three dozen attendees included the President, Vice President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell.

Larson focused on the agency’s importance to the entire government, emphasizing the agency’s role at the center of a whole of government effort. Larson described “the need for the help of all Cabinet members, since the program for telling the United States’ story can succeed only if everyone in public and private life is alert to the impact of our actions on world opinion.”

At the end of his nearly ninety-minute briefing, he made three specific requests to the cabinet. First, every department and agency needed to designate a liaison – a “watchdog,” as he called it – to stay on top of USIA’s activities and maintain conversations between their agency and both the State Department and USIA. Second, these liaisons must regularly meet as a group. And third, the briefing presented to the cabinet be repeated for the “top officials of each agency.”

The meeting minutes reflected the cabinet concurred with each request. The cabinet also “decided to ensure that the foreign opinion factor would be weighed in deciding upon actions and statements and that the Department of State and USIA would be informed in advance when such actions or statements would have an impact abroad.”

Attorney General Brownell inquired “the foundation for charges by the press that USIA was engaged in undue competition with the regularly established press.” Congress threatened to limit or reduce USIA’s budget as a response to these concerns. In modern academic reviews, the nature of these charges would take on different meanings, but that’s for a different time.

Members of Congress were channeling a few wire services, some newspapers, and the National Broadcasting Corporation. Not all of the media leveled these charges. The Associated Press and, to a lesser extent, the United Press pressed the competition argument since the government’s peacetime broadcasting plan started to form in October 1945. Such was the climate when Ike appointed Larson, a former Rhodes scholar and law professor, as Director of the agency.

In 1946, the American Society of Newspaper Editors dismissed the bulk of the AP’s concerns, concluding that “the present uncertainties in international relations justify an effort by the United States Government to make its activities and its policies clear to the people of the world through the agency set up in the State Department.” ASNE agreed with the State Department’s position that the government was intended only to fill in “the gaps where private agencies don’t do the job.”

Pledge your support

The AP frequently raised the point that since the Kremlin’s media used the AP wire service, this meant western information got into Russia and a US government news program, first in the form of Voice of America and later more broadly as part of the State Department’s US Information Service, were unnecessary. This argument was countered by other media leaders who noted that Moscow was selective in which stories from the AP and the stories were carefully edited. As for other nations, the AP’s chief, Kent Cooper, would later say that “all countries of any importance actually avail themselves” of news of the American wire services. As the State Department pointed out at the time, many of the countries the department intended to engage, such as Russia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Iran, “either do not get these reports or [Soviet Union-related services] process them beyond recognition.” An analysis requested by the State Department in 1946 found significant limitations in the ability of private agencies to deliver information abroad as structural problems in critical markets prevented private enterprise, whether American or otherwise, from operating effectively or at all.

As the war of ideologies proceeds, people in Europe are being super-saturated with statized propaganda. This is dramatically shown by the poor response to Russian movies even in countries like Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the full power of the regime is thrown behind them. In contrast, there is a refreshing quality of interest and believability in America’s free and uncensored movies, books, magazines, and newspapers — where they can get through. [Emphasis in the original]

But, in too many places they are not getting through. It is naive to say “Let private enterprise carry the ball,” and at the same time ignore the fact that there are widening areas in which private enterprise can no longer operate in a normal manner.

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The structural problems limiting private media from effectively operating in these markets ranged from currency conversation challenges to infrastructure to censorship. The report laid out three categories of countries. In “Free Zone” countries–including Canada, Cuba, and Mexico–commercial media had access and the potential for profits (that could be repatriated). “Iron Curtain” countries – Russia, and Yugoslavia, for example – were where a private operation was virtually impossible, commercial opportunities non-existent, and potential consumers were threatened by the state. The third category, “Mixed,” was “shaky” countries–including France and Italy–where a combined effort by private and government was necessary, partly because a distinguishing feature of these markets was the non-convertibility of currency that limited incentives for U.S. media.

The May 1947 version of a bill known as the Smith-Mundt Act contained language to directly address competition concerns like those of the APs.

[T]he Secretary shall encourage and facilitate by appropriate means the dissemination abroad of information about the United States by private American individuals and agencies, shall supplement such private information dissemination where necessary, and shall reduce such Government information activities whenever corresponding private information dissemination is found to be adequate.

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Through various markups, this language evolved until the final Smith-Mundt Act was signed into law by Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948. The original Section 502 was split into two: Section 502 (“Policies Governing Information Activities”) and Section 1005 (“Utilization of Private Agencies”).

In authorizing international information activities under this Act, it is the sense of the Congress (1) that the Secretary shall reduce such Government information activities whenever corresponding private information dissemination is found to be adequate; (2) that nothing in this Act shall be construed to give the Department a monopoly in the production or sponsorship on the air of short-wave broadcasting programs, or a monopoly on any other medium of information.

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In carrying out the provisions of this Act it shall be the duty of the Secretary to utilize, to the maximum extent practicable, the services and facilities of private agencies, including existing American press, publishing, radio, motion picture, and other agencies, through contractual arrangements or otherwise. It is the intent of Congress that the Secretary shall encourage participation in carrying out the purposes of this Act by the maximum number of different private agencies in each field consistent with the present or potential market for their services in each country.

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Both of these protections remain today. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 specifically called out both in Section 208, the passage addressing concerns of domestic dissemination of information by the agencies covered by the Act, where were the then-Broadcasting Board of Governors and the public diplomacy elements of the State Department. The concern about domestic access to these programs, including radio broadcasting, did not exist for the first two decades of Smith-Mundt. It was not the mid-1960s when Senator J. William Fulbright tried to abolish USIA, VOA, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty, which he described in 1972 as “cold war relics.”

7 Fulbright’s attack included requiring USIA be reauthorized annually and amending Smith-Mundt in a way that began falsely casting the law as an “anti-propaganda” law, a narrative that would be cemented in 1985 by Senator Edward Zorinsky.However, when Larson took over USIA near the end of 1956, the repeating cycle of charges of unfair competition with private agencies did have some truth. Foreign papers were using USIA’s news services delivered over the air and in print instead of paying for American wire services or entering into contracts with American newspapers. Congress and State Department intended that the information service use, to the “maximum extent practicable, the services and facilities of private agencies, including existing American press, publishing, radio, motion picture, and other agencies, through contractual arrangements or otherwise. This did happen at first, but it was curtailed quickly in 1946 due to a lack of oversight over programs written and produced by contractors (one of the examples is, separated by time, humorous). Through a separate amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, the Informational Media Guarantee, passed as part of the European Recovery Program, provided an additional channel to support the distribution of domestic media (often books and films) abroad. But the specter of competition, real or perceived, remained.

Pledge your support

The Attorney General’s question sparked discussion beyond the cabinet meeting. An Editorial Note posted on the State Department Historian’s website about the cabinet meeting above first appeared in the 1987 publication of Volume IX (“Foreign Economic Policy; Foreign Information Program”) of the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957. This Editorial Note came to my attention because of what it suggests: that the Eisenhower Administration considered abolishing USIA in 1957, barely four years after creating it.

The Historian’s three-decade-old Editorial Note requires context. The following four points, three of which begin with a passage from the Editorial Note, provide the background I believe is necessary to understand the commentary better.

First point:

In an April 26 request to C.D. Jackson, USIA Deputy Director Washburn cited the anti-USIA campaign by Roy Howard [of Scripps-Howard News Service] and criticism by the Information Chief of NBC as contributing to the USIA Congressional problems. In a memorandum of May 14 [1957], USIA Director Larson asked David G. Briggs, IPS, to investigate complaints from the United Press and Associated Press about USIA press file competition. Larson was especially concerned over the charges made by Frank J. Starsel, General Manager of the Associated Press, to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate Democratic leader and Appropriations Committee Chairman, that USIA was carrying on unfair competition against private United States press agencies.

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Opposition to the State Department’s news division focused on, but not limited to, the broadcasting entity inherited from the abolishment of OWI on Aug 31, 1945, and known as the Voice of America, came from a minority of the American news media. As described above, the AP led the opposition, but the UP soon joined with them. The AP’s resistance began after Reuters, its partner in a global news cartel, felt attacked by how it was portrayed in two brief footnotes in a report about the postwar information environment commissioned by the State Department in early 1945.

The dust-up between the AP and State was so intense by January 1946 that Congress stopped working on the legislation that would later become the Smith-Mundt Act, the bill that gave permanent authorization for information and exchanges programs of all kinds. The majority of the US media, including the International News Service (INS), William Randolph Hearst’s service and later the “I” in UPI when the two merged later, supported the foreign intervention by State. This collective bunch, including those who opposed government radio before the war. Included among the supportive journalists and editors was Mark Ethridge, who had been hired by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1938 to oppose Congressional attempts to launch a government radio service aimed at Latin America. But in 1946, Ethridge described the AP and UP as “exceedingly smug in their assumption they are the sole possessors of purity.” He criticized the wire services for imagining they could penetrate countries “where they cannot go” at a time “when we are trying to win the peace—now, while we are in an ideological war.”

The AP, however, argued it had demonstrable reach abroad, citing its contracts abroad, including behind the Iron Curtain, such as TASS, the Russian news agency. Most in the media and government found this unconvincing owing to the Kremlin’s penchant for being highly selective and often re-editing stories. Many in the American press also highlighted the inconsistency of the AP refusing to sell its service to the State Department on the grounds the AP would be tainted by association with a government broadcaster while having no such qualm selling to Moscow. (As an aside, the AP successfully campaigned to keep VOA out of the Senate press gallery for decades until the 1980s, long after Moscow’s news services were allowed in.)

Second Point:

After hearing opposition to the proposal by his staff, Secretary Dulles on May 17 expressed his objections to the President of any absorption by the Department of State of USIA. The President, who initially voiced some support for the measure, authorized Dulles to maintain his stand against a merger of USIA with the Department of State.

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Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was against State having a non-traditional role in diplomacy. He supported the creation of USIA in 1953, which was the natural result of State’s rejection of the public diplomacy programs it was charged with beginning in late 1945 by Executive Order and through early 1948 through appropriations, and finally from early 1948 on by legislative authority (the Smith-Mundt Act) onward. About that time, incidentally, Dulles argued for the need of a separate government agency “dedicated to the task of nonmilitary defense” with “adequate personnel and ample funds.”

Creating USIA and removing the information and cultural programs from the State Department reduced the department’s workforce by 40%. In addition to the broadcasting service, there were extensive information programs involving posters, books, movies, libraries, training, and exchanges of all types – technical, governmental, cultural, and educational – that require “front line” staff (i.e., public affairs officers) and “back office.” By reducing the headcount and simplifying the department's mission, the Secretary could focus on the traditional role of a foreign ministry. Such was the claim at the time. Dulles supported the split and did not want USIA’s operations to return four years later when USIA’s staff numbered around 7,000.

The argument to create USIA in the first place was because State was again rejecting and refusing to acknowledge a role in direct engagement abroad (the department similarly refused to engage in 1916 and 1938, and both times resulted in the creation of agencies designed to bypass the department: the foreign section of the Committee on Public Information and later the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs). The people who were in place in 1945-1947 that brought about the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act that made these programs permanent were gone by 1949. People like C.D. Jackson and Nelson Rockefeller, who previously supported State owning these responsibilities, came to accept creating a separate USIA, as long as certain conditions were satisfied. Spoiler: the conditions were not met and the short-lived International Information Administration was snuffed out by Dulles who rejected an operational role for the department.

Remember that when Eisenhower created USIA, the Information piece was the lesser of a two-part government reorganization along the DIME (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economics) model. In 1953, the new Eisenhower Administration consolidated foreign policymaking and execution by streamlining leadership, authorities, and appropriations. While some argued against this separation, those, especially at the State Department, supported it. The administration tried to move “separate and self-contained pieces” of the foreign policy process under a single leadership through two plans. A single roof would increase efficiency and efficacy through synchronization, reduce costs, and simplify interaction with Congress. The first, Plan No. 7, established the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) by consolidating several foreign affairs and aid activities under one roof. FOA was a hybrid agency bringing together Treasury, Defense, and State, with State the greater of among equals. The second, Plan No. 8, created USIA, which State supported so it could return to what it viewed as its “traditional” role in diplomacy.

Also, it is important to remember Senator Fulbright’s tepid support in 1953 Plan No. 8. He expected USIA would be shuttered within three years, or “maybe 10.” Whether intentional or not, ten years later, he began attacking the agency with vigor, as briefly mentioned above.

Third Point:

On May 29, Congress sent to the President a bill providing $96.2 million for the USIA 1958 budget. Part of the bill included a provision barring USIA from competing with or duplicating the services of private agencies in news or pictures.

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As noted above, there was already a non-compete clause in the Smith-Mundt Act. This language also doubled as a sunset clause to shutter the activities. In short, the government was to defer to private media whenever possible and reduce activities when the private press was deemed adequate. The redundancy of this text highlights reflects the agency’s failure to support the existing law (i.e., the language appears as a stern reminder), a breakdown of the Hill to exercise oversight over the authorities granted in legislation or lip service to the news media.

Fourth and final Point:

Not found in the Historian’s note is the overall opposition and confusion over what USIA was and was not. By the mid-1950s, discussions about the ongoing political warfare of the “cold war” (which would not be a capitalized proper noun for another decade) were happening in Congress, in newspapers and magazines and on radio news programs. While some in Congress were interested in vigorously defending against and fighting Russian subversion (aka “political warfare,” sometimes today referred to as “hybrid warfare” or “information warfare“) and USIA was simply not a part of that conversation as it was not charged with, resourced, or trained to counter Russian political warfare. There were also concerns about USIA being “un-American” because, in part, of certain books available in USIA’s libraries abroad.

Also not in the Editorial Note was the cause of the repurposing of the term “public diplomacy.” In the 1950s, public diplomacy was a diplomat leaving a closed-door negotiation and speaking to the press because the other side, often the Americans, did so (if they did at all). By the 1960s, “public diplomacy” emerged to stake out important turf that was not “diplomacy.” This was part of an effort to place USIA and its FSIOs (Foreign Service Information Officers) intentionally on equal footing with State and FSOs.

After Dulles asked his staff whether USIA should be reincorporated into State, he reversed his earlier apparent willingness to entertain the merger. The Congress would continue to apply pressure on USIA, with some seeking to end the agency’s “semi-autonomous” status while also eliminating redundancies by merging USIA into State. The House proposed reducing the $144 million budget by nearly 10%, while the Senate discussed cutting more than 30% of the budget. In the end, the budget was cut by 33%. And there was Arthur Larson, who was seen as a “propagandist” for Eisenhower more than the country. Larson would remain at USIA for less than a year, leaving in October 1957 to become a special assistant to the president. Larson was succeeded by Ambassador George V. Allen, a career diplomat who previously served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, 1948-1950. (Allen was one of two career Foreign Service Officers to be confirmed as Director of USIA. This is in contrast to not a single career Foreign Service Officer being nominated to be the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.) In that role, he managed the international information programs, exchange programs, and radio broadcasting operations then in the State Department before they were removed in 1953 to form USIA. When Allen took over, his “minor” problems were described as “slumping morale, administrative laxness, and a dearth of first-class information experts.” The major problem were three fundamental questions voiced by an increasing number in Congress: why does the agency exist? what job should it do? and what status should it hold in the hierarchy of the Executive?

USIA would continue to be a separate agency until it was abolished in 1999 following an April 1997 agreement. Today, there are calls to recreate USIA, most of which are ill-informed on what USIA was and was not, and none consider substantial organization questions. Today, like in 1997 and 1957, when Allen took over, the three fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Are there lessons we can learn from Arthur Larson’s briefing and the subsequent discussion? First, we need the president and the cabinet to accept the necessity of coordination and collaboration on policies, particularly regarding the information environment. Second, there is no practical separation of “there” from “here,” as reflected in Eisenhower’s statement, “Everything we say and do, and everything we fail to say and do, will have an impact in other lands.” This is more true than when Ike said it, but was true nonetheless (this was and remains particularly true in regard to problems in the US with civil rights). Third, there are political risks when the president installs a political actor as the central head of information. Republicans and Democrats alike did not like Larson, which led to a less-than-year-long tenure as director.

To wrap up this really long item, the depth and breadth of discussions stand out for me about this episode. This stuff mattered, and people paid attention and sought solutions. This is in stark contrast to the present where actions (i.e., spuriously creating new offices, appointments based on certain qualifications, lack of other appointments, lack of accountability, etc.) speak louder than the few words, too many of which are absurdly ill-informed, uttered around these topics.

For goodness sake, get your history right. This statement at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, accessed today (7 Feb ‘23), is utter nonsense, a reality revealed by even the tiniest inquiry and Gullion’s own words: “As coined in the mid-1960s by former U.S. diplomat Edmund Gullion, public diplomacy was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term propaganda, which had acquired pejorative connotations.” For a brief discussion on the term, see my chapter Operationalizing Public Diplomacy (2020).

Consider the emergence of “global public affairs,” a lovely distortion when considering public affairs had been global until “public diplomacy” came around. For what it’s worth, and our rejection of even knowing our history confirms it’s not worth much, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, originally “for Public and Cultural Relations,” was charged with global informational and engagement activities with a breadth far greater than USIA ever had. And then there’s “domestic public diplomacy,” which… never mind...

Memo from William Nichols to Howland Sargeant, “Private Enterprise and the U.S. Information Program — Preliminary Report.” October 18, 1947.

Section 502 of HR 3342 “United States Information and Exchange Act of 1947,” as of May 13, 1947.

Section 502, Public Law 80-402

Section 1005, Public Law 80-402

In early 1972, Fulbright declared, “These radios [VOA, RFE, and RL] should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold war relics.” Source: Gwertzman, Bernard, “Funding Near End for U.s. Stations Aimed At Red Bloc.” The New York Times, February 21, 1972. This isn’t commonly known, and less commonly known is a retort given by Leopold Labedz. Testifying before a Senate committee commenting on what he described as Fulbright’s “semantic blackmail” around USIA, Labedz questioned the Senator's dominance in the subject: “Looking at the voting record of the union Senator from Arkansas Negro rights, I wonder why nobody refers to him as a ‘relic of the Second Zulu War.’” Source: Negotiation and Statecraft Hearings, Ninety-Third Congress, First Session. Pursuant to Section 4, Senate Resolution 46, 93d Congress [and Section 4, Senate Resolution 49, 94th Congress] (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1973), p66.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v09/d203

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By Matt Armstrong · Launched a year ago

Discussing the past and present of political warfare and public diplomacy

5. Defining Public Diplomacy

A footnote from Matt Arrmstrong's article today critiquing this article.

1

For goodness sake, get your history right. This statement at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, accessed today (7 Feb ‘23), is utter nonsense, a reality revealed by even the tiniest inquiry and Gullion’s own words: “As coined in the mid-1960s by former U.S. diplomat Edmund Gullion, public diplomacy was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term propaganda, which had acquired pejorative connotations.” For a brief discussion on the term, see my chapter Operationalizing Public Diplomacy (2020). https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/eisenhower-dulles-and-usia-can-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=773227&post_id=101387881&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Defining Public Diplomacy

https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/page/what-is-pd

The study of public diplomacy is a new and expanding field. CPD defines it as the public, interactive dimension of diplomacy which is not only global in nature, but also involves a multitude of actors and networks. It is a key mechanism through which nations foster mutual trust and productive relationships and has become crucial to building a secure global environment. There is no single agreed-upon definition of the term; this lack of definitional consensus may well prove to be a good thing. To view various definitions used by practitioners, academics, research institutes, or governments, along with the latest scholarship on the topic please visit CPD's comprehensive public diplomacy PD Hub.

A Brief History of Public Diplomacy

As coined in the mid-1960s by former U.S. diplomat Edmund Gullion, public diplomacy was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term propaganda, which had acquired pejorative connotations. Over the years, public diplomacy has also developed a different meaning from public affairs, which refers to a government’s activities and programs designed to communicate policy messages to its own domestic audiences.

In the past few decades, public diplomacy has been widely seen as the transparent means by which a sovereign country communicates with publics in other countries aimed at informing and influencing audiences overseas for the purpose of promoting the national interest and advancing its foreign policy goals. In this traditional view, public diplomacy is seen as an integral part of state-to-state diplomacy, by which is meant the conduct of official relations, typically in private, between official representatives (leaders and diplomats) representing sovereign states. In this sense, public diplomacy includes such activities as educational exchange programs for scholars and students; visitor programs; language training; cultural events and exchanges; and radio and television broadcasting. Such activities usually focused on improving the “sending” country’s image or reputation as a way to shape the wider policy environment in the “receiving” country.

Recently, and notably since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC, public diplomacy has attracted increased attention from both practitioners and scholars from many parts of the world. As distinct from the “narrow” traditional, state-based conception of public diplomacy described above, recent scholarship has offered a “broader” conception of the field’s scope by developing the concept of the new public diplomacy which defines public diplomacy more expansively than as an activity unique to sovereign states. This view aims to capture the emerging trends in international relations where a range of non-state actors with some standing in world politics – supranational organizations, sub-national actors, non-governmental organizations, and (in the view of some) even private companies – communicate and engage meaningfully with foreign publics and thereby develop and promote public diplomacy policies and practices of their own. Advocates of the new public diplomacy point to the democratization of information through new media and communication technology as a new force that has greatly empowered non-state actors and elevated their role and legitimacy in international politics. As a result, a new public diplomacy is seen as taking place in a system of mutually beneficial relations that is no longer state-centric but composed of multiple actors and networks, operating in a fluid global environment of new issues and contexts.

This new diplomacy will not in the short term displace traditional state-to-state diplomacy as practiced by foreign ministries, but it will impact the way those ministries do business. More than ever before, foreign ministries and diplomats will need to go beyond bilateral and multilateral diplomacy and to construct and conduct relations with new global actors.

The increased interest in public diplomacy in recent years has been facilitated by conceptual developments in other fields. Marketing and public relations notions such as branding have been incorporated by public diplomacy scholars to great effect to cover countries, regions, and cities. Similarly, the concept of soft power coined by international relations scholar Joseph Nye has, for many, become a core concept in public diplomacy studies. Nye defines soft power as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.” In other words, soft power is the degree to which a political actor’s cultural assets, political ideals and policies inspire respect or affinity on the part of others. Thus, soft power has come to be seen as a resource, with public diplomacy a mechanism that seeks to leverage soft power resources.

The debate about a new public diplomacy promises to be global in nature, rather than a debate about U.S. foreign relations, as important as they are. The USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School (CPD) endorses this global approach and encourages a worldwide set of perspectives in its scholarly research, policy analysis and professional education activities. Moreover, the debate is taking on a multi-disciplinary character, with no single discipline determining public diplomacy’s intellectual agenda. Thus, CPD sees public diplomacy as an emerging, multi-disciplinary field with theoretical, conceptual and methodological links to several academic disciplines – communication, history, international relations, media studies, public relations, and regional studies, to name but a few.

6. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 6, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-6-2023

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian officials assess that Russian forces are preparing to launch a large-scale decisive offensive in eastern Ukraine in mid to late February. Ukrainian officials assess that Russian forces are preparing to launch a large-scale decisive offensive in eastern Ukraine in mid-to-late February.
Select Russian nationalist voices continued to express skepticism toward Russia’s ability to launch a successful offensive past late February.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz undermined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s false narrative that the provision of German tanks to Ukraine threatens Russian security.
Kremlin-appointed Russian and occupation officials continue to implement social benefit schemes that target children and teenagers in occupied areas of Ukraine to consolidate social control and integration of these territories into Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to open the door for further institutionalized corruption in Russia through legislative manipulations.
The Kremlin continues to deny Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin legitimacy and authority in Russia.
Prigozhin’s appeal in the Russian nationalist information space may also be declining as he continues to overcompensate for the culmination of Wagner’s attack around Bakhmut.
Failures of Western sanctions efforts against the provision of arms components to Iran have likely contributed to Russia’s ability to bypass Western sanctions to acquire combat drones through military cooperation with Iran.
Russian forces likely made tactical gains northeast of Kupyansk between February 4 and February 6, and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced west of previous positions on the Svatove-Kreminna line on February 5 and February 6.
Ukrainian forces maintain positions in Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast as of February 6 despite Russian claims that Russian forces captured Bilohorivka on February 3.
Russian forces continued ground attacks northeast and south of Bakhmut but still have not encircled the settlement as of February 6.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
Ukrainian forces continued limited attempts to cross the Dnipro River.
Russian conventional and irregular forces may be increasingly struggling to recruit from Russian penal colonies due to high casualties among prior penal colony recruits.
Russian forces continue to struggle with ethnic tensions and tensions between irregular forces.
Russian officials and occupation authorities may be intensifying operational security to conceal new Russian force deployments in Donbas.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 6, 2023

Feb 6, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Layne Philipson, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 6, 9:00 pm 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.

Ukrainian officials assess that Russian forces are preparing to launch a large-scale decisive offensive in eastern Ukraine in mid-to-late February. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov stated on February 5 that the Ukrainian military is expecting Russia to start its decisive offensive around February 24 to symbolically tie the attack to the first anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[1] Reznikov also clarified that the Ukrainian military has not observed the formation of Russian offensive groups in the Kharkiv and Chernihiv directions or Belarus; Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk noted that Russian forces are likely concentrating on launching offensive operations in the east rather than in southern Ukraine.[2] An unnamed advisor to the Ukrainian military told Financial Times that Russia intends to launch an offensive in the next 10 days (by February 15), a timeline that would allow Russian forces to strike Ukrainian positions before the arrival of Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.[3] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai stated that Russian forces are continuing to deploy reserves to Luhansk Oblast to strike after February 15.[4]

Select Russian nationalist voices continued to express skepticism towards Russia’s ability to launch a successful offensive past late February. A Wagner-affiliated milblogger noted that Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov (who currently commands Russian forces in Ukraine) has a limited time window to launch a large-scale offensive operation in Ukraine before it is entirely impossible to execute.[5] Another ultra-nationalist voice, former Russian officer Igor Girkin, forecasted that the Russian decisive offensive will not be successful until Russia mobilizes more manpower, industry, and economy.[6] Girkin claimed that an attack without such mobilization would shortly culminate. Both observations highlight that the Russian military command appears to be in a rush to launch the decisive offensive, likely ahead of the arrival of Western military aid and the muddy spring season in Ukraine around April that hindered Russian mechanized maneuvers in spring 2022.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz undermined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s false narrative that the provision of German tanks to Ukraine threatens Russian security. Putin stated on February 2 that German tanks are again threatening Russia, drawing a false parallel with World War II.[7] Scholz stated that Putin’s remarks are "a part of a series of abstruse historical comparisons that he uses to justify his attack on Ukraine."[8] Scholz added that the West and Ukraine have a "consensus" that Ukrainian forces will only use Western-provided weapons to liberate its territories from Russian occupation. Germany’s provision of Leopard tanks does not differ from Western military provisions of Soviet tanks and kit to Ukraine throughout the war, and Putin’s February 2 reaction is likely a continuation of Russian information operation to discourage Western military aid to Ukraine ahead of Russia’s decisive offensive. Kremlin information agents are amplifying similar rhetoric that Ukrainian forces will use Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDM) - which increase the range of HIMARS to 151km from roughly 80km – to target Russian territory alongside occupied Ukrainian territories.[9] Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov confirmed on February 5 that Ukraine agreed to not use Western long-range weapons to strike Russian territories, however.[10]

Kremlin-appointed Russian and occupation officials continue to implement social benefit schemes that target children and teenagers in occupied areas of Ukraine to consolidate social control and integration of these territories into Russia. Russian Commissioner on Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova (appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin) met with a slate of Russian occupation officials on February 6 to discuss various issues relating to children and youth in occupied regions of Ukraine. In a meeting with occupation head of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov, Lvova-Belova noted that the Crimean occupation government has been instrumental in "accepting" children from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.[11] Lvova-Belova also reported that the "Day After Tomorrow" organization will begin conducting "rehabilitation" tours in Crimea to work with children who need special psychological assistance.[12] ISW has previously reported on numerous instances of Russian occupation officials using the guise of psychiatric and medical rehabilitation to remove Ukrainian children further into Russian-controlled territory within Ukraine or deport them to Russia.[13] Sevastopol occupation head Mikhail Razvozhaev similarly announced that he met with Lvova Belova on February 6 to discuss "new formats of social work" on behalf of Putin and remarked that most of the children who require social support are not orphans.[14] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik stated that Lvova-Belova proposed that children whose personal data is in the regional data bank will be "able to find a family in other regions of the Russian Federation."[15] Pasechnik also reported that LNR authorities are working with Novosibirsk Oblast and Khanty-Mansi Okrug to secure "methodological assistance" in resolving issues regarding children in occupied Luhansk Oblast.[16] Lvova-Belova additionally met with Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin to develop programs "for the socialization of adolescents" and with Zaporizhia occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky to discuss social institutions for children in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[17]

Lvova-Belova is likely working directly on Putin’s orders to institute several social institutions and programs in occupied areas of Ukraine to collect personal data on children, carry out various social programming functions aimed at integrating occupied areas using pseudo-humanitarian organizations, and set conditions to legitimize and institutionalize the deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children into Russian families. Putin signed a list of instructions on January 3 that directed Lvova-Belova and directed the occupation heads of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts to "take additional measures to identify minors...left without parental care" in occupied areas to provide them with "state social assistance" and "social support."[18] Lvova-Belova's February 6 meetings with occupation heads are likely the manifestation of Putin’s list of instructions and represent an escalation in efforts by Kremlin-appointed officials to consolidate social integration of occupied territories by targeting children.[19] The implementation of "rehabilitation centers" and the tabulation of children’s personal data through these social programs will likely enable Russian occupation officials to facilitate the forced deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children to Russian families. Occupation officials continue to execute social control measures in occupied areas according to directives provided by Putin’s list of instructions. ISW continues to observe that efforts to deport and forcibly adopt Ukrainian children may constitute a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[20]

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to open the door for further institutionalized corruption in Russia through legislative manipulations. Putin signed a decree on February 6 allowing Russian deputies and senators to not publish their incomes in the public domain.[21] The law will allow deputies and senators to publish their incomes in an anonymized form that does not contain their personal data. The law will also apply to regional and municipal deputies.[22] Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed that the new law will not affect anti-corruption measures and stated that "the conditions of the [special military operation] bring their own specifics."[23] Putin previously approved a decree on December 29, 2022, that exempted all Russian officials, including members of the military and law enforcement, from making public income declarations.[24] These two decrees are likely efforts by the Kremlin to appease the political actors who comprise Putin’s domestic support base and will likely continue to contribute to the institutionalization of corruption in Russia.

The Kremlin continues to deny Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin legitimacy and authority in Russia. A Moscow court refused to recognize Prigozhin as the owner and founder of Wagner private military company (PMC) after revisiting Prigozhin’s lawsuit against Russian journalist Alexei Venediktov on February 6.[25] Prigozhin sued Venediktov in June 2021 for accusing him of being the "owner of Wagner," and the Moscow court concluded that information about Prigozhin’s ownership of Wagner was "unreliable."[26] Prigozhin attempted to reverse the court’s decision on January 19, claiming that Venediktov did not lie about Prigozhin’s ownership of Wagner—likely in an ongoing effort to overcompensate for his declining influence following the replacement of war-torn Wagner forces around Bakhmut with Russian conventional units.[27] ISW previously assessed that the Russian military’s decreasing reliance on Wagner forces around Bakhmut is likely reducing Prigozhin’s influence within the Kremlin inner circle.[28]

Prigozhin’s appeal in the Russian nationalist information space may also be declining as he continues to overcompensate for the culmination of Wagner’s attack around Bakhmut. A prominent Kremlin-affiliated milblogger commented on a video showing Prigozhin piloting an Su-24M bomber aircraft supposedly over Bakhmut on February 6.[29] The milblogger stated that Prigozhin became the main player in Russian information space rather than the traditional Russian military command which "lacked creativity."[30] Prigozhin also "declared" the US, UK, and Canadian governments to be illegitimate states that sponsor terrorism according to the "Wagner Charter."[31] The milblogger stated that Prigozhin’s manipulation of the information space - specifically his skill in trolling - had allowed him to gain more political influence than a Russian Defense Minister.[32] ISW assessed on October 25 that Prigozhin weaponized the Russian information space and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reliance on his forces to gain political leverage in Russia.[33] The milblogger’s acknowledgment of Prigozhin’s flashy tactics may indicate that the non-Wagner-affiliated nationalist information space may be awakening to Prigozhin’s efforts to use the war in Ukraine for personal benefit. Wagner-affiliated milbloggers, in turn, continued to celebrate Prigozhin and previous theater commander Army General Sergey Surovikin as the only two leaders who have "confirmed their high qualifications and enjoy the trust of the political leadership of the country and the people."[34]

Failures of Western sanctions efforts against the provision of arms components to Iran have likely contributed to Russia’s ability to bypass Western sanctions to acquire components for combat drones through military cooperation with Iran. US officials stated on February 5 that Russia and Iran are moving ahead with plans to build an Iranian drone factory on Russian soil, the second such international Iranian drone factory.[35] Iran opened a drone production factory in Tajikistan - a Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) member state and Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) candidate - in May 2022.[36] Russia may leverage its significant economic ties to Tajikistan through the CSTO and EAEU to launder drone components or procure manufactured drones for use in Ukraine to bypass international sanctions.[37]

UK investigative group Conflict Armament Research (CAR) reported in November 2022 that 82% of Iranian Shahed-131, Shahed 136, and Mohajer-6 drones downed in Ukraine had chips, semiconductors, and other components that came from the US despite high import and export control restrictions on such components to Iran.[38] CAR also noted that the downed drones contained higher-end technological capabilities and have a "significant jump in capabilities" compared to other systems previously observed in the Middle East.[39] Most Western-manufactured components in the downed Iranian drones were produced between 2020 and 2021, following the expiration of United Nations Security Council heavy arms sanctions against Iran in 2020.[40] Most Western companies whose components were found in downed Iranian drones in Ukraine denied directly selling components to Russia, Iran, or Belarus since the start of the war.[41] However, the representative of a Swiss manufacturing company noted that it is impossible to be completely sure that distributors of arms components do not sell components to sanctioned entities, implying that Russia, Iran, or other sanctioned states can exploit loopholes allowing them to acquire Western-produced arms components via proxy actors.[42]

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian officials assess that Russian forces are preparing to launch a large-scale decisive offensive in eastern Ukraine in mid to late February. Ukrainian officials assess that Russian forces are preparing to launch a large-scale decisive offensive in eastern Ukraine in mid-to-late February.
Select Russian nationalist voices continued to express skepticism toward Russia’s ability to launch a successful offensive past late February.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz undermined Russian President Vladimir Putin’s false narrative that the provision of German tanks to Ukraine threatens Russian security.
Kremlin-appointed Russian and occupation officials continue to implement social benefit schemes that target children and teenagers in occupied areas of Ukraine to consolidate social control and integration of these territories into Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to open the door for further institutionalized corruption in Russia through legislative manipulations.
The Kremlin continues to deny Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin legitimacy and authority in Russia.
Prigozhin’s appeal in the Russian nationalist information space may also be declining as he continues to overcompensate for the culmination of Wagner’s attack around Bakhmut.
Failures of Western sanctions efforts against the provision of arms components to Iran have likely contributed to Russia’s ability to bypass Western sanctions to acquire combat drones through military cooperation with Iran.
Russian forces likely made tactical gains northeast of Kupyansk between February 4 and February 6, and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced west of previous positions on the Svatove-Kreminna line on February 5 and February 6.
Ukrainian forces maintain positions in Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast as of February 6 despite Russian claims that Russian forces captured Bilohorivka on February 3.
Russian forces continued ground attacks northeast and south of Bakhmut but still have not encircled the settlement as of February 6.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area.
Ukrainian forces continued limited attempts to cross the Dnipro River.
Russian conventional and irregular forces may be increasingly struggling to recruit from Russian penal colonies due to high casualties among prior penal colony recruits.
Russian forces continue to struggle with ethnic tensions and tensions between irregular forces.
Russian officials and occupation authorities may be intensifying operational security to conceal new Russian force deployments in Donbas.

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

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

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

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

Russian forces likely made tactical gains northeast of Kupyansk between February 4 and 6. Multiple Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured Synkivka (10 km northeast of Kupyansk) on February 6, though one milblogger reported that this capture is unconfirmed.[43] A prominent Russian milblogger reported that Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses in Dvorichne (about 9 km north of Synkivka) and established positions on the settlement’s western outskirts on February 4.[44] Geolocated combat footage posted on February 5 shows Ukrainian artillery striking Russian forces in western Dvorichne, supporting the milblogger's report.[45] The Ukrainian General Staff did not report that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in these areas between February 5 and 6.

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced west of previous positions on the Svatove-Kreminna line on February 5 - 6. A Russian milblogger reported that unspecified Russian airborne elements (likely of the 76th Airborne Division) advanced through the Serebryanka forests south of Dibrova and that elements of the 144th Motorized Rifle Division are clearing mines in an unspecified area near Yampolivka as of February 5.[46] This milblogger also reported that elements of the 3rd Motorized Rifle Division pushed Ukrainian forces from unspecified high ground along the Makiivka-Ploshchanka-Nevske line.[47] A different Russian milblogger reported that Russian forces attacked in the direction of Nevske on February 5.[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Kreminna and Shypylivka on February 5 but did not mention repelling attacks further west near Yampolivka or Nevske on February 5 or 6.[49]

Ukrainian forces maintain positions in Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast as of February 6 despite Russian claims that Russian forces captured Bilohorivka on February 3. Geolocated video recorded on February 6 shows Ukrainian forces in Bilohorivka, confirming Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai’s February 5 statement that Russian forces did not recapture Bilohorivka.[51] The previous Russian claims may have been part of a larger Russian information operation. Deputy Head of the Kharkiv Oblast Administration Roman Semenukha stated on February 6 that there is no threat of an offensive on Kharkiv City and noted that all social media rumors about an attack on Kharkiv City are Russian information operations.[52] Russian milbloggers have increasingly been claiming that Russian forces gained the initiative in the Luhansk area and are pushing Ukrainian forces south and west back toward the Siverskyi Donets River. The Kremlin may be conducting information operations to demoralize Ukrainian forces ahead of a major Russian offensive in Luhansk Oblast.

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces have not yet succeeded in encircling Bakhmut as of February 6. A Ukrainian soldier who is fighting in Bakhmut stated on February 5 that while Russian forces are continuing efforts to interdict the T0504 Kostyantynivka-Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut road west of Bakhmut and the E40 Bakhmut-Slovyansk highway north of Bakhmut, supply to the city continues.[53] The soldier noted that Ukrainian troops are maintaining supply to their grouping in Bakhmut despite constant Russian shelling of critical roads.[54] Several Russian sources additionally reiterated on February 5 that Ukrainian troops are not yet withdrawing from Bakhmut.[55] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin noted that fierce battles are occurring in Bakhmut and emphasized that Ukrainian troops are not withdrawing from any part of the city, indicating that the Ukrainian command has not yet deemed the threat of encirclement imminent or exigent.[56]

Russian forces continued ground attacks around Bakhmut on February 5 and February 6. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 5 and February 6 that Ukrainian troops repelled Russian attacks on Bakhmut itself; northeast of Bakhmut near Verkhnokamyanske (32km northeast), Blahodatne (7km north), Krasna Hora (3km north), Paraskoviivka (5km north), and Vasyukivka (12km north); and southwest of Bakhmut near Ivanivske (5km west) and Klishchiivka (7km southwest).[57] Various geolocated footage posted on February 5 confirms marginal Russian advances northeast of Bakhmut in Krasna Hora and in the Rozdolivka-Mykolaivka area (15km northeast), in urban areas in northeastern Bakhmut, and southwest of Bakhmut near Opytne (3km south), Ozarianivka (15km southwest) and Klishchiivka.[58] Several Russian sources claimed on February 5 that Wagner Group forces advanced towards the Stupky area of northern Bakhmut.[59] Russian milbloggers emphasized that heavy fighting continued northeast and north of Bakhmut, particularly in the Krasna Hora and Paraskoviivka areas, as well as within urban sectors of northern and eastern Bakhmut on both February 5 and 6.[60] Russian sources additionally claimed that Wagner troops advanced to within a kilometer of the T0504 highway on February 6 and are attacking toward Stupochky (15km southwest) and Ivanivske in order to cut the T0504.[61] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that "volunteer" detachments captured Mykolaivka (15km northeast of Bakhmut), thus continuing to undermine Wagner Group's credit for gains around Bakhmut by not mentioning Wagner by name.[62] Prigozhin previously claimed Wagner took control of Mykolaivka on February 2.[63]

Russian forces continued ground attacks around Avdiivka and on the western outskirts of Donetsk City on February 6. The Ukrainian General Staff did not confirm any ground attacks in this area on February 5, and a Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces attacked from Opytne towards Pervomaiske (on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City).[64] Geolocated footage posted on February 5 shows marginal Russian advances within western Marinka.[65] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 6 that Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks near Avdiivka around Kamianka (5km northeast of Avdiivka) and Severne (7km west of Avdiivka) as well along the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Pervomaiske, Vesele, Krasnohorivka, and Nevelske and southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Marinka, Pobieda, and Novomykhailivka.[66] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are attacking toward Severne to push east on Avdiivka.[67]

Russian forces did not conduct any claimed or confirmed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on February 5th or 6th. Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian troops are transferring reserves to the Vuhledar areas (about 30km southwest of Donetsk City) in preparation for a counteroffensive attempt.[68] A Ukrainian reserve officer reported on February 6 that the situation around Vuhledar is mostly stable and that Russian forces are conducting small frontal assaults with fire support but are overall hesitant to launch a large-scale attack.[69] The reserve officer noted that Russian units fighting in the area—the 155th and 40th Naval Infantry Brigade—are largely destroyed.[70]

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

Russian forces did not make any confirmed territorial gains on the southern axis on February 5 or February 6. Head of the Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated on February 6 that Russian forces continue aerial reconnaissance and use civilian boats for reconnaissance operations on islands in the Dnipro River delta but are not making preparations for an attack from the south and have not changed positions in the southern direction.[71] Kherson Oblast advisor Serhiy Khlan, however, stated that Russian forces may go on the offensive in the southern direction, indicating that certain Ukrainian officials are keeping the possibility of a Russian offensive in the south within their forecast cone.[72] Humenyuk also stated that Ukrainian troops destroyed two Russian concentration areas and two sabotage and reconnaissance groups on the Kinburn Spit, suggesting that Ukrainian troops are continuing to strike rear concentration areas.[73] Video footage posted on February 5 reportedly shows Russian forces dropping incendiary munitions on Ukrainian positions on the west (right) bank of the Dnipro River.[74] The Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration stated on February 5 that Russian forces focus on maintaining occupied lines and shelling civilian infrastructure along the frontline in Zaporizhia Oblast.[75] Russian forces continued routine shelling in Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv Oblasts on February 5 and February 6.[76] Geolocated satellite footage shows that Russian forces built a fortified base on the Arabat Spit in northeastern Crimea between October 18, 2022, and January 21, 2023.[77]

Ukrainian forces continued limited attempts to cross the Dnipro River. Geolocated combat footage published on February 5 showed Russian artillery striking a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group near Kruhle Lake on the Dnipro River delta.[78] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Russian forces defeated Ukrainian reconnaissance elements near Kruhle Lake on February 1.[79]

Russian occupation officials continue efforts to consolidate control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on February 6 that Russian occupation officials in Enerhodar abducted Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) employees who refused to sign contracts with Russian state nuclear power company Rosatom.[80] The report states that Russian officials are not telling relatives of kidnapped workers where they are being held.[81] Ukrainian nuclear operator Energoatom reported that ZNPP workers refused to train imported Russian from the Kalinin NPP, suggesting that Russian officials at the plant are continuing efforts to import Russian employees to take control of the ZNPP.[82]

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

Russian conventional and irregular forces may be increasingly struggling to recruit from Russian penal colonies due to high casualties among prior penal colony recruits. Russian opposition outlet Mediazona reported on February 6 that the Wagner Group conducted a second prisoner recruitment drive in late 2022, and the drive at Correctional Colony 16 in Samara, Samara Oblast, only yielded 340 recruits whereas the first drive yielded over 1,000 recruits in the summer and fall of 2022.[83] Mediazona noted that other Russian penal colonies see similar declines in recruitment. Mediazona amplified one report that only 20 percent of prisoners recruited in 2022 are still alive as of February 6. A Russian source claimed that Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) personnel forcibly transported 56 prisoners from the Correctional Colony 41 in Yurga, Kemerovo Oblast, on February 5, suggesting that Russian authorities are increasing coercive measures to exploit prisoners amid low voluntary recruitment.[84]

Russian occupation authorities continue to set conditions for long-term force-generation efforts in occupied Ukraine. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on February 6 that Russian forces are introducing cadet classes for 10th and 11th grades in schools in occupied Kherson Oblast where students will study military affairs.[85] The Center reported that Russian occupation officials will offer graduates of this class noncommissioned officer ranks if they are later drafted.[86] These efforts continue to indicate that the Kremlin is preparing for a prolonged war effort in Ukraine, as ISW has previously reported.[87]

Russian forces continue to struggle with ethnic tensions and tensions between irregular forces. Russian Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin claimed on February 5 that it is an "injustice" that Central Asian and Caucasian people can move to Russia but are not required to serve in the Russian military and called for Russia to consider prioritizing directing "naturalized citizens," particularly those from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Transcaucasia, to participate in the war in Ukraine.[88] People from territories with high proportions of ethnic minorities have disproportionately borne the burden of the Russian war in Ukraine, as ISW has previously reported.[89] Tuvan mobilized personnel published a video on February 5 claiming that Russian military police and Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) forces routinely beat them and that Russian forces have not properly trained Tuvan mobilized personnel.[90] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russia service reported on February 5 that Chuvash Republic authorities only provided transportation for Chuvash mobilized personnel to return home on leave after substantial public outcry.[91] Republic of Bashkortostan Head Radiy Khabirov announced that the Republic has redirected funds from the construction of the Ar-Rahim Mosque, which began construction in 2007, to the Russian war effort.[92]

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

Russian forces are intensifying efforts to import medical personnel from Russia to staff civilian hospitals in Donbas, supporting ISW’s assessment that Russian forces are preparing for a renewed offensive in western Luhansk Oblast. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 5 that Russian forces stationed Russian medical personnel and surgeons at a field hospital in occupied Pokrovsk, Luhansk Oblast.[93] The Ukrainian General Staff stated on February 5 that hospitals in occupied Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast, are full of Russian servicemen as Russian forces continue to treat their wounded in local hospitals at the expense of local civilians.[94] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported on February 5 that imported medical personnel from Yakutia, Russia, arrived in Svitlodarsk, Donetsk Oblast, to staff a civilian hospital holding approximately 70 wounded Russian servicemen.[95] Business Gazeta, a media outlet based in Tatarstan, Russia, claimed on February 2 that the Kazan State Medical University in Kazan, Russia, developed an 18-hour first-aid course that teaches volunteers how to identify and treat minor injuries and communicate with people with severe mental trauma, following which the volunteers will be sent to Donbas.[96] Business Gazeta also claimed 30 newly trained volunteers have already been sent to Donbas and that a new batch of trained volunteers will depart for Donbas on February 6.[97]

Russian officials and occupation authorities may be intensifying operational security to conceal new Russian force deployments in Donbas. Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko stated on February 6 that Mariupol internet providers will be shut down indefinitely on February 11, likely in an effort to prevent residents from posting Russian military movements through Mariupol on social media.[98]

Russian federal subjects and occupation authorities are continuing to engage in patronage-like activity to support infrastructure projects in occupied territories. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin claimed on February 5 that he met with a delegation of Tomsk Oblast officials in Donetsk Oblast, after which he thanked the Tomsk Oblast delegation for providing humanitarian assistance and construction material to Donbas, sending Tomsk Oblast doctors to staff hospitals in occupied territories, and supporting those Donbas residents forced to leave their homes.[99] Pushilin stated that he and the Tomsk Oblast delegation discussed the potential for the Tomsk-based "IIma" company and the Donetsk-based Yasinovatsky Machine-Building and Kuzbass Plants to jointly implement an import-substitution plan.[100]

Russian-appointed Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhaev claimed on February 6 that the "World Russian People’s Council" established a branch in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea.[101] DNR Head Denis Pushilin announced on February 5 that Russian and Donetsk Oblast occupation officials created a constituent assembly of the "World Russian People’s Council," an organization that is run by the Russian Orthodox Church with a self-proclaimed mission of uniting all Russian people regardless of their place of residence or political views.[102] Pushilin claimed that "spiritual unity is the essence of the Russian people" and a component of the Russian Orthodox Church worldview that corresponds to the "impulse of all of Russia" to capture Donbas.

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.)

Russia continues to expand its military influence in Belarus. Belarusian Air Force Commander Andrei Lukyanovich stated on February 5 that Belarus will receive a squadron of Russian Mi-35 attack helicopters before April 2023 and that Belarus plans to buy an unspecified number of Su-30SM multirole fighters at an unspecified future time in 2023.[103]

The Kremlin media apparatus continues to promote the information operation about a Russian invasion of northern Ukraine from Belarus. Prominent Kremlin state TV propagandists Vladimir Solovyov visited joint Russian-Belarusian exercises in Belarus in early February and released a special report on the development of the joint Russian-Belarusian Regional Grouping of Forces on the Rossiya 1 TV channel on February 5.[104]

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced a snap military readiness check of the Military Academy of Belarus on February 6.[105]

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

[1] https://www.pravda dot com.ua/news/2023/02/5/7388012/

[2] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/06/za-czyu-nich-na-pivdennomu-napryamku-rosijski-vijska-vtratyly-dva-katery-ta-dvi-dyversijno-rozviduvalni-grupy-nataliya-gumenyuk/; https://www.pravda dot com.ua/news/2023/02/5/7388012/; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/05/vzhe-zavtra-rozpochynayutsya-navchannya-ukrayinskyh-voyiniv-na-tankah-leopard/

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

[8] https://www.bild dot de/politik/inland/politik-inland/olaf-scholz-im-bams-interview-klimakleber-viele-schuetteln-den-kopf-ich-auch-82789486.bild.html?t_ref=https%3A%2F%2Fm.bild.de%2Fpolitik%2Finland%2Fpolitik-inland%2Folaf-scholz-im-bams-interview-klimakleber-viele-schuetteln-den-kopf-ich-auch-82789486.bildMobile.html%3Ft_ref%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.bild.de%252Fpolitik%252Finland%252Fpolitik-inland%252Folaf-scholz-im...

[10] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/05/ukrayina-ne-zastosovuvatyme-dalnobijnu-zbroyu-po-rosijskij-terytoriyi-oleksij-reznikov/

[18] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... ﷟HYPERLINK "http://www.kremlin%20dot/"http://www.kremlin dot ru/acts/assignments/orders/70322

[19] http://www.kremlin dot ru/acts/assignments/orders/70322

[21] http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202302060005?index=4&rangeSize=1; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/06/putin-razreshil-deputatam-ne-publikovat-svedeniya-o-dohodah-v-otkrytom-dostupe-avtory-initsiativy-priznavalis-chto-im-prosto-len-eto-delat

[22] http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202302060005?index=4&rangeSize=1; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/06/putin-razreshil-deputatam-ne-publikovat-svedeniya-o-dohodah-v-otkrytom-dostupe-avtory-initsiativy-priznavalis-chto-im-prosto-len-eto-delat

[23] https://www.interfax-russia dot ru/main/peskov-o-novom-poryadke-publikacii-deklaraciy-parlamentariev-usloviya-svo-vnosyat-svoyu-specifiku

[24] http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202212290095?index=0&rangeSize=1; https://theins dot ru/news/258252; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[26] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/02/06/sud-otkazalsya-peresmotret-svoe-reshenie-o-nedostovernosti-slov-venediktova-nazvavshego-prigozhina-hozyainom-chvk-vagnera-hotya-biznesmen-sam-v-etom-priznalsya

[36] https://www.al-monitor dot com/originals/2022/05/iran-opens-drone-factory-tajikistan

[37] https://asiaplustj dot info/en/news/tajikistan/economic/20220715/tajik-authorities-still-exploring-possible-accession-to-eaeu

[40] https://www.aljazeera dot com/news/2020/10/18/arms-embargo-on-iran-expires-despite-us-opposition; https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7a394153c87947d8a602c3927609f572

[52] https://suspilne dot media/377018-zodnoi-zagrozi-harkovu-okrim-raketnih-udariv-nemae-semenuha/

[53] https://suspilne dot media/375629-es-zaprovadiv-embargo-na-rosijski-naftoprodukti-ukraina-povernula-116-bijciv-z-polonu-rf-347-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTHgecoEnM

[54] https://suspilne dot media/375629-es-zaprovadiv-embargo-na-rosijski-naftoprodukti-ukraina-povernula-116-bijciv-z-polonu-rf-347-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTHgecoEnM

[62] https://www.interfax dot ru/russia/884845; https://t.me/mod_russia/23985

[71] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/02/06/za-czyu-nich-na-pivdennomu-napryamku-rosijski-vijska-vtratyly-dva-katery-ta-dvi-dyversijno-rozviduvalni-grupy-nataliya-gumenyuk/

[80] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/06/okupanty-vykradayut-atomnykiv-yaki-vidmovlyayutsya-praczyuvaty-na-zaes/

[81] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/06/okupanty-vykradayut-atomnykiv-yaki-vidmovlyayutsya-praczyuvaty-na-zaes

[83] https://zona dot media/news/2023/02/06/scnd-crcl

[85] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/06/rosiyany-stvoryuyut-kadetski-klasy-v-shkolah-na-tot/

[86] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0kEn8yXXHJ431Z2LSsF8... https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2023/02/06/rosiyany-stvoryuyut-kadetski-klasy-v-shkolah-na-tot/

[91] https://d246jefe6d777p.cloudfront dot net/a/32240870.html; https://t.me/idelrealii/24815; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-feb-4-5

[92] https://prufy dot ru/news/society/132663-radiy_khabirov_rasskazal_kogda_budet_dostroena_mechet_ar_rakhim_na_vezde_v_ufu/?sphrase_id=97391753; https://prufy dot ru/news/society/133760-ar_rakhim/; https://t.me/Govorit_NeMoskva/4023; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-feb-4-5

[93] on the territory of the local dispensary, RUAF set up a field hospital with Russian medical personnel and surgeons.

[96] https://www.business-gazeta dot ru/article/582124; https://t.me/astrapress/20548; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-feb-4-5

[97] https://www.business-gazeta dot ru/article/582124; https://t.me/astrapress/20548; https://notes.citeam.org/mobilization-feb-4-5

[102] https://t.me/razvozhaev/1996; https://vrns dot ru/o-vrns.php

[103] https://www.rbc dot ru/rbcfreenews/63dffa429a7947f8653d1e48; https://ctv dot by/ukrainu-prevratili-v-teatr-voennyh-deystviy-glava-vvs-i-voysk-pvo-o-postavkah-tehniki-manyovrah-i; https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/16966615

understandingwar.org

7. Kremlin-Linked Group Arranged Payments to European Politicians to Support Russia’s Annexation of Crimea

Active measures of Russian political warfare.

Kremlin-Linked Group Arranged Payments to European Politicians to Support Russia’s Annexation of Crimea - OCCRP

occrp.org

Also published by our partners Eesti Ekpress (Estonia, in Estonian), IrpiMedia (Italy, in Italian) and Profile (Austria, in German).

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For years, a secret organization run from inside Russia’s parliament successfully interfered with European policies on occupied Ukraine. Leaked emails give a new overview of the operation and show how European Union politicians who helped push Moscow’s agenda were offered cash and perks.

Key Findings

Leaked emails show how a Duma insider built a network of analysts, journalists, and others who helped him push the Kremlin’s interests abroad.
His group offered cash to European politicians to propose pro-Russian motions in their local legislatures, and paid far-right activists to publish pro-Kremlin articles in European media outlets.
The network arranged trips to occupied Crimea for European politicians and businessmen, with travel and accommodation covered by Russian state-funded organizations and honoraria apparently offered to some individuals.
It also helped bring European political figures to Russia to act as election observers, with a 68,000-euro budget allocated to the project.

Since Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s overseas aggression has reached a fever pitch. Yet Russia can still rely on the occasional friendly voice in Europe: Last November, for example, far-right Italian local legislator Stefano Valdegamberi penned an op-ed decrying the EU’s decision to designate Russia a terrorist state as “a serious mistake” that “foments conflict by denying historical truth.”

But what Valdegamberi didn’t mention was that he had long been collaborating with a secretive Russian lobbying group with a direct link to the Kremlin. Since at least 2014, that group had designed plans to channel cash to European politicians to help it legitimize Russia’s occupation of Crimea and promote pro-Moscow policies inside EU countries.

Details of the group’s activities have come to light via hacked and leaked emails belonging to its coordinator, Russian parliamentary staffer Sargis Mirzakhanian, who ran the “International Agency for Current Policy” in the years following the annexation of Crimea.

Although the leaked emails contain extensive evidence that the Russian lobbyists planned to pay the politicians money, including lists of honoraria for key figures and budgets for travel plans, they do not include financial documents or bank statements proving that the payments were made.

The emails suggest his group paid politicians thousands of euros to put forward pro-Russian resolutions in European legislatures, a new investigation by Eesti Ekspress, in partnership with OCCRP, IrpiMedia, iStories, and Profil, has found.

It also helped arrange for political figures from countries including Germany, Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic and Poland to be flown on expensive junkets to pro-Russia events in occupied Crimea, and paid honoraria for their presence.

The lobbying group also flew several European political figures to Russia to act as official election observers.

The emails, which were leaked by a group of Ukrainian hacktivists, reveal especially close ties between Mirzakhanian’s operation and officials in Italy and Cyprus. These ties paved the way for pro-Russian motions to be passed in both countries, with both the Cypriot parliament and multiple Italian regional councils calling for an end to sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Crimea.

Previous media reports have shown links between EU politicians and Kremlin propagandists, but this is the first comprehensive insight into how this campaign was run from Russia. The emails show that Mirzakhanian, a well-connected staffer and adviser in Russia’s parliament, the Duma, built a network of political analysts, journalists, activists, and academics who helped him push the Kremlin’s interests abroad.

Credit: Sargis Mirzakhanyan/VK.com Sargis Mirzakhanyan.

Anton Shekhovtsov, chair of the pro-democracy non-profit Centre for Democratic Integrity, said the leaked emails “represent one of the most important sources of our knowledge of how particular engines of the Russian political war machine works.”

Most significantly, Shekhovtsov said, they showed Mirzakhanian’s role coordinating protests, placing media articles, and preparing parliamentary resolutions across Europe, while organizing “fake” election observation missions as he and his associates sought to legitimize the annexation of Crimea and “advance Russian domestic and foreign policy interests.”

The emails run from March 2007 until September 2017, and it’s unclear whether the International Agency for Current Policy is still at work today, although those linked to the network like Valdegamberi continue to make pro-Russian statements.

Olga Lautman, a researcher on Kremlin-related disinformation and hybrid threats at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said that groups like Mirzakhanian’s had helped open the door to Russia’s ongoing aggression in the rest of Ukraine.

“Russia was extremely successful in its efforts to soften the response to its various campaigns by putting former and current politicians on its payroll,” she said.

“Russia’s latest full-scale invasion is a direct result of the international community’s failure to hold Russia accountable after the 2008 Georgia invasion, the 2014 Ukraine invasion, the atrocities they helped [Bashar al-] Assad commit in Syria, and the various assassinations or attempts, using chemical weapons on foreign soil.”

Mirzakhanyan and other key figures connected to his group did not respond to requests for comment.

Some of the leaked emails.

‘The Price Tag of the Vote’

The International Agency for Current Policy is described in one PowerPoint presentation found within the leaked emails as a “closed association of professionals” that aimed to “cooperate with leading EU parliamentary parties and individual politicians.” Other presentations and draft presentations named Austria, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Latvia, Romania and Turkey as target countries.

The organization appeared to have a direct link to the Kremlin: Mirzakhanyan exchanged more than 1,000 emails between 2014 and 2017 with Inal Ardzinba, a department head in the Russian presidential administration who worked under Vladislav Surkov, a key adviser to President Vladimir Putin at the time.

The activities of the International Agency for Current Policy are made clear in a series of presentations attached to emails in the leak, as well as details in the emails themselves. They ranged from organizing anti-NATO street protests to peddling influence with European lawmakers.

The documents also discuss bringing European delegations to Moscow and Crimea, and targeting “national parliaments of the EU” with pro-Russian resolutions. The latter included resolutions to end anti-Russian sanctions and recognize Russia’s claim to Crimea.

The emails show how Mirzakhanian’s group arranged to make considerable payments to ensure that EU politicians pushed favorable motions in their home countries. Mirzakhanyan bluntly described these payments as the “price tag of the vote” in an email that contained project outlines for Italy and Austria.

Project outlines produced by the International Agency for Current Policy for passing resolutions in Italy, Austria, and Cyprus.

The group planned for Italian Senator Paolo Tosato and Austrian Member of Parliament Johannes Hübner, both from far-right parties, to put forward resolutions in their respective legislatures to lift sanctions against Russia. The project outlines don’t go into detail about how this would happen, but a “budget” of 20,000 euros was listed for both the Italian and Austrian resolutions, with a further 15,000 euros for each “in case of successful voting.” It’s unclear whether these sums were intended to be paid directly to the two politicians or were budgets for the entire projects.

In the end, Hübner and Tosato both presented resolutions against Russian sanctions on their respective parliament floors, but legislators did not adopt them. (These project plans were reported in the media last year, but without identifying the role played by Mirzakhanian’s organization. Tosato denied receiving payments from Russia for the resolution, as did Hübner’s party, FPÖ.)

Mirzakhanian: The Missing Link

The leaked Mirzakhanian emails were first obtained by Ukrainian hacktivists in 2020 and have been reported on before, but the extent of Mirzakhanian’s coordinated campaign to influence European politicians and push Moscow’s agenda across the EU has never before been revealed.

Ukrainian media has published on Mirzakhanian and Inal Ardzinba’s propaganda activities, but without uncovering the coordinated efforts of the International Agency for Current Policy.

Some of the links between Russia and European politicians exposed in the emails have also been previously reported. For example, the plans relating to Hübner and Tosato were covered last year in U.S. magazine New Lines, and picked up in Italy and Austria, after Newsline obtained a different set of leaked communications.

There have also been public revelations in Germany about ties between German politicians and Russian propagandists. In 2017, MEP Marcus Pretzell publicly admitted that the organizers of a 2016 forum in Crimea covered his travel costs. Then in 2019, Der Spiegel and partners revealed AfD’s Markus Frohnmaier was regarded as “under complete control of Russia.” In September 2022, researcher Anton Shekhovtsov revealed further connections between AfD and Russia, and named Mirzakhanian as a key contact for pro-Russian activist Mateusz Piskorski.

MoreLess

The documents also detail separate projects for Latvia, Greece, and even the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). However, there are no indications that these motions were ever proposed.

That doesn’t mean the International Agency for Current Policy didn’t find any success, however. In both regional councils in Italy and the national parliament of Cyprus, motions drafted with the help of Mirzakhanian’s Kremlin-linked apparatus were actually passed.

Success Stories

“It’s a bomb! From the point of view of the media, this will most likely be our loudest informational operation,” wrote Mirzakhanyan to a colleague in April 2016.

The International Agency for Current Policy was on the brink of its first significant European success: A local council in Veneto, Italy, was preparing a motion recognizing the results of rigged Russian referendums in Crimea and calling for the end of EU sanctions against Russia.

The motion had been drafted with the help of Mirzakhanian’s group, and their inside man was the local councilor Valdegamberi, at that time associated with the far-right Lega Nord party.

Credit: Photo from leaked email Valdegamberi (third from right) holds the Russian flag in Venice, where the Veneto regional council is based.

On May 18, 2016, the resolution was adopted in the council by a majority vote. Although a regional legislature has no meaningful power over state policy, numerous Russian propaganda media outlets gleefully reported on the first region in the EU to give legitimacy to Crimea’s annexation. In following months, led by the Lega Nord party, Italian local councils in Liguria and Lombardy followed Veneto’s example and passed their own resolutions “recognizing” Crimea as part of Russia.

“It is extremely important for Russia to infiltrate countries on every level, including local municipalities,” said Kremlin expert Lautman. “Russia would use these resolutions for domestic propaganda purposes and to infiltrate local municipalities to influence local opinion and capture local politicians.”

A few months after the Veneto motion, the group achieved an even more significant victory, this time in Cyprus.

In late April 2016, Mirzakhanian’s aide Areg Agasaryan sent him another project idea, suggesting a motion to be proposed to the Cypriot parliament by Andros Kyprianou, the longtime general secretary of Cyprus’s Progressive Party of Working People.

Agasaryan, who like Mirzakhanian is a graduate of Russia’s diplomatic academy, had made contacts in Cyprus via Dmitry Kozlov, a Cypriot-Russian businessman who put the group in touch with pro-Russia politicians there.

The motion presented by Kyprianou’s party in July 2016 matched those drafted by Agasaryan or his colleagues, and included two additional demands: Lifting sanctions against individual Russians, and implementing the terms of the February 2015 Minsk agreements between pro-Russian forces and Ukraine.

The motion was passed, putting the Cypriot parliament at loggerheads with the EU’s own position on sanctions against Russia over the Crimea annexation.

In October 2016, Kyprianou was invited to a meeting in Moscow with Kozlov and two leading figures promoting investment in Crimea, Andrey Nazarov and Rustam Muratov.

The latter pair’s organization Business Russia played a key role, alongside the International Agency for Current Policy, in pushing for Europe to accept Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Central to that effort were Russian state-funded trips for European politicians to an annual conference at a luxury hotel in Yalta, Crimea.

Kozlov told OCCRP he knew Agasaryan “from university years” and that he had been involved in the pro-Russia motion in Cyprus, but didn’t comment on the meeting in Moscow. Kyprianou told OCCRP that Kozlov had pressured him to meet Nazarov in Moscow, and said he had been unaware that the resolution on Russia was coordinated by Mirzakhanian’s team. Nazarov and Muratov did not respond to requests for comment.

Credit: Anna Pismenskova/Alamy Stock Photo The coastal city of Yalta, in Crimea.

Crimean Junkets

In several cases, the establishment of cooperation between European politicians and the Kremlin can be traced back to the Yalta International Economic Forums, organized with the help of Mirzakhanyan and his group. Business Russia’s Muratov and Nazarov were also executives at the forum, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as “the main Russian platform for showcasing investment opportunities in Crimea.”

Mirzakhanian set up a company called Hemingway Partners under his mother's name in 2017 to do media and PR work for the Yalta forums. From May 2017 its name replaced that of the International Agency for Current Policy in presentations and on documents, as shown here, but the company was shut down in 2021.

In April 2016, Mirzakhanyan sent Muratov a document entitled “European estimates,” which listed nine European politicians from Austria, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Poland who would attend the Yalta forum, along with a total of 21,500 euros’ worth of “honoraria” broken down by politician. These fees appear to go beyond compensation for expenses, since travel costs for each attendee were discussed in separate email exchanges. Another set of emails reveal how the organizers bought tickets worth around 7,600 euros to fly in the nine political figures.

Emails reveal planned payments of thousands of euros to specific politicians, seemingly in return for their attendance at the Yalta forum.

Marcus Pretzell, a former member of the European Parliament from Germany, whose name was listed in the document, denied being offered any money for his presence at the Yalta forum.

“I was offered membership on the board of the forum, which I rejected,” he told OCCRP.

Current member of the Austrian parliament Axel Kassegger and former politician Barbara Rosenkranz, both affiliated with the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), are also named in the “European estimates” document. They told OCCRP they did not receive payments either.

A document drafted before the Yalta forum in 2016, indicating honoraria totaling 21,500 euros for European politicians.

The purchase of the flights was organized by a marketing director from Granel, a major Russian construction company co-founded and chaired by the Yalta forum executive Nazarov.

The organizers also funded the politicians’ accommodation at the five-star Mriya Resort and Spa, a $300-million hotel on the shores of the Black Sea. The Russian government and a mix of state-backed and private banks sponsored the event, according to the Yalta forum’s website, and the state-owned Sberbank financed the construction of the hotel, which would later be sanctioned by the U.S. for its role as host.

Credit: Mriyaresort, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Mriya Resort and Spa in Yalta.

“It is important for Russia to have Western politicians visit…Crimea, in order to normalize and whitewash their illegal invasion and occupation,” Lautman said. “Domestically, [Russia] uses these visits for propaganda to show that Europe not only accepts the annexation of Crimea but there is nothing illegal [about] this aggression.”

“Russia wins in its PR operations every single time a politician or any influential figure visits Moscow or Crimea,” Lautman added.

From the outset, Ukraine protested the attendance of European politicians at the Yalta forums, but more and more of them continued to visit in 2017, 2018, and 2019 (the subsequent events were canceled due to the pandemic).

Observers Doing Business

Among the correspondence between Mirzakhanyan and Russian politicians are emails from Leonid Slutsky, a longtime member of Russia’s Duma aligned with the Kremlin, who chairs the committee on International Affairs. An exchange from 2017 reveals how Mirzakhanian’s and Slutsky’s teams worked together to bring prominent Europeans to observe local elections in Russia, covering their travel and accommodation costs.

The invitations were arranged through an NGO that Slutsky led, Russian Peace Foundation, and the 2017 election observation project had a budget of at least 68,000 euros, according to the leaked emails. Three members of the European Parliament and several local parliamentarians from countries like Belgium and Sweden were flown in for the occasion.

“Fake election observation is often an entry door to other pro-Kremlin activities which then might end up also in financial relationships or corruption,” said Stefanie Schiffer, chair of the board of European Platform for Democratic Elections, an organization that tracks election observation missions in Russia and elsewhere.

The code of conduct for international election observers says they should not “accept funding or infrastructural support from the government whose elections are being observed, as it may raise a significant conflict of interest and undermine confidence in the integrity of the mission’s findings.”

Schiffer said the 2017 mission “contradicted this requirement.”

Other politicians with ties to Mirzakhanian’s International Agency for Current Policy observed more recent Russian elections. For example, the Italian councilor Valdegamberi attended the Russian presidential election in annexed Crimea in 2018 and was also an election observer at the 2021 Russian parliamentary elections.

“I was struck by the transparency of everything,” he told Russian media during the 2021 vote.

Earlier emails show how Valdegamberia had seemingly sought to monetize his Kremlin connections. After the 2016 Yalta forum, he flew to Crimea seeking business relationships and brought other Italian politicians with him: Three from the Veneto region, plus one each from Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna and Liguria. A delegation of Italian investors joined the trip.

“For Stefano [Valdegamberi] the result of the trip was not purely PR, but the organization of promising contacts for business ventures, which pay for his election campaigns and support his political viability,” wrote one of Mirzakhanian’s European associates in an email to him in October 2016, just after the delegation’s visit to Crimea.

The strategy bore some fruit: The Chairman of the State Council of the so-called “Republic of Crimea” signed a cooperation agreement with the president of the Veneto regional council promising to build economic ties, and Russian state media announced various business deals established between Italian industrialists and Crimea.

Valdegamberi did not respond to reporters’ questions.

Key Allies in Austria, Germany and Poland

The leaked emails show how four specific political figures in Europe worked especially closely with Mirzakhanyan and his group: Robert Stelzl, a pro-Russia political activist from Austria; Manuel Ochsenreiter of Germany’s populist right-wing AfD party; Mateusz Piskorski, a Polish political activist arrested in 2016 for spying for Russia; and Piskorski’s wife, Marina Klebanovich, who helped coordinate the Agency’s activities in Europe.

Credit: Photo from leaked email From left to right: Mateusz Piskorski, Marina Klebanovich, Stefano Valdegamberi, Robert Stelzl, Andrey Nazarov, Barbara Rosenkranz, and Axel Kassegger posing together at the 2016 Yalta International Economic Forum.

Stelzl had worked for Piskorki’s think tank, The European Center for Geopolitical Analysis, and it was through Piskorski that Stelzl was invited to the 2016 Yalta forum. Emails show him setting up a call with Mirzakhanyan that led to a close working relationship: They subsequently exchanged more than 90 emails. These indicate Stelzl was paid for publishing Kremlin-coordinated articles in the Swiss magazine Zeit-Fragen.

In an email exchange from September 23, 2016, Stelzl complained to Klebanovich about the quality of an article he was being asked to sign.

“As it will be paid, Sargis doesn’t want explanations, but wants to get a text,” she told him.

“If he wants to get the message printed he has to accept that it must be of a style and contents that is acceptable,” he responded, adding: “I am not a robot.”

Four days later, an article by Stelzl ran in the magazine praising Russia’s most recent Duma elections as transparent, open and legitimate.

A presentation found in the leaked emails touting the pro-Russia media coverage the International Agency for Current Policy had arranged.

Stelzl had also set up and joined the Italian delegation to Crimea led by Valdegamberi in October 2016, and seems to have acted as an intermediary between the Russian propagandists and European politicians.

Stelzl had worked for Austrian MEP Ewald Stadler, a former member of the FPÖ party, which was a key ally of the International Agency for Current Policy. FPÖ members joined the Italians on their 2016 trip to occupied Crimea and were regular attendees at the Yalta forums. The Yalta forum even held a gala event in Vienna in 2018. The year before the gala, Mirzakhanian’s group arranged for a 25-strong FPÖ delegation to visit Moscow.

Stelzl told reporters he had fully supported Russia “for decades…and now even more than ever,” but would not respond to specific questions.

In Germany, Ochsenreiter demanded thousands of euros to publish pro-Russia articles orchestrated by Mirzakhanian’s associates in the magazine he edited, ZUERST!. Emails show this propaganda campaign had a budget of 12,000 euros, and included plans for an interview with AfD’s Marcus Pretzell on the problems with Russian sanctions, which was published in July 2016.

As with FPÖ in Austria, AfD was a key ally for the International Agency for Current Policy. Mirzakhanian’s emails include a plan to fund the 2017 political campaign of AfD’s Markus Frohnmaier, and show how in March 2016 the network worked on a draft of AfD’s anti-sanctions resolution, which was submitted at the legislative assembly of Baden-Wüttenberg two months later.

Ocshenreiter was later investigated for drumming up hatred between Ukraine and Hungary via false-flag arson attacks against a Hungarian center in Ukraine, but fled to Moscow and died there suddenly in 2021.

Piskorski was apprehended in Poland in May 2016, two months before a NATO summit in Warsaw. Emails show Mirzakhanian had planned a massive pro-Russian influence-peddling operation for the event with the help of Piskorski’s party, Smena. Piskorski was charged with carrying out espionage for Russian and Chinese intelligence, and though he was released on bail in 2019 he remains under police supervision. (Piskorski and Klebanovich did not respond to requests to comment).

Documents setting out Piskorski and Mirzakhanian’s plan, which aimed to promote anti-NATO stances in various countries during the Warsaw summit, included the names of a journalist and four political figures they were working with. In 2021 two of them — Lithuanian Algirdas Paleckis and Hungarian Béla Kovács — were found guilty of spying for Russia.

While Mirzakhanian has disappeared from the public eye, his group’s allies in Europe continue to make pro-Moscow statements and agitate for Russian interests: AfD’s Frohnmaier has criticized Germany for helping Ukraine; FPÖ’s Axel Kassegger demanded in September last year that Austria review its stance on Russian sanctions; and Robert Stelzl was photographed at a pro-Russian rally in Vienna in November wearing a t-shirt sporting the infamous Russian “Z” symbol and the text “Russian Army.”

Asked by reporters about the photo, Stelzl was unapologetic: “I bought this from Serbia. It is of good quality, breathable and the message is right.”

Stefan Melichar (Profil) and Dmitry Velikovsky (iStories) contributed reporting.

Data expertise was provided by OCCRP's Data Team. Fact-checking was provided by the OCCRP Fact-Checking Desk.

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8. Drone explodes less than 100 miles from Moscow as fear of strikes grows

Drone explodes less than 100 miles from Moscow as fear of strikes grows

Newsweek · by Nick Mordowanec · February 6, 2023

A drone of unidentified origin exploded less than 100 miles outside of Moscow, according to a Russian official.

The incident occurred in Kaluga, which is about 93 miles southwest of the Russian capital and about 162 miles from the Ukrainian border.

"It was established that at five in the morning in a forest near the city, a drone exploded in the air at a height of 50 meters [164 feet]," Kaluga Governor Vladislav Shapsha wrote Monday on Telegram.

There was no damage to local infrastructure and no casualties, he added. No specifics regarding the drone or where it was potentially fired were available.

Ukrainian military experts show to representatives of diplomatic missions in Ukraine downed drones that Russia allegedly uses for striking critical infrastructure and other targets in Ukraine during a press conference in Kyiv on December 15, 2022. A Russian official and head of the Kaluga region less than 100 miles outside of Moscow said on February 6, 2023, that a drone had been destroyed in its airspace. The origin of the drone remains unknown. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images

Drones being fired into the Kaluga region is not new.

Russian newspaper Kommersant reported in October that air defense systems shot down an unidentified unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) over the southern part of the region. It was the second such incident in the span of a week after another unidentified drone exploded over the Shaykovka air base, which is home to nuclear-capable Tu-22M3 supersonic missile carriers. No injuries reportedly in either incident.

In December, Shapsha approved a regional ban on the use of drones, quadrocopters, balloons and small aircraft by legal entities, individuals and citizens, Russian state media outlet Tass reported. A notification procedure for the use of airspace is required as part of the rule, which is in effect until further notice.

Exceptions include aircraft used by state authorities and organizations subordinate to them, as well as federal executive authorities of the regional level, local governments and organizations fulfilling the state defense order or ensuring the control and operation of infrastructure facilities.

Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Research Policy Institute, tweeted that the drone was a Ukrainian UAV—reportedly a Tu-141 Strizh—that was carrying an OFAB-100-120 high-explosive bomb. He cited Telegram reports in the tweet.

Samuel Bendett, Russia analyst for the Center for Naval Analyses and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Newsweek that he was still gathering information regarding whether Ukraine was responsible.

No governmental entities on either side have commented.

"Whether it was indeed a Tu-141 or another drone is less relevant than the fact that Ukraine is seeking to impose high costs on Russia by apparently launching drones deep inside Russian airspace to attack targets that are supposed to be secure," Bendett said.

"This attack also demonstrates that if this was indeed a Ukrainian drone, then providing full air defense coverage may prove problematic if Ukrainian drone attacks intensify in response to Russian military actions."

The incident came as Russia is upgrading its crumbling Soviet-era infrastructure like bomb shelters, the independent Moscow Times reported. That has included systematic inspections and repairs on thousands of bunkers, reinforced cellars and other safe hideouts that have been ignored for decades.

The Kremlin is reportedly spending "hundreds of millions of rubles" as part of the rehabilitation, based on a decision reportedly made by government officials in the spring.

Newsweek reached out to the Ukrainian and Russian defense ministries for comment.

Newsweek · by Nick Mordowanec · February 6, 2023

9. Seen Any Other Spy Balloons Lately?

Typical and expected criticism.

Seen Any Other Spy Balloons Lately?

An $850 billion defense budget, and we can’t detect a Chinese airship?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-spy-balloon-biden-administration-trump-administration-pentagon-glen-vanherck-11675724569?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

By The Editorial BoardFollow

Feb. 6, 2023 6:45 pm ET

The U.S. Navy is fishing fragments of a Chinese spy balloon out of the Atlantic Ocean, and each fresh detail about this episode raises new and troubling questions. A striking example is the news from the Biden Administration that previous Chinese balloon incursions into the U.S. appear to have gone undetected. This suggests there’s a major hole in U.S. defenses that needs closing.

A senior defense official told reporters on Feb. 2 that a balloon incursion “has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this Administration. It is appearing to hang out for a long period of time this time around, more persistent than in previous instances.”

The Biden Team was leaking over the weekend that balloons had snuck into U.S. airspace during the Trump Administration, and the obvious implication was to absolve President Biden of political blame. More than one media outfit took the bait. But then Trump officials started denying on the record that they’d ever heard of such an event—from former national security adviser John Bolton to Defense Secretary Mark Esper to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Administration’s attempt to muddy responsibility is bad enough, but the revelation that at least three past balloon flights evaded U.S. notice is alarming. “I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck of U.S. Northern Command told reporters on Monday. In Pentagon argot for the ages, he called it “a domain awareness gap.” The U.S. government ostensibly pieced the puzzle together later with the help of the intelligence community.

This after-the-fact discovery isn’t reassuring, since in a war there would be no chance for do-overs. The balloon was hardly a birthday party fly-away: Up to 200 feet tall, with a payload weighing more than 2,000 pounds, and potentially with explosives to self-detonate if China so chose.

These details are supposed to support the Pentagon’s case for waiting to shoot down the object until it crossed into the Atlantic, but the Biden team is lucky the balloon didn’t come down sooner in a populated part of the country.

Congress now has an opportunity to conduct productive oversight, including assembling a detailed timeline of events that can better explain when this Administration first detected the balloon, how it did so, and why it didn’t shoot it down over Alaska’s wide-open spaces. Would the Administration have even told the public about the balloon if it hadn’t been spotted by civilians looking up at the sky in Billings, Mont.?

The Administration’s talking points also need stress testing. The Pentagon is saying the balloon wasn’t collecting better intelligence than low-earth satellites, but could the Beijing blimp hover longer on areas of interest and collect better pictures? Why would Beijing risk the diplomatic blowback from sending the balloon on the eve of an important diplomatic visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken if there was no surveillance benefit?

These columns are among many voices warning that the American homeland is vulnerable to attack—from balloons to hypersonic weapons to cyber intrusions on the electric grid or water supply. Americans are now tuning in to this fact, and Congress and the Administration can use the moment to better protect 330 million civilians on U.S. soil.

Appeared in the February 7, 2023, print edition as 'Seen Any Other Spy Balloons Lately?'.

10. Duo accused of neo-Nazi plot to target Maryland power stations

Wannabes? Copycats? True wackos? Or is there a conspiracy or nationwide plan?

Excerpt:

In response to a question on whether this plot was connected to other attacks across the country, Sobocinski said the FBI has “no indication” that this plot was part of “anything larger.” Clendaniel and Russell were taken into custody without incident late last week, one in Florida and the other in Maryland, Sobocinski said.

Duo accused of neo-Nazi plot to target Maryland power stations

Atomwaffen founder Brandon Russell and Sarah Clendaniel allegedly sought to attack substations around Baltimore

By Rachel Weiner, Jasmine Hilton and Dan Morse

Updated February 6, 2023 at 1:00 p.m. EST|Published February 6, 2023 at 10:48 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Rachel Weiner · February 6, 2023

BALTIMORE — A neo-Nazi leader recently released from prison is accused of plotting an attack on the Maryland power grid with a woman he met while incarcerated.

The charges against Brandon Russell, 27, and Sarah Clendaniel, 34, come amid a spate of sabotage targeting power stations across the country. Gunfire at two North Carolina substations in December left 45,000 people without power for several days. Most of the cases remain unsolved, but authorities and experts say they follow increased interest among white supremacists in targeting electric infrastructure.

“If we can pull off what I’m hoping … this would be legendary,” Clendaniel said on Jan. 29, according to the court record. She was speaking to a federal informant, who was having similar discussions with Russell.

The two appeared in court Monday in Baltimore and Florida federal courts on a charge of conspiring to destroy an energy facility, which carries up to 20 years in prison.

According to prosecutors, their plan was to attack with gunfire five substations that serve the Baltimore area. In conversations about the plot, according to court documents, Clendaniel “described how there was a ‘ring’ around Baltimore and if they hit a number of them all in the same day, they ‘would completely destroy this whole city.’”

At a news conference Monday morning, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Erek L. Barron thanked federal, state and local law enforcement partners for stopping the plot.

“Together, we are using every legal means necessary to keep Marylanders safe and to disrupt hate-fueled violence,” Barron said. “When we are united, hate cannot win.”

Special Agent in Charge Thomas J. Sobocinski of the FBI field office in Baltimore said Clendaniel and Russell conspired to inflict “maximum harm” to the power grid.

“The accused were not just talking, but taking steps to fulfill their threats and further their extremist goals,” Sobocinski said.

The FBI views their extremist views as “racially or ethnically motivated,” Sobocinski said.

According to prosecutors, they used open-source information on the national infrastructure grid to pick five electrical substations around Baltimore that would, if attacked on the same day, create a “cascading failure” in the system.

“Their actions threatened the electricity and heat of our homes, hospitals and businesses,” Sobocinski said.

In response to a question on whether this plot was connected to other attacks across the country, Sobocinski said the FBI has “no indication” that this plot was part of “anything larger.” Clendaniel and Russell were taken into custody without incident late last week, one in Florida and the other in Maryland, Sobocinski said.

Clendaniel and Russell met while incarcerated at separate prisons, according to the court documents — Russell in federal custody for possessing bombmaking materials and Clendaniel in a Maryland facility for robbing convenience stores with a machete.

“Going to prison was worth it because I might not have met you otherwise,” Russell said in one text.

Both are on probation. In brief appearances Monday, represented by public defenders, neither contested detention. Clendaniel’s attorney declined to comment; attorneys for Russell could not be reached.

Clendaniel’s mother, Lanette Clendaniel, said in an interview on Monday that her daughter got involved with neo-Nazi beliefs in prison and carried them after her release.

“Her beliefs stem from the prison system,” Lanette Clendaniel said. “She didn’t really get into that crap until she was in prison.”

Sarah Clendaniel has struggled with drug abuse and has criminal convictions, going back to at least 2006, when she was 18 and sentenced to three years in prison for robbery, according to court records. Later, in 2016, she was sentenced to nine years in prison after being accused of robbing convenience stores three times while armed with a machete, according to court records and state officials. She has three children, who are living with grandparents.

When asked if it was possible that her daughter could have plotted to attack power substations, as the government alleges, Lanette Clandaniel said: “She’s just always been anti-establishment.”

Russell, a former Florida National Guard member, is the founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, which attempted to use violent attacks to spark a race war in the United States. Experts say the group, while small, is dangerous because of its influence on the broader far-right movement to eschew politics and spill blood.

An Atomwaffen member killed a gay, Jewish college student in 2019; another adherent is accused of killing his girlfriend’s parents for opposing his neo-Nazi views. Atomwaffen followers have also threatened and harassed journalists, African American churches and Jewish organizations.

A former Atomwaffen member named Devon Arthurs, who lived with Russell in Tampa, killed two of their roommates in 2017 and subsequently told authorities they had been planning attacks on U.S. nuclear plants and power lines.

Police discovered bombmaking materials and explosives inside the shared apartment where the murders occurred; Russell subsequently pleaded guilty to possession of an unregistered destructive device and improper storage of explosive materials.

His replacement as leader of Atomwaffen was subsequently imprisoned for “swatting,” or calling in fake crises to provoke lethal law enforcement raids.

Russell began talking to the informant while still in prison, according to the court record; he was released in August 2021. The discussions of infrastructure attacks allegedly began last summer.

Prosecutors say Russell recommended targeting transformers because they are “custom made and could take almost a year to replace.” He also said the attack would be most effective after a winter storm, “when most people are using max electricity.”

Sarah Clendaniel told the informant she expected to die of kidney disease within months and just wanted “to accomplish something worthwhile” first. She left a statement, according to the complaint, that referenced Hitler, the Unabomber and a Norwegian mass killer and said, “I would sacrifice **everything** for my people.” She said Russell, unlike her, “has a lot to lose.”

Clendaniel suffered from kidney damage and had told family members she only had a few months to live, according to her mother.

In discussing an attack on power stations, Clendaniel “added that they needed to ‘destroy those cores, not just leak the oil …’ and that a ‘good four or five shots through the center of them … should make that happen.’ She added: ‘It would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully,’” according to court documents.

In a statement, Baltimore Gas and Electric said they have increased security and surveillance at power stations in cooperation with law enforcement.

“This work is even more important now as threats have increased in recent years,” the company said.

Clendaniel’s desire to carry out an attack quickly was hampered by her lack of access to a rifle, according to the criminal complaint. Her semiautomatic weapon had been seized in a dispute with a neighbor, and she was hoping to get a new one from the informant. In the meantime, prosecutors say, she was planning to scope out the potential attack sites.

The charges come after similar attacks on the power grid in North Carolina and Oregon that remain unsolved; the Department of Homeland Security recently warned that the United States is in a “heightened threat environment” and that critical infrastructure is among the “targets of potential violence.”

Brian Harrell, who oversaw infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security in the previous administration, said there has been “a significant uptick” in online discussion of grid attacks by homegrown extremists and that it should be treated as “domestic terrorism, pure and simple.”

A report issued in September by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University found that white supremacists have been “laser-focused on conducting attacks on the energy sector during the last six years as a pretext for the anticipated collapse of American government and society.”

The researchers cited Russell as an early example.

Hannah Allam, Katie Mettler and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Rachel Weiner · February 6, 2023

11. Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 7, 2023 | SOF News

Ukraine Conflict Update - Feb 7, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · February 7, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, in the air, and on the seas. Additional topics include NATO, aid to Ukraine, refugees, internally displaced personnel, humanitarian efforts, cyber, and information operations.

Image / Photo: A German Army Leopard 2 tank, assigned to 104th Panzer Battalion, moves through the Joint Multinational Readiness Center during Saber Junction 2012 in Hohenfels, Germany, Oct. 25, 2012. Photo by Specialist Markus Rauchenberger, U.S. Army.

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

Ground Situation

Current operations by the Russians are concentrated in the country’s east. There are reports in the media that these operations are lacking proper coordination and that there is a lack of interaction between the Wagner Group and the Russian military units. Tens of thousands of recently mobilized Russian soldiers have arrived at the front; negating to an extent the qualitative advantage the Ukrainians have had thus far in the conflict. Many reports indicate that the Russians have at least 300,000 soldiers in Ukraine.

A Russian Offensive in February? Ukrainian officials are expecting a large general offensive by the Russians in mid-February or around February 24th – the anniversary of last years invasion. The timing of the Russian offensive is critical; it has to take place after a sufficient number of reinforcements have arrived in the area of the conflict – most likely eastern Ukraine. The stock of fuel, ammunition, and other supplies must be replenished to support a general offensive. The operation has to take place before the muddy spring season and prior to the arrival of Western armored fighting vehicles and tanks. Read more in “Ukraine braced for renewed Russian offensive later in February”, BBC News, February 6, 2023.

Degrading Russian Forces. For their part, the Ukrainians are degrading the supply and logistic network of Russia, causing many Russian casualities, and limiting any advances by the Russians to small parcels of hard-fought territory. The Russian logistical depots have been pulled back from the front due to the ability of HIMARS to range beyond the front lines. The introduction of the GLSDB HIMARS munitions will mean that the Ukrainians will be able to strike even deeper into Russian rear areas. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs provide the HIMARS with an increase of range from 80km to 150km. This will cause the Russians to pull their logistical nodes even further back from the front and will allow the disruption of critical bridge crossings that supply convoys must pass over.

Tanks for Ukraine. The news that Western nations will soon supply Ukraine with modern main battle tanks like the Abrams, Leopard 2, and Challenger is still on the front pages of the media. Unfortunately, the decision to send tanks is belated; it would have been better if the decision was made earlier in the year. Since the decision was made so late it won’t be until late 2023 that Abrams tanks will arrive in Ukraine; too late to stop a spring offensive by the Russians or for the Ukrainians to conduct their own push to the east. The Leopards and Challengers should arrive sooner. Once the tanks arrive they will add an offensive punch; especially when combined with the numerous armored fighting vehicles like the newly deployed Bradleys. However welcome the news is about the soon-to-be deployed tanks to Ukraine, one must remember that the total number of tanks to be sent is small and are unlikely to have a significant impact on the outcome of the war.

Here are some articles on the topic of tanks from the last few weeks:

“Tanking Up: Understanding the material – and moral – implications of the new armor heading to Ukraine”, by Frank Hoffman, Modern War Institute at West Point, February 3, 2023.
“The Weight of NATO Tanks May Pose a Problem in Ukraine”, Newsweek, February 5, 2023.
“Germany adds older Leopard 1s to the list of tanks for Ukraine”, The New York Times, February 3, 2023.
“Tanks a Lot (Well, Actually Not That Many for Ukraine)”, by Robert E. Hamilton, Foreign Policy Research Institute, February 2, 2023.
“Tanks and what they mean for the Ukraine War’s endgame”, by John A. Nagl, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, February 3, 2023.

Battle For Bakhmut. For months the Russians have been trying to take the eastern city from the Ukrainians – and with tremendous losses. The offensive for Bakhmut may likely continue and Ukraine will face the agonizing choice over whether to withdraw or face having units surrounded. The city is becoming increasingly isolated. The key to the battle is keeping the Bakhmut-Kostyantynivka highway open – a critical supply route for the Ukrainian army and evacuation artery for civilians. There are over 5,000 civilians still in Bakhmut. Thus far, the fight for this city has been the longest battle of the war. Taking the Bakhmut city and surrounding area is important to controlling the whole of the Donbas region. “Battle of Bakhmut nears tipping point as Russia intensifies offensive”, by Christopher Miller, Finanicial Times, February 2, 2023.

Phases of Russia’s Invasion. Serge Havrylets, a Kyiv-based journalist, explains how Russia has been changing its tactics in the war against Russia. He describes the invasion as one of four phases. Read more in “Evolution of Russian Tactics in Ukraine: From failed blitzkrieg to assault infantry”, Euromaidan Press, January 31, 2023.

Phase I: Blitzkrieg – a large-scale rapid operation from the air, land, and water.
Phase 2: Tank Breakthrough – taking place in April and May, use of tanks with massive artillery fires; followed by use of battalion task groups to establish a bridgehead.
Phase 3: Probing the Defense – smaller units engaged in local fighting, seeking weak spots in the defense; then followed with a large-scale assault.
Phase 4: Assault Infantry with artillery support. This is described as a creeping occupation. Most of the units are former convicts and mercenaries of the Wagner Group. These units are then followed into battle by the recently mobilized soldiers.

Fight for the Skies

Drone Factory. U.S. officials believe that Iran will assist Russia in the building of a facility that will produce about 6,000 drones to be used in Ukraine. The Russians are employing a number of drones that the Iranians have sent to Russia. There are reports that the Iranians will help Russia develop a Shahed-136 model that will have a new engine for a faster and farther flight. The senior leadership of an Iranian firm, Paravar Pars, has been sanctioned by the United States because the shipment of UAVs to Russia. Iran-produced UAVs are attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. See “U.S. Sanctions Leadership of Iranian UAV Manufacturer”, U.S. Department of State, February 3, 2023.

Air Defense Equipment: From U.S. to Ukraine. The Department of Defense announced that it will be providing another security assistance package to Ukraine. This will include a long-range fires capability as well as various types of equipment to defend against Russian missile attacks. “Air Defense Systems, Long-Range Fires Capability to be Sent to Ukraine”, DoD News, February 3, 2023.

Maps

Situation Maps. War in Ukraine by Scribble Maps. Interactive map by Institute for the Study of War. View more Ukraine SITMAPs that provide updates on the disposition of Russian forces.

Maps of Ukraine

https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/maps.html

General Information and Commentary

Negotiations. There was a recent prisoner exchange. Ukraine received more than one hundred ‘defenders’ in exchange for POWs sent to Russia. No sign of possible negotiations between the two countries in the near future.

Refugees, IDPs, and Humanitarian Crisis. View the UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation (Updated daily), https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine. As of January 31, 2023, the number of refugees from Ukraine registered for temporary protection in Europe is over 4.8 million; according to UNHCR.

Wagner Group. The Russian paramilitary corporation has suffered heavy casualties in Ukraine. It has been recruiting prisoners, foreign recruits, and some Russians to fill its ranks in the units fighting in Ukraine. The Wagner Group units have featured prominently in the ground action in eastern Ukraine; especially in the Bakhmut region. The company has grown from 5,000 seasoned veterans to a force of 50,000. But the paramilitary group is not just busy in Ukraine; it has increased its presence in some of the more volatile countries in Africa.

“Wagner Group Redefined: Threats and Responses”, by Raphael Parens, Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 30, 2023.
“Countering the Wagner Group and Degrading Russia’s War Efforts in Ukraine”, by Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State Press Statement, January 26, 2023.
“Actions to Counter Wagner and Degrade Russia’s War Efforts in Ukraine”, U.S. Department of State Fact Sheet, January 26, 2023.

China Aid to Russia. Russian government-owned defense companies are receiving navigation equipment, jamming technology, and jet fighter parts from China. In addition, thousands of dual-use goods, that have both commercial and military applications, are being provided to Russia. Many critical components (like semiconductors, commercial drones, etc.) needed for Russia’s war machine are on a sanctions list; however, nations like Turkey, China, and the UAE are key in avoiding these sanctions. “China Aids Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Shows”, The Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2023.

Australian Trainers in UK. Some Ukrainian recruits have been receiving military training in the United Kingdom. Over seventy Australian personnel arrived in the UK in late January to join a U.K.-led multinational mission named Operation Interflex to train the Ukrainians.

Key Leadership Changes. A new head for Ukraine’s defense may soon be appointed. It seems that the current defense minister is going to resign (or be told to resign) and be moved to the Ministry of Strategic Industries. The dismissal may be tied to allegations of corruption in the defense ministry. The Chief of Military Intelligence is rumored to become the next defense minister. President Zelensky has nominated a new head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Vasyl Maliuk has been the acting head of the security agency since July 2022. The also “Ukraine expects leadership shake-up, with defense minister replaced by military intel chief”, The Washington Post, February 5, 2023. (subscription)

Change in European Politics and Leadership. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine the Nordic and eastern European countries have taken a stronger role in European politics. They are now seen as driving some of the policy issues of the European Union (EU) and NATO. One example is the sending of modern main battle tanks to Ukraine; they pressed Washington and Berlin hard for this to happen. Perhaps these smaller nations are, because of their proximity to Russia, more aware of the threat posed by their big neighbor to the east.

Banning Russian Diesel. A 27-nation bloc will prohibit imports of Russian gasoline, diesel, and other products used throughout Europe. “Europe bans Russian oil products, the latest strike on the Kremlin war chest”, National Public Radio, February 5, 2023.

Russian Classics. Some folks that study Russian literature are giving it another look and coming away with differing opinions. Read how to reckon with the ideology of “Anna Karenina,” “Eugene Oneign,” and other ‘beloved’ books. “Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War”, The New Yorker, January 30, 2023.

Resources about the Ukraine Conflict

UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one

Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.

Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.

Weapons of the Ukraine War.

https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/weapons.html

sof.news · by SOF News · February 7, 2023

12. US military failed to detect previous spy balloons from China

Domain awareness gap. No. one can create buzzwords and phrases better than the US military.

US military failed to detect previous spy balloons from China

militarytimes.com · by Meghann Myers · February 6, 2023

At least three Chinese spy balloons floated over U.S. air space during the Trump administration, and another previously flew during the Biden administration, but it’s unclear which government agency tracked them or whether the presidents had previously been briefed on them, defense leaders said Monday.

Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the head of Northern Command, which is responsible for the area around the continental United States, Canada and Mexico, told reporters Monday that his organization hadn’t been aware of any previous balloons.

“We did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail,” he said.

He added that intelligence agencies “after the fact... assessed those threats through additional means of collection...and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America, or transited North America.”

Former President Donald Trump denied in a Truth Social post on Saturday that any balloons had been detected during his administration.

“Now they are putting out that a Balloon was put up by China during the Trump Administration, in order to take the ‘heat’ off the slow moving Biden fools,” he wrote. “China had too much respect for ‘TRUMP’ for this to have happened, and it NEVER did. JUST FAKE DISINFORMATION!”

13 thoughts China’s balloon (probably) had while floating over America

"There’s been a lot of chatter about blowing me up lately. I’m a balloon. Technically I’m already blown up! HA!"

Multiple officials have said that while President Biden ultimately opted to wait until the balloon was over water to shoot it down, the government took “protective measures” to make sure either that the balloon could not collect or transmit any information.

“Those are things that I need to go to Congress to talk about,” VanHerck said, declining to offer details on how that was accomplished. “I need to talk about with the department before we move forward. What I will tell you is we took maximum precaution to prevent any intel collection.”

Now, the government’s efforts are focused on learning as much about this spy balloon as possible.

Navy and Coast Guard ships are at the scene in the Atlantic Ocean, VanHerck said, along with Naval Criminal Investigative and FBI representatives, working to map the balloon’s debris field and recover bits and pieces.

“I don’t know where the debris is going to go for a final analysis, but I will tell you that certainly the intel community, along with the law enforcement community that works this under counter-intelligence, will take a good look at it,” VanHerck said.

That includes using unmanned underwater vehicles operated by an explosive disposal team, amid concerns that batteries or even a self-destruct device could be part of the wreckage.

“I did not have any corroboration or confirmation of explosives on this platform,” VanHerck said. “That was an assessment that we wanted to just to make sure for safety purposes.”

Military assets working the recovery include the dock landing ship Carter Hall, the oceanographic survey ship Pathfinder and the Coast Guard cutters Venturous, Nathan Bruckenthal and Richard Snyder.

VanHerck said he expects the debris field to measure about 1500 square meters, in water about 50 feet deep.

The balloon itself, he said, was up to 200 feet tall, carrying sensors and other equipment estimated to be the size of a regional jetliner, “in excess of a couple thousand pounds.”

“I would remind you that due to ocean currents, it’s possible that there may be some debris that does flow to shore,” he said. “And so what we would ask of the public ... is avoid contact, contact local law enforcement immediately to take care of any of that debris.”

About Meghann Myers

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

13. Chinese grey zone spy balloons over the American heartland

Yes, there is more hot air to come on this story!

Excerpts:

Last, the great hopes that China was moving away from wolf-warrior diplomacy to become a more responsible member of the international community seem dashed. China appears to be its own worst enemy. Recent American efforts to isolate China in areas such as microchip imports and production are starting to seem prescient. And worryingly, an escalating trend seems apparent with the occurrence of other recent Chinese grey zone incidents. Looking forward, China seems to be “pushing the envelope” towards an alternative future where it is increasingly bellicose, and increasingly willing to use uncrewed systems aggressively.

There’s more to come on this story. It’s not just all hot air.

Chinese grey zone spy balloons over the American heartland | Lowy Institute

PETER LAYTON

High-flying espionage went out of fashion in the 1960s,

but the most recent sky crisis has reignited tensions.

lowyinstitute.org · by Peter Layton

Bizarrely, the Chinese have sent a high-flying spy balloon deep into the American heartland. The logic is that such balloons fly more than 22.2 kilometres above the surface. Under international law, a nation’s territorial seas and the airspace above it extend to 12 nautical miles (22.2km). Accordingly, China’s high-altitude balloons are arguably flying in international airspace. It’s plausibly legal but also highlights the fact that if a balloon overflies a country below 22.2 kilometres altitude, that country’s sovereignty has been infringed and the craft can be legally shot down. Both happened in this case over the weekend.

High-flying balloons are very common. Some 800 small weather balloons are launched daily and fly up to 40 kilometres altitude. The United States launched hundreds of spy balloons over the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The Soviets grumbled that these were “incompatible with normal relations between states”, and they had a point. Some 90 per cent failed, and then came the development of spy satellites that were more capable, reliable and less provocative. Using balloons for long-range spy missions went out of fashion.

While space-based systems are at least as good in intelligence collection, they have very predictable orbital dynamics, giving adequate warning time for activities on the ground to be concealed.

China describes its balloon detected over the US mainland last week as an airship with a limited self-steering capability. It was very large, with its instrumentation payload of surveillance equipment approximating the size of three buses, and solar panels some tens of metres in length. Unalerted observers on the ground could see it clearly in the sky; it was a second moon.

While space-based systems are at least as good in intelligence collection, they have very predictable orbital dynamics, giving adequate warning time for activities on the ground to be concealed. Balloons, though, can take advantage of winds and ascend or descend to a limited degree. Such controllability means they can loiter to some extent, unlike satellites.

Balloons go where the east-west high-altitude winds push them. Last week’s Chinese spy balloon flew across the Pacific through the western Aleutians, into British Columbia and across Montana into Missouri, finishing up being shot down 10 kilometres off the South Carolina coast – by coincidence, a course taking it across several sensitive US strategic nuclear deterrent sites. The balloon’s role was most likely signals intelligence collection concerning communication systems and radars. The balloon probably transmitted the information collected back to China via a space-based communications relay satellite in real time.

In many respects, China's spy balloon represents a Sputnik moment that dramatises to the American public the China challenge (Sean Foster/Unsplash)

That is the technical side, but there is more to be considered.

First, the balloon fits grey zone activity parameters – being well planned, purposeful and avoiding violence. Given this, it sets a new normal. It suggests that like earlier grey zone activities in India, the South China Sea, East China Sea, Taiwan and South Korea, this will happen again. Indeed, this is not the first time, simply the first that has been publicly acknowledged. Other Chinese balloons have flown over Taiwan, near Guam and Hawaii, across Columbia and Venezuela and apparently over the continental United States during the Trump administration.

Second, in many respects this is a Sputnik moment that dramatises to the American public the China challenge. If office workers and households across the American heartland can look out their windows and see a Chinese spy balloon the size of a second moon cruising past, this creates a powerful strategic narrative. China deliberately acted to inflame America’s China hawks while simultaneously trying to embarrass the Biden administration. Instead of proactively placating the administration, China employed obfuscation and denial. Worse, if China really didn’t mean to inflame tensions, it suggests Beijing’s crisis management techniques are poor and very worrying for a major nuclear power.

The great hopes that China was moving away from wolf-warrior diplomacy to become a more responsible member of the international community seem dashed.

Third, this might be an opportune moment for a revamped open skies initiative. Agreed to post-Cold War, there were 34 members before the Open Skies treaty fell apart due to Russian violations. Open Skies participants made their territory accessible to overflights by unarmed observation aircraft. The nations could restrict flights for safety reasons, but couldn’t obstruct or forbid flights, including over military installations. If China thinks it needs overflights, maybe now is the time to publicly push countries towards a modern open skies treaty. China has already called for setting guardrails.

Fourth, China’s chutzpah is always impressive. Having created a major diplomatic incident, they now accuse the United States of recklessly shooting down a globe-trotting Chinese government-owned airship that was operated covertly and flew inside US airspace for days. This is an airship that flew over Billings, Montana at 18.2 kilometres (60,000 feet), well below the 22.2-kilometre national airspace limit. China knowingly infringed US sovereignty as they controlled the sensors and steered the airship.

Last, the great hopes that China was moving away from wolf-warrior diplomacy to become a more responsible member of the international community seem dashed. China appears to be its own worst enemy. Recent American efforts to isolate China in areas such as microchip imports and production are starting to seem prescient. And worryingly, an escalating trend seems apparent with the occurrence of other recent Chinese grey zone incidents. Looking forward, China seems to be “pushing the envelope” towards an alternative future where it is increasingly bellicose, and increasingly willing to use uncrewed systems aggressively.

There’s more to come on this story. It’s not just all hot air.

lowyinstitute.org · by Peter Layton

14. Opinion | The frenzy over China’s spy balloon is dangerous and unwarranted

Conclusion:

None of those advantages are negated by China’s ability to send a balloon wafting over the United States. Indeed, it’s not clear that China accomplished anything other than alarming Americans about the threat it poses. A healthy concern about China’s growing power is warranted, but paranoia and alarmism are not. The United States is still the No. 1 power in the world, and we can remain that way as long as we do not blunder into a catastrophic and unnecessary war with a No. 2 power whose rise might have already peaked.

Opinion | The frenzy over China’s spy balloon is dangerous and unwarranted

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · February 6, 2023

So the Battle of the Balloon is over — and, not surprisingly, America won. On Saturday, one of the most advanced U.S. weapons systems — an F-22 Raptor — shot down one of China’s most primitive surveillance systems: a balloon that had been traversing the United States during the previous week.

The whole incident leaves me feeling unsettled and alarmed. Oh, I’m not worried about the spy balloon. The violation of U.S. airspace was unacceptable, but it did not pose any actual threat, and it’s doubtful that it gathered any intelligence that Chinese spy satellites cannot. What concerns me is the hysterical overreaction on the part of so many Americans to the balloon’s progress.

Former president Donald Trump claimed that President Biden now “has surrendered American airspace to Communist China,” even though the Pentagon reports that Chinese balloons had crossed into U.S. airspace at least three times during Trump’s own presidency. “The president failed on this one,” said New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R). “Tough guy, Joe. Too little, too late,” huffed talk-show host Mark Levin. “Bought and paid for by the Communist Chinese government.”

What is it that Biden was supposed to have done? Should he have personally climbed into an F-22 cockpit and led the attack on the balloon like the president played by Bill Pullman in “Independence Day”? Should he have launched a nuclear strike against China in retaliation? Republicans didn’t have any clear alternatives, but that did not stop their hyperventilating. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) argued that China sent the balloon to show “that the United States is a once-great superpower that’s hollowed out, it’s in decline.”

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The reaction was so overwrought that Biden felt compelled to postpone Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China. That’s too bad, because the frenzy over the spy balloon underlines the need to establish better lines of communications with Beijing to prevent U.S.-China tensions from spiraling out of control.

The balloon-mania, after all, comes only a few days after Air Force Gen. Michael A. Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, sent out a memo to his subordinates predicting war with China within two years: “I hope I am wrong,” he wrote. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.” Sounding like one of the unhinged generals in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire “Dr. Strangelove,” he advised his airmen — who operate and maintain cargo aircraft — to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target” and “aim for the head.”

Minihan and everyone else who thinks that war is imminent (e.g., House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul [R-Tex.]) needs to get a grip. CIA Director William J. Burns said last week that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, but “that does not mean that he’s decided to conduct an invasion in 2027, or any other year.” Indeed, Burns noted, Russia’s bungled invasion of Ukraine might give Xi pause before launching a risky attack of his own.

War with China can and should be avoided — but we make it more likely by assuming it’s inevitable or by giving vent to exaggerated fears about Chinese power. The kind of anti-Chinese paranoia we are now seeing reminds me of the early days of the Cold War. Back then, there was also a sense that the United States was losing a global struggle with the Communists and that World War III might be nigh. That was a dangerous, destructive mind-set that led to anti-Red witch hunts at home and to ill-fated, costly military interventions such as the one in Vietnam. It almost led, during the Cuban missile crisis, to nuclear Armageddon.

In reality, the Soviet Union was never as strong or as reckless as so many imagined — and neither is Communist China. Xi presides over a country with an aging population, a slowing economy and few friends. That helps to explain why he has lately been trying to mend ties with the United States and Europe.

The United States, while it has a smaller population than China, is actually stronger by most measures of hard or soft power. Indeed, Australia’s Lowy Institute, in its annual survey of the balance of power in Asia, finds the United States still in first place ahead of China. The index notes that the United States leads in “future resources, resilience, defence networks, cultural influence, and military capability.” Last week saw another reminder of one of our key advantages — we have a lot more allies than China — when the Philippines agreed to extend U.S. access to four more military bases.

None of those advantages are negated by China’s ability to send a balloon wafting over the United States. Indeed, it’s not clear that China accomplished anything other than alarming Americans about the threat it poses. A healthy concern about China’s growing power is warranted, but paranoia and alarmism are not. The United States is still the No. 1 power in the world, and we can remain that way as long as we do not blunder into a catastrophic and unnecessary war with a No. 2 power whose rise might have already peaked.

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · February 6, 2023

15. Succeeding in strategic competition is today’s imperative

Excerpts:

A confident America must step forward with allied nations to diminish coercive behavior with nuanced economic statecraft, and expand mutually beneficial trade and strategic investments to overcome the many challenges we face today. We must cooperate whenever possible with everyone — including China — but compete vigorously when we must.

To ensure it succeeds as a strategic competitor, the U.S. must pursue multiple strategies. These include identifying strategic investment opportunities in technology, infrastructure and the environment; securing global supply chains; expanding trade and economic security with a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific, digital commerce, and WTO Reform; navigating a shock-free energy transition while maintaining energy security and independence; and achieving greater coordination among allies to leverage our collective resources.

The embrace of a few core realities is vital to success in today’s strategic competition: That unfair trade practices of rivals are rewarded by America’s retreat from trade leadership and will only be countered by giving the rest of the world a high-standards alternative trade architecture. That America benefits others and itself by supporting the infrastructure of other nations related to the digital, healthcare, energy, and climate technologies in which it excels, and logistic infrastructure that maintains supply chain security. That the United States needs to apply timely and proportionate responses to neutralize efforts by others to monopolize vital materials markets or advance digital technologies meant to control instead of empower. And, that America needs to re-engage with multilateral agencies to offer effective long-term alternative financial solutions to emerging economies instead of pushing them toward controversial loans that stifle economic growth.

America must again turn its attention to capturing mutually beneficial opportunities to economically engage and invest globally, as it blunts efforts by others to distort and coerce. Success in strategic competition must be the animating imperative.

Succeeding in strategic competition is today’s imperative

BY MARK KENNEDY AND SADEK WAHBA, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 02/06/23 10:30 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3845273-succeeding-in-strategic-competition-is-todays-imperative/

After the Versailles Peace Conference that followed WWI, Will Rogers, the social commentator, quipped, “The United States never lost a war or won a conference.” His words were providential as the treaty that emerged from that conference failed to keep the peace. As America disengaged in the period between the wars, the void was filled by authoritarian regimes that disregarded the nascent rules-based order. As Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, stated to an indifferent world at the League of Nations when his country was invaded by Fascist Italy three years before WWII, “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.”

Emerging from the hard-earned lessons of WWII, the United States built an international rules-based order that unleashed unprecedented prosperity, while protecting individual rights and sovereign nations — however small — from economic aggression.

Today we are again amid a geopolitical strategic competition spurred by authoritarian rivals seeking to bend the world order.

History will judge today’s leaders harshly if they fail to push back against the trends of isolationism and protectionism to embrace the tried-and-true path of engagement that fuels our mutual prosperity and to strengthen the global order.

In the eight decades since WWII, world poverty declined as standards of living improved. Infant mortality dropped. Literacy, access to education, life expectancy and those living in a democracy increased dramatically. This success was in great part due to the United States leading the reconstruction of a war-torn world and knitting it together through closer trading ties. America was well rewarded as it became the world’s leading economic and political power with a per capita GDP that more than tripled in constant dollars since 1960, making it the highest of G7 economies.

Despite these gains, America again finds many looking inward, as during the time of Will Rogers’s observation. While some aspire to reinvigorate efforts at building a better world and reengage with trade discussions, America’s retreat from championing more open trade and global development has left a void that nations seeking to challenge the hard-fought rules-based system are eager to fill.

Starting in the 1980s, China launched economic reforms that transformed the global economic system and allowed China to almost eradicate absolute poverty in the country. China’s achievements benefited from the world economic system. As China now seeks to carve its own route to prosperity and economic dominance, history suggests it will come at great cost and that its best choice remains the path of opening economically. China faces significant environmental, social, and economic challenges and a rapidly aging population.

Many bitterly regret the open policy toward China. Rather than responding with targeted interventions to blunt Chinese efforts to distort markets, they mistakenly have turned against expanded economic engagement with all countries. It seems less likely that China’s economy will surpass America’s — the United States’ per capita income is more than five times that of China.

A confident America must step forward with allied nations to diminish coercive behavior with nuanced economic statecraft, and expand mutually beneficial trade and strategic investments to overcome the many challenges we face today. We must cooperate whenever possible with everyone — including China — but compete vigorously when we must.

To ensure it succeeds as a strategic competitor, the U.S. must pursue multiple strategies. These include identifying strategic investment opportunities in technology, infrastructure and the environment; securing global supply chains; expanding trade and economic security with a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific, digital commerce, and WTO Reform; navigating a shock-free energy transition while maintaining energy security and independence; and achieving greater coordination among allies to leverage our collective resources.

The embrace of a few core realities is vital to success in today’s strategic competition: That unfair trade practices of rivals are rewarded by America’s retreat from trade leadership and will only be countered by giving the rest of the world a high-standards alternative trade architecture. That America benefits others and itself by supporting the infrastructure of other nations related to the digital, healthcare, energy, and climate technologies in which it excels, and logistic infrastructure that maintains supply chain security. That the United States needs to apply timely and proportionate responses to neutralize efforts by others to monopolize vital materials markets or advance digital technologies meant to control instead of empower. And, that America needs to re-engage with multilateral agencies to offer effective long-term alternative financial solutions to emerging economies instead of pushing them toward controversial loans that stifle economic growth.

America must again turn its attention to capturing mutually beneficial opportunities to economically engage and invest globally, as it blunts efforts by others to distort and coerce. Success in strategic competition must be the animating imperative.

Mark Kennedy is director of the Wilson Center’s Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition (WISC) and president emeritus of the University of Colorado. He served as a United States Congressman from Minnesota and as a presidentially appointed member of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations.

Sadek Wahba is the Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition steering committee chair and a member of the Wilson Center’s Global Advisory Council. He is a member of President Biden’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and chairman and managing partner of I Squared Capital.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions mentioned above.

16. Is the U.S. Over-Militarizing Its China Strategy?

Excerpts:

The United States needs to undertake a major review of its China policy to determine if it has become overly militarized and, if so, what are the alternatives. Further, are there positive steps that can be taken vis-a-vis China in the best interests of all concerned?

Too often in the past, instead of being the last option, military force, threatened or used, has become the default U.S. position. The United States is at risk of repeating that error. It may well be that the PRC is indeed the greatest threat to the United States and its allies. However, a race to that judgment is ill-advised. Perhaps the Congressional-Executive Commission on China can fill the gap in shaping a strategy.

If it does, the commission needs to answer the question of whether the United States has overly militarized its response to China. If the answer is yes, the next question is to what degree should Russia be the centerpiece for U.S. military thinking and strategy.

Is the U.S. Over-Militarizing Its China Strategy?

By Harlan Ullman

February 07, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/02/07/is_the_us_over-militarizing_its_china_strategy_880083.html?mc_cid=c7c98c07a0

Last weekend, a leaked memo from four-star U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael A. Minihan set Washington spinning, as Minihan predicted the United States would go to war with China in 2025. The proximate cause of this conflict would be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Then on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a planned trip to China after a Chinese balloon was spotted sailing across the northern part of the United States and over a U.S. strategic missile base in Montana.

These are just more signs of an over-militarization of U.S. China policy that dates to the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy of the Obama administration but has accelerated rapidly of late. In 2021, then Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. Phil Davidson warned of a Chinese move against Taiwan by 2027, a sentiment that has been echoed by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday as well as by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

Make no mistake: Many Americans see a war looming with China. And for many on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has focused more attention on a possible Chinese amphibious assault to take and occupy Taiwan. But few have questioned whether or not such an assault by China was feasible, what military capability would be needed for both the assault and subsequent occupation, what other options China has regarding assimilating Taiwan, and how such an operation might be prevented.

The answers to these questions will assist in determining whether or not the U.S. has overly militarized its strategy and policy towards China. The preliminary analysis is that it has.

Lessons from history

Clearly, many classified studies and war games have been conducted into the prospect of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invading Taiwan. None has been made public even in the most general terms, including in the impressive Department of Defense report, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2022” delivered to Congress last fall.

War games are helpful in answering this question. But history may provide more valid answers. Three World War II campaigns are relevant: operations Overlord, Causeway, and Jubilee. Overlord was the landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944. About 180,000 British, Canadian, French, and American soldiers disembarked from some five thousand ships and small craft on the first day. Operation Causeway planned for four hundred thousand marines and soldiers and six thousand ships and small craft to invade Taiwan; it never happened, deferred by the invasion of the Philippines.

Operation Jubilee was the disastrous raid on Dieppe against the Nazis in August 1942. Approximately 10,500 allied troops, mostly Canadian, were carried in about 240 ships and small craft landing on the northern coast of France. The assault was immediately repulsed by the Germans with substantial British losses.

The last major amphibious operation under fire was Inchon during the Korean War in late 1950. During the 1991 Iraq War, the U.S. Marines lobbied for an amphibious assault from inside the Gulf. That was denied as too dangerous. The Marines instead were used as a decoy force. With today’s precision weapons and ubiquitous surveillance, any amphibious operations would be even more difficult and costly.

By the numbers

While the exact size and capability of the PLA for conducting large-scale amphibious operations is uncertain, in general terms, China’s navy has about thirty thousand marines and a combined seventy large amphibious ships. China has two and is building a third helicopter assault ship that reportedly can carry about nine hundred marines. Taken together, these ships could carry perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand marines, and possibly as many as thirty thousand.

The PLA also has six army amphibious combined arms brigades with a total of twenty-four-to-thirty thousand troops and up to fifteen Special Operations (SOF) brigades. However, as with airborne troops, deploying SOF across the Taiwan straits in helicopters raises logistics problems that restrict their use over such a distance and in uncertain weather conditions.

It can be argued that China’s large shipbuilding industry could turn out the thousands of smaller landing craft essential for an amphibious assault. However, those shipyards build big ships, and making any transitions would be time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to conceal.

From a Chinese perspective, an invasion would be a worst-case option. Greater pressure can be applied by threatening or imposing a blockade against Taiwan, cutting off access by sea and air, and by economic sanctions. Grabbing small offshore islands belonging to Taiwan as leverage is well within PLA capabilities. Leninist doctrine has long called for regime change from within, as China could step up its attempts to use internal Taiwanese politics to effect a change.

And China could destroy or threaten to destroy Taiwan’s infrastructure under a rain of missiles after attempting a Dieppe-like assault to gain a foothold. But a traditional amphibious assault is more problematic.

Taiwan’s geography is unsuitable for those as well as amphibious operations, as it lacks the beaches of Normandy or Luzon. There are only a handful of landing sites on the west coast. Mountainous areas run the length of the 250-mile-long island, some topping ten thousand feet above sea level. While Taiwan does not train for guerrilla war, this difficult terrain would be very suitable for it. And Taiwan lacks the physical infrastructure to accommodate hundreds of thousands of invaders and support their logistical needs, the bulk having to come from the mainland.

Hence, to mount an opposed PLA amphibious assault to size and occupy Taiwan, China lacks, probably indefinitely, the military capability (power) and capacity (numbers).

Time for a strategy shift

A two year effort from 2017-2019 at the Naval War College called “Breaking the Mold” examined alternative means to implement the NDS. For the Indo-Pacific theater, a Mobile Maritime and Porcupine Defense for Taiwan was proposed in close concert with allies. That Japan is increasing defense spending is one indication of greater allied concern, as is the AUKUS program to provide nuclear submarines to Australia.

This Mobile Maritime strategy would confine the PLA to the first island chain running from Japan through Taiwan to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. As in World War II in the Pacific against Japan, China would be blockaded and denied access to overseas access and resupply. It would be cut off from its Belt and Road outposts. And by Taiwan adopting a Porcupine Defense to make a PLA invasion too costly to consider, the United States would not have to spend as many resources in deterring and preparing for that contingency.

If an opposed-entry invasion of Taiwan is beyond China’s capacity, and it could be prevented by a Porcupine Defense of the island, what would be the consequences for U.S. strategy? If Taiwan is not the immediate or even long-term danger spot the U.S. believes it is, then is it time to ask if U.S. strategy towards China has become overly militarized.

De-militarizing the China strategy

Tensions between China and the United States, if anything, are worsening. The specter of a world war has been raised with Taiwan as the cause célèbre. Rather than examining means to improve relations or to lower tensions, this focus on a Taiwan scenario has taken on greater importance and probability of occurrence. In this situation, the response has been for the United States to increase its emphasis on defense as the de facto policy and strategy. While this is understandable, it clearly has overly militarized U.S. strategy at the expense of other options.

During the Cold War, the United States fought a war against China in Korea and believed that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the surrogate enemy in Vietnam. The Nixon administration reversed this thinking with its “triangular politics” to offset the Soviet Union, culminating with then President Richard Nixon’s famous visit to China in 1972.

The United States needs to undertake a major review of its China policy to determine if it has become overly militarized and, if so, what are the alternatives. Further, are there positive steps that can be taken vis-a-vis China in the best interests of all concerned?

Too often in the past, instead of being the last option, military force, threatened or used, has become the default U.S. position. The United States is at risk of repeating that error. It may well be that the PRC is indeed the greatest threat to the United States and its allies. However, a race to that judgment is ill-advised. Perhaps the Congressional-Executive Commission on China can fill the gap in shaping a strategy.

If it does, the commission needs to answer the question of whether the United States has overly militarized its response to China. If the answer is yes, the next question is to what degree should Russia be the centerpiece for U.S. military thinking and strategy.

Harlan Ullman is an Atlantic Council senior advisor and UPI’s Arnaud deBorchgrave distinguished columnist. His latest book is The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD—How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large. He can be found on Twitter @harlankullman.

This article appeared originally at Atlantic Council.

17. Back From the Future: Stop Saying the Military Has an Innovation Problem

Conclusion:

If the U.S. military is going to ever realize the promise of the digital age, it must change this process to describe “what needs to be done” instead of “how to do it.” Military leaders will find this approach already embodied in the familiar concept of mission command. Leaders describe a desired end state they want to reach and mission parameters to operate within, then empower their subordinates to develop creative ways of getting there. The only difference here is that, instead of subordinate leaders, their vision will be executed by engineers in Silicon Valley.

This shift in thinking requires the right types of leaders with the vision and technical expertise to liaise between the two very different communities — a tough find in the Department of Defense today. The rare, enlightened program manager might leverage existing capabilities in the commercial sector that can be rapidly repurposed to meet the military’s needs. More frequently, a hapless officer, who may or may not have any specialized expertise in the technical aspects of the program they manage, must negotiate complex contracts, evaluate prototypes, develop a data strategy, and act as a systems integrator for hardware-software solutions. The Pentagon needs a different type of team for these projects, with the skills to appropriately spell out technical details like data and intellectual property rights in a way that makes the requirements process viable for private companies to participate.

Acquisition reform is a daunting task, but there is no easy way around it. Putting on more innovation theater for an expedient win gets us no closer to solving the real problems. Whatever the good intentions of these efforts, they distract us from the tough work of treating this disease at the source. Military leaders must embark on real reform to harness the incredible power of America’s private sector and put the best tools possible in the hands of the warfighter.

Back From the Future: Stop Saying the Military Has an Innovation Problem - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Erik Johnson · February 6, 2023

Senior leaders at the Pentagon love their acronyms and buzzwords. The soup du jour is “innovation,” embodied in various entities such as the Defense Innovation Unit, Defense Innovation Board, Small Business Innovation Research, Rapid Innovation Fund (now defunct), Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies, National Security Innovation Network — the list goes on. All are meant to overcome a perceived problem: The Department of Defense has stopped being good at creating new things and is terrible at innovating.

The Department of Defense is indeed struggling to get the right tools into our military’s hands to fight and win the nation’s wars. Until very recently, its nuclear arsenal ran on floppy disks. Its intelligence systems are so dysfunctional that warfighters prefer to use Google Maps. Experts estimate that our adversaries adopt new technology roughly five to six times faster and, in terms of purchasing power parity, spend one U.S. dollar for every 20 from the American military.

However, describing this as an “innovation challenge” has made things worse. This approach wastes the time of senior leaders with watching innovation theater. It strains relations with a Congress that is rightly skeptical of lavish spending on futuristic projects with little to show for their taxpayer dollars. But worst of all, it has obfuscated the true nature of the problem, enabling the root cause of the U.S. military’s technology woes to go unaddressed.

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The Department of Defense does not actually have an innovation challenge. The real culprit is an acquisition system that has failed to keep pace in the digital age. The current process rigidly defines capability requirements in a way that does not account for the iterative nature of modern technology and alienates us from the companies building it. The Pentagon should reimagine its requirements process as a series of defined end states and let the real innovators in America’s private sector figure out how to get there.

Behind the Curtain of Innovation Theater

Once upon a time, the U.S. government truly was a wellspring of innovation. Throughout the Cold War, federal spending on research and development was a dominant force in producing new technology. In the mid-1960s, government funding accounted for over two-thirds of total U.S. expenditures on research and development. What’s more, it reaped serious rewards. The internet, modern rocketry, and powdered orange juice were all crowning achievements of well-managed public sector innovation.

However, something changed at the end of the 20th century. Software became the lynchpin of virtually all technological progress, and the federal government never caught on. Defense acquisition critics have rightly wondered how the military could field six new fighter jets in less than a decade during the Cold War but take more than 20 years to roll out the F-35. Part of the answer is that Cold War-era platforms did not depend on millions of lines of computer code.

Today, the research and development spending of software giants like Google and Amazon dwarfs that of the federal government. High salaries, coupled with an exciting, fast-paced work environment, ensure that the best engineers today will choose SpaceX over NASA. Meanwhile, the state of software development in federal labs lags multiple years behind the private sector. What passes for a commercial defense and aerospace sector is little better. The industry has steadily consolidated into five so-called “Defense Primes” that provide the overwhelming majority of military platforms and effectively operate as an extension of the U.S. government. Their single-digit numbers for independent research and development investment indicate a lack of incentive to take risks by aggressively pursuing new technologies or ideas. When revenue is practically guaranteed, there is little incentive to innovate.

More significant still is the widening delta between public- and private-sector capacity to iterate on technological progress. Powerful new tools like software containerization allow commercial companies to test, deploy, and rapidly refine their products. The U.S. military still approaches the capabilities it acquires as static goods that undergo few changes once the final contract is signed. The cumulative effect is a Department of Defense that has fallen further and further behind on the technology curve. Unfortunately, the military’s leadership has mistaken the symptom for the disease.

Band-Aids Over Bullet Wounds

The response has been something like, “We don’t know what innovation is, but we know we need it now!” A frenzy of activity has ensued, primarily involving press releases on the formation of new “innovation task forces” and innovation funds. Astute observers with longer memories have pointed out that they have seen no shortage of these programs come and go over the years without delivering results. The various band-aids that have been slapped over this bullet wound will fail to stem the bleeding for two reasons.

Firstly, the military will never have the necessary technical expertise to build these tools ourselves. The Department of Defense has currently stood up no fewer than 29 independent software factories in a bid to cultivate organic capability for software development. Whatever talent this disparate collection of efforts generates will rapidly be poached by the private sector long before it delivers any results to the warfighter. Worse still, groups like U.S. Central Command’s new Task Force 99 are attempting to build things like counter-small unmanned aerial systems themselves when a mature commercial market for these products already exists. The military hires and trains world-class warfighters, not world-class engineers. It should stay in its lane.

Secondly, even if these engineering challenges were solved, there is no clear path forward for any of these “grassroots efforts” to scale. Systems that can be put into mass production and delivered to the joint force with the logistical tail to support them are what make a difference in combat. Doing so requires the use of the defense acquisition system, which is the sole prerogative of the military service departments. Even with a litany of new “bridge funds,” these innovation theater troupes have no avenue to see their efforts scaled into programs of record.

The impartial observer might reasonably ask: “What’s the harm in all this innovation buzz?” The answer is that it threatens to keep us perpetually chasing shiny prototypes into the so-called “valley of death.” We are liable to enter the next fight with a litany of half-baked ideas that will never scale into real capabilities for the warfighter. The undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment recently lamented the amount of time the Department of Defense spends obsessing over concepts that will never be put into meaningful levels of production. This trend can be quantified by observing that the ratio of procurement to research and development has fallen from a high of 2.74:1 in the 1980s to nearly one-to-one today. Meanwhile, the root causes of the Department’s technology woes go unaddressed.

The antiquated, byzantine acquisition process of the U.S. military is what truly deprived our warfighters of the incredible benefits of the digital revolution. While some of the efforts to date have recognized this, they give the false impression of an easy fix. The Defense Innovation Unit was founded as a tech-savvy acquisition office with special authorities for contracting to bring Silicon Valley to the military. At the beginning of 2023, they reported $4.9 billion in total contracts awarded since their inception in 2016. While this is an admirable effort, the reality is that this represents just 0.00499% of total Department of Defense spending on procurement over the same period. The overwhelming majority of military platforms continue to churn through a process in desperate need of reform.

If You Buy It, They Will Come

At the heart of this reform is reimagining the task of requirements validation in the defense acquisition system. The Pentagon’s existing process for this, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, defines exactly what warfighters will need from each military system in excruciating detail. It was designed with a hardware-first mindset to ensure interoperability across the joint force. However, the military services are starting to wake up to the fact that even in ostensibly traditional hardware platforms, like the Army’s next-generation fighting vehicle, software is the critical ingredient in success. When we say “innovation” today we are primarily talking about software, and if you need software, there is only one place to go: Silicon Valley.

The good news is that much of the tech that programs like the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle desperately need — computer vision, mesh networks, autonomous software stacks — already exists in mature forms in the commercial sector. The bad news is that this idea of rigid, exhaustive specifications for products, laid out by acquisition officers on the Joint Staff, is not how Silicon Valley approaches building the future. Startups become the next Google or Amazon by building something that no one has ever thought of before — the exact anthesis of the Joint Staff’s approach. New acquisition vehicles such as the Middle Tier of Acquisition and the Software Acquisitions Pathway are a step in the right direction, but their success is wholly dependent on their parent process for requirements definition.

Conclusion

If the U.S. military is going to ever realize the promise of the digital age, it must change this process to describe “what needs to be done” instead of “how to do it.” Military leaders will find this approach already embodied in the familiar concept of mission command. Leaders describe a desired end state they want to reach and mission parameters to operate within, then empower their subordinates to develop creative ways of getting there. The only difference here is that, instead of subordinate leaders, their vision will be executed by engineers in Silicon Valley.

This shift in thinking requires the right types of leaders with the vision and technical expertise to liaise between the two very different communities — a tough find in the Department of Defense today. The rare, enlightened program manager might leverage existing capabilities in the commercial sector that can be rapidly repurposed to meet the military’s needs. More frequently, a hapless officer, who may or may not have any specialized expertise in the technical aspects of the program they manage, must negotiate complex contracts, evaluate prototypes, develop a data strategy, and act as a systems integrator for hardware-software solutions. The Pentagon needs a different type of team for these projects, with the skills to appropriately spell out technical details like data and intellectual property rights in a way that makes the requirements process viable for private companies to participate.

Acquisition reform is a daunting task, but there is no easy way around it. Putting on more innovation theater for an expedient win gets us no closer to solving the real problems. Whatever the good intentions of these efforts, they distract us from the tough work of treating this disease at the source. Military leaders must embark on real reform to harness the incredible power of America’s private sector and put the best tools possible in the hands of the warfighter.

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Erik Johnson is a senior engineer who has worked on numerous software and hardware programs for the U.S. military. He is a former infantry and military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army who served in Iraq and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds a B.S. from the United States Military Academy and a master’s degree from Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the United States Department of Defense.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Erik Johnson · February 6, 2023

18. Alexander Vindman and the Road to World War III

Ad hominem attack on Vindman?

Excerpt:

There are a lot of assumptions underlying Vindman’s plan. One is his claim that “Western officials are less worried about Russian nuclear saber rattling than they once were.” He does not identify who those officials are or why they are allegedly less worried about nuclear escalation. Another assumption is that a dramatic increase in Western military supplies--giving Ukraine everything it needs to defeat Russia--is less dangerous than what he calls “incremental escalation.” And Vindman assures us that “Putin has no interest in a fight with NATO.” Presumably, that includes a NATO that supplies Ukraine with everything it needs to defeat Russia.

Perhaps Vindman’s most questionable assumption--which is not mentioned in the Foreign Affairs article, but that he voiced after his trip to Ukraine in the summer of 2022--is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “the most important geopolitical event of the last 20 years.” Others would argue that China’s rise--economically and militarily--and its expanded influence throughout Eurasia and beyond is a more important geopolitical event, especially when it is coupled with the growing strategic partnership between China and Russia. In the past, American statesmen recognized the importance of maintaining the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. It is why we sided with Stalin against Hitler. It is why we sided with Mao against the Soviet regime. But all the Vindman approach does is to push Russia even closer to China. And as tensions increase in the western Pacific over Taiwan, Vindman’s counsel may get us into a two-front war that nobody should want.

Alexander Vindman and the Road to World War III

By Francis P. Sempa

February 07, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/02/07/alexander_vindman_and_the_road_to_world_war_iii_880075.html

Retired U.S. Army LTC Alexander Vindman, who gained fame for helping Democrats impeach President Donald Trump for a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian officials in July 2019, is urging the Biden administration and its Western allies to swiftly and dramatically increase military aid and supplies to Ukraine to help the Ukrainian armed forces credibly threaten to take back Crimea, which Russian forces seized in 2014. He lays out a Ukrainian military campaign--armed and funded by the United States and its NATO allies--that he claims will cause Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a Russian withdrawal from Crimea and reduce the risk of a wider war. Vindman is reminiscent of those European statesmen and generals before and during World War I who thought that mobilizing for war would somehow prevent it and, if not, would result in a swift victory.

Writing on the Foreign Affairs website, Vindman notes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a video appeal at the meeting of the World Economic Forum, saying: “Crimea is our land, our territory,” and requesting Western nations to “give us your weapons” so that Ukraine can retake “what is ours.” In his article, Vindman urges Washington and NATO to “give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively in all occupied territories north of Crimea--and to credibly threaten to take the peninsula militarily.” Vindman suggests that a credible threat to militarily retake Crimea will be sufficient to bring Putin to the negotiating table and end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine.

Vindman has been one of the most vociferous war hawks when it comes to U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War. Politico reports that Vindman is organizing a group of experienced American military contractors “who would travel to Ukraine and embed themselves with small units near the front lines” and provide Ukrainian forces with “military logistics support.” Back in the summer of 2022, Vindman traveled to Ukraine to help the country wage successful war against Russia. He called the Ukraine war “the most important geopolitical event of the last 20 years & maybe the next 20 years.”

And Vindman has not shied away from partisan politics in his “geopolitical” analysis. He has blamed former President Trump, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Republican Party, and Fox News for “emboldening Russia to invade Ukraine,” even though Russia’s invasions of Ukraine occurred during the Obama and Biden administrations. “There is blood on the Republican Party’s hands,” Vindman said. “They were partially responsible for what is happening in Ukraine.”

Vindman claims that if the U.S. and NATO continue to provide military assistance to Ukraine incrementally instead of giving Ukraine everything it needs now, the risk of widening the war and embroiling NATO in the conflict will increase. But, he claims, with swift and decisive Western military support, including hundreds of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, advanced fighter aircraft, long and short-range missiles, and thousands of rocket systems, Ukraine can credibly threaten to retake Crimea, which he claims will force Putin to negotiate, withdraw from Crimea, and will supposedly reduce the risks of a wider war.

Vindman even lays out a tactical strategy that includes tying down Russian forces in the Luhansk, Kherson, and northern Donetsk regions, severing Russia’s land route to Ukraine by pushing through to the Sea of Azov, and interfering with Russia’s military resupply route by destroying the Kerch Strait Bridge that connects Russia to the Crimea. This would be followed by “weeks of strikes” on Russian armed forces, including air bases, naval installations, transportation nodes, and command and control centers. Then Ukraine would launch “land and amphibious attacks to gain a foothold in Crimea,” and move on to seize Russia’s naval installation at Sevastopol, the capital of Simferopol, Feodosiya, and Kerch. Unless, that is, the Clausewitzian “friction” of war intervenes, as it usually does.

There are a lot of assumptions underlying Vindman’s plan. One is his claim that “Western officials are less worried about Russian nuclear saber rattling than they once were.” He does not identify who those officials are or why they are allegedly less worried about nuclear escalation. Another assumption is that a dramatic increase in Western military supplies--giving Ukraine everything it needs to defeat Russia--is less dangerous than what he calls “incremental escalation.” And Vindman assures us that “Putin has no interest in a fight with NATO.” Presumably, that includes a NATO that supplies Ukraine with everything it needs to defeat Russia.

Perhaps Vindman’s most questionable assumption--which is not mentioned in the Foreign Affairs article, but that he voiced after his trip to Ukraine in the summer of 2022--is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “the most important geopolitical event of the last 20 years.” Others would argue that China’s rise--economically and militarily--and its expanded influence throughout Eurasia and beyond is a more important geopolitical event, especially when it is coupled with the growing strategic partnership between China and Russia. In the past, American statesmen recognized the importance of maintaining the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. It is why we sided with Stalin against Hitler. It is why we sided with Mao against the Soviet regime. But all the Vindman approach does is to push Russia even closer to China. And as tensions increase in the western Pacific over Taiwan, Vindman’s counsel may get us into a two-front war that nobody should want.

Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21^stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, The American Spectator, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a former contributing editor to American Diplomacy.

19. Flexible Enmeshment: The Philippines’ New Approach to China-US Competition

The Philippines has come a long way from coaling stations for our Navy after the Spanish American War ceded the Philippines to the US. But it remains important for one reason that cannot be altered: Geography.

Excerpts:

Cutting through the political noise, the country underwent what two analysts aptly called as “Philippinedization” under Duterte: a temporary cooling of relations with an opposing neighbor, while improving its national security infrastructure at the operational level. Meanwhile, Aquino’s lawfare strategy that secured the Philippines’ South China Sea arbitral award in 2016 effectively constrained future presidents from any strategic concession of Philippine-claimed areas – something evident in Marcos’ address to the United Nations, despite his clear view that maritime disputes should not be the lynchpin of China-Philippines relations.

All these developments better position the Philippines under Marcos to pursue Philippine national interest. Recent developments make it clear to China that the Philippines is potentially a “holder-of-balance” in the region, being the only country in Southeast Asia that can realistically host significant American boots on the ground if China does not behave. China is up for a rude awakening to the reality that a dissatisfied and threatened Philippines might just grasp at anything when pushed to a corner.

On the other hand, the United States, sometimes accused of squeezing partners in its embrace, needs the Philippines to consent to its suggestions, but must prepare for likely scenarios where its force posture is not accepted by the Philippines hook, line, and sinker. The Philippines is therefore well placed geographically and strategically.

Washington, however, would be mistaken to interpret Marcos as a return to normality. For good or ill, Marcos could be characterized as the sedimentation of the approaches of his predecessors – more flexible and less principled in his enmeshment with the United States than Aquino, but less charitable to Beijing than Duterte. At the very least, the Philippines is finally making a more credible interpretation of “independent foreign policy” – not as a bystander hoping to just steer clear of China-U.S. tensions, but as a form of autonomy with a well-defined balance of power strategy.

Flexible Enmeshment: The Philippines’ New Approach to China-US Competition

Marcos could be characterized as a middle ground between his predecessors – not as pro-U.S. than Aquino, but less pro-China than Duterte.

thediplomat.com · by Justin Baquisal · February 6, 2023

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s recent visit to Manila grabbed international headlines following the joint Philippine-U.S. announcement to accelerate the implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. The agreement, originally made in 2014, allows the United States to build and operate facilities on Philippine military bases, but was stalled under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte between 2016-2022. Now, in addition to pushing forward with the EDCA, the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. expanded it to cover an additional four bases on top of the original five agreed upon in 2014.

This is a far cry from when Duterte lodged (and later suspended) a formal cancellation of the Visiting Forces Agreement that, at a more basic level, allows the U.S. presence in the Philippines. Since taking office, Marcos has unmistakably shown interest in cultivating warmer ties with Washington: whereas Duterte refused high-level meetings with the United States, Marcos met with U.S. President Joe Biden in New York in September last year, while Vice President Kamala Harris visited Palawan Island near waters claimed by China in November.

Flexible Enmeshment

The claim by many analysts, however, that Marcos is reinvigorating the Filipino-American alliance is only part of the story. More fundamentally, Marcos’ actions can be described as “flexible enmeshment” rather than the more U.S.-reliant, explicitly principled anti-China foreign policy of former President Benigno Aquino III (2010-2016) when territorial disputes became the defining issue of China-Philippines relations. What Marcos is doing is not merely equidistant balancing between the United States and China or plain old independent foreign policy – labels that speak nothing of the operational changes he is implementing.

Most importantly, the EDCA is subject to a review in 2024 (Article XII) and entitles the Philippines to retain non-relocatable structures and improvements developed by the United States (Article V) even in the event that the deal is terminated. As such, the EDCA is arguably a low-risk, high-reward bargain for the Philippines: an additional U.S. security blanket short of a full-blown return to pre-1992 basing access and more easily winded down if national interests change over time.

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As such, the new government has drawn an increased but measured U.S. footprint – which Washington gleefully provides – to raise U.S. stakes in committing to Philippine defense, improve the balance of forces in the region, and even helps stem the growing perception by Chinese officials that the Philippines should effectively be neutral ground amid great power competition.

While the Chinese embassy in Manila has recently urged the Philippines to stay vigilant against being taken advantage by the United States given the latest developments, the EDCA’s positioning in existing Filipino military bases and purported purpose to advance humanitarian assistance and disaster response make it difficult for China to openly go against the deal without making Beijing look like it is interfering in a sovereign decision by the Philippines. The Philippine ambassador to the U.S. stated that the revamped EDCA is not meant to oppose any country.

Ultimately, the EDCA in the context of China-U.S. competition today may help the Philippines generate some measure of “strategic ambiguity” toward China that can better force Beijing to the bargaining table.

Also, it is not so much the actual number of troops or capabilities fielded that matters, but the fact that U.S. presence will grow. U.S. investments in EDCA make strategic abandonment of the Philippines more difficult and politically costly for sitting U.S. presidents – something that does not fully address but still provides some palliative to the Philippine policy circles’ complaints that U.S. security guarantees in the South China Sea are only guarantees and not actual text baked into the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty.

Undoing Unfounded Expectations

Duterte’s dramatic anti-West, Beijing-friendly heel turn in 2016 proved to China – for the first time – that it is even possible to change the traditionally pro-American Philippine foreign policy, despite mounting domestic criticisms of China due to its occupation of features in parts of the West Philippine Sea. This, however, seems to have created the expectation from China that the Philippines should not host significant foreign military assets, analogous to what Cuba was to the United States during the Cold War.

This view, which made strange bedfellows of the Philippine Left and Duterte supporters, unfortunately had the strategic effect of tying the Philippines’ hands to some abstract notion of neutrality as independence – a position that says nothing about how to address the country’s territorial disputes with China. Marcos’ inroads with the EDCA thus has the political importance of reminding Beijing that Duterte’s accommodation was conditional, reversible, and frankly aberrant. Even Duterte began realigning with the United States close to the end of his term.

Under the Duterte administration, China continued to militarize islands in the South China Sea and harass Filipino fishermen. Meanwhile, China failed to finance its promised infrastructure projects in the Philippines according to Duterte’s own former economic minister, which made many question what “win” was gained in the first place. “Independent foreign policy” interpreted as “peace at any price” and being “friend to all, enemy to none” ultimately proved Machiavelli’s derision of unarmed prophets.

To be sure, the new EDCA plans are not significant enough to tilt the regional balance of power on their own. That would ultimately rest on the success of Philippine military modernization and whether the United States walks its talk of a military rebalance to Asia.

The Philippines also needs to walk a fine line to not make EDCA too threatening to China, by limiting higher-end deployments such as U.S.-operated shore-based batteries or missiles. Still, the point in these arrangements is to provide the Philippines with options. Whether or not the country decides to harden its enmeshment with the United States, it should have that legroom to rapidly address perceived threats to its national security using its alliance if necessary. Ultimately, future presidents are better positioned to maintain peace when their defense policies are not limited by unrealistic expectations from China.

Marcos as the “New Normal”

To his predecessors’ credit, Marcos inherited an Armed Forces of the Philippines that is relatively much more capable than it was in 2012 when the Philippines and China had a military standoff in Scarborough Shoal. During his end-of-term speech, Duterte’s defense chief, Delfin Lorenzana, underscored big-ticket aircraft, radar, and combat equipment acquisitions, as well as upgrades to the country’s strategic border areas such as the Pag-Asa island runway and the Mavulis island detachment facing Taiwan.

Cutting through the political noise, the country underwent what two analysts aptly called as “Philippinedization” under Duterte: a temporary cooling of relations with an opposing neighbor, while improving its national security infrastructure at the operational level. Meanwhile, Aquino’s lawfare strategy that secured the Philippines’ South China Sea arbitral award in 2016 effectively constrained future presidents from any strategic concession of Philippine-claimed areas – something evident in Marcos’ address to the United Nations, despite his clear view that maritime disputes should not be the lynchpin of China-Philippines relations.

All these developments better position the Philippines under Marcos to pursue Philippine national interest. Recent developments make it clear to China that the Philippines is potentially a “holder-of-balance” in the region, being the only country in Southeast Asia that can realistically host significant American boots on the ground if China does not behave. China is up for a rude awakening to the reality that a dissatisfied and threatened Philippines might just grasp at anything when pushed to a corner.

On the other hand, the United States, sometimes accused of squeezing partners in its embrace, needs the Philippines to consent to its suggestions, but must prepare for likely scenarios where its force posture is not accepted by the Philippines hook, line, and sinker. The Philippines is therefore well placed geographically and strategically.

Washington, however, would be mistaken to interpret Marcos as a return to normality. For good or ill, Marcos could be characterized as the sedimentation of the approaches of his predecessors – more flexible and less principled in his enmeshment with the United States than Aquino, but less charitable to Beijing than Duterte. At the very least, the Philippines is finally making a more credible interpretation of “independent foreign policy” – not as a bystander hoping to just steer clear of China-U.S. tensions, but as a form of autonomy with a well-defined balance of power strategy.

Justin Baquisal

Justin Baquisal is a geopolitical analyst based in Manila. He previously worked as a policy officer in the Philippine government.

thediplomat.com · by Justin Baquisal · February 6, 2023

20. Israel Raids Hamas Cell Responsible for Restaurant Attack

Israel Raids Hamas Cell Responsible for Restaurant Attack

fdd.org · by Danielle Kleinman · February 6, 2023

Latest Developments

Israeli forces killed at least five Hamas gunmen and detained a suspected Hamas operative on Monday during a raid on the normally quiet West Bank town of Aqabat Jabr near Jericho. The Israelis sought to capture the terrorist cell behind an attack on a restaurant along a major highway that connects Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. In the January 28 incident, two terrorists approached an Israeli-owned restaurant at Almog Junction on Road 1, then opened fire at the restaurant’s 30 customers. The terrorists managed only one shot before their assault rifle malfunctioned and forced the assailants to flee, likely sparing Israel another massacre barely a day after a pistol-wielding Palestinian murdered seven people outside a Jerusalem synagogue.

Expert Analysis

“The restaurant attack suggests that an almost year-long surge of Palestinian terrorism focused in the northern West Bank may be spreading to Israel’s main artery between its capital and communities in the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. This would mark a major escalation, and the Israelis have clearly moved fast to tamp it down. The big question is whether the restaurant was a one-off attack by a now-eliminated cell of Jericho terrorists or if there is more widespread support in the town for taking up arms.” — Mark Dubowitz, FDD CEO

“Hamas is predictably thundering about Jericho’s death toll and the need to avenge it. No doubt the Palestinians would like to see this incident resonate internationally, like the January 26 Israeli raid on Jenin, to dampen some foreign criticism of their terrorist attacks. But it should be clear that in Jericho, as in Jenin, the counter-terrorist objectives were urgent and necessary to save Israeli lives.” — Joe Truzman, Research Analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal

IDF Conducted Operations to Clear Hamas Cell

On Saturday, Israeli forces went into Aqabat Jabr to arrest the suspects in the January 28 attack. According to Palestinian media, 13 Palestinians were injured during the ensuing gunfight. While the operation failed to apprehend the restaurant shooting suspects, the IDF detained 18 suspects for questioning, six of whom it arrested.

Prompted by new intelligence on Monday, a combined force including the Israel Defense Forces’ Lions of the Jordan Valley Battalion — in which male and female infantry soldiers serve side by side — re-entered Aqabat Jabr, apparently crushing the local Hamas network behind the restaurant attack.

In the aftermath of the Israeli operations, Hamas issued a statement acknowledging five of its members had been killed.

Related Analysis

“Mapping Terrorism in the West Bank,” by Joe Truzman

“Abbas Blames Israel for Rise in Terrorism,” FDD Flash Brief

“Israeli Forces Eliminate Terror Cell Planning Major Attacks,” FDD Flash Brief

fdd.org · by Danielle Kleinman · February 6, 2023

21. Clipping the wings of Iran and its militias

Conclusion:

Whoever has been continuously clipping the wings of the pro-Iran militias has been doing so impressively, selecting secret targets and bombing them discreetly when needed and less so when circumstances — like in Syria — permit.

Without the ongoing attacks, like the one on Isfahan and the airstrikes that followed on convoys that crossed from Iraq into Syria, pro-Iran terrorist groups would have improved their capabilities enormously. Not long ago, the US was the one that led such counterterrorism, but it has now given up on the role. Israel, or whoever is responsible for bombing Iran and its militias, has stepped up to fill the American void.

Clipping the wings of Iran and its militias

arabnews.com · February 5, 2023

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

February 05, 2023 20:47

A satellite image shows damage on the roof of an Iranian military workshop, center, after a drone attack in Isfahan, Iran. (AP)

Short Url

https://arab.news/bcrsv

The recent drone attack on an Iranian military compound in Isfahan was not the first of its kind and is unlikely to be the last. It was one of many that have hit Iranian arms depots and convoys across the region, including in Syria and Lebanon. Just hours after the Jan. 29 attack in Iran, for example, trucks that had crossed from Iraq into Syria were also reportedly attacked with drones. While many see these strikes as part of an undeclared war on Iran’s nuclear program, they should be viewed more as a regional counterterrorism effort.

Israel has rarely admitted carrying out these attacks, but it is widely understood that it is behind them and that the goal is to prevent Iran from building up the asymmetric war capabilities of its militias. According to US law, “premeditated, politically motivated, violence,” committed by “subnational groups (militias) against noncombatants,” are acts of terrorism. This legal definition makes it hard to argue against the fact that Israel is helping combat terrorism across the Middle East.

Iran, for its part, seems to have been too embarrassed to admit the extent of the damage these strikes have caused. Tehran has downplayed them, while its militias have often denied that they even took place.

In Syria, Bashar Assad’s weak grip on power has forced Israel to act with a high frequency to prevent Iran from building a military infrastructure in Syria’s southwest — a region that shares a border with Israel. At first, the Assad regime tried to hide the Israeli strikes, mainly through claiming that the explosions were caused by an electrical short circuit, an explanation that invited widespread sarcasm. As it became known that Israel was targeting Iranian militias in Syria, the Assad regime stopped commenting. Israel, for its part, started to open up about the strikes, without elaborating on any one of them in particular.

In Lebanon, things are different. Iran-backed Hezbollah rules with an iron fist and an overt Israeli strike might ignite a full-scale war that neither side wants. Hence, bombings targeting Hezbollah’s weapons caches have remained mysterious.

Israel has long accused Hezbollah of storing weapons in Lebanon’s civilian neighborhoods. During the 2006 war between the two sides, Israel hit Lebanese houses, saying that it was responding to spots from where Hezbollah had launched missiles.

In September 2018, Israel released photos of facilities located close to Beirut airport, where Hezbollah “converted regular missiles into precision-guided ones.” Two months later, Israel “exposed and destroyed” a series of tunnels dug “from within civilian houses in Lebanon into Israel.” These were the only times when Israel talked publicly about Hezbollah’s military sites, until December, when Israel threatened “to strike the Beirut airport over Iran’s arms shipments.”

In September 2020, a weapons depot exploded in the southern Lebanese village of Ain Qana. The pro-Iran militia borrowed one of Assad’s favorite excuses, blaming an electrical short.

Iran seems to have been too embarrassed to admit the extent of the damage these strikes have caused.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

Since December 2021, a series of explosions have rocked Lebanon. One was heard in Janta, a Hezbollah stronghold in the east. Two weeks later, locals near the southern village of Homin Al-Fawqa were woken by an explosion. Six days later, a bang was heard near the coastal city of Tyre.

Hezbollah reacted the same way to all these blasts. It sealed off the area, sent in its own ambulances to transport the dead and the injured to undisclosed medical facilities, and invented cover stories. In Homin Al-Fawqa, Hezbollah said an overheated generator detonated its diesel reservoir. The last of the explosions went off last week, again in Homin Al-Fawqa, where a Hezbollah “social services” office was hit.

Hezbollah is not the only pro-Iran militia in Lebanon to see its arms caches go up in flames. In December 2021, an explosion rocked a Hamas weapons depot at the Burj Shemali Palestinian refugee camp, near Tyre. Hamas also blamed, you guessed it, an electrical short. A day later, the Palestinian organization, which is designated as a terrorist group by the US, Israel and Europe, held a funeral for its militants killed in that “short.”

Like Iran, Hezbollah has been suppressing news about explosions to avoid a war that could ravage a country that is already falling apart. The bombings have also shown that Iran and its militias are heavily infiltrated by foreign intelligence agencies and that they have been irresponsibly storing arms and ammunition in civilian neighborhoods.

Whoever has been continuously clipping the wings of the pro-Iran militias has been doing so impressively, selecting secret targets and bombing them discreetly when needed and less so when circumstances — like in Syria — permit.

Without the ongoing attacks, like the one on Isfahan and the airstrikes that followed on convoys that crossed from Iraq into Syria, pro-Iran terrorist groups would have improved their capabilities enormously. Not long ago, the US was the one that led such counterterrorism, but it has now given up on the role. Israel, or whoever is responsible for bombing Iran and its militias, has stepped up to fill the American void.

• Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Twitter: @hahussain

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view

arabnews.com · February 5, 2023

22. China seizure of Taiwan not ‘imminent,’ says key DoD official

Video at the link: https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/02/06/china-seizure-of-taiwan-not-imminent-says-key-dod-official/

China seizure of Taiwan not ‘imminent,’ says key DoD official

Defense News · by Joe Gould · February 6, 2023

The undersecretary of defense for policy, Colin Kahl, doesn't “see anything that indicates [an invasion of Taiwan] is imminent in the next couple of years.”

WASHINGTON ― There’s no indication China will attempt to take Taiwan imminently, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday, responding to an Air Force general’s leaked assessment that an attempt could be made in the next two years.

The four-star in charge of U.S. Air Mobility Command, Gen. Mike Minihan, said in a recent memo to his troops, “My gut tells me will fight [China] in 2025,” and urged them to prepare.

Asked about that timeline, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said, “I don’t see anything that indicates that this thing is imminent in the next couple of years.”

Kahl’s full remarks on Jan. 31 were part of an exclusive interview with the Defense News’ Early Bird Brief podcast, which was released Monday. They preceded the most recent blow to strained U.S.-China relations: The U.S. military on Saturday shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast after it traversed sensitive military sites across North America.

Minihan’s views reflected high-level concerns in the U.S. military over a possible attempt by Beijing to seize Taiwan, which China claims as territory. Both the U.S. and Taiwan will hold presidential elections in 2024, which could create an opening for China to cause trouble, Minihan wrote.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last month he seriously doubts China’s stepped up military exercises around Taiwan means Beijing is planning an imminent invasion.

The U.S. has bolstered military relations with nations such as Japan, South Korea and Australia in response to North Korean and Chinese aggression. Austin last week visited the Philippines and Seoul to strengthen ties.

Pentagon sees no imminent threat to Taiwan from Chinese buildup

Annual report outlines China's military progress.

Kahl told Defense News in spite of China’s military modernization efforts, China’s coercive behavior towards the island nation and investments in amphibious capabilities, he sees “no sign” Chinese President Xi Jinping and his fellow leaders believe the Chinese military is capable enough.

“They understand well that the United States continues to have pretty significant overmatch in a lot of critical domains, and that Xi Jinping would ― all else being equal ― like to resolve the Taiwan issue without having to resort to force,” Kahl said.

Kahl said China’s military has been untested by war for several decades and likened it to Russia’s, whose performance in Ukraine has frustrated Moscow. America’s “deterrent capability is meaningful and real,” and its forces are honed by experience, he said.

“It’s kind of like saying you got the two teams in the preseason that look like they should be in the Super Bowl, except one team has never played a single game. And the other team has been playing season after season after season for decades,” Kahl said.

“I don’t think the PRC leadership assesses that this is possible, and I’m not sure that they’ve made any decision about whether it’s even desirable,” he added.

About Joe Gould

Joe Gould is the senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry. He served previously as Congress reporter.

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