Quotes of the Day:

"In the darkest of times, it is our unity and resilience that shine the brightest."

– Cho Man-sik (Korean freedom fighter)

"Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less." 

– C.S. Lewis

"Every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential." 

– Thomas Jefferson

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 22, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 22, 2024

3. Exclusive: Chinese police work in Kiribati, Hawaii's Pacific neighbour

4. US imposes sweeping sanctions against Russia, targets over 500 people and entities

5. Why the Army needs a drone branch: Embracing lessons from Ukraine

6. The Biggest Ever Sanctions Have Failed to Halt Russia’s War Machine

7. Will the U.S. Abandon Ukraine?

8. US Congress members praise Taiwan's democracy in a visit that's certain to draw China's scrutiny

9. What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine

10. Opinion | Ukraine is at a critical moment. Does the speaker of the House see?

11. Opinion | A decent future for Myanmar is within reach — if the U.S. acts now

12. This soldier repeatedly ran into a burning building to save others

13. Politics Can’t Stop at the Water’s Edge

14. A War Putin Still Can’t Win by Sir Lawrence Freedman

15. Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation

16. IWI Responds: The Two-Year Anniversary of Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

17. Vladimir Putin Is Trapped

18. Corruption and Low Morale Still Plague China’s Military

19. New military prosecutors replace generals and admirals in more than 2,500 courts-martial in just 2 months

20. The epic battle that saved Kyiv from Russian occupation

21. How Was Israel Caught Off-Guard?

22. Leaked files from Chinese firm show vast international hacking effort

23. War Books: The Works of Colin Gray

24. Preparing to Win the First Fight of the Next War

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 22, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-22-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would likely have to seize Kyiv sooner or later while identifying Russia’s possible further territorial objectives in Ukraine.
• Medvedev’s mention of Russia’s possible intentions to occupy Odesa may be worth noting in light of recent developments in the pro-Russian breakaway republic of Transnistria in Moldova, the southern tip of which is about 50 kilometers from the city.
• Medvedev also described Russian plans to repress Ukrainian citizens in occupied Ukraine.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders and Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov on February 21 and 22.
• Ukrainian forces conducted another successful strike against a Russian training ground in occupied Kherson Oblast on February 21 and likely inflicted significant casualties.
• Ukraine’s European and Western allies continue to ramp up their support for Ukraine.
• Russian opposition outlet Proekt reported on February 22 that the Russian government has subjected at least 116,000 Russians to criminal and administrative charges since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fourth term in office in 2018.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on February 22 that the Kremlin does not regard Russian military correspondents (voyenkory) and milbloggers as participants of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shortly after the suicide of a prominent Russian milblogger on February 21.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
• A Russian insider source claimed that Russian officials have postponed creating Rosgvardia’s 1st Volunteer Corps from remaining Wagner Group detachments because of an ongoing rotation of former Wagner personnel in Africa.
• Russia continues to export its state policies on systemic religious persecution to occupied Ukraine.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Feb 22, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 22, 2024

Christina Harward, Angelica Evans, Grace Mappes, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

February 22, 2024, 8:15pm ET 

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

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2:00pm ET on February 22. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the February 23 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Click here to read ISW’s latest warning update on the possibility of Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, calling for Russian annexation or taking other action to support Russian hybrid operations against Moldova.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would likely have to seize Kyiv sooner or later while identifying Russia’s possible further territorial objectives in Ukraine. Medvedev responded in an interview published on February 22 to a question asking if there will “still be any part of Ukraine left that [Russia] will consider as a legitimate state, whose borders [Russia] will be ready to recognize.”[1] Medvedev stated that Russia must “ensure its interests” by achieving the goals of the “special military operation” as laid out by Russian President Vladimir Putin – referring to Russian demands for Ukraine’s “demilitarization,” “denazification,” and neutrality. Medvedev reiterated Russia’s intention of changing the government in Ukraine, stating that the Ukrainian government “must fall, it must be destroyed, it must not remain in this world.” Medvedev claimed that Russia must create a “protective cordon” in order to protect against “encroachments on [Russia’s] lands,” including shelling and active offensive operations. Medvedev stated that he does not know where Russia should “stop” but that Russia “probably” must seize and occupy Kyiv “if not now then after some time.” Medvedev claimed that Kyiv is historically a “Russian” city from where “international” threats to Russia’s existence currently originate. Medvedev also labeled Odesa a historical “Russian” city. Putin similarly emphasized on January 31 the idea of a “demilitarized” or “sanitary” zone in Ukraine.[2] ISW previously assessed that Putin’s statements about creating a “protective” zone in which Russia’s claimed and actual territories are out of Ukrainian firing range actually mean that Russia cannot accept the existence of any independent Ukraine with the ability to defend itself.[3] Medvedev, however, also claimed that “if ... something remains of Ukraine,” then it “probably” has a low chance of survival and reiterated his previous comments about a possible Ukrainian rump state in Lviv Oblast while alluding to the fact that this area was Polish territory earlier in history.[4] Medvedev’s comments continue to indicate that the Kremlin has returned to its domestic narrative that Russia is fighting the war to “liberate its historic lands.”[5]

Medvedev’s mention of Russia’s possible intentions to occupy Odesa may be worth noting in light of recent developments in the pro-Russian breakaway republic of Transnistria in Moldova, the southern tip of which is about 50 kilometers from the city. Transnistrian authorities recently announced that the Transnistrian Congress of Deputies is planning to meet on February 28.[6] ISW forecasts that deputies may initiate a new referendum seeking annexation by Russia or propose or demand action on a 2006 referendum that called for Transnistria’s annexation by Russia.[7] ISW has not observed clear indications of Russian military preparations to intervene in Transnistria or Moldova more generally, and Russian military intervention would be challenging for Moscow since Moldova and Transnistria are landlocked and accessible only through Romanian or Ukrainian territory.[8]

Medvedev also described Russian plans to repress Ukrainian citizens in occupied Ukraine. Medvedev claimed that Ukrainian citizens in occupied Ukraine who “harm” (vredyat) Russia in must be “exposed and punished, sent to Siberia ... for re-education in forced labor camps.”[9] Stalin-era show trials and repressions starting in the 1920s and 1930s similarly targeted saboteurs (vrediteli), particularly in the agricultural sphere.[10] Medvedev’s usage of Stalin-era purge rhetoric is significant. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation governor Yevgeny Balitsky also openly discussed – and attempted to defend – the illegal Russian occupation policies, including the forced deportation of Ukrainian citizens who oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and possibly even alluded to Russian occupation forces’ summary executions of Ukrainian citizens.[11]

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders and Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov on February 21 and 22. Putin attended the “Games of the Future” in Kazan alongside Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kyrgyzstan’s President Sadyr Japarov, Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon.[12] Putin also met with Minnikhanov and former head of Tatarstan Mintimer Shamaiev to discuss the construction of a new unspecified research and development center in Sibur, Tatarstan.[13] CTP-ISW previously reported that Minnikhanov visited Iran, likely to discuss Russo-Iranian defense industrial and military cooperation.[14] Minnikhanov’s visit was particularly noteworthy given his trip to the Esfahan Province, where several prominent Iranian defense industrial and military sites are located and considering that Iran is helping to construct a military drone manufacturing facility in the “Alabuga” Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Tatarstan. Minnikhanov also has previous ties to authorities in Gagauzia, a pro-Russia autonomous region of Moldova (although separate from Transnistria), which is notable given ISW’s February 22 warning forecast about a possible Russian hybrid operation against Moldova.[15]

Ukrainian forces conducted another successful strike against a Russian training ground in occupied Kherson Oblast on February 21 and likely inflicted significant casualties. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk reported on February 22 that a Ukrainian strike killed nearly 60 Russian servicemen at a Russian training ground in occupied Podo-Kalynivka, Kherson Oblast.[16] Humenyuk stated that the targeted Russian assault groups were training to conduct operations near Krynky.[17] Footage published on February 21 shows the strike, which reportedly killed members of the Russian 328th Airborne Assault (VDV) Regiment (104th VDV Division), 810th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet), and 81st Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment (likely a reconstituted Soviet-era unit).[18] Russian milbloggers criticized the Russian command for conducting training exercises within the range of Ukrainian drones and HIMARS systems and advocated for updated training policies that account for the threat of Ukrainian strike systems and better protect Russian servicemen.[19] Some Russian milbloggers noted that this strike follows the February 20 Ukrainian HIMARS strikes against a Russian training ground near Volnovakha, Donetsk Oblast, which reportedly killed “dozens” of Russian military personnel.[20]

Ukraine’s European and Western allies continue to ramp up their support for Ukraine. The Danish Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced a new military aid package for Ukraine on February 22 valued at 1.7 billion Danish kroner ($228 million). This package includes 15,000 155mm shells jointly produced with the Czech Republic, air defense materiel and ammunition, mine clearance equipment, drones, radar, and communication equipment.[21] Denmark also signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement with Ukraine.[22] UK Defense Minister Grant Shapps announced that the UK is sending 200 Brimstone anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.[23] New Zealand also announced a new aid package for Ukraine valued at 25.9 million NZD ($15.4 million), including humanitarian aid and funding for other international funds that support Ukraine’s weapons acquisition, recovery, and reconstruction.[24] The German Bundestag approved additional military support to Ukraine, including unspecified long-range weapons systems and ammunition, but rejected a bill that called for Germany to provide Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.[25]

Russian opposition outlet Proekt reported on February 22 that the Russian government has subjected at least 116,000 Russians to criminal and administrative charges since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fourth term in office in 2018.[26] Proekt reported that Russian authorities pursued criminal charges against 11,442 people for politically motivated charges, including extremism, justifying terrorism, discrediting the Russian military, and spreading “fake” information about Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2018-2023.[27] Proekt noted that Russian authorities brought administrative charges against an additional 105,000 people for charges related to speech, conscience, and assembly, including at protests.[28] Proekt reported that Russian authorities initiated 5,829 cases for crimes against the state in this time period, including espionage, disclosure of state secrets, cooperation with foreign organizations, and for refusing to participate in the war in Ukraine.[29] Proekt’s partner organization Agenstvo Novosti noted that Russian authorities have tried 329 people for disclosing state secrets since 2018, more than the Soviet Union did during the entirety of the Cold War.[30] Proekt reported that Russian authorities have tried over 13,000 people under criminal statues introduced due to the war in Ukraine, including spreading fake information and discrediting the Russian military, including roughly 4,500 military personnel punished for new articles related to conduct in the military or on the battlefield.[31] Proekt reported that Russian authorities have pursued over 600,000 cases for insubordination against, insulting, and violence against Russian government officials and over 159,000 cases for violating pandemic restrictions in this timeframe.[32] While it is likely that some and even many of these cases are legitimate, the Kremlin has increasingly weaponized the Russian criminal justice system to crack down on domestic dissent against the war and Putin’s autocratic rule to consolidate control over domestic Russian society.[33] Proekt noted that the number of political repression-related cases initiated has sharply increased since 2022 and that many of the cases are dubious, either due to officials’ obfuscation of the criminal case itself or because they are prosecutions of a fake or overblown crime to cover up another misdeed.[34]

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on February 22 that the Kremlin does not regard Russian military correspondents (voyenkory) and milbloggers as participants of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shortly after the suicide of a prominent Russian milblogger on February 21. Peskov stated that it would be wrong to linearly equate voyenkory to Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine because they do not bear arms.[35] Peskov implied that Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a similar opinion and noted that Russian military correspondents' contributions to the war effort should be acknowledged in their own distinct category, despite the fact that many Russian milbloggers do in fact bear arms and engage in combat operations, among other tasks that military personnel perform.[36] Peskov’s statement follows the Russian information space‘s widespread discussion of the suicide of Russian serviceman and independent milblogger Andrei Morozov (alias Boytsovskiy Kot Murz).[37] Morozov served in the Russian 4th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People’s Republic’s [LNR] Army Corps) while simultaneously maintaining a Telegram channel with over 100,000 followers — where he avidly criticized the Russian military command and senior Russian political figures — and coordinating aid provisions to Russian frontline forces. Morozov blamed the Russian military command and propagandists for triggering his decision to commit suicide after an abusive Russian military commander ordered him to delete his reports about high Russian personnel losses around Avdiivka. The timing of Peskov’s remarks is notable and may reflect a broader Kremlin campaign to consolidate a monopoly over the Russian military correspondent and milblogger community. The Kremlin has been increasingly collaborating with voyenkory who work as frontline correspondents, and ISW observed an increase in reports about persecutions against milbloggers who perform humanitarian or combat operations in addition to maintaining Telegram channels.[38] Russian officials have previously threatened to restrict certain milbloggers from reporting on the frontlines unless they possess Kremlin-issued “press” vests, and the Kremlin may be attempting to eliminate the independent class of milbloggers and replace them with Kremlin-affiliated voyenkory.[39]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would likely have to seize Kyiv sooner or later while identifying Russia’s possible further territorial objectives in Ukraine.
• Medvedev’s mention of Russia’s possible intentions to occupy Odesa may be worth noting in light of recent developments in the pro-Russian breakaway republic of Transnistria in Moldova, the southern tip of which is about 50 kilometers from the city.
• Medvedev also described Russian plans to repress Ukrainian citizens in occupied Ukraine.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders and Republic of Tatarstan Head Rustam Minnikhanov on February 21 and 22.
• Ukrainian forces conducted another successful strike against a Russian training ground in occupied Kherson Oblast on February 21 and likely inflicted significant casualties.
• Ukraine’s European and Western allies continue to ramp up their support for Ukraine.
• Russian opposition outlet Proekt reported on February 22 that the Russian government has subjected at least 116,000 Russians to criminal and administrative charges since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fourth term in office in 2018.
• Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on February 22 that the Kremlin does not regard Russian military correspondents (voyenkory) and milbloggers as participants of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shortly after the suicide of a prominent Russian milblogger on February 21.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
• A Russian insider source claimed that Russian officials have postponed creating Rosgvardia’s 1st Volunteer Corps from remaining Wagner Group detachments because of an ongoing rotation of former Wagner personnel in Africa.
• Russia continues to export its state policies on systemic religious persecution to occupied Ukraine.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Positional engagements continued along the Kupaynsk-Svatove-Kreminna line on February 22, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional engagements continued northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Tabaivka, Berestove, and Krokhmalne; west of Kreminna near Terny and Yampolivka; and south of Kreminna in Bilohorivka.[40] Elements of the Russian 7th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People’s Republic [LNR] Army Corps) are reportedly operating near Bilohorivka.[41]

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

Russian forces recently marginally advanced northwest of Bakhmut amid continued positional fighting in the area on February 22. Geolocated footage published on February 9 and 21 shows that Russian forces marginally advanced southeast and south of Bohdanivka (northwest of Bakhmut), respectively.[42] Russian milbloggers claimed that elements of the Russian 11th Separate Guards Air Assault (VDV) Brigade and 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) broke through Ukrainian defenses on the northern and northeastern outskirts of Ivanivske (west of Bakhmut) and are now fighting in the village itself and on its eastern outskirts, though ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[43] Positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut near Vyimka; northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka; southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Andriivka; and south of Bakhmut near Mayorske, Niu York, Toretsk, and Pivdenne.[44] Elements of the Russian 200th Motorized Rifle Brigade (14th Army Corps [AC], Northern Fleet) are reportedly operating near Bohdanivka, and elements of the Chechen “Sever-Akhmat” detachment (78th Motorized Rifle Regiment, 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th CAA, SMD) are operating near Klishchiivka.[45]

Russian forces advanced west of Avdiivka, and Russian sources claimed that Russian forces captured Sieverne to the southwest on February 22. Geolocated footage published on February 22 shows that Russian forces advanced in a field west of the Avdiivka Coke Plant in northern Avdiivka.[46] Russian milbloggers claimed that the Russian 1st “Slavic” Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic’s [DNR] AC) captured Sieverne and that other Russian forces captured roughly 40 percent of Pervomaiske (southwest of Avdiivka), though ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[47] Positional fighting continued northwest and west of Avdiivka near Stepove, Berdychi, Orlivka, Lastochkyne; and southwest of Avdiivka near Sieverne, Pervomaiske, and Nevelske.[48] Elements of the Russian 55th Motorized Rifle Brigade (41st CAA, Central Military District [CMD]) continue to operate in Avdiivka, and elements of the Russian 110th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) are operating near Nevelske.[49]

A Ukrainian military analyst stated that Russian forces lost roughly a division’s worth of tanks and roughly two divisions’ worth of armored vehicles in the Russian campaign for Avdiivka. Ukrainian military analyst Colonel Petro Chernyk reported on February 22 that Russian forces lost 364 tanks and 748 armored vehicles, which Chernyk stated amounts to just over one division’s worth of tanks and nearly two divisions’ worth of armored vehicles, respectively.[50] Chernyk stated that Russian forces have not suffered equipment losses at this scale since the Second World War and noted that Soviet forces only lost a maximum of 180 tanks in the entire nine-year war in Afghanistan.[51] Chernyk warned that Russian forces will use infantry to compensate for extreme vehicle losses, which is consistent with ISW’s observations about Russian attritional infantry-led “meat assaults” observed near Avdiivka and elsewhere in the theater.[52]

Positional fighting continued west and southwest of Donetsk City on February 22, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces marginally advanced towards Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk City) from the south.[53] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) officially announced the Russian capture of Pobieda (southwest of Donetsk City) on February 22 after Russian forces seized the settlement no later than February 21.[54] Positional fighting continued west of Donetsk City and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda and Novomykhailivka.[55]

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

Positional engagements continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on February 22. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced near Novodonetske (southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and Pryyutne (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[56] Positional fighting continues south of Zolota Nyva (southeast of Velyka Novosilka) and near Novozlatopil (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[57] Elements of the Russian 30th Artillery Brigade (36th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) are reportedly operating near Urozhaine (south of Velyka Novosilka).[58]

Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in western Zaporizhia Oblast on February 22. A prominent Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced one kilometer near Robotyne and that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces from several positions near Verbove (east of Robotyne).[59] Another prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced more than two kilometers near Robotyne on February 21.[60] Fighting continued east and on the southern outskirts of Robotyne and west of Verbove.[61] Elements of the Russian 136th Artillery Regiment (likely a reconstituted Soviet-era unit) are reportedly operating near Robotyne.[62]

Positional fighting continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, particularly near Krynky, on February 22.[63] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces retreated from unspecified positions near Krynky following a Ukrainian assault in the area.[64]

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

Russian forces launched another drone and missile strike against Ukraine overnight on February 21 to February 22. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 10 Shahed 136/131 drones from Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Krasnodar Krai and one Kh-31P anti-radar missile from the Black Sea.[65] Ukrainian military officials reported that Ukrainian force shot down eight Shahed drones over Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, and Kharkiv oblasts.[66] Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces launched a missile, possibly a Kh-31 type, against Odesa Oblast on the evening of February 21.[67] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces targeted and struck the Myrhorod military airfield in Poltava Oblast.[68]

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) reported on February 22 that Russian forces have used more than 20 North Korean ballistic missiles in strikes against Ukraine.[69] The SBU reported that it collected evidence of Russian forces using North Korean Hwasong-11 (KN-23/24) ballistic missiles and noted that Russian forces first used these missiles to strike Zaporizhzhia City on December 30, 2023. The SBU added that Russian forces launched North Korea ballistic missiles against an apartment building in Kyiv City in early January 2024 and have also struck residential and civilian infrastructure in Donetsk and Kharkiv oblasts.

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

A Russian insider source claimed that Russian officials have postponed creating Rosgvardia’s 1st Volunteer Corps from remaining Wagner Group detachments because of an ongoing rotation of former Wagner personnel in Africa.[70] The source claimed that assault troops — likely referring to Wagner’s former 15th, 16th, and 17th assault detachments — in Kazachi Lageri, Rostov Oblast are preparing to rotate in Africa. A Russian milblogger claimed on February 19 that Russian efforts to integrate former Wagner personnel into Rosgvardia have halted.[71]

The Kremlin-affiliated Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) claimed that 68 percent of Russians believe that military professions in Russia have high prestige, based on survey data collected as of February 2024.[72] The FOM claimed that the number of Russians characterizing the Russian military as having high prestige has been consistently increasing from 53 percent in mid-February 2022 to 60 percent in February 2023. The FOM largely conducts surveys for the Russian Presidential Administration and this data may be exaggerated to incentivize military recruitment in Russia.[73]

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

Russian design bureau “Stratim” reported that Russian operators will test the “Chaika” drone in Ukraine in March 2024.[74] “Stratim” claimed that the Chaika drone is a tailsitter drone that combines the advantages of fixed wing aircraft and multi-rotor UAVs. “Stratim” claimed that this drone has a range of up to 30km, a speed of at least 100 kilometers per hour, and can carry a payload of four to five kilograms.[75]

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

The Danish Ministry of Defense and US Department of Defense announced on February 22 that the Air Force Capability Coalition expects to provide the first F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine in summer 2024.[76]

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

Russia continues to export its state policies on systemic religious persecution to occupied Ukraine. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Denis Pushilin posted footage on February 22 purportedly showing the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Rosgvardia raiding an office of a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in occupied Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.[77] Pushilin claimed that Russian authorities seized more than 5,000 books from the office. Russia banned Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist” organization in 2017, and Russian authorities have persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities in Russia and Ukraine.[78]

Russian authorities continue to illegally deport Ukrainian civilians, including children, to Russia under the guise of rehabilitation programs. The Russian “We Help Ours” organization stated on February 22 that Russian authorities deported a group of 20 Ukrainian children and their mothers from occupied Luhansk Oblast to a sanatorium in Moscow Oblast.[79]

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reiterated Kremlin narratives on February 22 intended to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and portray the Russian economy as stable and successful despite the pressure of Western sanctions. Putin and Peskov claimed that Russian military personnel are “liberating” historical Russian lands and “minimizing” and “eradicating” danger in Donbas and “Novorossiya.”[80] Putin additionally claimed that all of Russia’s oblasts — including illegally annexed Ukrainian territories — have good potential for further economic growth.[81]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attempted to blame perceived Western “arrogance and pre-occupation with Russophobia” on February 22 for the lack of peace negotiations to resolve the war in Ukraine, despite official Russian statements that the Kremlin is not interested in good-faith peace negotiations with Ukraine.[82]

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

Belarus continues strengthening its military-technical cooperation with Russia. Belarusian Defense Minister Lieutenant General Viktor Khrenin stated that Russia and Belarus have established a legislative framework for creating and operating joint combat training centers and recently proposed to develop a plan for a joint weapons program.[83] Khrenin also stated that the Russian regional grouping of forces and Belarusian forces will conduct their standard biennial exercises again in 2025.[84]

Belarus continues to amplify Kremlin rhetoric that Ukraine poses an existential threat to Russia and Belarus. Khrenin claimed on February 22 that Ukraine has concentrated a “strike force” on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border and that Ukrainian sabotage groups may conduct provocations across the border.[85]

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.

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, February 22, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-february-22-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Yemen: Iran and the Houthis are likely using their attacks in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to test and refine their approach to striking naval targets.
• Northern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces 162nd Division continued to conduct clearing operations in Zaytoun, eastern Gaza City.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to conduct clearing operations in western Khan Younis.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas said that there may be progress in negotiations with Israel over a prisoner-for-hostage deal.
• Iraq: Former Iraqi Parliament Speaker Mohammad al Halbousi discussed the US military presence in Iraq with US Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Coons and US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski.
• Iran: Iranian Strategic Foreign Relations Council Chairman Kamal Kharazi met with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials in Tehran.

IRAN UPDATE, FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Feb 22, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, February 22, 2024

Peter Mills, Ashka Jhaveri, Annika Ganzeveld, Kathryn Tyson, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00pm ET

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

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

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

Iran and the Houthis are likely using their attacks in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to test and refine their approach to striking naval targets. Houthi leader Abdulmalik al Houthi stated on February 22 that the group will “escalate” its operations targeting shipping around the Red Sea.[1] Abdulmalik added that the group would introduce "submarine weapons,” likely referring to unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV), but gave no further details.[2] CENTCOM reported that the Houthis used a UUV for the first time to threaten shipping around the Red Sea on February 17.[3] The Houthis — enabled directly by Iran — have used combinations of cruise and ballistic missiles as well as aerial, surface, and underwater drones to attack civilian and military vessels around the Red Sea since November 2023. Iranian military advisers are providing targeting intelligence to support the Houthis’ attacks targeting US naval vessels.[4] US naval vessels have regularly intercepted Houthi munitions targeting civilian and military vessels off the coast of Yemen. These Houthi attacks provide Iran and the Houthis opportunities to evaluate the effectiveness of different strike packages to understand how they can evade and overwhelm US defenses more effectively.

Key Takeaways:

• Yemen: Iran and the Houthis are likely using their attacks in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to test and refine their approach to striking naval targets.
• Northern Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces 162nd Division continued to conduct clearing operations in Zaytoun, eastern Gaza City.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to conduct clearing operations in western Khan Younis.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas said that there may be progress in negotiations with Israel over a prisoner-for-hostage deal.
• Iraq: Former Iraqi Parliament Speaker Mohammad al Halbousi discussed the US military presence in Iraq with US Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Coons and US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski.
• Iran: Iranian Strategic Foreign Relations Council Chairman Kamal Kharazi met with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials in Tehran.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) 162nd Division continued to conduct clearing operations in Zaytoun, eastern Gaza City, on February 22.[5] Israeli forces launched new, “division-wide” clearing operation in Zaytoun on February 20.[6] Israeli forces killed approximately 20 fighters and directed airstrikes to attack over 10 unspecified targets. Palestinian militias, including Hamas, clashed with Israeli forces in Zaytoun using small arms and anti-tank rocket-propelled grenades (RPG).[7]

Palestinian militias used mortars and rockets in most of their attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip on February 22.[8] CTP-ISW cannot determine the point of origin of any of the indirect fire attacks. The militias targeted Israeli positions in Zaytoun as well as in the northeastern Gaza Strip.[9] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement mortared an IDF “dispatch site” east of Beit Hanoun.[10] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement is a Palestinian faction aligned with Hamas that has expressed close ties with Iran.

The IDF Nahal Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) located and destroyed rocket launchers during clearing operations in the central Gaza Strip on February 22.[11] Palestinian fighters had rigged the launchers to explode, according to the IDF.

Israeli forces continued to conduct clearing operations in western Khan Younis on February 22. The IDF Givati Brigade (assigned to the 162nd Division) used sniper fire to ambush a Palestinian fighter cell in western Khan Younis.[12] The IDF 89th Commando Brigade (assigned to the 98th Division) located weapons and documents affiliated with Hamas during clearing operations in the area.[13] The Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry reported on February 22 that Israeli forces raided Nasser Hospital in western Khan Younis shortly after withdrawing from it.[14] Nasser Hospital had been the largest functioning hospital in the Gaza Strip until Israeli forces raided it on February 15.[15] Israel received “credible intelligence” that Hamas-held hostages were in the hospital and detained ”hundreds” of Hamas fighters there.[16]

Hamas said that there may be progress in negotiations with Israel over a prisoner-for-hostage deal. Hamas International Relations head Musa Abu Marzouk said on February 22, “there may be progress in the negotiations of a prisoner swap in the near future.”[17] The Wall Street Journal reported on February 22 that Egyptian officials said that Hamas is ready to lower the number of Palestinian fighters it wants released as part of a deal.[18] Israel previously refused to further engage in hostage talks because Hamas demanded that Israel release thousands of Palestinian prisoners as part of the deal.[19] The Egyptian officials also stated that Hamas will not release Israeli soldiers until there is a permanent ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Hamas wants a plan where more hostages are released only if progress is made in ending the war during a ceasefire. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly emphasized that Israeli forces will continue the ground offensive until Hamas is defeated.[20]

Israel agreed to send negotiators to Paris for hostage talks on February 23 after the United States urged Israel to do so.[21] Israeli media reported on February 22 that the Israeli war cabinet approved sending negotiators to Paris.[22] US National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk met with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a meeting in Israel on February 22.[23] McGurk told Gallant that there has been progress in the negotiations between Egyptians and Qatari mediators and Hamas, according to three sources with knowledge on the issue who spoke to Axios.[24] CIA director Bill Burns is expected to travel to Paris on February 23 to hold talks with Qatari and Egyptian officials.[25]

Gallant told McGurk that the Israeli government “will expand the authority given to our hostage negotiators” while simultaneously “preparing [for] the continuation of intense ground operations” in the Gaza Strip.[26] Netanyahu previously ordered Israeli negotiators exclusively to listen during the most recent meeting between US, Israeli, Egyptian, and Qatari officials on February 13 in Cairo.[27] Gallant emphasized to McGurk that the IDF must “dismantle” the remaining Hamas battalions in the central and southern Gaza Strip.[28]

Palestinian militias conducted two indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel on February 22.[29]

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Israeli forces have clashed with Palestinian fighters at least four times in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on February 21.[30]

Three Palestinian attackers fired small arms at Israeli civilian vehicles at an Israeli checkpoint outside of Jerusalem on February 22.[31] The attackers killed one Israeli civilian and injured at least eleven others before Israeli police killed all three attackers at the checkpoint.[32] Several Palestinian militia groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, praised the attack.[33]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least 12 attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on February 21.[34]

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Former Iraqi Parliament Speaker Mohammad al Halbousi discussed the US military presence in Iraq with US Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Coons and US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski on February 22.[35] Halbousi, Coons, and Romanowski discussed the ongoing negotiations between Washington and Baghdad about the status of the US-led coalition mission to defeat ISIS. The United States and Iraq began these negotiations in late January 2024.[36] Halbousi described the negotiations as important for creating a “sustainable bilateral partnership” between the United States and Iraq.[37] Halbousi, Coons, and Romanowski also emphasized the need to “maintain security cooperation” between the United States and Baghdad to root out the “remnants of terrorism.” Iran and its Iraqi proxy and partner militias have intensified their campaign to expel the United States from Iraq since October 2023.[38] Halbousi previously released a statement on February 14 warning “war merchants and seditionists from the Islamist parties” against “tampering with the stability of Anbar [Province],” implying that Halbousi might oppose Iranian-backed efforts to expel the United States from Iraq.[39]

Unspecified individuals unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate State of Law Coalition parliamentarian Bagher Kadhim Naser al Saadi in al Jadriyah, Baghdad, on February 22.[40] Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki heads the State of Law Coalition. This assassination attempt comes amid an uptick in likely politically motivated killings between competing Shia factions in Baghdad and southern Iraq in recent weeks.[41] 

The Houthis claimed attacks targeting Israel, a commercial ship, and a US warship on February 22. The group launched two anti-ship ballistic missiles that hit the UK-owned, Palau-flagged MV Islander in the Gulf of Aden.[42] The Houthis separately claimed an attack targeting an unspecified US destroyer in the Red Sea.[43] US CENTCOM stated that it intercepted six Houthi one-way attack drones in the Red Sea.[44] The Houthi military spokesperson claimed the group launched drones and missiles targeting unspecified targets in Eilat, Israel.[45] Israel intercepted a surface-to-surface missile south of Eilat on February 21.[46]

Iranian Strategic Foreign Relations Council Chairman Kamal Kharazi met with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials in Tehran on February 22.[47] Kharazi claimed that “resistance” is the only way for Palestinians to achieve their goals and confront Israel during a meeting with senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan and PIJ Political Bureau member Ali Abu Shahin.[48] Hamdan and Shahin explained the “latest state” of the war in the Gaza Strip and thanked the Iranian regime for supporting Palestinian militias. Hamdan and Shahin are both based in Lebanon. Kharazi is a senior foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.[49]

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei repeated his criticism of unspecified Muslim countries for failing to sever political and economic ties with Israel during a meeting with Quran reciters on February 22.[50] Khamenei has, even before the Israel-Hamas war began, repeatedly called on Muslim countries to isolate Israel.[51]

3. Exclusive: Chinese police work in Kiribati, Hawaii's Pacific neighbour

This is an example of the Chinese "Go strategy."

And this remains my thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions.

Exclusive: Chinese police work in Kiribati, Hawaii's Pacific neighbour

By Kirsty Needham

February 23, 20243:14 PM GMT+9Updated 9 hours ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-police-work-kiribati-hawaiis-pacific-neighbour-2024-02-23/?utm

Students holding national flags of China and Kiribati wait for a welcoming ceremony for Kiribati's President Taneti Maamau at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China January 6, 2020. REUTERS/Jason Lee/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

SYDNEY, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Chinese police are working in the remote atoll nation of Kiribati, a Pacific Ocean neighbour of Hawaii, with uniformed officers involved in community policing and a crime database program, Kiribati officials told Reuters.

Kiribati has not publicly announced the policing deal with China, which comes as Beijing renews a push to expand security ties in the Pacific Islands in an intensifying rivalry with the United States.

Kiribati, a nation of 115,000 residents, is considered strategic despite being small, as it is relatively close to Hawaii and controls one of the biggest exclusive economic zones in the world, covering more than 3.5 million square kilometres (1.35 million square miles) of the Pacific. It hosts a Japanese satellite tracking station.

Kiribati's acting police commissioner Eeri Aritiera told Reuters the Chinese police on the island work with local police, but there was no Chinese police station in Kiribati.

"The Chinese police delegation team work with the Kiribati Police Service - to assist on Community Policing program and Martial Arts (Tai Chi) Kung Fu, and IT department assisting our crime database program," he said in an email.

China's embassy in Kiribati did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the role of its police. In a January social media post the embassy named the leader of "the Chinese police station in Kiribati".

Aritiera, who attended a December meeting between China's public security minister Wang Xiaohong and several Pacific Islands police officials in Beijing, said Kiribati had requested China's policing assistance in 2022.

Up to a dozen uniformed Chinese police arrived last year on a six month rotation.

"They only provide the service that the Kiribati Police Service needs or request," Aritiera said.

The Kiribati president's office did not respond to a request for comment.

CHINA SEEKS POLICING TIES

China's efforts to strike a region-wide security and trade deal in the region, where it is a major infrastructure lender, were rejected by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2022.

However, Chinese police have deployed in the Solomon Islands since 2022, after the two nations signed a secret security pact criticised by Washington and Canberra as undermining regional stability.

Australian National University's Pacific expert Graeme Smith said China was seeking to extend its reach over the Chinese diaspora, and police were "very useful eyes and ears" abroad.

"It is about extraterritorial control," he said. Chinese police would also "have eyes on Kiribati's domestic politics and its diplomatic partners".

Aritiera said the Chinese police were not involved in security for Chinese citizens on the island.

China's ambassador to Australia said last month that China had a strategy to form policing ties with Pacific Island countries to help maintain social order and this should not cause Australia anxiety.

Kiribati switched ties from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, with President Taneti Maamau encouraging Chinese investment in infrastructure. It will hold a national election this year.

China built a large embassy on the main island and sent agricultural and medical teams. It also announced plans to rebuild a World War Two U.S. military airstrip on Kiribati's Kanton Island, prompting concern in Washington. The airstrip has not been built.

At its closest point, Kiribati's Kiritimati island is 2,160 km (1,340 miles) south of Honolulu.

The United States countered with a pledge in October to upgrade the wharf on Kanton island, a former U.S. military base, and said it wants to open an embassy in Kiribati.

Director of the Lowy Institute's Pacific Islands Program, Meg Keen, said China had security ambitions in the region.

"Australia and the United States are concerned about that prospect, in Kiribati and around the region, and are taking measures to protect their position," she said.

A spokeswoman for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs said Australia was working to meet Kiribati's security needs and had donated two patrol boats.

"Australia is supporting the Kiribati Police Service with major upgrades to its policing infrastructure, including a new barracks and headquarters and radio network," she said.

Papua New Guinea, the biggest Pacific Island nation, said this month it would not accept a Chinese offer of police assistance and surveillance technology, after news it was negotiating a policing deal with China prompted criticism from traditional security partners, the United States and Australia.

Reporting by Kirsty Needham; Editing by Sonali Paul

4. US imposes sweeping sanctions against Russia, targets over 500 people and entities

"Sanctions R us"

We must do this but how much effect can we have if other countries continue to trade with Russia because it is in their interest?

US imposes sweeping sanctions against Russia, targets over 500 people and entities

https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-announces-new-sanctions-vs-russia-two-years-into-ukraine-war-2024-02-23/?utm

By Daphne Psaledakis and David Brunnstrom

February 23, 202411:02 PM GMT+9Updated an hour ago

[1/2]U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to the media, following his meeting with late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s widow and daughter in San Francisco, California, U.S., February 22, 2024. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Feb 23 (Reuters) - The United States on Friday issued sweeping sanctions to mark the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, targeting over 500 people and entities as Washington seeks to increase pressure on Moscow.

The measures targeted the Mir payment system, Russian financial institutions and its military industrial base, sanctions evasion, future energy production and other areas. They also included officials involved in the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Treasury and State departments said in statements.

The action seeks to hold Russia to account over the war and the death of Navalny, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement, as Washington looks to continue to support Ukraine even as it faces acute shortages of ammunition and U.S. military aid has been delayed for months in Congress.

"They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home," Biden said of the sanctions.

The U.S. Treasury Department targeted nearly 300 people and entities, while the State Department hit over 250 and the Commerce Department added over 90 companies to the Entity List. That was an increase from last year, when the U.S. imposed sanctions on over 200 individuals and entities while Commerce targeted 90 companies for the first anniversary of the war.

Friday's sanctions from the United States came in partnership with those from European Union member nations and Britain. The actions are the latest of thousands of targets announced by the United States and its allies following Russia's Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine, which has killed tens of thousands and destroyed cities.

00:00

02:36

Russia's export-focused, $2.2-trillion economy has proven more resilient to the unprecedented sanctions than either Moscow or the West anticipated.

Biden's administration has exhausted money previously approved for Ukraine, and a request for additional funds is languishing in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

"We must sustain our support for Ukraine even as we weaken Russia’s war machine. It’s critical that Congress steps up to join our allies around the world in giving Ukraine the means to defend itself and its freedom against Putin’s barbarous assault," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

PAYMENT SYSTEM

The U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement it imposed sanctions on state-owned National Payment Card System, the operator of the Mir payment system.

Mir payments cards have become more important since its U.S. rivals suspended operations in Russia after Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, and their payment cards which were issued in the country stopped working abroad.

"The Government of Russia's proliferation of Mir has permitted Russia to build out a financial infrastructure that enables Russian efforts to evade sanctions and reconstitute severed connections to the international financial system," the Treasury statement said.

Also targeted were over a dozen Russian banks, investment firms, venture capital funds, and fintech companies, including SPB Bank, which is owned by SPB Exchange, Russia's second-largest stock exchange which specializes in trading foreign shares.

FUTURE ENERGY, SANCTIONS EVASION

The United States also targeted Russia's future energy production and exports, taking further aim at Arctic-2 LNG project in Siberia. In November, Washington imposed sanctions on a major entity involved in the development, operation and ownership of the massive project.

On Friday, the State Department targeted Russia's Zvezda shipbuilding company, which it said is involved in the construction of up to 15 highly specialized LNG tankers intended for use in support of Arctic-2 LNG exports.

U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told reporters that Treasury plans to level additional sanctions later on Friday over the G7's $60 price cap on Russian oil that he said will increase the costs for Russia to use an aging "shadow fleet" of tankers to get oil to markets mainly in India and China.

The United States also imposed sanctions on entities based in China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Liechtenstein over the evasion of western sanctions on Russia and backfilling, including for sending items Moscow relies on for its weapons systems.

The action comes as Washington has increasingly sought to crack down on Russia's circumvention of its measures.

The move also targeted a network through which Russia, in cooperation with Iran, has acquired and produced drones.

NAVALNY'S DEATH

The State Department on Friday also targeted three Russian Federal Penitentiary Service officials it accused of being connected to Navalny's death, including its deputy director who it said reportedly instructed prison staff to exert harsher treatment on Navalny.

Navalny, 47, fell unconscious and died suddenly last week after a walk at the "Polar Wolf" penal colony above the Arctic Circle where he was serving a three-decade sentence, the prison service said. Biden directly blamed Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. actions also targeted individuals involved in what the State Department called the forcible transfer or deportation of Ukrainian children to camps promoting indoctrination in Russia, Belarus and Crimea.

Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis, David Brunnstrom and Timothy Gardner in Washington, Polina Devitt in London and Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru, Editing by William Maclean. Nick Macfie, Don Durfee and Chizu Nomiyama

5. Why the Army needs a drone branch: Embracing lessons from Ukraine

Excerpts:

However, establishing a separate Army branch for uncrewed systems is not just about recognizing their operational value. It’s about understanding the specialized skills and knowledge these technologies require. Today, drone operators represent a unique military occupational specialty, but the future will demand a broader array of expertise, including machine learning programmers, cloud technicians, specialized mechanics, and operators for more diversified systems. A drone branch would support specialized training and talent development. It would foster innovation and integration of uncrewed systems in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

Moreover, the establishment of a branch dedicated to uncrewed systems opens up new avenues for recruitment. The Army could tap into a growing pool of talent previously overlooked by traditional military branches. By actively seeking drone hobbyists and experts, the service can attract individuals with a passion for and expertise in drone technology and autonomous systems.

Why the Army needs a drone branch: Embracing lessons from Ukraine - Breaking Defense

In this op-ed, Army Lt. Col. Robert Solano argues the need for the US military to boldly embrace how it approaches uncrewed systems.

breakingdefense.com · by Lt. Col. Robert Solano · February 22, 2024

A small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) is shown in flight at Dugway Proving Ground. (Photo by Becki Bryant)

The conflict in Ukraine has shown that uncrewed systems are no longer the future of war, but the present. The proliferation of drones has led Ukraine to dramatically change its approach to the technology, and in this new op-ed, US Army Lt. Col. Robert Solano argues that it’s time for the Pentagon to do the same.

The recent decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine to establish a separate branch within their armed forces dedicated to drone systems signals a significant shift in military strategy, and reflects an evolving battlefield where uncrewed systems play a pivotal role. This move, grounded in the hard-learned lessons of Ukraine’s ongoing conflict, should prompt a broader conversation about the future of warfare and the role of technology within it.

It also begs the question: Should the United States follow suit and establish its own service focused on uncrewed systems, regardless of operational domain? Or is there a different approach that better fits America’s military system but still allows uncrewed capabilities to reach their full potential?

Zelenskyy’s initiative is groundbreaking because it positions a drone systems force as a distinct entity alongside Ukraine’s established military branches. The United States military has traditionally categorized its forces based on operational domains — land, air, sea and, most recently, space — with the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Space Force, respectively. While the 2019 establishment of the Space Force illustrates the US military’s willingness to adapt to new operational realms, creating a separate service branch for uncrewed systems would represent a significant shift from this domain-based structure.

An approach that is more in line with the framework of the US military would involve the individual armed services — Army, Air Force, and Navy — each developing a specialized branch or career field focused on uncrewed systems (excluding space systems, which are uncrewed by nature and covered by the Space Force). Each service could harness its unique domain expertise to advance the integration and utilization of drones and autonomous systems.

Specifically, the Army should take the lead on land-based uncrewed vehicles and the smaller to medium-sized aerial drones that have become prominent in conflicts like the one in Ukraine. The first step would be to establish an Uncrewed Systems Branch that stands alongside the traditional Combat Arms branches like Infantry, Armor, and Aviation. This new drone corps would accelerate the adoption of uncrewed technologies, advance the development of new strategies, and improve talent management.

The use of uncrewed systems are not new to the US, leading to the obvious question of why this change is needed now. The reality is that the quantity and capabilities of drones, both air and ground, have increased significantly since the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. As just one example, a coalition of European nations recently pledged to supply Ukraine with one million drones, highlighting the surge in drone utilization across various combat scenarios. Furthermore, the DoD last August announced its Replicator Program which seeks to field warfighters with thousands of autonomous systems.

Given the rapidly changing nature of warfare, small task forces and individual unit experimentation is no longer enough. The Army needs a professional drone corps as part of an uncrewed systems branch.

History provides a clear roadmap. When tanks were first introduced in World War I, they were initially assigned to infantry units in a supporting role, providing armored protection while breaching enemy lines. This limited their speed to that of foot soldiers and constrained their strategic potential. At the onset of World War II, military strategy evolved, recognizing that tanks offered new tactical advantages that infantry or horses could not. It was a learning curve that eventually led to the creation of the Armor Branch in 1940, fundamentally changing the dynamics of ground warfare.

The drone unit of the 108th Territorial Defense Brigade of the Ukrainian Army continues its combat training as heavy clashes continue on the Zaporizhzhia frontline in Ukraine on November 04, 2023. (Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Drawing parallels to the present, drones and autonomous systems offer capabilities that extend beyond the traditional roles of aviation, armor, or infantry units. These capabilities include swarm attacks, persistent surveillance, psychological operations, electronic warfare, autonomous operations, and more. These tactics are reshaping the modern battlefield, as evidenced by their effectiveness in theaters like Ukraine. The unique potential of small and large drones to alter warfare demands a specialized focus that transcends their current role as mere enablers of existing combat arms branches.

Why start with the Army as a test case for a new drone corps? It’s multidomain nature and two decades of experience with a variety of systems makes it the obvious choice.

The Army already has experience in deploying uncrewed system forces. For instance, during the Global War on Terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army formed Task Force ODIN, a battalion-sized unit with the mission to “observe, detect, identify and neutralize (ODIN) improvised explosive devices using both manned and unmanned aerial reconnaissance assets.”

While Task Force ODIN pioneered Army unmanned reconnaissance strategy, the presence of drones on the battlefield has increased exponentially since the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some units have already begun to incorporate smaller drones into their combat strategies. Recently, the 82nd Airborne Division used small drones to drop munitions during training, making them the first US Army unit to do so. The adoption of a drone branch could leverage the insights gained by the 82nd Airborne, as well as those acquired from allies and previous conflicts, to formulate a more comprehensive combined arms strategy.

However, establishing a separate Army branch for uncrewed systems is not just about recognizing their operational value. It’s about understanding the specialized skills and knowledge these technologies require. Today, drone operators represent a unique military occupational specialty, but the future will demand a broader array of expertise, including machine learning programmers, cloud technicians, specialized mechanics, and operators for more diversified systems. A drone branch would support specialized training and talent development. It would foster innovation and integration of uncrewed systems in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

Moreover, the establishment of a branch dedicated to uncrewed systems opens up new avenues for recruitment. The Army could tap into a growing pool of talent previously overlooked by traditional military branches. By actively seeking drone hobbyists and experts, the service can attract individuals with a passion for and expertise in drone technology and autonomous systems.

It’s important to acknowledge the ongoing discussions within the Army and Congress about whether different Army branches should have different physical fitness standards. For example, some have argued that cyber soldiers should have lower physical standards since they usually work behind desks away from combat. The specific physical fitness requirements for drone operators will depend on the development of drone doctrine and strategy. Notably, drone units in Ukraine frequently operate in close proximity to frontline action. If the US Army adopts similar tactics, we could expect the drone force to have higher physical standards than if they were operating remotely piloted drones from thousands of miles away.

It is also important to recognize that uncrewed air and ground systems often share underlying technologies, such as artificial intelligence for decision-making processes, sensor fusion for enhanced situational awareness, and secure communication networks for reliable control and data transfer. A unified drone branch could effectively synchronize military strategy and technology applications across the air and ground domains, ensuring that innovations and advancements in one area can be readily applied to the other. An Army uncrewed systems branch could also coordinate drone technology development and joint strategy between the Air Force, Navy, and Space Force.

Critics might argue that uncrewed systems are important enablers for other combat arms branches and that those combat units should retain ownership of their own uncrewed systems. Yet, the concept of specialized branches is not new to the Army, and those infantry, armor, aviation, engineer and other units could retain their uncrewed capabilities. The Signal Corps, for instance, is dedicated to communications and information systems, essential to all military operations yet distinct enough to warrant its own branch. Similarly, an uncrewed systems branch could operate both standalone drone units and provide specialized teams to support other combat units, ensuring that the unique capabilities of drones are integrated seamlessly across all domains of warfare.

The war in Ukraine has starkly illustrated the rapidly evolving nature of warfare, where drones and autonomous systems have become not just tools but game-changers on the battlefield. For the US Army to fully leverage the potential of these technologies, a dedicated branch could provide the focus, resources, and expertise required to integrate them effectively into the broader military strategy as part of the combined arms team.

About the author: Lt. Col. Robert Solano is the commander of the Defense Contract Management Agency at Boeing in Mesa, Arizona. He is a senior aviator and acquisitions corps officer in the US Army. You can follow him on LinkedIn. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization.

6. The Biggest Ever Sanctions Have Failed to Halt Russia’s War Machine

The Biggest Ever Sanctions Have Failed to Halt Russia’s War Machine

Western officials say restrictions are damaging Russia’s economy and military output but acknowledge the impact is slower than hoped

https://www.wsj.com/world/the-biggest-ever-sanctions-have-failed-to-halt-russias-war-machine-0986873f?utm

By Laurence Norman

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 and Georgi Kantchev

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Updated Feb. 22, 2024 2:38 pm ET

President Vladimir Putin with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in the Kremlin this week. PHOTO: ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions have failed in their most important task—stopping the Kremlin’s war machine.

Western officials and experts say the financial, economic, military and energy sanctions imposed on Russia since February 2022 have damaged Russia’s economy and arms-production capacity, and will create serious problems for the Kremlin in the coming years. But they acknowledge the restrictions have hit more slowly than they hoped.

This week, Western countries are adopting new sanctions against Russia. For the first time, the European Union will target companies from mainland China when its measures are detailed on Saturday, officials say, shifting from efforts to persuade Beijing not to undercut sanctions to a more forceful approach. 

The U.K. on Wednesday sanctioned six Russians it said were involved in the death of leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny, disclosed on Feb. 16. Washington plans to announce U.S. measures over Navalny’s death on Friday.

On Thursday, in response to the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, London also set forth new sanctions aimed at Russia’s commodities and armaments sector. The targets included several oil traders and shipping companies, and three Chinese firms that have been supplying sanctioned electronics and drone engines to Russia. Under the sanctions, no U.K. entity can do business with the firms.

U.S. officials privately concede that the new measures set to to be announced Friday are likely to land a limited blow. The package is expected to expand measures against an array of defense firms, industries and institutions already sanctioned by the U.S. and target officials deemed responsible for Navalny’s death in a remote Arctic prison colony, senior administration officials said. Hundreds of entities will be added to the sanction rosters, they said.

The Biden administration argues that such measures will over time strangle the Russian economy and defense industry—and hamper its ability to wage war on Ukraine—while naming and isolating officials complicit in human-rights abuses.

“This is another turn of the crank, another turn of the wheel,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters earlier this week.

On Thursday, Navalny’s mother Lyudmila said she was allowed to see her son’s body, but authorities wouldn’t release it to her. Instead, she said, they demanded that he be buried in secret. In a video address, she said she would not agree to it, despite what she called attempts to blackmail her by authorities who threatened they would “do something with my son’s body.” Navalny’s team’s spokeswoman also said his mother was shown a medical document stating that he died of natural causes. The Russian Investigative Committee didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

For Russia, dodging sanctions has become a priority. The Kremlin has directed Russian intelligence services to find channels for evasion and backfilling, Western officials say. Moscow has increased trade with China, India and other countries not subscribing to the Western measures, helping it sell energy and secure the supply of critical imports for the war.

The Russian Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber relies on parts from the West. PHOTO: MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Russia has used shell companies and neighboring countries to buy components used in weapons. And it has obtained a large number of old vessels operating under opaque ownership to circumvent a Western-imposed oil price cap.

Moscow’s avoidance of sanctions has created an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. Western officials design measures to hurt Russia, but the Kremlin eventually adapts, forcing the U.S. and European policymakers back to the drawing board. It is a competition the Kremlin can’t afford to lose. Western officials think Russia can’t produce enough ammunition on its own to achieve its aim of subjugating Ukraine. 

However, with Ukraine on the defensive and U.S. support for Ukraine facing political opposition, sanctions haven’t prevented Russia from vastly increasing military spending this year.

Iran and North Korea have delivered drones and missiles to Russia, while China and Turkey have helped provide Moscow with a regular supply of Western-made dual-use goods its military depends on to conduct the war.

Unlike with past sanctions against Iran or North Korea, Russia’s economic weight has made it hard to isolate. So has the fact it exports not just oil and gas but resources including uranium and titanium that Western economies rely on.

U.S., British and EU officials have visited capitals around the world to persuade neutral countries not to undercut sanctions on critical military and dual-use goods. The effort has had some success in places including Central Asia but less with giant economies including India, Brazil and China, which have shunned sanctions on Russia.

“The medium-term prognosis for the Russian economy is not good,” said David O’Sullivan, the EU’s Russia sanctions czar. “But the time frame is not necessarily in sync with what is needed on the battlefield.” 

A Russian military vehicle undergoes testing in Crimea after repairs. Sanctions have hampered Russia’s military industry but not stopped it. PHOTO: SERGEI MALGAVKO/TASS/ ZUMA

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and its partners saw sanctions as the third pillar in supporting Ukraine, alongside economic and military aid for Kyiv. They hoped the measures, which have been unprecedented in scale, would deprive Russia of modern, high-tech weaponry, curb Russian revenue and inflict enough economic pain to persuade the Kremlin to seek peace.

Results have been mixed. U.S. and European officials say that their sanctions have deprived Russia of around 400 billion euros in revenue they would otherwise have had since February 2022.

Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at British security think tank the Royal United Services Institute, said that sanctions have forced Russia to rely on tanks that are inferior to vehicles they were producing before the invasion. Restrictions are also hampering the military’s ability to fight at night, which depends on Western technology. 

Russia was able to access Western microchips for missiles only at higher prices than before the war, or it was depending on lower quality Chinese ones. There is a big question mark about Russia’s stock of spare parts for its most effective bombers and other aircraft.

Western officials on Wednesday said that sanctions were hurting Russia’s military industry and would prevent the Kremlin from producing enough ammunition for its war needs. 

A member of Russia’s Vostok Group of Forces carries out repairs in Crimea this week. PHOTO: SERGEI MALGAVKO/TASS/ZUMA

Western officials believe Russia is unable to manufacture enough ammunition on its own to subjugate Ukraine. PHOTO: YURI SMITYUK/TASS/ZUMA

Yet a study from the Kyiv School of Economics published last month found that roughly 95% of the 2,800 foreign components found in Russian weapons on the battlefield since the war started were Western. Over 70% came from U.S. firms.

In relatively few cases was Russia buying components from Western vendors. China and Hong Kong accounted for roughly 69% of the entities making final sales to Russia of components, the study said. However, sanctions enforcement in the EU, where it is divided among several national authorities, has helped Moscow maintain critical supplies.

Western officials say China has become increasingly emboldened as the war has progressed and Chinese companies are providing Russia with chemicals to make explosives and other components that are helping it make more weapons. Chinese firms have also discussed sending drones to Russia, the officials said.

Companies should face multibillion-dollar fines, “where there is a proven case that they knew or should have known that their components might end up with the Russian military,” said Elina Ribakova, the director of the International Program at the Kyiv School of Economics.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, is setting up a full-blown war economy. Russia has boosted its military budget by nearly 70% this year, to a post-Soviet record of more than $100 billion. A vital U.S. $60 billion aid package for Ukraine has been sitting in Congress for months.

In the first half of 2023, Russia’s federal budget’s oil-and-gas revenue fell by 47% from the same period in 2022 as the oil price cap and the loss of Russian oil-and-gas exports to Europe kicked in. Yet Russia has been able to undermine the price cap by amassing a ghost fleet of oil tankers that allows it to export most of its oil without relying on Western ships and insurance. Russia earned $15.6 billion from its oil exports in January, up from a low of $11.8 billion last summer, according to the International Energy Agency.

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American officials have recently ramped up efforts against Russia’s shadow fleet, increasing the discount Russian oil is selling at and slimming its profits, according to the IEA. But the U.S. still worries about the impact on global oil supplies of enforcing the price cap too aggressively. “We want the oil to flow. We just want it to flow at the lowest price possible,” a senior U.S. Treasury official said. 

“There is no doubt the West was too cautious in certain respects, especially around targeting Russia’s oil revenues and using U.S. secondary sanctions” against foreign firms, said Edward Fishman at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, a former senior U.S. sanctions official. “Those mistakes are now coming back to bite us.”

Many Western officials and economists expect Russia’s economy to hit more severe trouble as early as next year, offering Ukraine hope if it can sustain its resistance and the U.S. elections don’t kill off Washington’s support.

After Russian gross domestic product grew by 3.6% last year, according to official data, the International Monetary Fund now expects 2024 growth of 2.6% before slowing sharply next year. Most of the economy’s expansion has been from the government’s spending spree on the war and a fiscal stimulus designed to keep the domestic population placated. 

The moves have overheated Russia’s economy, fueling a growing property bubble. Inflation has been running above 7%, spurring the central bank to raise interest rates to 16% to cool the economy. Many firms face labor shortages as Russians have left the country or been sent to the front lines.

For Russia in the short term, “the rise in oil prices helped counteract the effect of sanctions,” said Richard Portes, a professor at the London Business School. But over the years ahead, Putin is “running out of reserves…and he’s facing a catastrophic capital flight and brain drain.”

Ian Talley, Andrew Duehren and Max Colchester contributed to this article.

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com

7. Will the U.S. Abandon Ukraine?

Excerpts:

In recent months, European nations have started taking more seriously the possibility that, if Russia defeats Ukraine, it would be tempted to test the defenses of current members of NATO and the EU, said Camille Grand, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who served until 2022 as an assistant secretary-general of NATO.

“There is a new awareness that Russian ambitions aren’t limited to the post-Soviet space,” he said. “What’s at stake in Ukraine goes well beyond the future of Ukraine itself.”

1. THE SATURDAY ESSAY

Will the U.S. Abandon Ukraine?

Two years after Russia’s invasion, America’s waning commitment is raising fears that Putin could win the war—and that Europe may be on its own in future conflicts.

https://www.wsj.com/world/will-the-u-s-abandon-ukraine-168c4a0a?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow

Feb. 23, 2024 9:37 am ET

When President Vladimir Putin sent tanks toward Kyiv in February 2022, he bet that Western societies—and especially Europe, so dependent on Russian energy—wouldn’t have the stamina to oppose his attack and would eventually acquiesce to Ukraine’s dismemberment or outright disappearance.

Two years later, Ukraine has proved a formidable foe, regaining half of the land initially occupied by Russia and inflicting staggering casualties on Russia’s much more powerful military. Europe, too, has absorbed the economic shock of severing Russian natural-gas supplies and is boosting its military spending and commitments to Ukraine. This month the European Union passed a new $54 billion aid package for Kyiv, overcoming objections by Hungary.

It’s in the U.S., however, that Putin’s wager appears to be paying off, at least for now, as Moscow has successfully inserted itself into America’s culture wars.

Support for Ukraine, widely deemed a self-evident American national interest two years ago, has become a divisive partisan issue in an election year. A notable part of the Republican right has begun expressing admiration for Putin and even for the beauty of Moscow subways and the quality of Russian supermarkets—while pouring scorn on Ukraine’s embattled government and army.

Workers wave the Ukrainian flag after replacing a Soviet emblem with the coat of arms of Ukraine on the shield of the Motherland Monument in Kyiv, Aug. 6, 2023. PHOTO: ROMAN PILIPEY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

For months the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives has been blocking legislation that would authorize fresh military assistance to Ukraine, including the latest bipartisan bill passed 70-29 by the Senate. The resulting cutoff has already caused an acute shortage of artillery shells in Ukrainian units. According to President President Biden and Ukrainian commanders, it’s the main reason why Russia was able to seize the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka this month, Moscow’s first major battlefield advance since May.

The abrupt nature of the cutoff—which came after months of bipartisan assurances that, one way or another, American weapons would continue to flow—has left Ukraine in a particularly vulnerable spot. Russia has regrouped and is pressing a new offensive across the war’s entire front line, a push fueled by massive shipments of artillery shells and ballistic missiles from Moscow’s newfound ally North Korea.

“It’s not just that American aid has been cut, but it’s been cut without warning and without giving us any time to adjust. And it’s clear that Russia could gain the upper hand if Ukraine doesn’t have what it needs to defend itself,” said former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who advises President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration. “If this crisis is not resolved, and Ukraine doesn’t receive the assistance, it will become a huge gift to Putin.”

The prospect of an outgunned Ukraine losing much more ground in coming months, coupled with fresh doubts about America’s commitment to defend its allies should Donald Trump return to the White House next year, is increasingly unnerving democracies in Europe and beyond. That’s especially so as Putin has established a de facto military alliance with the rogue regimes of North Korea and Iran while growing closer and closer to authoritarian China.

The sense of anxiety is particularly high in Taiwan, an island democracy that Beijing considers a “renegade province” and has pledged to “reunify” with the mainland. America’s walking away from Ukraine, if it happens, “is going to be a disaster and is going to encourage the dictators in Beijing, in North Korea and in other countries,” warned Wang Ting-yu, who is slated to become chairman of the Taiwanese parliament’s defense and foreign affairs committee. “They will realize that the global leader doesn’t have the strength to keep its patience to support its allies. And if they think that way, they will make wrong decisions and misjudgments.”

That’s a warning echoed by the Biden administration and by some leading Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who helped to shepherd through this month’s bipartisan bill, which would provide $95 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. “The entire world of democracies thinks this is important, and we are the leader of this free world. We cannot back away,” Sen. McConnell said about helping Ukraine in an interview. “This is not the time, in my view, to be sending the message that we are not up to the task.” Much of that funding, he added, will flow back to create jobs in U.S. industries.

While Europe and other allies already account for more than half of Western support for Ukraine, only the U.S. possesses the stockpiles of ammunition and other weaponry, such as air-defense interceptors, that can significantly help Ukrainian forces in the immediate future. European production of ammunition, though rising, won’t be sufficient to sustain the Ukrainian military until sometime in 2025, or even later, according to military analysts. Some key pieces of military equipment can only come from U.S. stocks.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (left). who has blocked military funding for Ukraine, walks through the U.S. Capitol building with fellow Republican and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been pushing for the funding, Nov. 29, 2023. PHOTO: DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (left) with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Feb. 16; Germany, like some other EU countries, signed a defense cooperation agreement with Ukraine and pledged to provide more ammunition. PHOTO: KRISZTIAN BOCSI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The Biden administration and congressional leaders of both parties have been assuring Ukrainian officials that the cutoff in American supplies—now a determining factor on the battlefield—will never happen. The Republican speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson, made similar promises after getting the job in October. “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine, because I don’t believe it would stop there,” he said in a Fox TV interview at the time. “We’re not going to abandon them.”

Now, even though the latest Senate bill would likely gain an overwhelming majority on the House floor, Johnson has refused to allow a vote on it, saying that he has other priorities. As it currently stands, the House is unlikely to consider Ukraine aid at least until mid-March, and it appears possible that no additional funding for Ukraine will be approved by the current Congress at all. 

Looming above the congressional debate, of course, is the prospect of Trump winning the election in November. The former president has repeatedly said that he will reach a quick peace deal in Ukraine, though he hasn’t explained how and under what conditions. In a recent campaign appearance, he also intensified his criticism of NATO, indicating that he wouldn’t defend member-states who fail to meet the military spending target of 2% of GDP. “In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said he had told a European leader.

Asked why so many Republicans are now opposed to funding Ukraine, Sen. McConnell pointed to the isolationist spirit that has long been a force in American politics, particularly before World War II—and to the influence of Trump. “Our likely nominee for president is not enthusiastic about helping Ukraine,” McConnell said.

Officials in Washington and European capitals are skeptical about the prospects of any peace talks with Russia and discount any possibility of a deal before the U.S. presidential elections in November. While Ukraine says it’s unwilling to settle on anything short of regaining all of the 18% of its internationally recognized territory that is currently occupied by Russia, Moscow hasn’t dropped its initial war aim of controlling all of Ukraine.

In this month’s interview with talk-show host Tucker Carlson, Putin spent half an hour talking about how Ukraine—including the western city of Lviv—is historically Russian land and how Ukrainian identity is an artificial construct invented by the Austrian military before World War I. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said in January that Ukraine is a “cancer” and that any independent Ukrainian state, no matter how friendly to Russia, will inevitably be wiped out, even if it’s 10 or 50 years down the line.

“The very existence of Ukraine is fatal for Ukrainians,” said Medvedev, who heads Russia’s ruling party. “They will understand that life in a big common state, which they currently dislike very much, is preferable to death. Their death and the death of their loved ones. And the sooner Ukrainians realize it, the better.”

The new self-assurance coming from Moscow has prompted a flurry of warnings from American allies in Europe—and in Asia—about the potential domino effect of allowing Russia to win in Ukraine. The stakes, unlike at the outset of the war two years ago, are much higher today because of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Western allies have spent on Ukraine since then and because of their frequent public commitments to stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

“The level of U.S. investment in the project of Ukraine’s independence has increased, and therefore [so has] the extent to which U.S. credibility is judged based on Russia’s ability to accomplish or not accomplish its objectives in Ukraine,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the think tank RAND who has advised caution over Ukraine in the past. “If there were to be a dramatic reversal of fortunes in Ukraine, there would be a whole lot more confidence in the emerging pseudo-bloc of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.”

Many Trump supporters who oppose further funding for Ukraine frame this approach as part of the need to focus on China, a much stronger rival than Russia. Despite warnings to the contrary from Asian allies, they downplay the effect that an American retreat in Europe could have on Asian security. American voters seem to care about Europe and Asia in equal measure, however. According to a recent Pew poll, some 74% of Americans believe that the war in Ukraine is important for U.S. national interests, just a notch below the 75% who say the same about the tensions between China and Taiwan. 

 “The U.S. has to focus more on East Asia. That is going to be the future of American foreign policy for the next 40 years, and Europe has to wake up to that fact,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said last week at the Munich Security Conference, where he declined to attend a congressional delegation meeting with Zelensky. “The problem with Europe is that it doesn’t provide enough of a deterrence on its own because it hasn’t taken the initiative in its own security. I think the American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy,” he added.

Ukrainian Army soldiers unload gear and supplies at a front line near Mala Tokmachka, Dec. 24, 2023. PHOTO: MANU BRABO FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The bond between Russia, North Korea, Iran—and China—makes that pivot to Asia even more urgent, said Elbridge Colby, a leading Republican strategist who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration. “It increases rather than diminishes the importance of prioritizing because we can expect them to act collaboratively, to stretch us out and to distract us. And because China is the dominant player in that alliance, we can expect that alliance to distract us from the decisive theater, which is what is happening,” he said.

The decline of the American industrial base and America’s inability to quickly replenish the stocks of munitions that had been supplied to Ukraine limit America’s foreign-policy options, he added. “We have to operate in conditions of scarcity, like a company that is overextended. We are in a world of bad choices now,” Colby said. “That’s our fault because we continued to believe, like the president and some senior Republicans, that we could do everything when we can’t, and because the Europeans didn’t step up.”

Europe is definitely stepping up now, expanding ammunition production and approving new funding for Ukraine. Germany, France and the United Kingdom have all recently signed defense cooperation agreements with Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Danish counterpart, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, this month unveiled the construction of a new ammunition plant in Lower Saxony that is expected to eventually produce 200,000 artillery shells a year.

The EU last year pledged to supply Ukraine with a million shells but was able to furnish only about one third of that amount. North Korea alone, by contrast, has supplied roughly a million shells to Russia, according to American estimates.

Some European nations—particularly Poland and the Baltic states—have made major investments in their military, far exceeding NATO’s 2% threshold for military spending, noted Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. “But, of course, it’s not enough if Germany, France and a lot of the other European members don’t follow suit in a serious way,” he said.

The unfolding debate in Germany about potentially extending the British and French nuclear umbrella to their European allies shows just how spooked Europeans have become by America potentially abandoning both Ukraine and its other European commitments, Benner added. “It tells you about the level of doubt and fear about the world that we are entering—the one with the U.S. not being there for us and where the hostile superpowers of Russia and China are potentially lining up against us.”

For all its recent gains in Avdiivka, the Russian military is also an exhausted force—and one that is losing more tanks, howitzers and other military equipment to Ukrainian forces than it’s able to produce or refurbish. Attrition currently works in Ukraine’s favor, even though that favorable ratio is gradually declining because of ammunition rationing, said Franz-Stefan Gady, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who has frequently traveled to Ukrainian front lines. Over time, that attrition phase should allow Ukrainian forces to resume offensive operations if Western aid continues, he said.

“The Russian army is not unbeatable,” Gady said. “But there is a gradual realization in Europe that this could go south, and that if it does go south, it’s really going to have tremendous consequences for the entire security architecture of the continent.”

Ukrainian antiaircraft gunners move into their position in the Donetsk region, Feb. 20. PHOTO: ANATOLII STEPANOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In recent months, European nations have started taking more seriously the possibility that, if Russia defeats Ukraine, it would be tempted to test the defenses of current members of NATO and the EU, said Camille Grand, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who served until 2022 as an assistant secretary-general of NATO.

“There is a new awareness that Russian ambitions aren’t limited to the post-Soviet space,” he said. “What’s at stake in Ukraine goes well beyond the future of Ukraine itself.”

Yaroslav Trofimov is The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent and the author of the new book “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence.”

8. US Congress members praise Taiwan's democracy in a visit that's certain to draw China's scrutiny

US Congress members praise Taiwan's democracy in a visit that's certain to draw China's scrutiny

AP · by SIMINA MISTREANU · February 22, 2024

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — A group of United States Congress members met with Taiwan’s president Thursday in a show of bipartisan support that is certain to draw scrutiny from China, which opposes such visits and sees them as a challenge to its claim of sovereignty over the self-governing island.

Two years ago, a visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan resulted in China dispatching warships and military aircraft to all sides of the democratic island, and firing ballistic missiles into the waters nearby.

In a meeting Thursday with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, highlighted the bipartisan support for the U.S.-Taiwan partnership, which he described as “stronger and more rock-solid than ever now.”

The U.S., like most countries, doesn’t formally recognize Taiwan as a country but maintains robust informal relations with the island and is bound by its own laws to provide it with the weapons it needs to defend itself.

Gallagher thanked Tsai, who is nearing the end of her second and last term in office, for her leadership in Taiwan and for distinguishing herself “as a leader within the free world.”

Tsai thanked the U.S. for continuing to help Taiwan strengthen its self-defense capabilities.

“Together we are safeguarding freedom and democracy and maintaining regional peace,” she said, adding that she hoped to see more exchanges between the U.S. and Taiwan in a range of domains.

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that China opposes any form of official exchange between the U.S. and Taiwan. “Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory,” she said.

The delegation, led by Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D.-Ill., was expected to be in Taiwan for three days as part of a larger visit to the Indo-Pacific region. Other members include Reps. John Moolenaar, R-Mich.; Dusty Johnson, R-S.D.; and Seth Moulton, D-Mass.

Consisting of some of Congress’ staunchest critics of China, the bipartisan delegation was to meet with other senior Taiwanese leaders and members of civil society to discuss U.S.-Taiwan relations, regional security and trade, among other issues of mutual interest.

Krishnamoorthi said Taiwan is one of the United States’ “closest friends” and a role model for democracy, after Lai Ching-te emerged victorious as Taiwan’s president-elect and vowed to safeguard the island’s de facto independence from China and further align it with other democracies.

“It’s one of the most robust, most vibrant, one of the most exciting democracies in the world,” Krishnamoorthi said. “And this year, when half of the world’s population will be going to the polls to vote, you provided a role model for how elections should be conducted, and for that we salute you on this peaceful transfer of power, and you are an exemplar of democracy.”

Krishnamoorthi is the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party’s ranking Democrat. The committee was formed in 2023 and has held numerous hearings focused on human rights, trade, cyber intrusions and other issues central to the rising tensions between the two superpowers.

Earlier in February, the Commerce Department announced that for the first time in more than two decades, Mexico surpassed China as the leading source of goods imported by the United States. In 2023, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan’s president in a rare high-level meeting on U.S. soil.

The shows of support for Taiwan reflect the growing willingness by many in Congress to confront China on a range of issues as economic relations between the two nations deteriorate.

Taiwan has been under “hybrid” pressure from China, especially in the military and economic spheres, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said at a news conference following the meeting.

The support Taiwan receives from both parties in the U.S. is a bulwark against military conflict with China, Gallagher said.

But, he added, democracies like those in Taiwan and the U.S., while sometimes messy, remain “unbeatable.”

Taiwan was part of the $95-billion aid package that passed the Senate on Feb. 13, but has stalled in the House. That package, which focused on Ukraine and Israel, included $1.9 billion to replenish U.S. weapons provided to Taiwan. Another $3.3 billion would go to build more U.S.-made submarines in support of a security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom.

___

Freking reported from Washington.

AP · by SIMINA MISTREANU · February 22, 2024

9. What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine

Excerpts:

Almost 90 Russian soldiers were slain in a single attack in 2022, explained Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, when Ukrainian forces dropped U.S.-provided rockets on buildings pulsing with electronic signals.

Here in the Mojave Desert, where Taylor oversees simulated war designed to prepare U.S. troops for the real thing, the same behavior abounds, he warned.

Taylor held up his cellphone. “This device,” he said, “is going to get our soldiers killed.”

...

The general is adamant about stamping out such behaviors. He likens the threat to that posed by cigarette smoking on the front lines during World War II, when enemy forces looked for bright orange flickers to help identify their targets.

“I think our addiction to cellphones is equally as threatening,” Taylor said. “This is the new cigarette in the foxhole.”

Troops also have to consider the cellphone use occurring around them. Personnel tasked with portraying noncombatants capture photos and videos of troop locations and equipment, and upload the imagery to a mock social network called Fakebook. There, it populates in a feed used by service members playing the part of enemy forces who then use that data to attack.

What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine

With hundreds of thousands dead or wounded and still no end in sight, the conflict has revealed that U.S. battlefield calculations must evolve

By Alex Horton

February 22, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · February 22, 2024

FORT IRWIN, Calif. — As the general paced the briefing room, he displayed a piece of lethal technology and detailed the death and chaos it has caused in Ukraine.

Almost 90 Russian soldiers were slain in a single attack in 2022, explained Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, when Ukrainian forces dropped U.S.-provided rockets on buildings pulsing with electronic signals.

Here in the Mojave Desert, where Taylor oversees simulated war designed to prepare U.S. troops for the real thing, the same behavior abounds, he warned.

Taylor held up his cellphone. “This device,” he said, “is going to get our soldiers killed.”

The U.S. military is undertaking an expansive revision of its approach to war fighting, having largely abandoned the counterinsurgency playbook that was a hallmark of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to focus instead on preparing for an even larger conflict with more sophisticated adversaries such as Russia or China.

What’s transpired in Ukraine, where this week the war enters its third year with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded on both sides and still no end in sight, has made clear to the Pentagon that battlefield calculations have fundamentally changed in the years since it last deployed forces in large numbers. Precision weapons, fleets of drones and digital surveillance can reach far beyond the front lines, posing grave risk to personnel wherever they are.

The war remains an active and bountiful research opportunity for American military planners as they look to the future, officials say. A classified year-long study on the lessons learned from both sides of the bloody campaign will help inform the next National Defense Strategy, a sweeping document that aligns the Pentagon’s myriad priorities. The 20 officers who led the project examined five areas: ground maneuver, air power, information warfare, sustaining and growing forces and long range fire capability.

“We immersed them in this conflict to make sure they were really understanding the implications for warfare,” said a senior defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the initiative.

The “character of war” is changing, another official said, and the lessons taken from Ukraine stand to be “an enduring resource.”

The Ukraine conflict has challenged core assumptions. The war has become an attritional slugfest with each side attempting to wear down the other, a model thought to be anachronistic, said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.

It also has complicated a long-held belief in the Pentagon that expensive precision weapons are central to winning America’s conflicts, Pettyjohn said. GPS-guided munitions provided to Ukraine have proven vulnerable to electronic jamming. Its military has adapted by pairing older unguided artillery with sensors and drones, which can be used to spot targets and refine their shots. U.S. military commanders have almost certainly taken notice, she said.

‘The new cigarette in the foxhole’

Ukraine has demonstrated that everything U.S. troops do in the field — from planning missions and patrolling to the technology that enables virtually every military task — needs to be rethought, officials say.

Fort Irwin is home to the National Training Center, or NTC, one of two Army ranges in the United States where troops refine tactics and prepare for deployments. The training area, known to soldiers as “The Box,” is a patch of desert about the size of Rhode Island.

In years past, the facility replicated what U.S. forces could expect to face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now trench lines zigzag across positions intended to replicate the battlespace in Ukraine.

Over the winter, the facility was occupied by the 1st Armored Division. As soldiers fought simulated battles, Taylor, the commanding general here, explained Ukraine’s transformational imprint on how the Army thinks and trains for combat. “Russian artillery has rendered maneuver difficult and command posts unsurvivable,” one of his briefing slides noted.

Vitally, commanders warn over and over that most electronic gear is a potential target. Soldiers are instructed to not use their phones in the training area, and observers, known as OCs, carry handheld detectors trying to sniff out any contraband.

Taylor told the story of an Apache helicopter pilot who successfully avoided air defense systems during a simulated attack. Personnel portraying the enemy forces were unable to determine the path the helicopter took, but after examining commercially available cellphone data, they were able to map the journey of a device traveling across the desert at 120 miles per hour. It revealed where the Apache flew to evade the defenses.

The general is adamant about stamping out such behaviors. He likens the threat to that posed by cigarette smoking on the front lines during World War II, when enemy forces looked for bright orange flickers to help identify their targets.

“I think our addiction to cellphones is equally as threatening,” Taylor said. “This is the new cigarette in the foxhole.”

Troops also have to consider the cellphone use occurring around them. Personnel tasked with portraying noncombatants capture photos and videos of troop locations and equipment, and upload the imagery to a mock social network called Fakebook. There, it populates in a feed used by service members playing the part of enemy forces who then use that data to attack.

Radios, drone controllers and vehicles all produce substantial amounts of electromagnetic activity and thermal energy that can be detected. To confuse enemy surveillance, the Army is teaching soldiers to hide in plain sight.

The troops are learning, leaders said. But a walk around The Box showed room for improvement. The division’s command post, essentially a folding table with four Humvees parked around it, was draped in camouflage netting that helps dampen electronic and thermal signatures. The post was hidden well — except for the bright white Starlink satellite internet terminal placed outside.

The netting interfered with its signal, a soldier explained. It risked standing out to drones or surveillance aircraft, Taylor told them. “Put a blanket on that,” he advised.

Threats from above

The Russian and Ukrainian militaries each flood the sky with one-way attack drones that are inexpensive and able to skirt detection. Their prolific use has forced American military leaders to consider where there are gaps in their capabilities.

Whereas recent U.S. conflicts featured big, expensive drones employed for missions orchestrated at very senior levels of command, in Ukraine leaders have put powerful surveillance and attack capabilities in the hands of individual soldiers — a degree of autonomy for small units that the U.S. military is only recently trying to emulate.

The technology’s proliferation has also created a new urgency at the Pentagon to develop and field better counter-drone systems. In Jordan last month, three U.S. soldiers were killed after a one-way drone, which officials have said likely went undetected, crashed into their living quarters.

The Army, taking cues from the Ukraine war, has begun experimenting with dropping small munitions from drones, a tactic used by the Islamic State that has since become a mainstay in Ukraine. It also has made a decision to do away with two surveillance drone platforms, the Shadow and Raven, describing them as unable to survive in modern conflict.

“We are learning from the battlefield — especially in Ukraine — that aerial reconnaissance has fundamentally changed,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said.

The Ukrainians have discovered some innovative solutions to detect drones, Gen. James B. Hecker, the chief of Air Force operations in Europe and Africa, said during a recent symposium.

He told the story of two Ukrainians who collected thousands of smartphones, affixed microphones and connected them to a network capable of detecting the unique buzzing sound of approaching unmanned systems. The information then gets relayed to air defense soldiers who can take action. The effort was briefed to the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and referred to NATO and U.S. commands to potentially duplicate, Hecker said.

Hecker also described recent drone and missile attacks targeting merchant and military ships in the Red Sea. The violence by militants in Yemen has been met with an aggressive response by the United States. Gesturing to his counterpart responsible for defending against potential threats from China, he said that “What the Houthis did, what Russia is doing, is nothing compared to what we’re going to see in your theater.”

The pace of change

In the woods at Fort Johnson, an Army post in western Louisiana, American troops inspired by the lessons of Ukraine have a motto: Dig or die.

Soldiers who rotate through the Joint Readiness Training Center there are learning to create trenches and dugouts, relics of past conflicts brought back to provide protection from bombs and drones. At one position, soldiers scooped up handfuls of sticks and brush to better conceal their foxholes, saying they put shovel to earth for hours in preparation.

“I hope they come,” one said. “I didn’t dig this for no reason.”

Personnel playing the role of opposing forces used AI software and cheap drones to throw their compatriots off balance, then showed them what they uncovered to help them improve.

Although troops are getting better at physical camouflage, their digital trail is still a vulnerability. One drone used by opposing forces at Fort Johnson is capable of detecting WiFi signals and Bluetooth-enabled devices, an officer noted.

In another case, a command post was identified through its network name: “command post.”

While the Ukraine war has pushed battlefield innovation, some observers surmise the Pentagon will move only so quickly without forces in extremis.

There are plenty of signs that the legacy of the post-9/11 wars, which shaped the careers and experience of today’s military leaders, still looms large. U.S. forces remain under threat in the Middle East, and troops there are still assigned to — and attacked at — the same bases their predecessors occupied years ago.

At Fort Johnson, the new soldier in-processing center has three digital clocks on the wall. One displays the local hour. The others flash the time in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Pettyjohn, with the Center for New American Security, acknowledged that the U.S. and Ukrainian militaries operate differently, meaning some takeaways from the war with Russia may not be applicable.

But she noted that some American military leaders she has spoken to have seemed circumspect that there’s much for them learn. They underestimate, she said, how the nature of fighting has changed, holding tight to the risky assumption that the United States would simply do better in similar circumstances.

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · February 22, 2024

10. Opinion | Ukraine is at a critical moment. Does the speaker of the House see?

Conclusion:

Mr. Johnson has Ukraine’s future in his hands, as well as the commitments of the United States. He can save both from becoming casualties of Russia’s aggression.

Opinion | Ukraine is at a critical moment. Does the speaker of the House see?

The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · February 23, 2024

As year three of its war with Russia begins, Ukraine’s forces are exhausted and depleted, ammunition supplies are running low, and the country just suffered a morale-busting defeat in Avdiivka, retreating after four months of grueling combat to defend the town. The United States had helped Ukraine beat back Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, yet, at this critical moment, Congress is wavering. At stake is not just the survival of democracy in Ukraine — but the future of Europe, international peace and the United States’ credibility.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), can bring a Senate-passed Ukraine aid bill to the floor, where it likely has the votes to pass. His refusal so far — bowing to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump — is a gross dereliction of responsibility, hurting Ukraine, the United States and the Republican Party.

At the two-year mark, Ukraine is not defeated. When the full-scale Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, Mr. Putin’s orders included “the murder of Ukraine’s executive branch and the capture of parliament,” while Russian security services and military rehearsed “kill-or-capture” missions to find those behind Ukraine’s pro-democracy Maidan Revolution in 2014. The plans anticipated seizing Ukraine’s national heating, electricity and financial operations to subjugate the population. Mr. Putin assumed Ukrainians would submit in a matter of days. But none of this happened. Despite devastating losses, Ukraine rallied to fight back. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was not murdered, its army has fought with courage and cunning, its air defenses have downed hundreds of missiles, and Ukraine has disabled one-third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by the use of unmanned naval drones. Russia occupies just under one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and Donbas taken in 2014.

But Ukraine’s war effort is precarious, as the rushed retreat from Avdiivka showed. Hundreds of Ukrainian solders were reported captured or killed in the chaos. Russia massed troops on three sides of the city and then cut off the last Ukrainian path out. The Russian forces threw wave after wave of assault troops at the Ukraine holdouts, who were outnumbered 7 to 1. A Ukraine major fighting there was quoted by the New York Times as saying in December, “I would say the motto of their attacks is, ‘We have more people than you have ammunition, bullets, rockets and shells.’”

This defeat explains Ukraine’s vulnerability — it is smaller than Russia and depends on the United States and Europe to sustain the war. If it cannot keep fighting, there will be more Avdiivkas, or worse. Only Ukraine can solve its serious personnel problem; a platoon commander estimated for Reuters that just 60 to 70 percent of the several thousand men in his brigade at the start of the conflict were still serving. A new troop mobilization bill is moving through parliament. But the West can help Ukraine with weapons supplies. The pause since the last U.S. funds ran out has created a dire shortage of artillery and ammunition, permitting Ukraine to fire just one shot for every five Russia discharges.

Mr. Putin, marshaling Russia’s larger economy and manpower, seems prepared to accept devastating losses indefinitely. He must see the Johnson-Trump roadblock in Congress as encouraging. Mr. Putin has imposed a totalitarian hold on Russia, so he does not face any serious internal political challenge. After the harsh treatment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, sent to a frigid prison above the Arctic Circle, where he died a week ago, Russians are not likely to protest. Ksenia Khavana, a 33-year-old dual Russian American citizen from Los Angeles who was visiting her parents in Yekaterinburg, was detained on charges of “treason” for her $51 contribution two years ago to a Ukrainian charity. A 72-year-old woman was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for disseminating “fake news” about the Russian military in two reposts on the social media platform VKontakte.

Ukraine seeks to escape this kind of dictatorship; its aspirations are democratic. Fortunately, European nations seem to be growing more aware of the threat from Russia, helping to fill — but far from making up for — the huge assistance gap the United States has left.

Republicans used to champion democratic values against the tyranny of the Soviet Union and Mr. Putin’s Russia, not only to advance freedom but also to build enduring international partnerships through which free peoples prospered. This posture served the nation for generations. Now, a Republican House speaker and a Republican presidential front-runner are blocking aid to Ukraine at this pivotal time.

Mr. Johnson has Ukraine’s future in his hands, as well as the commitments of the United States. He can save both from becoming casualties of Russia’s aggression.

The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · February 23, 2024

11. Opinion | A decent future for Myanmar is within reach — if the U.S. acts now

Wow: anticipate, anticipate, anticipate. The author is advocating for future planning - for what comes next.

There are a handful of Americans who are all in in Burma and would welcome this support. And the US should welcome their expertise from their long time "boots on the ground."

Conclusion:

This all might seem like a big ask, given that Congress is unable to agree on funding for Ukraine and Israel. But we are looking at this hated regime’s eventual demise. Planning for what comes next — and ensuring the country has a chance for a democratic future — needs to start now.

Opinion | A decent future for Myanmar is within reach — if the U.S. acts now

The Washington Post · by Keith B. Richburg · February 23, 2024

What seemed plausible two months ago is now undeniable: Myanmar’s awful ruling military junta is in retreat against the country’s anti-regime insurgents. The rebels include regional militias and self-styled “People’s Defense Forces” or PDFs, the ad hoc armed resistance groups that sprung up in response to the military’s February 2021 coup.

Ethnic armies have been a feature of Myanmar’s fractious political landscape since its independence in 1948. Along with the PDFs, the insurgents have seized hundreds of townships and military outposts since launching an Oct. 27 offensive. In January, the military suffered its most humiliating defeat yet, when soldiers surrendered Laukkaing, a key city and regional command center in Shan state to the rebels. There were conflicting reports as to the fate of six brigadier-generals responsible for the debacle. Local media outlets reported they had been sentenced to death, which the junta denied.

Myanmar’s military is finding its number of troops depleted by battlefield losses, surrenders and desertions. In a sign of its desperation, the junta has announced plans to begin conscripting young people into military service for at least two years. The announcement prompted thousands of people to attempt to flee over the border into Thailand, or to line up for visas outside Western diplomatic missions in Yangon.

But the surprisingly rapid retreat of the military’s forces from key areas doesn’t mean it is on the verge of collapse. By withdrawing to more defensible positions, including to the major cities and the capital, Naypyidaw, the military appears to be digging in for the long haul. While stymied on the ground, the armed forces continue to deploy devastating airstrikes against civilians — likely a war crime. The insurgents’ widespread use of drones, though effective, has not erased the regime’s battlefield advantage. Myanmar’s military is battle-hardened, well-armed and close-knit, living largely isolated from the population. Its soldiers have a reputation for brutality against civilians.

The rebels, by contrast, are splintered along ethnic and regional lines. There are about 20 ethnic armies in Myanmar, also known as Burma, totaling around 135,000 soldiers. And there are some 65,000 fighters in the People’s Defense Forces, which were formed after the 2021 coup that toppled the government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (who remains in prison). The PDFs are the armed wing of the National Unity Government, which is made up of figures from the legitimate deposed government. Many of its fighters are former students who took to the mountains and jungles — guerrillas who lack heavy equipment, formal training and a unified command structure.

The military’s recent defeats have come at the hands of the ethnic armies, not the PDFs. The recent success in Shan state was carried out by three separate insurgent groups, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army operating jointly since 2019 as the Three Brotherhood Alliance — a rare instance of cooperation among the ethnic groups. The PDFs, meanwhile, may lack weapons, ammunition and battlefield experience. But they bring the imprimatur of the government in exile.

For those who want to see an end to this conflict and a return to a democratic Myanmar, an outright victory by the rebels still seems a long way off. A prolonged period of strife — and more suffering for Myanmar’s people — is unfortunately more likely. By latest estimates, some 2.6 million people have been driven from their homes, 660,000 since the October offensive. And more than 95,000 refugees have fled into neighboring countries. More than 18 million people, one-third of the population, are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.

The world response to this crisis has been mostly nonexistent, with wars in Gaza and Ukraine sucking up all the diplomatic oxygen. Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbors have vacillated between indifference and maintaining ties with the junta. For its part, China has been playing both sides, keeping close ties with the junta while backing the ethnic armies on its border. The success of the rebels in Shan state is believed to be because of Beijing’s tacit support. China is mainly interested in exercising control in Myanmar’s lawless border regions which have become havens for sprawling internet scam centers, slavery and various other illicit activities.

The United States should be doing a lot more to bring a decent end to the war. The Biden administration already has the tools at its disposal to make a difference. Congress in 2022 passed the Burma Act, which was reauthorized in a watered down form late last year as part of the defense authorization bill. The Burma Act calls for the delivery of humanitarian aid, support for federalism and democracy, and nonlethal aid to the ethnic armies and the PDFs. But the Burma Act hasn’t come with any funding allocation, and U.S. support so far is scant.

The Myanmar civil war is at a turning point, and more U.S. help now can make a difference. The Biden administration needs to open dialogue with all the armed rebel groups and the National Unity Government, helping to bring them together around a common agenda of federalism and democracy. And it should listen to what else the rebels say they need to win the war — from cutting the junta’s revenue sources to more weapons. President Biden should also revive the idea of appointing a special coordinator for Burmese democracy, a provision that was inexplicably dropped from the modified Burma Act.

This all might seem like a big ask, given that Congress is unable to agree on funding for Ukraine and Israel. But we are looking at this hated regime’s eventual demise. Planning for what comes next — and ensuring the country has a chance for a democratic future — needs to start now.

The Washington Post · by Keith B. Richburg · February 23, 2024

12. This soldier repeatedly ran into a burning building to save others

Another great American soldier.

This soldier repeatedly ran into a burning building to save others

armytimes.com · by Todd South · February 22, 2024

Warrant Officer Zarah Dimond sat in her rental car in the hotel’s parking garage warming herself on a cold December morning when she began to smell smoke.

The cyberspace defense soldier had arrived a day early at the Colorado Springs Colorado Hilton Garden Inn to attend a defensive cyber operations symposium at Fort Carson from her home station at Fort Stewart, Georgia where she serves with Division Headquarters and Headquarters Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, according to an Army release.

At first, she thought the smoke smell must be the car — maybe it was the heater.

Then she looked up and saw people exiting a small business complex next door in a cloud of smoke.

“I get out of my vehicle and run over to the railing, yelling down to the individuals, ‘hey is that building on fire?’” she said.

“Yes!” they responded.

She climbed over the railing and jumped onto a garbage can below before she got to the ground and began running toward the structure.

“As I’m banging on the doors, I find a man stumbling his way through the hallway,” Dimond said. “I grabbed him by the arm and guided him towards the door to get him outside.”

Dimond went back into the burning building, gathering more people and leading a second person outside. The single mother of five children had a personal motivation.

“For those people who are in there, they have families, too,” said Dimond. “Something as simple as going in there to get them out can save a whole life and a whole family from grief.”

The warrant officer’s courageous acts on Dec. 4 didn’t surprise those who work with her and know her.

“She’s always ready to help and always prepared to answer a question,” said Capt. Donny Lopera, a network engineer with 3rd Infantry Division. “When a person with five kids takes the initiative to enter a burning building without hesitation, it’s personal courage and selfless service.”

Dimond’s unit is in the process of recommending her for the Soldier’s Medal, pending additional documentation, 3rd ID spokeswoman Maj. Angel Tomko told Army Times.

Th warrant officer hails from Guam and joined the Army in July 2008 as an information technology specialist. She has previously earned three Army Commendation Medals and eight Army Achievement Medals during her service.

*Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include additional information provided by the 3rd Infantry Division Public Affairs Office.

About Todd South

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

13. Politics Can’t Stop at the Water’s Edge

Excerpts:

Americans should hope that elites can fix these issues and revive a more functional system. The United States confronts a more complex security environment today than in the early Cold War years—perhaps the last time Washington faced such an unsettled world. The present order involves more players than the Cold War, and the two largest powers, the United States and China, have an interdependent economic relationship, whereas the Soviet Union and its allies were largely siloed from Western economic activity. Making decisions about how to prioritize supporting friends under attack (such as Israel and Ukraine), reassure treaty allies, and engage in “de-risking” with China will, necessarily, require the hard, kludgy work of partisan politics. The United States has too many competing ideological, political, and societal interests to operate any other way.

Adding more politics will not guarantee good decisions. Elites made plenty of bad choices even in simpler times. In politics there are rarely easy fixes, only different tradeoffs. But through elite bargaining, both within and across parties, the United States managed to become the most powerful country in the world and to avoid a third world war. In democracies, elite politics is the worst way to run things—except for all the others.

Politics Can’t Stop at the Water’s Edge

The Right Way to Fight Over Foreign Policy

By Elizabeth N. Saunders

March/April 2024

Published on February 20, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace · February 20, 2024

American politicians and analysts have long argued that it is dangerous to politicize U.S. foreign policy and national security. “U.S. foreign policy is stronger when it enjoys bipartisan support,” wrote Democratic Senator Chris Coons in a 2020 Foreign Affairs article. “For the United States to play a steady, stabilizing role in world affairs, its allies and adversaries must know that its government speaks with one voice and that its policies won’t shift dramatically with changing domestic political winds.” Following the 2016 election, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and Nancy Lindborg, the president of the U.S. Institute of Peace, argued that a “bipartisan approach to foreign policy is achievable and remains essential for our security.” Such statements invoke the words of U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who shaped the 1948 Republican Party platform with a call for Democrats to “join us under the next Republican Administration in stopping partisan politics at the water’s edge.”

But it would be a mistake to yearn for a foreign policy devoid of politics. After all, national security has always been political. George Washington’s administration engaged in spirited debates at home about how the United States should conduct itself in the world. Republicans and Democrats sparred over whether the United States should enter World War I and whether it should join the League of Nations afterward. Before 1941, the parties debated whether the United States ought to aid the United Kingdom in its fight against the Nazis. And during the Cold War, politicians argued intensely over how best to contain the Soviet Union. As in any democracy, politics is a natural part of how the U.S. government makes foreign policy choices.

Most of this politicking happens at the elite level, and it includes what Americans might consider unseemly behavior when applied to national security—bargaining, horse-trading, and careerism. In fact, elected officials frequently accuse their opponents of playing politics with national security. But these political tools are simply how policy gets made. When the Red Scare engulfed the State Department’s China specialists in the early 1950s, for example, the Truman administration asked Vandenberg for help in appointing a Republican adviser to provide cover for the administration’s embattled Asia policy. Truman also knew he would need Republican votes for his military rearmament program in Europe. Recognizing his leverage, Vandenberg pushed the administration to hire John Foster Dulles, his ambitious protégé, with the understanding that Dulles would advance certain GOP priorities in Asia. Truman reluctantly agreed. Dulles became a special adviser in the State Department, and Truman continued to receive internationalist Republican support for his Europe policies. Once in office, Dulles successfully pressed the administration to be more supportive of Taiwan.

Americans cannot change, and thus should not lament, the fact that their leaders look beyond the water’s edge through a political lens. But they should expect the politics of foreign policy to be healthy, and today, the core elements of a hardy foreign policy are either missing or endangered. The United States has fewer and fewer debates that are shaped by good information and expertise. Both elected and unelected officials lack incentives to take appropriate risks in the name of the wider national interest, or even to develop the policy expertise and political power essential to unearthing and acting on good information. And many of the seasoned officials from one of the United States’ two main parties—the Republicans—have been out of power for over 15 years, including during U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, badly damaging the party’s pipeline of talent.

Those problems need to be addressed, but they must be addressed on their own terms—not by imagining a time before politics entered national security. That means analysts must also be clear-eyed about the very real problems and pathologies foreign policy faced in the past. Partisan political incentives to appear tough, for example, have long pushed elites toward overly hawkish behavior. Careerist goals can lead officials to help implement controversial policies. And U.S. leaders have a long track record of making mistakes, from their intervention in the Vietnam War to the protracted war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

It is tempting to look at the history of American foreign policy and conclude, as many populists do, that elites are doomed to fail as stewards of national security. Yet such thinking is both incorrect and self-defeating. Elites—elected politicians, bureaucratic officials, military leaders—are an inescapable part of crafting and managing foreign policy, and they succeed more frequently than critics think. But to help them make smart choices more often than not, these elites need to function within a system that incentivizes them to develop expertise, to expend personal or political resources on what they believe to be the right policies, and to participate in real political bargaining over the direction of U.S. national security. And today, the link between making good policy and reaping career or political benefits has eroded because of partisan polarization, the centralization of power in the White House and in the leadership in Congress, and the widespread demonization of elites.

These challenges are serious, and fixing them will not be easy. But politicians and commentators can start by not vilifying officials for serving in government or seeking positions outside it when their party leaves power. The political system can once again reward candidates for engaging with foreign policy elites and demonstrating interest or experience in international affairs—a former hallmark of the Republican Party that has all but vanished. It can create partisan and career incentives that ensure there are diverse views in national security. And it can make space for people with differing perspectives to share and exercise power.

These shifts cannot guarantee good decisions in foreign policy; nothing can. But they can, at least, make bad decisions less likely, helping the United States as it navigates an uncertain future.

DIVIDED WE STAND

U.S. foreign policy has been political since the founding. During Washington’s administration, officials were divided over their fledgling nation’s stance in the war between France and Great Britain. In the late 1800s, Democrats and Republicans in Congress pressured a reluctant President William McKinley to go to war with Spain on behalf of Cuban independence.

Even the emergence of the so-called Cold War consensus—a bipartisan commitment to build and use American military power to contain communism—was the product of intense political bargaining. To get the European rearmament program he deemed necessary to counter the Soviet Union, President Harry Truman had to negotiate with isolationist Asia-first Republicans, who opposed new international commitments in Europe; internationalist Europe-first Republicans such as Vandenberg, who generally supported Truman’s national security agenda but wanted to use their political leverage; and southern Democrats, who opposed his domestic agenda. Truman largely succeeded, but only by bolstering Taiwan, making concessions on military strategy in the Korean War, and jettisoning his efforts to expand civil rights and the social welfare system.

Even after Truman set this basic direction for national security, the Cold War continued to involve fierce political disagreements. Some of these policy fights reflected real differences of opinion on policy, such as the merits of arms control. But personal ambition and electoral motivations also shaped foreign policy. During the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy and his advisers feared Republican political attacks if he did not follow through on his promise to keep offensive weapons out of Cuba. President Richard Nixon wanted the Senate to overwhelmingly ratify the agreements that resulted from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, not only because he deemed it good policy but also so that he could look statesmanlike.

Both parties exhibited internal cleavages. The Democratic Party was home to a cohort of defense hawks who championed a strong military, as well as a more diplomacy-minded wing. Former Republican President Ronald Reagan railed against the détente prized by Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Each party also had more extreme factions, including far-left Democrats who opposed almost any foreign intervention and, relatedly, isolationist Republicans who wanted Washington to focus its attention at home. Yet the parties made room for their various factions, and the debates both within and between them served as a form of checks and balances. Hawks and doves disagreed but also bargained, creating deals that survived from administration to administration. The stability of American Cold War policy was no utopia of bipartisan consensus. It was the result of hard-won, cross-party compromises.

The system that produced a relatively durable foreign policy also enabled foreign policy disasters that left terrible stains on the records of the various factions. Democrats initiated U.S. military intervention in the Vietnam War. Nixon and Kissinger supported a coup d’état in Chile. Reagan backed a brutal counterinsurgency campaign by El Salvador’s military. The politics of national security has always carried the risk of tragic errors.

TOP DOWN

To understand why the politics of national security is both necessary and deeply flawed, analysts must look to elites: the presidents and appointees who shape the bureaucracy, the military leaders who advise on and implement decisions, and members of Congress. Although the democratic process can help keep foreign policy on an even keel, the role of voters is limited. The general public cannot judge every policy issue closely, and people pay closer attention to issues that affect them directly, such as health care or tax policy, than to international relations. Even voters who do care deeply about international affairs have only the blunt tool of infrequent elections to try to shape policy.

When it comes to international affairs, voters tend to be led by their parties instead of the other way around. As the political scientists Adam Berinsky and John Zaller have shown, people look to elites on matters of national security, trusting those with whom they share a partisan affiliation. They often take their cues from major politicians, choosing their preferred leaders and then adopting those politicians’ views as their own. Trump’s rise to power in 2016 dramatically illustrated this phenomenon. Republicans have traditionally been more hawkish than Democrats, but as Trump won the GOP nomination and presidency, Republican opposition to foreign interventions rose sharply. As the political scientist Michael Tesler has shown, Trump voters were hawkish in their opinions of U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Syria before 2015, but they completely reversed their views after Trump won the presidency. The party’s voters were sharply critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but Trump’s praise led Republican voters to view Putin and Russia more favorably.

That elites make national security decisions is not, by itself, bad. Given how much of foreign policy is hidden, elites make prudent choices more often than the public might realize. They can also make decisions quickly and efficiently in crises. Elites who are knowledgeable or care intensely about an issue or a country can also provide valuable insights, monitor events, and process information more effectively than both ordinary people and practitioners with a different set of interests. Elites who have a strong affinity or bias can play a particularly important role in the policy process: for example, scholars have found that high-stakes diplomacy can be more effective when ambassadors are political appointees with the president’s ear or when they are biased toward their host country and thus elicit more trust from that country’s leaders.

National security has always been political.

Elites can also hold politicians accountable in ways that ordinary voters cannot. They can pass information on to other elites or the media, criticize policy in front of audiences that matter to policymakers, and resign in protest. The information unearthed and publicized by the January 6 committee—whose very existence resulted from partisan political maneuvering—is a good example. The insurrection threatened U.S. foreign policy and national security by undermining the peaceful transition of power, straining civil-military relations to the near-breaking point, shaking global leaders’ confidence in the stability of core U.S. institutions, and exposing deep fissures that Washington’s adversaries might exploit. But the committee helped create some accountability for this disaster. By getting testimony from people in Trump’s inner circle, the committee’s work helped facilitate some of the legal cases now proceeding against the former president.

Sometimes, elites give each other cover to break from consensus, as did John Murtha, the former Democratic congressman, when he publicly turned against the Iraq war. Such pressure, however, tends to be most powerful when applied by elites who are typically aligned with the president or who are arguing against their known instincts. When Senate Foreign Relations Chairman J. William Fulbright began holding hearings and publicly opposing the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, he helped give voice to dovish sentiments and loosened the grip that President Lyndon Johnson then had on his fellow Democrats in Congress. Fulbright’s opposition eventually helped force Johnson to reconsider his Vietnam policy, especially after the shocking North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Fulbright was an influential critic precisely because he had been Johnson’s longtime ally.

Such intra-elite accountability rarely stops bad decisions before they are made. But it is an important source of constraint afterward. In fact, it is usually elites who convince presidents to change course. It was concern inside his own administration and among Republicans in Congress that persuaded Reagan to withdraw U.S. marines from Lebanon in 1984.

HAWKS AND DOVES

So what motivates elites? The answer can involve many factors, including policy views, patriotism, and the desire to do what is right. But it surely also includes political and career incentives—even for those who are not elected by voters. They want to do what is right, but they also want to better their own prospects. Career bureaucrats or military leaders take actions to protect their future ambitions, whether that means speaking out or, more often, keeping quiet and trying to make the best of policies they might not support.

Such motivations are not necessarily detrimental to the policymaking process. During the Cold War, for example, some members of Congress were incentivized to acquire deep, specialized knowledge so they could wield the power this knowledge afforded them in the political arena. Elites vary in how much importance they assign to different issues, but some elites must care enough about a foreign policy to make bargains that give others something of value in return, and there must be some political or career benefit to furthering policy goals even if voters are not paying attention. Partisan political or career incentives can also be healthy for national security if they lead opposition parties to unearth bad ideas, poor policy choices, or incompetent implementation.

But there is no free lunch in national security politics, and the political forces that help foreign policymaking also push it in a hawkish direction. It is not that elites share a warmonger mindset—there are often plenty of powerful dovish voices that go along with or even choose hawkish policies. Instead, it is that the “insiders’ game” elites must play can lead to wars the public might not choose and prolong ones that voters want to end sooner.

The source of hawkish bias lies in the credibility gap that dovish leaders face when making foreign and security policies. For better or for worse, voters trust hawks more than doves on national security issues, so hawks have more leeway on matters of war and peace. Research by the political scientists Michaela Mattes and Jessica Weeks suggests leaders want to signal that they are moderate, giving hawkish leaders who want to avoid the “warmonger” label an advantage in peace initiatives compared with doves—the famous idea that only a hawk like Nixon could normalize relations with China. Yet the incentive to act against type also applies to dovish leaders, who can reap political benefits or avoid political costs when they use force. In fact, that “against type” incentive is much stronger for doves than it is for hawks. Hawks are given greater deference on matters of war and peace, and so they can play to type—choosing to use military force—and benefit by reinforcing their image as strong and tough leaders. Dovish leaders, by contrast, have a hard time convincing a domestic audience that their peaceful policies are in the national interest.

Fulbright holding a Senate hearing about the Vietnam War, 1966

Bettmann / Getty

Elites are not pushed in a hawkish direction solely because they fear they will face political penalties. Policymakers are also motivated by private benefits—such as promotions—when they consider war and peace. And some elites will gain from using military force when they are charged with preparing, maintaining, and controlling the nation’s military resources—even if they do not support a particular war.

As a result of these dynamics, dovish leaders often feel pushed to embrace aggressive policies rather than expend political capital by calling for diplomacy or restraint—especially if they want to use that political capital for other priorities. The result is the “dove’s curse,” in which dovish leaders become trapped in an inconclusive military conflict, fighting just enough to neutralize the issue but not enough to win. Many Democratic presidents have succumbed to this tendency: Truman in Korea, Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, and Barack Obama in Afghanistan. Dovish leaders also face pressure to appoint hawkish officials to help close their credibility gap on national security, as illustrated by the frequency with which Democratic presidents appoint Republican secretaries of defense. And when a hawk occupies the Oval Office, dovish officials frequently greenlight their policies—loosening the constraints on aggressive leaders and enabling “hawks’ misadventures.” In 2002 and 2003, for example, many congressional Democrats opposed invading Iraq. But they were afraid of looking weak, and some believed opposing the war would mar their presidential aspirations. As a result, President George W. Bush managed to secure their support by making only procedural concessions, such as seeking congressional authorization.

Sometimes, of course, doves do stick to their positions. Biden pulled all American troops from Afghanistan in 2021 as promised, ending a long-standing and costly war that most voters and elites (including his predecessor) had wanted to conclude long ago. And yet the president incurred political costs for his choice. Biden’s approval ratings dropped after the tragic circumstances of the withdrawal, as the Taliban moved in and Republicans accused Biden of undermining U.S. power. For doves, fighting or supporting a war is often the politically easier path.

PARTY FOUL

These pathologies are not new, and they are important reminders that there is no perfect baseline for national security decision-making. Even a well-run Washington will follow bad processes and make mistakes. But a clear-eyed view of the national security politics of the past, and how it was both flawed and invaluable, is essential to understanding what is really ailing foreign policy today.

Consider the issue of expertise, especially in Congress. In the past, major foreign relations or armed services committee membership was politically valuable and a source of real influence. Committee chairmen, especially, wielded significant power over policy specifics, and so they sweated the details. During the latter stages of the Cold War, for example, nuclear policy had to go through Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, the knowledgeable chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. If Nunn endorsed a defense bill, he could bring along the votes of other members of his party who were skeptical or who simply did not follow defense issues closely. In the post–Cold War years, he used his defense clout to team up with Republican Senator Richard Lugar and push through funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative, designed to safeguard nuclear material and know-how in the former Soviet Union.

But now, this nexus between power and expertise has melted away. Changes in committee membership rules have disincentivized learning by increasing turnover and weakening the once powerful congressional committees, while presidential and congressional leaders have increased their power since September 11. If committees can no longer influence policy, representatives have far fewer incentives to invest scarce time and political resources in learning about a region or a national security issue.

Voters trust hawks more than doves on national security issues.

Institutional changes are only one reason why elites are now less capable of making foreign policy. The bigger culprit is intense partisan polarization. By pulling elected representatives to extremes, polarization reduces the pool of moderates who can make the kind of bargains that guided Washington through the Cold War. Instead, it incentivizes officials to shoot down ideas tabled by the opposing “team” irrespective of the policy merits. And as the political scientist Rachel Myrick has argued, polarization undermines U.S. credibility by making it harder for Washington to commit to policies that last beyond the current administration.

Polarization, however, has not done equal damage to both parties. These dynamics have affected Republicans far more than Democrats, thanks to Trump’s capture of the GOP and his delegitimization of its traditional internationalism, as well as right-wing media pressure to take oppositional stances and avoid policy debates. This toxic combination of forces has changed incentives for Republican presidential and congressional candidates so much that they no longer feel the need to demonstrate their capability on foreign policy. Ironically, even though the Democratic Party has increased its share of the country’s national security professionals in Congress, the GOP retains the advantage in public opinion polls in terms of national security competence.

The GOP has dismantled much of its pipeline of foreign policy talent by becoming actively disdainful of expertise. When Trump campaigned for president in 2016, he did so on an explicitly anti-experience platform, and once in office, he drove many of his party’s most talented officials out of government. Other officials refused to even consider serving. Trump has continued to rail against expertise in his 2024 campaign and has plans to—in the words of the leading pro-Trump think tank—“destroy” parts of the civil service. A second Trump term could prompt even more foreign policy officials to voluntarily leave government.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in Washington, D.C., December 2023

Elizabeth Frantz / Reuters

The Republican Party, of course, still has many experts, and there is sincere internal debate within the GOP about whether some form of isolationism or restraint is preferable to the party’s more traditionally hawkish stance. Although there is nothing wrong with arguing for reducing U.S. commitments around the world, many GOP elected officials are likely most interested in falling in line behind Trump’s positions and in opposing Biden’s. The sight of Republican candidates refusing to take a strong stand against Russia at last September’s presidential primary debate at the Reagan Library underscores this dynamic.

The GOP’s problems will not be easy to solve. Many of the party’s talented national security professionals sat out the Trump years and would likely do so if he wins again. At a minimum, that means a large share of the Republican Party’s experienced officials will have been out of power for two Obama terms, a Trump term, a Biden term, and then, presumably, either a second Biden or Trump term—a total of 20 years. Even if a traditional Republican wins the presidency in 2028, the newly elected leader will have few top-level officials to appoint who both share the president’s views and have recent experience in a presidential administration. This president will have fewer junior officials, too. Because traditional, top-level GOP foreign policy experts have gone so long without power, they have not been able to hire deputies, and those deputies have not had the chance to hire staffers who can then move up the ranks.

Whatever one’s party affiliation, this broken GOP pipeline should be of great concern, and restoring it is in the national interest. As Kori Schake has written in these pages, “The United States needs a strong and vibrant Republican Party.” It helps Democrats to have another party that will bargain, share blame, and subject it to scrutiny and opposition—and whose support can be earned when the United States confronts a crisis. But this process only works if the parties believe they benefit from having and publicly discussing substantive views about foreign policy. It is no indictment of the Biden team or the pipeline of Democratic officials behind him to say that if traditional conservative Republicans continue to remain out of power, the Democratic Party’s ideas are likely to stagnate.

DON’T HATE THE PLAYER

It is never a good time for an unhealthy politics that devalues knowledge and professionalism. But the present moment is especially perilous. Technological developments on which the U.S. economy and military are increasingly reliant, such as high-performance computing, network connectivity, and artificial intelligence, demand a government that welcomes, incentivizes, and seeks out expertise—as well as one that makes difficult policy choices.

Resurrecting such a politics will not be easy. Yet leaders and commentators on both ends of the political spectrum can start by not vilifying national security professionals as corrupt swamp creatures. Elites are not saints: they certainly have self-interested motivations, but so does everyone. The public may like to lionize policymakers who risk their jobs out of conviction, such as the former congresswoman Liz Cheney (who lost her Republican primary election for taking on Trump), but the United States simply cannot depend on elites to always adopt good ideas, sacrifice their careers, or undergo full ideological conversions when they speak out on a particular issue. Attacking elites, particularly for supporting policies or serving in a particular administration that needs professionals to keep the lights on, is self-defeating. The best the country can do is to align incentives so that smart policymaking points in the same direction as career longevity.

It would also be bad for national security if bureaucrats and elected officials resigned in response to every poor policy outcome. Many State Department, Pentagon, and CIA officials are civil servants who are supposed to serve the government regardless of who is in charge, and they provide ballast and institutional memory that help stabilize Washington’s behavior. Not every member of the U.S. foreign policy establishment has the power to make decisions. Many work hard to make the best of bad policies or to make the best of reasonable policies that have gone wrong.

Even a well-run Washington will follow bad processes and make mistakes.

If commentators want to encourage elites to resign on moral grounds—to be principled even at the cost of their government careers—they must stop judging bureaucrats and appointees who take lucrative corporate positions or prestigious think-tank posts when they leave. If officials know they can make money working as lobbyists or consultants, or that they can retain input in the policy process from a perch outside government, they are more likely to protest bad policies or make decisions that carry some risk to their careers. The so-called revolving door, where political officials cycle between government and the private sector, can also help reduce threats to democracy. As the political scientist Adam Przeworski wrote, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” To make this simple proposition work, those who lose must have more to gain by waiting to contest another election than by turning against the system.

Accepting career incentives does not mean that journalists and watchdogs should ignore officials who violate norms or rules. There are lines that elites should not be allowed to cross without paying a cost, such as violating the very institutions and norms that underpin American democracy. No one who helps or cheers on efforts to overturn an election deserves a good post-government position. The careless (or worse) treatment of national security secrets and classified documents also violates important norms and rules. And some policies are so abhorrent that those who craft them should suffer career consequences.

But most of the policy choices made by duly elected administrations are not so clear-cut. Should supporting or merely participating in policymaking related to the Iraq war, for example, mean the end of a foreign policy career? Every administration needs people to maintain basic systems—including those involving nuclear weapons—and to make day-to-day policy decisions. Employers can and should scrutinize records and choose not to hire former officials whose values or performance do not align with their standards. But where reasonable people can disagree, analysts should be cautious about undermining the career prospects of officials who serve.

It is here that the U.S. foreign policy apparatus needs more elite politics. To end the vilification of careerism and expertise and return to a system that values at least some foreign policy fluency or competence, candidates should not be punished for engaging with or giving speeches at “establishment” institutions. They should not be knocked for publicly debating different foreign policies. To have a healthy politics, the United States must tolerate a range of legitimate views in both parties, allowing the parties to better bargain over policy.

Elite politics is the worst way to run things—except for all the others.

Reviving a healthy culture of debate will be difficult because it requires that elites refrain from demonizing government officials for every misstep, or for simply serving in their posts. It will require that elites and commentators distinguish between honest disagreements and attempts to violate democratic norms and rules. It will require that they call out people who do not give officials leeway and who instead engage in wanton, anti-elite attacks. But both parties must engage in such restraint and enforcement if foreign policy is to get back on track.

Fixing the GOP’s dwindling pipeline of talent, and the party’s broader ills, is an even harder task. It will be extremely difficult for anyone to persuade Republican officials to compromise or to build up a new corps of foreign policy officials, or for Democrats to compromise as Republicans become increasingly unwilling to engage in real policy bargaining. But here again, more politics can help. If the GOP again embraces the democratic process and accepts that it will cycle in and out of office, the party is more likely to adopt moderate policies and work in a more cooperative fashion.

Americans should hope that elites can fix these issues and revive a more functional system. The United States confronts a more complex security environment today than in the early Cold War years—perhaps the last time Washington faced such an unsettled world. The present order involves more players than the Cold War, and the two largest powers, the United States and China, have an interdependent economic relationship, whereas the Soviet Union and its allies were largely siloed from Western economic activity. Making decisions about how to prioritize supporting friends under attack (such as Israel and Ukraine), reassure treaty allies, and engage in “de-risking” with China will, necessarily, require the hard, kludgy work of partisan politics. The United States has too many competing ideological, political, and societal interests to operate any other way.

Adding more politics will not guarantee good decisions. Elites made plenty of bad choices even in simpler times. In politics there are rarely easy fixes, only different tradeoffs. But through elite bargaining, both within and across parties, the United States managed to become the most powerful country in the world and to avoid a third world war. In democracies, elite politics is the worst way to run things—except for all the others.

• ELIZABETH N. SAUNDERS is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and the author of The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024), from which this essay is adapted.

Foreign Affairs · by The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace · February 20, 2024

14. A War Putin Still Can’t Win by Sir Lawrence Freedman

Excerpts:

The war is now at a critical stage. Ukraine will keep fighting come what may, but it will have to move to a much more defensive stance if support from Washington continues to falter. If the U.S. aid package does come through, and without too much more delay, it should make it easier for Ukraine to hold its lines and, equally important, to recast its strategy for the longer term—the main task Zelensky has given General Sysrsky. That priority will also require Washington to reconsider its approach. The past year has made clear how much needs to be done to prepare Ukrainian forces for future ground offensives, but it also has shown how much can be accomplished with long-range strikes beyond the frontlines. The Biden administration has been uneasy about supporting such strikes (and will probably still not want to be seen as facilitating attacks on Russian territory). But the situation has advanced so much, and Russian strategy become so remorseless, that the United States will need to recognize the importance of Ukraine being able to hit more targets with accuracy and at distance.

In the Bible, David slew Goliath in a single encounter. But in a long war, it is much harder for David to beat Goliath. On the second anniversary of the war, there is no clear succession of battlefield wins, or an enemy in disarray, that points the way to an inevitable triumph. But Russia does not have such a credible path either. For there can be no stable peace as long as there is a hostile Ukrainian government getting closer to the West, building up its armed forces, and strengthening its economy, as Russia works out what to do with a depopulated territory that it has helped to devastate, along with a long frontline to defend. The war will end when one side believes it is no longer worth the effort and looks to cut its losses. That decision will be the consequence not only of military factors but also of economic, social, and political ones. It is hard to see Ukraine pressing for a cease-fire as long as so much of its territory is occupied.

For his part, Putin might be thinking about starting some diplomatic initiative after the March 17 presidential election, although it remains hard to see what could be a credible offer if he insists on holding on to all the territory that he claims to have annexed for the Russian Federation . Or perhaps he is hoping that Donald Trump will deliver Kyiv to him next January if Trump becomes U.S. president. In this, he may be exaggerating Russia’s strength and underestimating Ukraine’s staying power. If Western support can hold steady, Putin may still find that the war appears to be as unwinnable on its third anniversary as it appears now at its second.

A War Putin Still Can’t Win

To Thwart Russia, America Needs a Long-Term Strategy—and Ukraine Needs Long-Range Weapons

By Lawrence D. Freedman

February 23, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine · February 23, 2024

In the two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, the brutal war has often defied expectations. In the weeks after February 24, 2022, when Russian forces poured over the Ukrainian border, Ukraine surprised the world, and possibly itself, as it mounted an effective resistance and quickly ended the siege on Kyiv. Then, after the war moved south and east, Ukraine again caught observers off guard with its lightning campaign to push Russian forces out of Kharkiv Province in early September 2022.

But in addition to these stunning results, there were also disappointments. Rather than signaling a larger change in momentum, for example, the Kharkhiv offensive resulted in newly hardened frontlines that, other than Russia’s belated withdrawal from an untenable position in Kherson, moved little in the months that followed. And perhaps most of all, after stirring hopes among many Western analysts and politicians, Ukraine’s long-awaited 2023 counteroffensive was unable to achieve a decisive breakthrough. It was not many weeks old before Ukraine’s commanders had to accept that their forces were not well suited to large-scale operational maneuvers.

Now, as the war enters its third year, according to much current commentary, Ukraine is in an increasingly dire situation and Russia has the upper hand. Underlying the deep pessimism are reports of acute shortages of munitions and manpower on the Ukrainian side, doubts about continued U.S. support, and the perception that Russian forces, unconcerned about their own losses, are prepared to take advantage. The problem is not with the quality of predictions, which are always difficult in war, but rather that the way the war develops over 2024 will depend not only on how Ukraine faces its military challenges but also on how much—and in what ways—the West supports it.

Ukraine certainly faces steep challenges. Given how stretched the country’s warfighting resources are now, there will be few opportunities for major operational moves against Russia in the year ahead. And if a major new package of U.S. aid dies in Congress, it could drastically impede Ukraine’s ability to cope and leave too much of the initiative with Moscow. But the West knows far less about the pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin faces and how that might intensify if he fails to get quick results from all the investments made in this costly and frustrating war. If Russia cannot find a way to quickly take a large chunk of new territory without incurring huge losses in the process, it will be harder to hide the futility of the whole enterprise. As the West reassesses the extent and nature of its backing for Kyiv, it needs to recognize that this remains an incredibly difficult war for Putin to win, and one he might even lose.

DAVID’S SLINGSHOT

From the outset, Ukraine’s response to Russia’s 2022 invasion was David taking on Goliath, but with a crucial difference. In the biblical story, after David uses an accurate slingshot to stun the much larger giant with a small stone, he moves quickly to decapitate him. And with Goliath, their champion, now slain, the Philistines accept defeat. Although Ukraine, like David, could wield its slingshot effectively, it had no way of decapitating Goliath. In other countries, such a humiliation following an incompetent act of aggression might have brought down the leaders who ordered it. But not in Putin’s Russia.

In Moscow today, no political opposition is allowed. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had condemned Russia’s war, could not be tolerated even when he was locked away in a remote Arctic prison, almost completely cut off from the outside world. His death, in dubious and as yet unexplained circumstances, was reported by prison officials on February 16. His demise is in keeping with the Kremlin’s general suppression of all criticism since the “special military operation” began.

Even major setbacks in the war seem to have little effect on Putin. The costs of the war, including economic sanctions, have been limited by the rise in oil and gas prices. By the end of 2022, the Kremlin had succeeded in putting the whole country on a war footing, accepting that it was in for a long fight. Polls have showed Russians generally supporting the war, if not with much enthusiasm. Because Putin’s position and legacy depend on having something to show for all the lives and effort, he has been determined to keep going until he can bring about something he can call victory. So, for now, Goliath is staying in the fight, still enjoying the advantages of size and brute strength.

Destroyed Russian tanks in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, February 2024

Vladyslav Musiienko / Reuters

But David is also still in the fight. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who knows how to perform in public, is a natural David. Hardly the warrior type and lacking military experience, he made his career satirizing politicians until he decided to become one himself. In fact, his acting background helped turn him into an effective war leader: he changed his suit for fatigues, found the right words, delivered his messages in punchy phrases, and made meaningful gestures, including visits to frontline troops. He has regularly updated his people on the course of the war and spoken constantly to world leaders and Western parliaments, whose financial and material support for Ukraine has been vital. And although he has been unable to finish Goliath off, he has overseen a major transformation of Ukrainian forces, so that despite being outgunned, they can still frustrate Russia and inflict blows of their own.

While Ukraine waits for the U.S. Congress to resolve its debate over funding, Russia persists with its attritional offensives, throwing thousands of men into battles for towns that are battered beyond habitation when and if they are taken. At least for now the Russian strategy seems unlikely to yield the kinds of gains that Putin needs to truly change the frontlines and gain a more decisive advantage in the war.

RELIABLE EUROPE, WAVERING WASHINGTON

In the war in Ukraine, David, of course, is not acting alone. Ukraine has been getting Western support since the start of Russia’s aggression in 2014 , although never quite enough and normally too late. Prior to the full-scale invasion, Western countries provided enough support to help Ukraine win the battle for Kyiv, and then, impressed by that achievement, they began to send much more. That is why Putin has invested so much Russian effort into undermining that support. By late 2023, he was talking as if he had succeeded, joking that he had almost achieved demilitarization—one of his announced war aims at the start of the invasion—because Kyiv would soon have no weapons left as the flow from the West dried up. Putin’s optimism was understandable, though not, as might have been assumed, because of wavering resolve in European capitals.

When the war began, many expected that Europe would be the weak point in the Western alliance. Initially there were suspicions that countries such as France and Germany would wish to protect their roles as potential peacemakers, But both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz came to appreciate that trust in Putin was misplaced. Over the course of 2022, by restricting the flow of gas and raising its price, Moscow deliberately created energy shortages to persuade European leaders that backing Ukraine was a bad idea and would cause their people to freeze come wintertime. This was when the first lazy tropes about an imminent “Ukraine fatigue” on the continent began to appear in the Western media . Much was also made of the supposed disunity of European leaders, which was expected to become more pronounced as the war dragged on.

For Europe, sustaining Ukraine is less costly than coping with a Putin victory.

None of this, it turned out, was sufficient to outweigh the evident danger to Europe of allowing Russia to win. Instead, the more European leaders backed Ukraine, the more they needed to sustain their commitments. In the fall of 2023, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban seemed ready to block a new EU aid package to Ukraine. Yet EU countries called Orban’s bluff, and on February 1, after being given some minor concessions, Hungary lifted its veto and the EU unanimously approved a new $54 billion aid package. Although aspects of European support remain disappointing, including the slow pace of ammunition production, many governments are stepping up their efforts to help Ukraine. Two years into the war, and with the prospect of a Russian victory revived, most European leaders recognize that sustaining the beleaguered country is much less costly than coping with the aftermath of a Putin victory.

The same cannot be said for Washington, where a vital $60 billion aid package for Ukraine has been held up in the House of Representatives. Even there, however, the problem is not a collapse of general U.S. support for Ukraine; it is the consequence of former President Donald Trump’s influence over the Republican Party and over Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. If Putin is looking more confident than he did a year ago, when yet another Russian offensive was achieving little at high cost, this is the reason. There are essential supplies Ukraine needs, such as artillery shells and support for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), that only the United States can deliver.

Russia has already taken advantage of this hiatus in U.S. support as it persists with its attritional offensives. There is an urgency to this Russian campaign that belies assumptions that Putin is deliberately playing a long game and simply waiting for Ukraine’s exhaustion. Putin wants the war over, but only on his terms. If the Ukrainians concentrate on strengthening their defenses, they can prevent Russia, which for now lacks combat power, from rapid victory. But the longer they have to wait for more U.S. support, the more difficult that task will become.

MORE BLOOD, NOT FRESH BLOOD

Perhaps because Putin thinks things are going his way, he sees few reasons for changing Russia’s approach. As the conflict has unfolded, Russia has shown an ability to adapt and innovate, but not so much in how it fights the ground war. Having dealt with Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, after he called off his June 2023 mutiny, and about to be confirmed for a fifth term as president in a rigged election in March, Putin is persevering with the same methods and largely the same team. Unlike other dictators, he has not promoted himself to field marshal and pretended to be guiding the military strategy himself. He is content for the generals to take the credit and the blame for the conduct of the war.

Thus, Putin has stuck with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Commander in Chief Valery Gerasimov, both of whom have occupied positions in the military leadership for years. Their loyalty to Putin is unquestioned, so he tolerates their crude and unimaginative strategies, including their frontal assaults on Ukrainian cities with little regard for either the Russian casualties involved or the state of the cities themselves when finally captured.

Earlier in the war, Russia offered glimpses of what a different military leadership might do. In October 2022, the more talented Sergei Surovikin was put in charge of Russian operations in Ukraine. He organized Russia’s missile and drone offensive against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, which the Ukrainians withstood only with difficulty. At one point, it threatened to leave Kyiv and other cities without electricity. To stabilize the frontlines, Surovikin also paid attention to Russia’s defensive needs. The “Surovikin line,” with its layers of minefields, dragon’s teeth, and fortified positions, withstood the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, February 2024

Ramil Sitdikov / Reuters

But Putin was impatient for more territory and in January 2023, he put Gerasimov in charge with Surovikin serving as his deputy. Then, in the summer of 2023, Surovikin was sufficiently in sympathy with Prigozhin’s critique of the war effort that led to the failed mutiny that it was felt necessary to push him aside altogether. Indeed, it is clear from the period leading up to the mutiny that Shoigu and Gerasimov had many critics, not least for their willingness to sacrifice enormous numbers of Russian soldiers into the meat grinder of Ukraine. For now, that approach seems unlikely to change.

Zelensky is also secure in his position. Kyiv has made clear there will be no elections at a time of war and martial law, given that so much of the population is displaced and so much Ukrainian territory is under occupation. Zelensky remains popular, although not quite as much as before. Not unusually for political leaders, he has become more dependent on an ever-narrowing circle of trusted advisers. His early February replacement of his widely admired commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, with the older and more Soviet-influenced Oleksandr Sysrsky was not well received in Ukraine, especially among the troops. Some have raised concerns that Zelensky is looking for the military advice he wants to hear rather than the advice he needs. Although the move was attributed to the Ukrainian president’s jealousy of Zaluzhny’s popularity, the most likely reason is Zelensky’s frustration with Ukraine’s lack of progress in liberating territory over the past year, as well as his desire to shake up command and management practices.

Ukraine and its supporters invested a lot—too much—in last summer’s counteroffensive. Against Surovikin’s defenses, a breakthrough was always going to be difficult. (It remains an open question whether, given their available capabilities and lacking air superiority, the Ukrainians could have found a way to breach them.) Now, with shortages of both ammunition and manpower, Ukraine’s choices have become harder. The government’s main priority is to sort out the mobilization process to generate larger and fresher forces and to raise the quality of junior commanders. Sysrsky’s first big decision was to withdraw from Avdiivka. This was prudent, though the evacuation should have come earlier, and some Ukrainian troops were trapped. The move made clear that in the current stage of the fight, Ukraine must avoid squandering valuable human and material resources simply to defend the principle that no patch of territory will be yielded without a fight.

A GAME OF DENIAL

The wear and tear of a long war is taking its toll on Ukraine. But the Ukrainians have shown that they can keep fighting. The current Western fixation on Ukraine’s problems, and the difficulty of working out exactly what is going on in Moscow, has led to easy assumptions that Russia can keep fighting without also showing wear and tear. In fact, for all the resources that Putin has thrown into this war, the results have been meager since its opening weeks, when Russia acquired the bulk of the territory it currently occupies. Russia can find additional basic manpower, but it has a much harder time replacing lost junior officers and modern equipment.

Even if Ukraine is unable to gain a major advantage, it can accomplish a great deal simply by keeping Russia’s casualties high and denying it easy wins. Its frequent disruption of Russian logistics, and its hits on factories, oil refineries, and even ships within drone range, will be the most likely morale-boosters for its forces. Ukraine’s ability to continue exporting grain by sea and its threat to cut off Crimea from Russia do not offer Kyiv a route to victory, but they embarrass the Kremlin.

In a long war, it is much harder for David to beat Goliath.

The war is now at a critical stage. Ukraine will keep fighting come what may, but it will have to move to a much more defensive stance if support from Washington continues to falter. If the U.S. aid package does come through, and without too much more delay, it should make it easier for Ukraine to hold its lines and, equally important, to recast its strategy for the longer term—the main task Zelensky has given General Sysrsky. That priority will also require Washington to reconsider its approach. The past year has made clear how much needs to be done to prepare Ukrainian forces for future ground offensives, but it also has shown how much can be accomplished with long-range strikes beyond the frontlines. The Biden administration has been uneasy about supporting such strikes (and will probably still not want to be seen as facilitating attacks on Russian territory). But the situation has advanced so much, and Russian strategy become so remorseless, that the United States will need to recognize the importance of Ukraine being able to hit more targets with accuracy and at distance.

In the Bible, David slew Goliath in a single encounter. But in a long war, it is much harder for David to beat Goliath. On the second anniversary of the war, there is no clear succession of battlefield wins, or an enemy in disarray, that points the way to an inevitable triumph. But Russia does not have such a credible path either. For there can be no stable peace as long as there is a hostile Ukrainian government getting closer to the West, building up its armed forces, and strengthening its economy, as Russia works out what to do with a depopulated territory that it has helped to devastate, along with a long frontline to defend. The war will end when one side believes it is no longer worth the effort and looks to cut its losses. That decision will be the consequence not only of military factors but also of economic, social, and political ones. It is hard to see Ukraine pressing for a cease-fire as long as so much of its territory is occupied.

For his part, Putin might be thinking about starting some diplomatic initiative after the March 17 presidential election, although it remains hard to see what could be a credible offer if he insists on holding on to all the territory that he claims to have annexed for the Russian Federation . Or perhaps he is hoping that Donald Trump will deliver Kyiv to him next January if Trump becomes U.S. president. In this, he may be exaggerating Russia’s strength and underestimating Ukraine’s staying power. If Western support can hold steady, Putin may still find that the war appears to be as unwinnable on its third anniversary as it appears now at its second.

• LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London and the author of Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs · by Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine · February 23, 2024

15. Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation

Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation

The Washington Post · by Lauren Weber · February 21, 2024

Four major nonprofits that rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic by capitalizing on the spread of medical misinformation collectively gained more than $118 million between 2020 and 2022, enabling the organizations to deepen their influence in statehouses, courtrooms and communities across the country, a Washington Post analysis of tax records shows.

Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., received $23.5 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 alone — eight times what it collected the year before the pandemic began — allowing it to expand its state-based lobbying operations to cover half the country. Another influential anti-vaccine group, Informed Consent Action Network, nearly quadrupled its revenue during that time to about $13.4 million in 2022, giving it the resources to finance lawsuits seeking to roll back vaccine requirements as Americans’ faith in vaccines drops.

Two other groups, Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors, went from receiving $1 million combined when they formed in 2020 to collecting more than $21 million combined in 2022, according to the latest tax filings available for the groups.

The four groups routinely buck scientific consensus. Children’s Health Defense and Informed Consent Action Network raise doubts about the safety of vaccines despite assurances from federal regulators. “Vaccines have never been safer than they are today,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on its webpage outlining vaccine safety.

Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors promote anti-parasitic or anti-malarial drugs as treatments for covid, long after regulators and clinical trials found the medications to be ineffective or potentially harmful. Leaders of these groups say they disagree with medical consensus and argue that their promotion of alternative treatments for covid and other conditions is safe.

Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, said that in his view, the four groups endanger lives with their spread of misinformation.

“These groups gave jet fuel to misinformation at a crucial time in the pandemic,” Caplan said. “The richer they get, the worse off the public is because, indisputably, they’re spouting dangerous nonsense that kills people.”

The influx of pandemic cash sent executive compensation soaring, boosted public outreach, and seeded the ability to wage legislative and legal battles to weaken vaccine requirements and defend physicians accused of spreading misinformation.

Some doctors following guidance by Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance or America’s Frontline Doctors have been disciplined or face the possibility of discipline from state medical boards alleging substandard medical care. In cases involving two doctors alleged to have followed Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance guidance, three patients died.

Public health experts, including Caplan, worry that the well-funded anti-science movement could lead to devastating long-term public health consequences if childhood diseases once vanquished by vaccines come roaring back.

Many of the contributors are not known because nonprofits are generally not required to publicly report their donors. But nonprofits are supposed to disclose groups to which they contribute more than $5,000. In addition to the tax forms filed by the four groups, The Post reviewed more than 330 filings by nonprofits that donated to the groups during the pandemic. Half of those gifts over $100,000 were made through a tax vehicle popular among the ultrawealthy known as “donor-advised funds,” which allow individuals to obscure their identities. The Post identified two funds dedicated to advancing biblical, libertarian or conservative values that each had given at least $1 million in total to at least three of the groups since 2020.

Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, said the group gained prominence — and donors — during the pandemic as the public sought “medical information free from special interests.” The money has allowed the organization to expand its influence into other areas, he said.

“Our team continues to develop guidance and educational materials on other chronic conditions,” Kory said in a statement to The Post.

Jose Jimenez, a lawyer for America’s Frontline Doctors, said donors recognize that the group is “fighting for the freedom of choice and health care for individuals and fighting for physician independence.”

“There’s been a lot of support by donors to get that message out,” Jimenez said in an interview. “The level of revenue, the level of donations is a recognition that this is something that Americans are yearning for.”

Neither Informed Consent Action Network nor Children’s Health Defense responded to requests for comment.

Boosting executive compensation

As the groups’ coffers grew, so did the salaries of some top executives. Children’s Health Defense paid Kennedy, then chairman and chief legal counsel and now an independent candidate for president, more than $510,000 in 2022, double his 2019 salary, tax records show. Informed Consent Action Network paid Executive Director Del Bigtree $284,000 in 2022, a 22 percent increase from 2019. Bigtree now works as communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

Some of the individuals behind the family foundations or trusts that fund the four groups also contributed the legal maximum in personal donations to Kennedy’s presidential bid, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political donations.

Bigtree did not respond to requests for comment about his or Kennedy’s salary. Neither did the media team for Kennedy’s campaign.

The salaries of Kory and Paul Marik, chairman and chief scientific officer of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, also rose significantly. In 2022, Kory earned $368,815 from the FLCCC — nearly 60 percent more than his 2021 salary — and Marik earned $400,000, eight times his 2021 earnings, according to tax records. (The FLCCC reported that it did not pay the men in 2020.)

When asked about the increase, Kory told The Post that he and Marik had left their jobs as “full-time practicing physicians and medical educators” to “dedicate their full attention to the FLCCC.”

The credentials and certification committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine has urged that Kory’s and Marik’s certifications be taken away for spreading misinformation, a recommendation that both men are appealing, according to a statement released by the FLCCC in August. The board would not comment on the details of the case. Marik’s medical license in Virginia expired in 2022, according to the state’s Department of Health Professions.

America’s Frontline Doctors paid the group’s founder, Simone Gold, $581,000 in 2022, more than 17 times what she was paid by the group in 2020, according to tax filings. Gold’s lawyer, Jimenez, said she was released after serving 48 days of an original 60-day prison sentence in 2022 for trespassing in the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump.

In a November 2022 lawsuit, America’s Frontline Doctors accused Gold of using nonprofit money to fund her lifestyle. It alleged that Gold purchased a $3.6 million home in Naples, Fla., and a fleet of luxury cars, and hired a housekeeper and security officer. The lawsuit also alleged that she used the organization’s employees to work at her for-profit wellness company, GoldCare.

Jimenez said that the board had approved the Naples house purchase as the group’s headquarters but that he could not speak to the individual expenses. Gold has previously denied any improper spending.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, citing a lack of jurisdiction, in December 2022. U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell noted Gold’s previous comments that the group’s “most significant business operation is the creation of social media content” and said the location of the group’s headquarters was in dispute. “These vague descriptions of AFLDS’ purpose leaves the Court short of being able to define its ‘nerve center,’” the judge wrote.

Financing social and political influence

The groups contributed to a media ecosystem that spread misinformation during the pandemic. Children’s Health Defense started an internet TV channel with daily programming casting doubt on vaccine safety, said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law at San Francisco who tracks the influence of these organizations. Informed Consent Action Network spent nearly $6 million on online “educational programs” in 2022 that the group says reached more than 6 million viewers in 209 countries, according to tax filings.

Caplan said that in his view, the four groups “were able to take advantage of fear and panic and anger at a crucial time in the pandemic and raise considerably more money to tell people what some of them wanted to hear.”

Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance took in more than $8 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 — nearly 23 times as much as in 2020 — as it continued to tout the anti-parasitic ivermectin, which it also began promoting to prevent and treat flu and RSV. The CDC has said there is no clinical data to support the use of ivermectin for flu and RSV. Kory, the group’s president, said he and Marik frequently appear on shows run by Children’s Health Defense and Informed Consent Action Network. The latter group gave the FLCCC $210,000 in 2022, according to its tax filing.

Kory also used Twitter to encourage his hundreds of thousands of followers to visit his telehealth practice, which charges up to $2,350 for three video appointments.

Kory and Marik have testified in statehouses across the country espousing their views of ivermectin as a treatment for covid or against legislation promoting vaccines. Kory said Marik’s testimony in Tennessee helped lead to the passage of a bill that expanded access to ivermectin. Merck, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures ivermectin, has said there is “no scientific basis” and “no meaningful evidence” to prescribe the drug for covid. (When asked about the promotion of ivermectin for the flu and RSV, the company told The Post last year that use of the drug is not supported beyond what federal regulations have approved it for.)

“When the pharma company that sells it tells you it’s not intended to treat a viral disease because it acts on parasites, that’s saying something,” Caplan said.

Children’s Health Defense, which in 2020 had just two state chapters, in California and New York, has expanded to 19 states, as well as chapters focused on New England and the military. These chapters enable the organization to “spread misinformation” about vaccines in a more sophisticated way, with potential legislative consequences, said Becky Christensen, founder of the Safe Communities Coalition & Action Fund, which advocates for vaccines.

In January, the Tennessee chapter director of Children’s Health Defense appeared at a routine legislative committee meeting that sets the procedural rules for the year, Christensen said.

“They’re a part of every step of the legislative process now,” she said.

Children’s Health Defense says its legal team works closely with state attorneys general to protect off-label use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat covid; attorneys general in six states have done so.

The group donated $50,000 in 2021 to the Republican Attorneys General Association; IRS rules bar charities from making political contributions. Children’s Health Defense told Popular Information, which first reported the contribution, that the group made the donation to “educate attorneys general on health policy issues” and “we regret our mistake.” The Republican Attorneys General Association returned the funds, tax records show.

War chest for court battles

Three of the groups are also deploying their war chests to try to rack up legal wins.

Tax records from 2022 show that Children’s Health Defense spent at least $3 million in legal fees. The group has filed lawsuits, written amicus briefs or engaged in appeals in more than two dozen cases since the start of 2020, including an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against The Post and other media companies alleging suppression of what it claims is “wholly accurate and legitimate reporting” that “self-appointed ‘truth police’” deemed “misinformation.” The Post and its co-defendants have filed a motion to dismiss, which is pending.

The organization says it helped defeat coronavirus vaccine requirements for New York health-care workers. In January, it joined forces with Kory, president of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, in suing to stop California’s medical board from punishing doctors who spread what the board determined was misinformation.

Children’s Health Defense said it also helped fund Maine physician Meryl Nass’s legal defense against the state medical board’s allegations that she improperly prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Her license has been suspended by the state medical board until April 2025. Nass did not respond to requests for comment.

America’s Frontline Doctors spent nearly $1.5 million on legal fees in 2021 and again in 2022, tax records show, funding work including its opposition to coronavirus vaccine mandates. In 2023, the group had to defend itself in an ongoing lawsuit alleging that its promotion of hydroxychloroquine led to the death of a Nevada man who had been prescribed the anti-malarial drug by a doctor affiliated with the organization. Jimenez disputes the allegations.

Informed Consent Action Network has used its pandemic fundraising to file more than 40 lawsuits since 2020, including suing federal agencies for records on vaccine safety data to drive vaccine skepticism, said Reiss, the law professor. The group spent more than a third of its 2022 contributions and grants on legal fees, tax filings show.

The group says it supported a 2022 lawsuit that created religious vaccine exemptions for schools in Mississippi — which has one of the highest childhood vaccination rates in the country — and is raising money to “free the five” other states that still bar exemptions for people who say their religious beliefs prevent them from being vaccinated.

Nationally, the proportion of kindergartners with a vaccine exemption reached a new high of 3 percent in the 2022-2023 school year, according to the CDC. Public health experts, including Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, predict this trend will result in more outbreaks of preventable disease, such as the spate of measles among people who remain unvaccinated.

“We’ll find ourselves back a half-century, when the U.S. was ravaged by infectious diseases,” Gostin said.

Inside the donor groups

While many donors are shielded by tax vehicles for the wealthy, The Post used ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer — a database of charitable organizations’ IRS filings — to identify two of the donor-advised funds that contributed the most money to the groups during the pandemic.

The National Christian Foundation gave more than $1.8 million in total to the four groups from 2020 through 2022. The organization describes itself on its website as working with donors to be a “good steward of all God has entrusted to you.”

The foundation told The Post all grants are initiated on the recommendation of its more than 25,000 donors.

DonorsTrust, which contributed $1 million in total to Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, America’s Frontline Doctors and Informed Consent Action Network in 2021 and 2022, calls itself on its website a “principled philanthropic partner for conservative and libertarian donors.”

“People of good faith hold a variety of different beliefs on issues related to health-and-human services and a healthy skepticism of those in authority,” Lawson Bader, president and chief executive of DonorsTrust, said in a statement to The Post. He added that “perhaps our givers’ critics should sue the CDC instead of smearing legitimate nonprofit organizations in good standing with the IRS.”

DonorsTrust noted that donations to the same three groups fell to less than $10,000 combined in 2023.

Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he thinks the funding of misinformation by conservative donors is particularly disheartening because their communities faced higher rates of coronavirus vaccine refusal — and death — during the pandemic.

In his view, he said, “we should be as a society really concerned that people are spending this amount of money to distort the truth.”

The Washington Post · by Lauren Weber · February 21, 2024

16. IWI Responds: The Two-Year Anniversary of Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Excerpts:

As the full-scale war enters its third year, IWI is committed to deepening our analysis of the conflict, with a keen focus on three broad areas. First, we aim to understand which irregular tactics have proven effective and explore the reasons behind their success. This includes articles on technology and innovation, such as cyber tactics, drone warfare, and trench and urban combat. Second, with 2024 anticipated as a build year for Ukraine, we are interested in how Kyiv can best prepare, particularly in terms of developing irregular forces and capabilities. This encompasses examining the strategic, training, and psychological impacts of the conflict, including the role of special operations forces, resistance movements, private military companies, and the country’s new military branch dedicated to drone warfare. Third, we are eager to explore the impact of security assistance on both sides of the conflict. Western governments have provided critical support to Kyiv, while countries like North Korea and Iran have similarly provided significant aid to Moscow. Looking beyond traditional government-to-government support, we are also interested in understanding the use of crowdfunding for defense in Ukraine. Lastly, while these focus areas are of particular interest, we remain open to a broad range of irregular warfare topics related to the war.

Sadly, there is no end in sight for this conflict. A combination of battlefield setbacks, shortages of resources, and uncertain U.S. support suggests a tough year ahead for Kyiv. With neither side willing to negotiate, the battle continues, marked by Russian progress around Avdiivka, drone and missile strikes in urban centers, and Ukrainian countermeasures in the Black Sea and within Russian territory. As the situation evolves, IWI remains dedicated to bringing together experts and insights to shed light on irregular warfare in this conflict. Your engagement and contributions are invaluable to us. Thank you for your continued support.

IWI Responds: The Two-Year Anniversary of Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Sam Rosenberg · February 22, 2024

As the world marks the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, lights are blinking red in Kyiv. Ukraine’s much-anticipated summer offensive petered out with disappointing results, and Russia’s relentless attacks, particularly around Avdiivka, echo the grim tactics seen in Bakhmut, where “meat wave” assaults took a heavy toll on resource-strapped Ukrainian defenders. Amid uncertainty around US security assistance and facing critical shortages in personnel and ammunition, Ukraine is also navigating a significant leadership transition within its armed forces.

Yet, despite the challenges facing Ukraine’s conventional units, Kyiv’s irregular tactics have carved out significant successes, particularly in information and sabotage operations. And as deadlock persists on the frontlines, with no immediate prospect of a decisive edge for either Russia or Ukraine, the role of irregular warfare may become increasingly central to the war’s eventual outcome.

Over the past two years, the Irregular Warfare Initiative has produced in-depth articles, podcasts, and events that analyze these tactics and their wider implications. As we reflect on this anniversary, I take stock of our efforts and set our sights on the year ahead. Our aim since the outbreak of the wider war has been threefold: to grasp the war’s trajectory, highlight lesser-known aspects of the conflict, and offer fresh insights to those on the ground and in policy circles.

Understanding the Course of the War

Our podcast guests and authors have provided important insights into how the war has evolved from a low-level hybrid conflict in 2014 to the largest war in Europe in eighty years, following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Just a few days after Putin’s invasion began, we enlisted Shashank Joshi from The Economist and Rob Person from West Point to examine how historical events and Russian cultural myths shape Moscow’s worldview. During the first summer of the full-scale war, we brought in Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analyses and Kent DeBenedictis, a US Army Special Forces officer and author of the book Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare,’ for a two-part discussion on Ukrainian and Russian approaches to irregular warfare. Taking a broader view of the war, retired US Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges and Ravi Agrawal, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, recently joined the podcast to discuss the evolution of European defense relations and how policies toward Ukraine have changed from before the war to now.

Our authors have contributed crucial analysis, too. In an article last fall, National Defense University’s Sean McFate attributed Russian failures early in the war to an overreliance on traditional warfare no longer suited to the modern battlefield. In a piece written in June 2022, retired US Marine Colonel and former IWI podcast host Andrew Milburn foreshadowed many of the challenges Ukraine is currently facing. Highlighting inadequate training time for recruits, the rapid reduction of forces due to high casualty rates, and the urgent need for more weaponry, Milburn argued that time is a luxury that Kyiv does not have – a conclusion that is, unfortunately, proving more accurate every day.

Our team extended its reach beyond articles and podcasts to expert panels exploring key developments in the war. During the first summer of full-scale fighting, IWI convened defense researchers Byron Harper, James Kiras, and Ulrica Peterson and the deputy commander of the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command, Major General Patrick Roberson, to examine how societies employ a mix of peaceful and aggressive actions to fight against foreign control, using Ukrainian resistance against Russia as a key example. With NATO’s Resistance Operating Concept as a foundation, the panel expanded on their points in a September 2022 article. Later that same fall, IWI assembled another notable panel, including Nataliya Bugayova from the Institute for the Study of War, LTG Tony Fletcher, commander of NATO Special Operations Forces, and defense officials from Finland and Estonia. A few weeks later, we teamed up with Northwestern University for a session with analysts Michael Kofman and John Spencer, and academics Will Reno, Alexandra Chinchilla, and Jahara Matisek. They covered a range of topics, including Ukraine’s strategy for dealing with the economic and energy challenges caused by Russia’s invasion. Our most recent engagement expanded beyond Ukraine and focused on Russian influence operations in Moldova. Later this month, our team will sit down with retired General and former CIA director David Petraeus to discuss the war and his recent book.

Spotlighting the Unseen

We take pride in publishing articles that highlight lesser-known aspects of the war. In this vein, Dr. Josh Roose, a political sociologist at Australia’s Deakin University, and IWI’s own Jacob Ware offered a compelling analysis of the conflict’s gender dynamics. They contrast Putin’s deliberate use of hypermasculinity in the invasion with Ukraine’s successful inclusion of women, a move that not only challenged traditional gender norms but also helped strengthen the country’s ability to resist Russian attacks. While not directly about the war in Ukraine, US Army officer Rick Chersicla’s article about Russian and Belarusian attempts to weaponize migration tackles an important, if underappreciated indirect approach employed by Putin to distract Western leaders.

Information and cyber operations have been recurring themes within the IWI community. Last April, our podcast team explored both topics, featuring insights from experts Gavin Wilde and Jason Kikta on Ukraine’s cyber resilience and Russia’s cyber strategy. Dan Grobarick, a research associate at the US Naval War College, recently examined how Ukraine has employed information and influence operations to garner international backing and increased military aid. IIlya Varzhanskyi, a member of Ukraine’s armed forces and Peter Schrijver, a doctoral researcher at the Netherlands Defence Academy, assessed the role of information warfare in Chechnya’s quest for independence and its connection to Ukraine’s struggle against Russia. Defense technologist Wes Bryant discussed how Elon Musk’s decision not to enable Starlink for Ukrainian military operations in Crimea illustrates the significant influence private CEOs can have on international conflicts.

Forward-Looking Recommendations

IWI articles have also shared some innovative ideas on how to approach the war. Dr. Spencer Meredith, a professor at the National Defense University and adviser to Joint Special Operations Command, suggested that the path to victory lies not in relying on Kyiv’s experience in trench warfare but in continuing to harness NATO partnerships and specialized training, particularly through special operations forces. US Army Second Lieutenant Hannah Lamb, in her award-winning essay for the IWI-Joint Staff writing contest, advocated for the adoption of unconventional warfare tactics in Ukraine, focusing on preparing guerrilla units to disrupt Russian forces in occupied areas.

Joshua Huminski, the director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs, gave his advice on dealing with Russian political warfare, arguing that Western governments need to do more than just respond to Russian actions. They should “inoculate” themselves from future attacks by fighting misinformation, securing their financial systems, and sustaining counterintelligence efforts. Besides policy recommendations, we have also started to publish book reviews related to the conflict. US Marine Lieutenant Paul Shields reviewed Dr. Jade McGlynn’s book, Russia’s War, and highlighted its insights into how autocratic leaders use irregular warfare to maintain power and garner popular support for questionable policies.

Looking Ahead

As the full-scale war enters its third year, IWI is committed to deepening our analysis of the conflict, with a keen focus on three broad areas. First, we aim to understand which irregular tactics have proven effective and explore the reasons behind their success. This includes articles on technology and innovation, such as cyber tactics, drone warfare, and trench and urban combat. Second, with 2024 anticipated as a build year for Ukraine, we are interested in how Kyiv can best prepare, particularly in terms of developing irregular forces and capabilities. This encompasses examining the strategic, training, and psychological impacts of the conflict, including the role of special operations forces, resistance movements, private military companies, and the country’s new military branch dedicated to drone warfare. Third, we are eager to explore the impact of security assistance on both sides of the conflict. Western governments have provided critical support to Kyiv, while countries like North Korea and Iran have similarly provided significant aid to Moscow. Looking beyond traditional government-to-government support, we are also interested in understanding the use of crowdfunding for defense in Ukraine. Lastly, while these focus areas are of particular interest, we remain open to a broad range of irregular warfare topics related to the war.

Sadly, there is no end in sight for this conflict. A combination of battlefield setbacks, shortages of resources, and uncertain U.S. support suggests a tough year ahead for Kyiv. With neither side willing to negotiate, the battle continues, marked by Russian progress around Avdiivka, drone and missile strikes in urban centers, and Ukrainian countermeasures in the Black Sea and within Russian territory. As the situation evolves, IWI remains dedicated to bringing together experts and insights to shed light on irregular warfare in this conflict. Your engagement and contributions are invaluable to us. Thank you for your continued support.

Sam Rosenberg is the Deputy Editorial Director at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. He is an active-duty US Army officer with operational experience in Eastern Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan and is currently pursuing a PhD at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

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

Main Image: The Mother Ukraine monument statue in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Dima Pima via Unsplash)

If you value reading Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the coolest swag, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

​17. Vladimir Putin Is Trapped

Vladimir Putin Is Trapped

The Putin regime is baring its fangs and revealing its weakness in the process. First to be killed was the leader of the democratic opposition, Alexei Navalny. Next came Maxim Kuzminov, a helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in August 2023

The National Interest · by Alexander J. Motyl · February 22, 2024

The Putin regime is baring its fangs and revealing its weakness in the process. First to be killed was the leader of the democratic opposition, Alexei Navalny. Next came Maxim Kuzminov, a helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in August 2023. At the same time, two groups of Ukrainian POWs, one near Avdiivka and one near Robotyne, were mowed down after surrendering and throwing down their weapons.

Navalny’s murder is well known. He may have been beaten to death; he may have been poisoned; he was definitely condemned to death by being transferred to a notorious prison colony in Russia’s inhospitable far north. What Russia’s illegitimate president failed to realize is that, in killing Navalny, he created a symbol and a martyr that will haunt him until his dying days. Only a feeble-minded leader would think that murdering a weakened dissenter wasting away in his Gulag could be of advantage to his regime.

Lest there be any doubt as to the regime’s responsibility for Navalny’s death, Putin promoted Valery Boyarinev, the first deputy director of the FSIN, the federal agency responsible for carrying out sentences, to the rank of colonel-general, presumably for a job well done. According to human rights activists, Boyarinev also oversaw the killing of hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Kuzminov’s murder is less well-known but no less important. The 28-year-old Russian was stabbed twelve times and run over in a car in Spain—hardly the victim of a random mugging or a professional hit by organized criminals. His death was intended to convey to potential defectors just what awaited them if they chose to flee to the Ukrainian side. The Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, effectively took credit for the killing by stating that “that traitor and criminal became a moral corpse in the moment that he planned his dirty and terrible crime.”

Once again, both Putin and Naryshkin failed to see that, although Kuzminov’s brutal death would certainly intimidate many potential defectors, it also showed just how fearful the regime was of potential defection by growing numbers of Russians who would prefer not to go to certain death in Ukraine and thereby contribute to one of Putin’s proudest achievements—the pointless destruction of several hundred thousand Russian soldiers.

As to killing Ukrainian POWs, it’s been a while since Russia has practiced that transgression against international law. But, once again, although Putin and his sidekicks probably consider such flouting to be a sign of strength, it is in fact the opposite. Self-confident regimes and armies don’t need to act as savages. They can just win. Desperate armies that are frustrated by their inability to do more than capture several hundred meters of rubble can take out that frustration on unarmed adversaries and thereby get some satisfaction. Since Russia apparently sacrificed 16,000 men in its attempt to capture Avdiivka, one can appreciate that the frustration and aggression among the rank and file must be great.

In a turn of events, a young Russian military blogger and Putin supporter, Andrei Morozov, committed suicide after bemoaning the enormous casualties Russia had suffered and being condemned thereafter by Putin’s pet propagandists, Yulia Vityazeva and Armen Gasparyan, who called his post a “piece of ****, promoting defeatist ideas.” Morozov’s suicide note accused the “political prostitutes” who criticized him as being “too chicken**** to pull the trigger themselves.” In a bizarre logical jump, Morozov then concluded, “Well, I'll do it myself. I'll shoot myself if no one dares to take on this petty business.”

Morozov’s death certainly testifies to cracks in Putin’s propaganda machine. It may also foreshadow the path desperate Russian soldiers who want to defect but don’t dare to may be increasingly inclined to take.

It’s possible that the Putin regime’s turn toward Nazi-like savagery is testimony to its strength or, at the least, to the Kremlin’s self-confidence. Far more likely, the violence is testimony to the bumbling, fearful nature of the Putinite system and to the dictator’s delusions of grandeur.

Why turn to barbarity now? After all, if Western doomsayers are to be believed, the Kremlin is brimming with confidence, the Russian army is unstoppable, and Ukraine is slated for defeat. Unless, of course, the doomsayers are wrong, and the war isn’t going quite as well as the Kremlin insists—16,000 dead soldiers are a helluva lot of dead soldiers to be sacrificed in the taking of a strategically secondary town—and the regime isn’t quite as strong as the doomsayers believe.

Consider the alternative. The Russian bear is cornered. Its violence and bloodthirstiness are signs of desperation, not of triumph.

About the Author

Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.” The author's opinions are his own.

The National Interest · by Alexander J. Motyl · February 22, 2024

18. Corruption and Low Morale Still Plague China’s Military

Corruption and Low Morale Still Plague China’s Military - Geopolitical Futures

Military-civil fusion is meant to modernize the force, attract recruits and fight youth unemployment.

geopoliticalfutures.com · by Victoria Herczegh · February 14, 2024

It’s early days in the Year of the Dragon, but Beijing’s purge of the People’s Liberation Army shows no signs of stopping. The latest known victim is Wang Xiaojun, one of China’s foremost rocket scientists, who had been working closely with the PLA Rocket Force and Chinese defense companies. Wang was reportedly expelled from the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top advisory body, in late January. As with other recent sackings of Rocket Force officials, no reason was given for Wang’s dismissal.

Officially, the Chinese Communist Party is in the midst of a crackdown on corruption. In 2023, 45 senior officials were put under investigation, which Chinese media say is a record. But that is not the full story. Instead, misappropriated funds and a resultant drop in troop morale are fueling worries in the government about unrest within the PLA. Additionally, the Rocket Force officials who were expelled late last year reportedly made weapons acquisitions without the central government’s knowledge, raising questions about President Xi Jinping’s authority among the PLA’s top officials.

Aside from the high-level purges, in January the Communist Party secretaries of three Chinese provinces (Anhui, Fujian and Jiangxi) conducted separate tours of the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, which oversees Taiwan. All three secretaries met with the theater commander, delivered rousing speeches before the troops, pledged benefits for veterans and soldiers’ families, and promised to contribute to the unification of Taiwan with mainland China. Provincial chiefs rarely do in-person inspections of military commands, so three in one month is highly unusual.

These are unusual times in the PLA. Xi’s government is committed to the force’s rapid modernization, to transform it into a “world-class” military by 2049. Its plans include the expansion and diversification of China’s nuclear capabilities. However, several recent reports have cast doubt on the PLA’s modernization drive. According to former officers, some military departments can hardly afford supplies or new equipment because of rampant corruption and poor budget management. Other reports cite the lack of cross-training among the five services and a critical shortage of professionally trained noncommissioned officers, who ensure that officers’ decisions are communicated to the troops and properly executed.

At stake is not only the PLA’s distant future but also its present, because these problems are damaging to troop morale and military recruitment. About 35 percent of China’s 2 million military personnel are conscripts, 80 percent of whom say they will return to civilian life when their two-year service is completed. Ads on social media target young and middle-aged recruits for active-duty officer and administrative roles in the PLA, promising better benefits than those enjoyed by civil servants. But even salary hikes and a recent revision of the conscription requirements have not helped the PLA recruit and retain technically skilled personnel.

The government’s latest method of addressing problems in the PLA is “military-civil fusion,” which Beijing has sold as a way to boost war readiness. It set up so-called military-civil fusion offices in several provinces and tasked them with involving the private sector in the military buildup, allocating funds and technologies to support the PLA’s modernization, and making recruitment more efficient. The government is especially interested in exploiting dual-use technologies such as quantum computing, big data, semiconductors, 5G, advanced nuclear technology, aerospace and artificial intelligence. It is developing or acquiring key technologies through investment in private industries, talent recruitment programs, academic research benefitting the military, intelligence gathering and outright theft. Crucially, the fusion approach enables more civilian entities to undertake classified military research and development as well as weapons production.

To support military mobilization, new local mobilization offices have been organizing large events targeted mainly at the 16-24 age group. At these events, which have been extended to most major cities, young people can participate in simulated military drills and learn how the PLA uses science, technology and engineering skills. Beijing hopes to kill two birds with one stone: filling the PLA’s ranks while providing more employment opportunities for the more than 10 million college graduates expected to swell the job market this year. A large share of these graduates will be seeking jobs in science or tech – precisely the fields that have suffered most directly from Xi’s tech crackdown, causing firms to hesitate when it comes to large-scale hiring, particularly of young people with no work experience. Attracting more science, tech and engineering talent to the PLA would not only help it achieve its modernization goals but also alleviate the burden of youth unemployment.

Institutional reform is never easy, and the combination of a crackdown on high-level military corruption, low troop morale and mounting economic problems makes China’s current effort especially volatile. The only thing more frightening to the regime than protests in the streets would be a revolt within the military. What’s more, technology theft and the military modernization drive are worrying Beijing’s rivals, encouraging them to do more to decouple from China. But for now, China is mostly looking inward. Until it is satisfied that the PLA is fully under political control, starting a military conflict will not be on Xi’s short-term agenda.

geopoliticalfutures.com · by Victoria Herczegh · February 14, 2024

19. New military prosecutors replace generals and admirals in more than 2,500 courts-martial in just 2 months

New military prosecutors replace generals and admirals in more than 2,500 courts-martial in just 2 months

Stars and Stripes · by Gary Warner · February 21, 2024

A training exercise in August 2018 of the 167th Theater Sustainment Command Judge Advocate General at the Calhoun County Courthouse in Anniston, Ala. (Katherine Dowd/U.S. Army National Guard)

Four independent military prosecution offices created by Congress have invoked their authority in the past two months to take the decision-making in 2,658 courts-martial from generals and admirals.

Under the new policy, which took effect Dec. 28, 162 specially trained attorneys serving in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines would have the last say on bringing court-martial charges against defendants for 13 specific offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military’s legal statutes, the Pentagon said.

The crimes include murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, rape, certain sex crimes, crimes against children, intimidation such as stalking or retaliation, and the possession or distribution of pornographic or intimate images or other materials. Sexual harassment will become part of the jurisdiction of the counsels on Jan. 1, 2025.

Four special counsels have been created — one each for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, which will also handle cases involving the Space Force. The attorneys will be among the 2,000 staffers working for the four offices, according to the Pentagon.

Officials with each service’s special trial counsel confirmed last week the number of cases investigated or prosecuted under the new policy. The Air Force said its counsel invoked court-martial authority in 970 cases. The Navy counsel took over 855 cases. The Army has moved 594 cases to its counsel. The Marines moved 239 cases.

Prior to the policy, commanding officers had great leeway on when to prosecute, who would sit on court-martial panels, and what the sentences would be, according to a Defense Department briefing in December.

Critics in Congress such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and advocates for victims of sex crimes such as former Air Force prosecutor Don Christensen have said top military officers were not recommending charges in many sex abuse cases. In others, commanders were accused of reducing or negating punishments determined in courts-martial.

The new policy was supported by some lawmakers, such as Gillibrand, who had introduced legislation calling for special counsels more than a decade ago.

“It took a long time to pass my reforms, but finally, victims of sexual assault and other serious crimes have the independent, impartial justice system they deserve,” she has said.

It also had backing from others, including Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who has said she was sexually harassed during her 23-year career in the Army, in which she rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

A majority in both chambers of Congress supported an end to command influence on courts-martial, according to an April 2021 report in the New York Times. The 2020 killing at Fort Cavazos, Texas, of Spc. Vanessa Guillen, whose reports of sexual harassment went uninvestigated prior to her death, drew national attention and helped spark the change. An internal Pentagon report cited by The Times said younger enlisted personnel did not trust their commands to fairly investigate complaints — a view that some Pentagon leaders said could undermine military retention and recruiting.

In January 2021, President Joe Biden ordered Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to create a commission to review sexual assault in the military. The 13-member panel of civilian experts and former military leaders issued a report with 82 recommendations, including an end to command decisions in sex crime cases.

Austin endorsed the recommendations to create special prosecutors to handle sex crime cases, as did Biden. Congress passed the framework for what became the offices of special counsel in December 2021 and created training to staff the operations. Biden issued an executive order in July 2023 to amend the UCMJ to remove commanders from sex crime decisions.

“It’s the most important reform to our military justice system since the creation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1950,” Austin said in a statement in December.

Under the new policy, new cases involving the 13 selected crimes that are reported after Dec. 28 will automatically go to the new special counsels. However, the policy also allows the counsels to review cases already underway and assume the prosecution from the existing command.

At least one case involving the 13 offenses has already been tried under the new policy and led to a conviction, according to Michelle McCaskill, communications director for the Army Office of Special Trial Counsel, which is based in Fort Belvoir, Va.

Army Sgt. Antonio Robert Aden, 27, an active-duty soldier on Okinawa, was found guilty on Feb. 7 of rape and sexual assault of victims in California and South Korea, according to McCaskill. The case was originally charged by U.S. Army Japan.

Aden was sentenced to 20 years in prison, a dishonorable discharge, a reduction to the rank of private, and forfeiture of all pay and allowances.

Aside from the 13 crimes moved to the special counsels, all other UCMJ violations remain under the authority of commanding officers, according to memos released in December by each service.

Commanding officers are required to forward any allegations regarding violations of the 13 crimes to the offices of the special counsels in their service to determine whether to pursue charges.

“Our office has been empowered to independently evaluate and prosecute cases based on the facts and evidence, free from outside influence,” Col. Rob Rodrigues, acting lead special trial counsel for the Army, said Dec. 28 —the first day of the new policy.

Stars and Stripes · by Gary Warner · February 21, 2024

20. The epic battle that saved Kyiv from Russian occupation

The epic battle that saved Kyiv from Russian occupation

We spent months painstakingly piecing together eyewitness accounts of the most important battle of the war so far: This is the Battle of Antonov Airfield.

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/the-epic-battle-that-saved-kyiv-from?

TIM MAK

FEB 22, 2024

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Editor’s note: Ahead of the two-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion, we are taking the step of making this issue full available to the public.

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Russian helicopters fly over Kyiv as the invasion began two years ago.

“Where’s my artillery?” demanded the voice on the phone. 

It was Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Russian paratroopers had landed on Antonov Airfield, 20 miles northwest of central Kyiv, despite courageous efforts by Ukrainian special operators and the Fourth Brigade of the National Guard to defend the grounds. 

By 3 p.m. on February 24th, 2022, the first day of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces had been forced to pull back to the perimeter of the strategic site. 

This single moment was the point of maximum danger and vulnerability for the survival of the modern Ukrainian state. 

Having taken the airfield in an air assault, the Russians now had the opportunity to land massive cargo planes filled with armored vehicles and thousands of troops, right in the suburbs of Kyiv. With that ability, the city could fall within hours, and with it, the democratically-elected government.

It fell to Col. Oleksandr Vdovichenko, the commander of Ukraine’s 72nd Brigade, to make sure that the Russians couldn’t hold the airfield. 

Vdovichenko stands in a park in Kyiv, a city he and his unit helped save.

But Vdovichenko didn’t have much to work with. He told Zaluzhny that a mere four pieces of 2S3 artillery, Soviet-era guns firing 152.4mm rounds, were en route to firing positions near the airfield. Everything else was still being unloaded from train carriages in Kyiv. 

Zaluzhny ordered that they open fire on the runway as soon as they could – they needed to disable it immediately.

The colonel had no time to think about it then, but he was fighting in the most important battle of the war. If Putin was able to take the airfield intact, the Russian military would be able to bypass a long trek over land, and bring soldiers right in to take the capital. 

“The Battle for Kyiv could have ended with a Russian victory had they taken the airfield," said Nick Reynolds, a research fellow at the British think tank RUSI. "Russian offensive operations would have been much easier." 

Approaching one of the main hangars at Antonov Airfield.

During the disorganized, frenzied battle that followed, Ukrainian resistance – and luck – turned the tide of the entire war. 

This epic stand by the people who fought at Antonov Airfield pierced the idea of Russian military superiority, and of a quick military victory. Shocked as they were about the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian morale skyrocketed with this tale of resistance.

The story of this epic, 36-hour battle is also the story of how Ukrainians prevented Kyiv from falling into Russian hands. 

It’s why we are talking about fighting in the east of Ukraine now rather than fighting in the west. 

And it’s arguably why Volodmyr Zelenskyy is still alive.

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Hundreds of Russia’s elite troops storm the airfield

In the first hours of his invasion, Vladimir Putin ordered his most elite troops to get behind enemy lines, to an airfield right outside Kyiv that was normally used for cargo and flight testing. Dozens of helicopters ferried hundreds of Russian airborne soldiers to within striking distance of the capital city’s central district.

The Russians had already successfully hit two air defense sites that were responsible for protecting the skies north of Kyiv, allowing a helicopter air assault from the direction of Belarus. 

It was about 11 a.m. when the sound of helicopter rotors began filling the air near Antonov airfield. Still in a state of confusion or denial, both civilians and soldiers near the airfield thought it must be some sort of training exercise. 

Inside the cockpit of a Russian Ka-52 helicopter during a combat mission over Antonov Airfield on Feb. 24, 2022.

Russian Ka-52 helicopters patrolled the airspace around the airfield, shooting at everything that moved. Nicknamed ‘The Alligator,’ for their battlefield capabilities, these attack helicopters made large, looping circles above the airfield as they fired and prepared for additional attack runs. One of them hit a fuel tank, setting up dark smoke that could be seen from miles away. 

Russian helicopters were firing everywhere, shooting unguided rockets at the airfield, office buildings, buses, and a hangar. There was no discernible strategy or effort to avoid hitting civilian targets.

Helicopters over Antonov Airfield on the day of the invasion.

The Russian airborne troops, numbering in the hundreds, landed in several groups: two assaulted from the west side of the airfield, while one came from the east. Soldiers and civilians in the area say that about three dozen helicopters were involved in the initial rush to secure the airfield.

The images from that day are surreal and cinematic: helicopters bursting across the sky with urban backdrops. Ukrainians filmed from their windows as ferried soldiers whizzed by, headed to Antonov Airfield. 

It was like a scene out of Black Hawk Down: soldiers moving effortlessly in unison as they assaulted an airfield operations building, a thick plume of black smoke billowing in the distance, and attack helicopters racing overhead releasing a burst of flares.

Russian troops dashed off helicopters, moving quickly to take control of the control tower and the adjacent airfield administration building. 

"Contact left!" shouted one soldier as Ukrainian forces began firing at them. "Let's go!” shouted another, as they rushed forward. In the chaos, a Russian is shown yelling through a bullhorn: "Soldiers of Ukrainian army: Put down your weapons and give up!"

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

Only about 200 Ukrainian soldiers had been left to guard the airfield, many of them conscripts who were barred by law from taking part in combat. They were supply officers, press officers, financial officers, and military firefighters assigned to the brigade's headquarters. Most had no experience in battle: a local commander estimated that less than twenty men had seen combat prior to the morning of the invasion. 

The Ukrainian soldiers were also lightly armed: they had an ancient, Cold War era anti-aircraft autocannon known as the ZU-23-2, but very little ammunition for it; They had some rocket propelled grenades, but again, only a handful of rounds. 

For the most part, they used small arms against the incoming helicopters – a terribly unfair fight. Lt. Andrii Kulish, a rare combat-hardened soldier who had already spent years fighting Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, was among those troops who tried to delay the Russian advance. 

“I cannot say that the guys were panicking,” he recalled. “It’s hard to say why. Maybe they didn’t know what to expect.” 

After all, there were plenty of reasons to panic. Kulish had just four magazines for his rifle – a mere 120 rounds. 

But one thing that the Ukrainian defenders did have was a Soviet-made Igla, a surface to air missile launcher. A National Guard soldier, specializing in anti-air operations, managed to hit a Ka-52, sending it to the earth and boosting the morale of the Ukrainian defenders. 

It was among the few bright points of that morning. Hours of fighting commenced, with rounds upon rounds of incoming Russian automatic cannon and rocket fire. 

Kulish began firing at the low-flying helicopters from his first floor office, taking cover as they approached, and then popping out to take shots after they passed by. Other Ukrainian defenders took cover between cars, ultimately managing to damage the heavily armored helicopters with just their rifles.

Looking out over the airfield, from a destroyed office building owned by the Antonov company.

The lead attack helicopter on the scene that morning was immediately shot down, said Russian pilot Ivan Boldyrev, in an interview with Telekanal Zvezda, a Russian network owned by the Ministry of Defense. “They shot from all sides,” he said. Incoming fire damaged his main gearbox and left engine, forcing him to retreat.

Running out of ammunition and about to be overrun, the Ukrainian National Guard forces made the decision to withdraw in the early afternoon, getting into a shootout with Russian forces as they did. 

Miraculously, none of these Ukrainian soldiers were killed in combat. The Russian troops were, however, able to capture a number of soldiers who were guarding a radar station as prisoners, as well as Ukrainian border officials that worked at the airfield. 

The Russians had been confused when the Ukrainians fought so fiercely. 

“Our guys were interrogated by Russians and they asked our guys, ‘Why did you shoot back?’ explained Kulish. “So apparently they were so brainwashed that they just thought that there would be absolutely no resistance from us.”

The border officials and prisoners of war were forced by the Russian troops to collect bodies that day. They said that the number of Russian dead totaled 80 soldiers.

Members of the National Guard unit after the initial battle at Antonov Airfield.

Ultimately, video released at the time shows Russian soldiers unfurling two Russian flags on the roof of a building at Antonov Airfield by mid-afternoon on the 24th. 

It was around that time that Zaluzhny made his call to Col. Vdovichenko.

They needed to turn the tide, and quickly.

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Ukrainians taken off guard, despite warnings from the West

How did it even get to this point? 

Most Ukrainians to this day will recall how impossible the prospect of a full-scale invasion felt before it happened. A common line of thinking was that the Russians were merely pretending to invade, in order to create uncertainty among the international business community and cause trouble for the Ukrainian economy.

This naïveté extended to the Ukrainian government. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was downplaying the threat of an invasion until almost the very end – he later said it was because he was also concerned about the economy. 

Zelenskyy was hardly alone in his assessment: European officials told Ukraine they didn’t see it as likely, and in particular it took the Germans so off guard that the chief of its foreign intelligence service was in Ukraine when the invasion happened, and had to be evacuated by special forces. 

“We are here,” Zelenskyy said from a video in central Kyiv on February 25th, 2022, as fighting continued around Antonov Airfield.

Even among those who thought that a full-scale invasion was likely, there were doubts that it would target Kyiv. But the Ukrainians can’t say they weren’t warned: CIA Director William Burns visited Kyiv less than two months before the invasion, specifically warning that the Russians would try to seize Antonov Airfield, in order to create an air bridge into the Kyiv region, swiftly overthrow the government, and capture the capital.

This information was not appropriately acted on. Kulish is part of the 4th Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard, which has a base located adjacent to Antonov Airfield. 

When explosions began on the day of the invasion, virtually none of the brigade was present at their base. 90 percent of the unit had been deployed to the east: infantry battalions, tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft defenses – several thousand troops were sent away from the critical airfield, ignoring American warnings that it would be the site of a Russian attack. 

“Some part of your nature, until the very end, tries to resist it and does not believe that [the Russians] will actually do this,” Vdovichenko explained, citing wishful thinking.

Walking around the ruins of a building at Antonov Airfield.

Antonov, the Ukrainian aircraft company that owned the airfield, also acted as if it did not take the threat of invasion seriously. The Ukrainian intelligence agency, the SBU, said that a subsequent investigation revealed that company officials prohibited the Ukrainian military from building defensive fortifications at the airport before the invasion. 

“We were discussing employee procedures in case there were missile attacks, but the physical capture of the airfield – we were not ready for that,” an Antonov company official said.

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Russian arrogance meets Ukrainian unpreparedness 

While the Ukrainians were engaged in wishful thinking, Russian planners were plotting.

“The Russians sought to conduct an air assault to rapidly seize the airport and secure it,” said George Barros, a Russia and Ukraine analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “Meanwhile, elements of the Russian Central and Eastern Military Districts would drive south from Belarus to Kyiv’s western outskirts and link up with the Airborne forces in Hostomel, relieving them.”

The plan called for 18 enormous Russian strategic cargo planes, IL-76s, to fly to the newly-secured Antonov Airfield with further reinforcements of infantry, armored vehicles, and artillery.

A Russian IL-76 flies over the Tver region of Russia in a stock photo (Getty Images)

There had also been a well-thought out infiltration scheme in which Russia supporters already in Ukraine would help airborne and special operations troops access the capital, less than an hour’s drive away. It had been widely reported that assassins and saboteurs were on the streets of Kyiv in those days, seeking to decapitate the government and kill Zelenskyy.

There were traitors among the Ukrainians: an Antonov Airfield employee’s son had connections to Russian intelligence, and reportedly revealed where the airfield’s air defenses were. 

For this critical and risky mission, the Russian military relied on the VDV – its elite airborne forces. The VDV is considered the most competent, professional and combat-experienced part of the Russian military. 

The Russian military has a history of airborne assaults, such when they captured Prishtina airport in Kosovo in 1999. In 1968, Soviet troops swiftly captured an airport in Prague, allowing large cargo aircraft to arrive and unload tanks to crush the Prague Spring. In both cases – and unlike at Antonov Airfield – they met little to no resistance.  

And it appears the Russians were counting on that again. 

Russian news sources show the VDV soldiers loading up onto trucks at Mozyr airfield in Belarus, presumably to take them to waiting helicopters. As they embraced each other and prepared for combat, they placed duct tape on their arms to identify themselves to fellow Russian soldiers. 

Russian troops prepare in Belarus for the attempted seizure of Antonov Airfield. Footage posted by RT.

The Russians thought it would be a cakewalk – that they would be met with locals bearing bread and salt, a traditional Slavic welcoming gesture. So confident were they that on the first morning of the invasion, freshly landed Russian airborne troops were walking casually around the outskirts of Antonov Airfield, 30 km from the heart of Kyiv. 

This careless approach would have terrible consequences for Putin’s plan. 

Low on ammunition, a convoy of soldiers from the Georgian Legion – a group of foreign fighters supporting Ukraine – were driving around Antonov Airfield, having spent hours shuttling rifle rounds to and from the battlefield. 

One Georgian Legion soldier, Mamuka Mamulashvili, watched as Russian troops walked along the perimeter of the airfield. Lacking bullets to fire his weapon, he stepped on the pedal in his black 2000 BMW 5 Series, turning his vehicle towards the Russian soldiers on the road. 

"It was very chaotic,” he recalled. “So we just pressed the gas and fucked them up." 

Multiple cars in his convoy would run over the Russian troops.

The Russian soldiers – he said he didn’t count how many – were uninterested in his civilian car up until the moment he ran them over. The bloody story exemplified everything about the haphazard battle, in which Russian arrogance met Ukrainian unpreparedness. 

Mamuka Mamulashvili stands outside the Georgian Legion headquarters outside Kyiv.

Russian troops also fired indiscriminately, without clear objectives. Around noon, fighting on the airfield set three aircraft on fire. They had been fully fueled and prepared for takeoff at short notice. Civilian emergency workers rushed over to put out the fire, an airfield official said, and were killed.

They were among the first alleged war crimes of the full-scale Russian invasion (there are now more than 125,000). 

Three bodies were later recovered, but the body of the man who led the emergency services brigade still hasn’t been found.

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The result of the Battle of Antonov Airfield was, in at least some small part, due to luck and timing. By 3 pm on February 24th, Russian troops had hoisted their flags over the airfield. 

Colonel Vdovichenko was determined to deny them a stronghold. His brigade was only at about 50 percent of its capacity, but had been battle-hardened in the years before the full-scale invasion.

As soon as his artillery rolled into place near Antonov Airfield, he ordered them to open fire. A local commander pushed back: “aren’t our people there?” came the response. Even then, there was a sense of bewilderment that the Russians could be in their backyard. 

After double-checking that Russians had taken the airfield, artillery fire began around 5 p.m.

“It was to show them that we can reach out and hit the airstrip, so [that they would feel] afraid to land on it,” Vdovichenko explained. “They still had the physical opportunity to do so, but they were afraid to do it because we were showing them that we had clear fire control over the airfield.” 

The colonel ordered bridges pre-rigged with explosives to be destroyed, to halt any Russian advances. As Ukrainian troops fought to retake the airfield, control of the strategic site switched back and forth. 

"Fuck, at least one more day and it would be easier, you know, and we would be more prepared,” he recalled. “One more day. 24 hours. And we didn't have 24 hours." 

But ultimately the defenders on the airfield, and Vdovichenko’s four artillery pieces, bought that crucial time for other forces around Kyiv to prepare. 

The artillery opened fire, he said, “just in time.” 

Vdovichenko’s artillery were soon joined by two Ukrainian Su-24 bombers which Kulish saw hit the runway.

The blasts damaged the surface of the airstrip, destroyed lighting along the runway, and knocked out navigation equipment. From that point on, the airfield was ineffective as a place for the Russian military to land troops and vehicles.

Overhead satellite imagery of Antonov Airfield, northwest of Kyiv.

Frantic fighting continued for control of the airfield itself, leading to confusion over who controlled the grounds. As night fell, impromptu groups of Ukrainian volunteers, some armed only with rifles and many without body armor, ambushed and were ambushed by Russian troops around the perimeter of the airfield. 

The Ukrainian government was handing out rifles to whoever would take them at this point, and one senior Ukrainian officer said that in the initial days, “there were random civilians firing at Russians.”

“I have goosebumps [recalling this] because for me the most important thing wasn't even the technical aspects of a single battle… It was just this spirit that everyone was together… everyone wants to fuck [the Russians] up at that moment,” Vdovichenko said. “For the Battle of Kyiv, it was just us. There were no individuals. It was just us. That was the great thing about it.”

Ukrainian staff on the airfield had made a critical decision that would buy time: they opted to block the airstrip with large trucks and vehicles, all along the runway, so it would be impossible for anyone – Russian or Ukrainian – to quickly land or take off.

The Russian IL-76s cargo planes that were to bring in an additional thousand troops, along with armored vehicles, turned around mid-air and returned to Belarus.

It’s not known precisely why – but the blockages on the runway, active combat, artillery fire on the airfield and the failure of Russian troops to secure the airfield likely played a key role. 

The destroyed remains of Mriya, the Antonov An-225, which before its destruction at Antonov Airfield during this battle had been the largest plane in the world.

Russian forces ultimately took control of Antonov Airfield, but their tactical victory was also an extremely costly one. The time spent fighting for control of it allowed Ukrainian forces to build up defenses of the city, and for Vdovichenko to bring more armored vehicles and artillery to the fight for the broader Battle for Kyiv.

The Battle of Antonov Airfield took around 36 hours, and effectively ended with the Russians taking control of a disabled airfield, rendered useless by Ukrainian attacks. 

The occupation of the airfield lasted much longer: until early April. 

During the period, some of Russia’s best troops were worn down by relentless ambushes and attacks. Long columns of Russian vehicles were stuck in traffic jams, stuck in rough terrain and under constant harassment by Ukrainian anti-tank teams. 

Russian generals quickly learned that they would not be taking Kyiv in 72 hours. 

It took another month and a half to learn they wouldn’t be taking Kyiv at all.

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After the Battle of Antonov Airfield, Ukrainian forces retreated south to the other side of the Irpin River to hold the Russians away from the center of the capital.

Tatiana Slesareva, a retired math teacher living near the airfield, counted 36 helicopters the morning that the battle kicked off. Troops began patrolling and checking Tatiana’s house twice a day – along with an enormous, ceaseless rumbling, the constant movement of howitzers and artillery and armored vehicles. Tatiana’s husband refused to leave their home, and she refused to leave him – so they stayed through the entire occupation.

Tatiana sits in her garden with pieces of shells and missiles that she found on her property, the result of the battles around her home.

She spoke often with the young Russian soldiers who walked by her home – they were shocked that the Ukrainians were not prepared to accept their “liberation.” One time, she spoke to a Russian commander, whose troops had just come back from a bruising defeat. 

“He started to speak to me in this hostile manner. ‘Do you know what happened? I have a friend left behind there, in a tank. His legs were ripped off!’” she recounted. “‘What have we done to you? We came to liberate you!’”

Tatiana stood her ground, telling the commander, “Why did you come here? This is our homeland. Obviously we’re going to defend it.” 

The period left her with terrible mental scars. As we talk about the period of occupation, when she was without electricity, gas, or information from the outside world, she lets out these involuntary grunts and moans. This is more than a year later. 

One day during the occupation period, she felt that something was off: the dogs weren’t barking, even the chickens in the yard were silent. The normal screech and whine of vehicles and tanks were absent. 

“We actually were more mostly terrified of calm, peaceful moments,” she said, “always anticipating the worst during silence.” 

Chickens which survived the period. ofRussian occupation, in the front yard of Tatiana’s home.

At first, they were too petrified to do anything – but three days passed, and she told her husband that they should walk around to see what they could find out. 

“I saw eight people walking towards me,” she said. From a distance, she couldn’t tell who they were – Russian or Ukrainian.

“And I asked them, ‘are you ours?’” she recalls. “And they responded, ‘we are yours.’ And then I started to cry uncontrollably… it was impossible for me to talk.” 

They had been liberated. 

Ukrainian forces rushed to retake Antonov Airfield, abandoned by retreating Russian forces who abandoned the city, concluding the Battle for Kyiv. The Ukrainians had, by sweat and blood, pushed the invading force out. 

Destroyed vehicles at Antonov Airfield.

With a little luck, they prevented Russia from fulfilling their plan of capturing the airfield and immediately using it to bring in thousands of troops, along with tanks, artillery and armored vehicles that would have been put to work in an attempt to capture Kyiv. 

The fact that it did not happen comes down to three events, none of which were coordinated:  

First, the Antonov Company put trucks out on the runway, preventing massive Russian cargo planes from landing. 

Second, the unprepared and understrength Ukrainian defenders of the airfield did just enough to repel the initial waves of the Russian assault, preventing the clearing of the runway. 

And finally, Ukrainian commanders belatedly recognized how vulnerable the airfield was and ordered its destruction through bombardment, greatly reducing its value to the Russian military.

Another couple who lives adjacent to Antonov Airfield describes the horrors of living through the Russian occupation.

The battle had enormous strategic consequences, among them a message to the Russian military and the world that Ukrainians would resist the Russian military ferociously. 

The combat at Hostomel Airfield also blunted Russian momentum and the advantage of surprise – ultimately leading to Russians failing to encircle Kyiv, decapitate the government, or control the capital city. 

It wasn’t neat or pretty, but the disorganized defense of the airfield showed Ukrainian will against extraordinary odds. 

It exemplified the national spirit in those early days of war. 

And it’s the reason why Ukrainians still control Kyiv today.

Ross Pelekh, Alessandra Hay and Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova contributed to this story.

21. How Was Israel Caught Off-Guard?

​Excerpts:

Another lesson here lies in the risks associated with pinning excessive hope on one of the most common (and intuitively appealing) recommendations for avoiding strategic surprise —promoting institutional pluralism in assessments and encouraging devil’s advocacy. Israeli intelligence did this in response to the trauma of the 1973 war, implementing the recommendations of the Agranat Commission of Inquiry that followed. Yet the practice of devil’s advocacy atrophied over time, while pluralism proved insufficient. The combination of routinized practice, groupthink, and policy pressure largely defeated its utility. Recent evidence suggests that last September the department in Israeli’s military intelligence that was supposed to play a devil’s advocate role did in fact warn that Hamas was becoming more conflict prone, but these warnings were dismissed.

This leads to the biggest takeaway. In final analysis, governments should periodically revisit their precise expectations of warnings from the intelligence community to ascertain that these are not only realistic but also adjusted to changing circumstances and policy priorities. They should recognize the ever-present risks of relying on intelligence at the expense of planning for unexpected scenarios. Most policymakers would rather not worry about threats that their intelligence services view as unlikely. Prediction and estimates should not supplant preparedness, as they will inevitably lead to occasional failure. Some, perhaps subconsciously, are eager to have intelligence as a convenient scapegoat should debacles occur. But it falls to policymakers to realize that intelligence is always imperfect. For this reason, prediction should never take the place of preparedness.

How Was Israel Caught Off-Guard? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Ariel Levite · February 22, 2024

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks did not happen out of the blue. They were preceded by years of bitter conflict, ever since the group consolidated its control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Months later, it remains deeply puzzling how Israel was caught so woefully unprepared.

Conventional explanations advanced over the years by numerous scholars and practitioners analyzing similar historical fiascoes provide part of the answer. The surprise can be attributed to abundant noise, deception, wishful thinking, groupthink, and failure of imagination. Nevertheless, careful analysis of the case at hand highlights several additional factors. The degree of surprise reflected an intelligence-collection shortfall on Hamas’ intentions. There was an over-reliance on warning systems, a misguided policy and military attitude toward Hamas, and a toxic relationship between Israel’s top leadership and its defense and intelligence establishment. These factors both distracted the establishment and systematically discouraged a confrontation with Hamas. Taken together, these factors underscore the need for countries to recalibrate their expectations regarding warnings of potential attacks and to put a newfound emphasis on readiness rather than prediction.

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Roberta Wohlstetter’s pioneering study of the Pearl Harbor disaster triggered a voluminous literature seeking to understand how surprise attacks happen. Wohlstetter drew attention to signal-to-noise ratios, as well as to the bias introduced by their analysis in hindsight. Subsequently, scholars examining similar historical cases — notably the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, the Egyptian–Syrian October 1973 attack on Israel, and 9/11 — further drew attention to the role of deception and diverse psychological barriers, biases, and cognitive pathologies. Other authors were inspired by related academic contributions on the role of flawed decision-making dynamics (such as groupthink) in distorting awareness and commensurate responses. A related literature has examined the contribution of institutional and irrational factors, as well as misleading human heuristics for dealing with uncertainty and complexity, associated with estimates of probability. In short, scholars commonly trace surprises back to this set of rather common and persistent psychological, institutional, and political roots, even if they typically differ in the relative weight they assign to this or that factor in specific cases.

However, when applied to the events of Oct. 7, these explanations manifest two problems that have also plagued many earlier studies of surprise attacks. First, they build upon the contentious premise that the quality of the advance warning available to the victim was more than adequate to anticipate the attack. This premise is heavily influenced by the lack of a comparative benchmark of warning indicators and thus highly susceptible to hindsight bias. Second, by focusing on one observable outcome — a glaring disaster in the face of a bold adversarial action — they generally fail to disaggregate two analytically distinct phenomena: The failure of intelligence to anticipate and warn of an impending attack, and the inadequate military preparations in the face of an unanticipated threat. Israel not only failed to anticipate such a bold Hamas assault, but also lacked adequate plans, forces, and levels of readiness to effectively respond to such a scenario.

The 10/7 Intelligence Failure

Israeli intelligence contributed to this by failing to foresee that such a large, sophisticated onslaught was viable or coming, notwithstanding multiple tactical and operational signs accumulating over time. When the internal security service (Shabak) finally caught on to some disconcerting signals from Gaza hours before the attack started, its head apparently interpreted these as suggesting merely a localized kidnapping attempt, ordering only a modest effort to confront it.

On the face of it, this in itself remains shocking. The Hamas threat has been high on Israel’s radar since 2007. An extensive intelligence apparatus was tasked with monitoring the group’s activities and assessing its intentions. Additionally, the Israeli intelligence community, badly shaken by the surprise attack of 1973, was nominally hypersensitive to the prospects of another one. And a sizable Israeli military force was routinely deployed next to the Gaza Strip, tasked with protecting the population and responding to Hamas’ almost constant provocations and periodic attacks.

Furthermore, Hamas’ extensive, methodical planning and preparations for the attack and its intensifying dress rehearsals took place in plain sight of Israeli observers. These were spotted in real time and widely reported, but they were mostly interpreted as intensifying training exercises rather than an attack in the making. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that these warning indicators appear clairvoyant, presaging concrete attack preparations — whereas at the time all they revealed was the acquisition of the capability to attack, or perhaps an indication (as has often been the case with Hamas) of politically motivated saber rattling.

The nature of the Israeli–Hamas conflict was such that Israeli intelligence was put in the unenviable position of being expected first and foremost to assess Hamas’ intentions rather than its capabilities. While Israeli intelligence did correctly estimate earlier in the year the probability of war with one or more Arab parties to meaningfully rise in the course of 2023, prior to Oct. 7, Israeli intelligence never managed to obtain a “smoking gun” of Hamas leadership’s intentions to carry out a bold attack, let alone its timing. The consequences of this failure were exacerbated by the supreme confidence of the intelligence chiefs — as well as the consumers of their intelligence — that they would in fact obtain concrete early warning ahead of any sizable attack. This was further reinforced by their successful track record in discovering Hamas’ strategic and operational secrets and correctly estimating its behavior.

Remarkably, some intelligence officials are reported to have concluded in the months preceding the attack that the quality of their coverage of Hamas’ intentions was slipping and required bolstering. This assessment, however, did not fundamentally shake the widespread expectation that a Hamas decision to deviate from its past behavior and undertake bolder action than mere skirmishes along the border would not go undetected. This set the stage for a colossal intelligence failure when tightened Hamas compartmentalization, a thicker veil of secrecy on its plans, and perhaps some deliberate deception over its intentions succeeded in depriving Israel of explicit signals presaging an attack.

Absent explicit warning indicators, all Israeli intelligence could do was offer estimates of Hamas’ calculus and intentions, which in retrospect seem badly misguided. Apparently, they were led astray by some combination of five factors.

The first was an over-reliance on their formidable technical intelligence apparatus — primarily signals intelligence — to offset the collection difficulty associated with prying open, through human intelligence, the innermost secrets of Hamas’ top leaders. As the CIA director recently observed, human intelligence is especially critical for assessing a leader’s intent, yet exceedingly difficult to obtain in secretive and tight-knit leadership circles. The second was cultural arrogance, leading the Israeli establishment to grossly underestimate the capacity and audacity of Hamas. The group was viewed as a mere second-tier terrorist or paramilitary organization (certainly in comparison to Hizballah), hardly capable of mounting a sophisticated low-tech attack against the vastly superior Israel Defense Forces. The third was institutional chauvinism. This manifested itself in systematic undervaluation of warnings sounded by junior women in various observation and collection units, and perhaps reflecting that fact that women are hugely underrepresented in the higher echelons of Israeli intelligence. The fourth was bandwidth limitations on Israeli intelligence, which was simultaneously focused on disconcerting developments and operational requirements in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Finally, Hamas deception may have played a role, as perhaps did the crying wolf syndrome; Israeli intelligence had previously warned of a possible attack on April 23 that Hamas then called off, apparently realizing that its plans had been compromised.

The Causes of Unpreparedness

The Israeli military’s standing forces and contingency plans proved woefully inadequate to effectively contain and subsequently respond to the 10/7 Hamas attack. With the partial exception of the internal security head who responded to non-specific but alarming signals hours before the attack by dispatching to the area a small counter-terrorism unit, Israeli units on the ground as well higher echelon commanders further afield were caught completely off-guard, woefully uninformed about the situation, and utterly unprepared to effectively address such a chaotic scene. For the better part of a day, the military’s reaction to Hamas’ atrocities was largely improvised, and by the time the military and security forces were able to regroup, much of the damage had already been done.

What accounts for this lack of preparedness? One factor was clearly Hamas’ choice to time the attack on the Sabbath, when many active-duty units are typically on home leave (reminiscent of the Egyptian–Syrian practice on Yom Kippur in October 1973). Perhaps more critical, though, were three additional factors. First was a deeply misplaced trust in the efficacy of Israeli deterrence. This was largely predicated on the Israeli military’s overwhelming overall superiority and the virtues of the billion-dollar, high-tech fence Israel has erected along its border with Gaza, which was believed to present a formidable barrier both above and below the ground.

Over time, the reliance on the efficacy of the fence induced complacency. This led to the decision to reclaim the rifles that Israel had originally issued to the emergency security teams in the border settlements and reassign standing military forces toward supposedly more pressing hot spots, a trend that had intensified in the days immediately preceding the attacks. Second, a measure of cultural arrogance, conceptual rigidity, and groupthink prevented Israeli officials from recognizing the calculus guiding the Hamas leadership. Strikingly, all the way up to Oct. 7, Israeli policymakers sustained their belief that Hamas’ top leadership was not only deterred from escalation but also heavily motivated by self-preservation and greed. Thus, they assumed that Israel could use small gestures, ranging from work permits for Gazans in Israel to acquiescence in regular Qatari cash infusions, to preserve the status quo. Finally, besides general preoccupation with other (potentially graver threats) there was a more immediate distraction caused by the rapidly deteriorating situation on the West Bank, a threat that was especially politically sensitive for the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which resulted in the gradual redeployment of units away from the vicinity of Gaza to beef up the presence in the West Bank.

The Intelligence–Policy Nexus

These failures were compounded by trouble at the intelligence–policy nexus. First, relations between the prime minster, the defense minister (who he unsuccessfully tried to fire), and the security establishment had grown especially toxic after they repeatedly warned the prime minister earlier in 2023 about the adverse impact on Israeli security of his extreme right-wing government’s policies and the growing prospects of war as a result. Netanyahu resented their repeated warnings about the growing internal divide within Israeli society unleashed by his policies and the way these influenced foes’ perceptions of Israeli vulnerability.

Second, Netanyahu was less receptive to warnings about Hamas because he saw the group’s hostility toward Israel and rivalry with the Palestinian Authority as helpful bulwarks against external pressures to negotiate the formation of a Palestinian state. This perception of expediency manifested itself in his consistent decisions to try to “bribe” Hamas and resist repeated calls to check its militarization through a combination of sanctions and decisive military action. Netanyahu’s preference for seeking some form of modus vivendi with Hamas probably also factored in the formidable risks associated with launching a comprehensive preemptive Israeli military campaign against them, as well as his previous success in managing tensions with the group.

Conclusions

What lessons do these failures offer for other countries? Western countries in particular should be wary of an over-reliance on technological prowess to avoid human or political sacrifice. Technological solutions can work astoundingly well, as is the case with the Israeli missile defense systems or, initially, the Gaza fence and Israeli signals intelligence. However, they are rarely a panacea. Worse still, their very success can become self-defeating by breeding complacency as adversaries work to counter or bypass them. Governments should consistently subject to critical review (ideally drawing on ad hoc external experts) their threat assessment of the capabilities and intentions of supposedly second-rate players, allowing for the possibility that the combination of single-minded determination, the harvesting of ever more affordable commercial dual-use technology, and extensive foreign assistance could make them into very potent threat actors. Witness not only the al-Qaeda 9/11 and Hamas 10/7 attacks, but also the remarkable sophistication repeatedly demonstrated by the Houthis.

Another lesson here lies in the risks associated with pinning excessive hope on one of the most common (and intuitively appealing) recommendations for avoiding strategic surprise —promoting institutional pluralism in assessments and encouraging devil’s advocacy. Israeli intelligence did this in response to the trauma of the 1973 war, implementing the recommendations of the Agranat Commission of Inquiry that followed. Yet the practice of devil’s advocacy atrophied over time, while pluralism proved insufficient. The combination of routinized practice, groupthink, and policy pressure largely defeated its utility. Recent evidence suggests that last September the department in Israeli’s military intelligence that was supposed to play a devil’s advocate role did in fact warn that Hamas was becoming more conflict prone, but these warnings were dismissed.

This leads to the biggest takeaway. In final analysis, governments should periodically revisit their precise expectations of warnings from the intelligence community to ascertain that these are not only realistic but also adjusted to changing circumstances and policy priorities. They should recognize the ever-present risks of relying on intelligence at the expense of planning for unexpected scenarios. Most policymakers would rather not worry about threats that their intelligence services view as unlikely. Prediction and estimates should not supplant preparedness, as they will inevitably lead to occasional failure. Some, perhaps subconsciously, are eager to have intelligence as a convenient scapegoat should debacles occur. But it falls to policymakers to realize that intelligence is always imperfect. For this reason, prediction should never take the place of preparedness.

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Ariel (Eli) Levite is a senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Intelligence and Strategic Surprises.

Image: Wikimedia

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Ariel Levite · February 22, 2024

22. Special Ops Command sees change in mission as a return to roots

Here are some roots to return to (that should have been applied in Afghanistan).

Remote Area Operations

•Remote area operations are operations undertaken in insurgent-controlled or contested areas to establish islands of popular support for the HN government and deny support to the insurgents. They differ from consolidation operations in that they are not designed to establish permanent HN government control over the area. Remote areas may be populated by ethnic, religious, or other isolated minority groups. They may be in the interior of the HN or near border areas where major infiltration routes exist. Remote area operations normally involve the use of specially trained paramilitary or irregular forces. SF teams support remote area operations to interdict insurgent activity, destroy insurgent base areas in the remote area, and demonstrate that the HN government has not conceded control to the insurgents. They also collect and report information concerning insurgent intentions in more populated areas. In this case, SF teams advise and assist irregular HN forces operating in a manner similar to the insurgents themselves, but with access to superior combat support (CS) and combat service support (CSS) resources. (From FM 3-05.202 Foreign Internal Defense 2007.) (NOTE: No longer in current FID Doctrine)

Special Ops Command sees change in mission as a return to roots

militarynews.com · by Jim Garamone DOD News

U.S. Special Operations Command leaders see the current move to integrate the command into great power competition as a return to its roots.

Army Gen. Bryan Fenton and Army Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter, the commander and senior enlisted leader of Socom, spoke with the Defense Writers Group recently and discussed the changes happening in the world and Special Operations Command’s place in it.

The command has come off more than 20 years as America’s preeminent counterterrorism organization. Even before the attacks on the United States in September 2001, the command was tracking and pursuing violent extremist organizations around the world. The command operated against narco-trafficking gangs in Central and South America, as well as transnational criminal organizations in the Balkans. Socom came into its own in counterterrorism in operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, fundamentalist groups in Iraq and against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Special operators also worked with and formed relationships with national and indigenous forces from the Indo-Pacific to Europe to Africa and South America.

But before that, the special operations community was an integral part of great power competition working to “fill in the gaps” of conventional power structures when the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, Fenton said. “We still have to maintain and stay on the [violent extremist organization] threat because it has not gone away. What I will tell you is … the special operations command team frankly is born for the integrated deterrence, great power competition era.”

But while the mission set might be changing, the values behind the force are not. “The most important line of effort that we have in our headquarters is still our people,” said Shorter. “We’re not a platform-centric organization, we’re a people-centric organization.”

The first rule of the command is “Humans are more important than equipment,” and Fenton and Shorter are sticking with that.

Change is tough. Many in the command grew up in the organization when it was sometimes jokingly called “Counter Terrorism Command” and that is what they know. But Shorter said in travels around the command, service members are making the switch to great power competition and integrated deterrence. “We focused hard on the global war on terror, and I’m very proud of what we did, but we’ve never had [to] … pull ‘Socomians’ towards the nation’s main effort.”

So the bulk of the forces is absolutely laser focused on great power competition and integrated deterrence, Shorter said. Special operators are studying China and Russia. They are taking lessons learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine. They are studying the nature of all-domain combat and applying new tactics, techniques and procedures to it. They are also looking at better ways to integrate new technologies and equipment into the fight, the command sergeant major said.

“We always will be focused on the nation’s priorities and the department’s priorities,” Shorter said.

Still, the experience of counterinsurgency combat is valuable, and special operators can take that experience and apply it to new situations and new missions, he said.

Fenton said that people lead in the strategic priorities of the command. “If we have one more dollar to spend, we’re spending it on our people, and then we’ll wrap the technology around them,” he said.

That idea is born in the people attracted to special operations. Service members “go through a rigorous assessment selection process, and more arduous training because they really want to be at the leading edge,” Fenton said.

Transformation of the command also is all about people, the general said. Special operators must “think how we’re going to be prepared, not only in equipment or some level of technology to meet the world, but how are we thinking about the world differently,” he said. “We have to hold these different ideas in our head and actually still complete the mission, even though it doesn’t look the same as it did 20 years ago. But the outcome has still got to be the same. We’ve got to succeed for the nation.”

Typically, when a counterterrorism mission ends, organizations put the capability on the back burner. In the United States, this happened at the end of the Vietnam War and there are moves to cut the number of special operations personnel. This hits at another Special Operations truth: Special operations cannot be mass produced in times of a crisis.

The services, from whom Socom gets their recruits, are having trouble attracting new service members. Fenton said Socom has not felt that problem yet, but says it could happen further down the road. Fenton did say there is no retention problem in special operations, and that the command is already working with the services to improve the recruiting climate.

He has asked members of the command to reach out to recruiters when they travel in the United States to inform the American people about the military in general and Special Operations Command in particular.

militarynews.com · by Jim Garamone DOD News

22. Leaked files from Chinese firm show vast international hacking effort

Leaked files from Chinese firm show vast international hacking effort

By Christian Shepherd, Cate Cadell, Ellen Nakashima, Joseph Menn and Aaron Schaffer

Updated February 22, 2024 at 10:01 a.m. EST|Published February 21, 2024 at 8:00 p.m. EST

The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd · February 22, 2024

A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are carrying out large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — exploiting what the hackers claim are vulnerabilities in U.S. software from companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google.

The cache — containing more than 570 files, images and chat logs — offers an unprecedented look inside the operations of one of the firms that Chinese government agencies hire for on-demand, mass data-collecting operations.

The files — posted to GitHub last week and deemed credible by cybersecurity experts, although the source remains unknown — detail contracts to extract foreign data over eight years and describe targets within at least 20 foreign governments and territories, including India, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Taiwan and Malaysia. Indian publication BNN earlier reported on the documents.

“We rarely get such unfettered access to the inner workings of any intelligence operation,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst of Mandiant Intelligence, a cybersecurity firm owned by Google Cloud. “We have every reason to believe this is the authentic data of a contractor supporting global and domestic cyberespionage operations out of China,” he said.

U.S. intelligence officials see China as the greatest long-term threat to American security and have raised alarm about its targeted hacking campaigns.

Experts are poring over the documents, which offer an unusual glimpse inside the intense competition of China’s national security data-gathering industry — where rival outfits jockey for lucrative government contracts by pledging evermore devastating and comprehensive access to sensitive information deemed useful by Chinese police, military and intelligence agencies.

The documents come from iSoon, also known as Auxun, a Chinese firm headquartered in Shanghai that sells third-party hacking and data-gathering services to Chinese government bureaus, security groups and state-owned enterprises.

The trove does not include data extracted from Chinese hacking operations but lists targets and — in many cases — summaries of sample data amounts extracted and details on whether the hackers obtained full or partial control of foreign systems.

One spreadsheet listed 80 overseas targets that iSoon hackers appeared to have successfully breached. The haul included 95.2 gigabytes of immigration data from India and a 3 terabyte collection of call logs form South Korea’s LG U Plus telecom provider. The group also targeted other telecommunications firms in Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal and Taiwan. The Indian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the documents.

ISoon clients also requested or obtained infrastructure data, according to the leaked documents. The spreadsheet showed that the firm had a sample of 459GB of road-mapping data from Taiwan, the island of 23 million that China claims as its territory.

Road data could prove useful to the Chinese military in the event of an invasion of Taiwan, analysts said. “Understanding the highway terrain and location of bridges and tunnels is essential so you can move armored forces and infantry around the island in an effort to occupy Taiwan,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a national security expert and chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank.

Among other targets were 10 Thai government agencies, including the country’s foreign ministry, intelligence agency and senate. The spreadsheet notes that iSoon holds sample data extracted from those agencies from between 2020 and 2022. The Thai Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Most of the targets were in Asia, though iSoon received requests for hacks further afield. Chat logs included in the leak describe selling unspecified data related to NATO in 2022. It’s not clear whether the data was collected from publicly available sources or extracted in a hack. NATO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Another file shows employees discussing a list of targets in Britain, including its Home and Foreign offices as well Treasury. Also on the list were British think tanks Chatham House and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“In the current climate, we, along with many other organizations, are the target of regular attempted attacks from both state and non-state actors,” said a Chatham House spokesperson, who said the group is “naturally concerned” about the leaks but has protection measures in place.

Asked about the leaked documents, the U.K. foreign office declined to comment.

The hackers also facilitated attempts to extract information from close diplomatic partners including Pakistan and Cambodia.

China encourages hacking rivalry

ISoon is part of an ecosystem of contractors that emerged out of a “patriotic” hacking scene established over two decades ago and now works for a range of powerful government entities including the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security and the Chinese military.

According to U.S. officials, hackers with the People’s Liberation Army have breached computer systems in about two dozen key American infrastructure entities over the past year in an attempt to establish a foothold and be able to disrupt power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation system.

China’s model of mixing state support with a profit incentive has created a large network of actors competing to exploit vulnerabilities and grow their business. The scale and persistence of their attacks are headaches for American technology giants like X, Microsoft and Apple, which are now locked in a constant race to outsmart the hackers.

All software products have vulnerabilities, and a robust global marketplace rewards those who find back doors or develop tools known as exploits to take advantage of them. Many software vendors offer bounties to reward researchers who report security flaws, but government contractors in the United States and elsewhere often claim these exploits — paying more for the right to use them in espionage or offensive activity.

U.S. defense and intelligence contractors also develop tools for breaking into software, which are then used by federal officials in surveillance and espionage operations, or in offensive cyberweapons.

Chinese security researchers at private companies have demonstrably improved in recent years, winning a greater number of international hacking competitions as well as collecting more bounties from tech companies.

But the iSoon files contain complaints from disgruntled employees over poor pay and workload. Many hackers work for less than $1,000 a month, surprisingly low pay even in China, said Adam Kozy, a former FBI analyst writing a book on Chinese hacking.

The leaks hint at infighting and dissatisfaction in the network of patriotic Chinese hackers, despite the long-standing collaboration between groups.

Although it’s unclear who released the documents and why, cybersecurity experts said it may be an unhappy former employee or even a hack from a rival outfit.

The leaker presented themselves on GitHub as a whistleblower exposing malpractice, poor work conditions and “low quality” products that iSoon is using to “dupe” its government clients. In chats marked as featuring worker complaints, employees grumbled about sexism, long hours and weak sales.

Hackers for hire

Within China, these groups present themselves as essential to the Communist Party’s extensive campaign to eliminate threats to its rule from cyberspace.

China has in recent years escalated its efforts to trawl international public social media and trace targets abroad, though the crossover between public mass-monitoring and private hacking is often unclear.

ISoon has signed hundreds of deals with Chinese police that range from small jobs priced at $1,400 to multiyear contracts costing as much as $800,000, one spreadsheet showed.

The company’s leaked product manuals describe the services they offer and their prices, and boast about being able to steal data without detection. The product descriptions, targeted at state security clientele, at times use wartime language to describe a data-extraction mission underpinned by extreme threats to China’s national security.

“Information has increasingly become the lifeblood of a country and one of the resources that countries are scrambling to seize. In information warfare, stealing enemy information and destroying enemy information systems have become the key to defeating the enemy,” reads one document describing an iSoon package for sale that, it claims, would allow clients to access and covertly control Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail accounts by bypassing authentication protocols.

ISoon’s product manuals also advertise a $25,000 service for a “remote access” control system to obtain Apple iOS smartphone data from a target, including “basic mobile phone information, GPS positioning, mobile phone contacts” and “environment recording.”

One pitch advertised a service in which iSoon could efficiently conduct phishing campaigns against individuals or groups of Twitter users. Another outlined services that would allow the firm to remotely control targeted Windows and Mac operating systems.

Apple, Microsoft, Google and X, formerly Twitter, did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to striking long-term agreements, iSoon regularly worked on demand in response to requests from police in smaller Chinese cities and with private companies, according to pages of chat logs between the company’s top executives.

Sometimes the clients knew exactly what they wanted — for example, to find the identity of a specific Twitter user — but they also often made open-ended requests. In one exchange, employees discussed a request from a state security bureau in southern China asking if iSoon had much to offer on nearby Hong Kong. An iSoon employee suggested emails from Malaysia instead.

The scattershot approach appeared motivated in part by pressure from clients to deliver more and higher quality information. But despite the company boasting of cutting-edge capabilities, chats show that clients were regularly unimpressed with the hacked information.

ISoon repeatedly failed to extract data from government agencies, internal discussions showed, with some local authorities complaining about subpar intelligence.

Although some of iSoon’s services focused on domestic threats, the company often highlighted its ability to target overseas targets in the region — including government departments in India and Nepal, as well as in overseas Tibetan organizations — to attract clients. In December 2021, the group claimed that it had gained access to the intranet of the Tibetan Government in Exile, setting off a frantic search for a buyer. Some 37 minutes later, the company had found an interested client.

Another product — priced at $55,600 per package — is meant to allow control and management of discussion on Twitter, including using phishing links to access and take over targeted accounts. ISoon claims the system then allows clients to find and respond to “illegal” and “reactionary sentiments” using accounts that are centrally controlled by the client to “manipulate discussion.”

The documents show that iSoon met and worked with members of APT41, a Chinese hacking group that was charged by the U.S. Justice Department in 2020 for targeting more than 100 video game firms, universities and other victims worldwide.

Afterward, iSoon’s founder and CEO, Wu Haibo, who goes by the alias “shutd0wn,” joked with another executive about going for “41” drinks with Chengdu 404 — the organization APT41 is a part of — to celebrate them now being “verified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

But chat messages between executives from 2022 suggest that relations between the groups had soured because iSoon was late in paying Chengdu 404 more than 1 million yuan ($140,000). Chengdu 404 later sued iSoon in a dispute over a software development contract.

Wu and his team appeared blasé about the idea that they would one day be charged by U.S. authorities like APT41. In July 2022, an executive asked Wu whether the company was being closely watched by the United States. “Not bothered,” Wu replied. “It was a matter of sooner or later anyway.”

Neither iSoon nor Wu responded to emailed requests for comment.

Pei-Lin Wu and Vic Chiang in Taipei and Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd · February 22, 2024

23. War Books: The Works of Colin Gray

One of Professor Gray's overlooked areas of expertise is in special operations and irregular and unconventional warfare.

War Books: The Works of Colin Gray - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by ML Cavanaugh · February 23, 2024

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Editor’s note: Welcome to another installment of our weekly War Books series! The premise is simple and straightforward. We invite a participant to recommend five books and tell us what sets each one apart. War Books is a resource for MWI readers who want to learn more about important subjects related to modern war and are looking for books to add to their reading lists.

This week’s installment of War Books highlights the works of renowned strategist Colin Gray. February 27 marks the four year anniversary of his death. In addition to the contribution his works made to the community of individuals who study war and strategy, he made an important personal contribution to MWI by donating much of his personal library—thousands of books—to the organization. In this edition of War Books, retired Lieutenant Colonel ML Cavanaugh—a former MWI staff member who was also one of Colin’s PhD students at the University of Reading—highlights several of his books and describes the enduring value they offer to the study of war.

I knew Colin Gray well late in his life. In 2013 I had just finished a two-year master’s program at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and desperately wanted to continue work toward a PhD. American graduate schools wouldn’t accept my time in New Zealand as a stepping stone to the doctorate, so I cold-emailed Colin at the University of Reading in the UK. Surprisingly, he responded quickly that he liked my proposed topic, and so began five years of study under him (as well as Professor Beatrice Heuser, now at the University of Glasgow). Along the way, Colin retired from Reading, but continued as my advisor in his status as professor emeritus. It’s possible I was his final PhD student.

Colin was as much a writer as he was a thinker. That’s what drew me to him in the first place, and I suspect it’s the same for others. Arguably, nobody’s been so prolific a writer in strategic studies. His contributions are everywhere, and because much of it predates our digital age, much keeps popping up.

Some of his many fans may not know about a couple collections of his in the United States. For many years he wrote an annual manuscript for the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. And, as of 2019, the Modern War Institute at West Point houses his personal library. An email Colin wrote to me on the matter said he hoped his “written comments in the books add spice” to our debates and discussions.

What follows are just a few of his books that impacted me the most and why they were so impactful. They just scratch the surface, so I encourage others to explore more.

The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice

My copy of this book has almost as many post-it notes as pages. It seems like every paragraph pops with some new insight that requires reader notation for future reference. In particular, when I read Colin describe the lack of “careful and deep [study] of the role of the [supreme] commander” as a “prominent” weakness in “modern Western strategic theory,” I took that on as my dissertation subject. Moreover, when Eliot Cohen calls something the “first original and serious work on strategy” of the century, you should check it out.

Strategy & Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty

Colin listened to his students, even the greenest greenhorns. While he finished edits on this book, we had a back-and-forth in which I shared with him an essay written by H.R. McMaster from the New York Times. He liked it so much he included it as his opening epigraph. For a student, this was richly rewarding and felt like an actual (if miniscule) contribution toward scholarship in progress.

Strategy in the Contemporary World

Colin coedited (with John Baylis and James J. Wirtz) the finest comprehensive primer on strategic studies series out there, and I’ve benefited from and enjoyed each of the six editions out in publication.

Modern Strategy

This was my first, and you never forget your first. Because it predates my post-it policy for book preservation, it’s full of marginalia and magnificently ugly green fluorescent markings. I can still flip through it and bump into so many good ideas: the many different dimensions of strategy; a compelling argument that strategy, operations, and tactics aren’t really hierarchical and “not wholly distinctive”; and an explanation of why culture and the human dimension of strategy are often overlooked.

Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy

This slim volume of maxims is Colin’s most efficient ideas-per-page performance. This is where he most directly stated that there “are no new ideas in strategy.” Most writers simply “update the classics for a better fit with contemporary realities.” That said, this one was good enough to land on former Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s professional reading list.

The Future of Strategy

Another short book of Colin’s that made Mattis’s list. He began it by writing, “I am a strategist. For fifty years I have spoken, written and sought to advise [others] about strategy.” While the future of strategy may be murky, one thing is certain—it will forever include the words and works Colin Gray produced over those five decades. And we’re all the better for it.

ML Cavanaugh, PhD, is a retired US Army strategist. A cofounder of the Modern War Institute, he is a professor of practice with the Arizona State University School of Politics and Global Studies. He is also the coeditor of Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict and Winning Westeros: How Game of Thrones Explains Modern Military Conflict.

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

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by ML Cavanaugh · February 23, 2024

24. Preparing to Win the First Fight of the Next War

Excerpts:

If NTC is to keep faith with the founding vision of General DePuy and Major General Gorman, then the lessons of the war in Ukraine should inform the continuous and steady evolution of the way that we replicate the first battle of the next war. Adapting to this unfamiliar environment and incorporating the steady flow of observations from Ukraine is our number one focus and top priority here at NTC. Thus far, this adaptation has manifested in four ways: the transparent battlefield, greater use of mass precision strikes, greater synchronization required above the brigade level, and the battle of the narrative. This article, as part one of a two-part series, will provide an overview of how NTC is adapting to each of these emerging trends. Part two will provide specific recommendations for unit command teams as they prepare their units for this emerging operational environment.

....

Although no commander wants to be dragged into a public relations struggle while also fighting an existential battle for survival against a peer adversary, it is naive to assume that strategic leaders will be able to wait patiently for the facts while credible claims of US atrocities circulate on the global media. This is a reality of future war and something that staffs at every tactical echelon will have to be prepared to address.

The global nature of communications also raises the issue of personal cell phone use on the future battlefield. There have been a myriad of instances of both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers getting themselves and their units obliterated through the undisciplined use of personal cell phones to communicate with families back home. Worse, these devices pull innocent loved ones into the conflict by making them potential direct information operations targets rendered vulnerable in the battle of signatures.

Preparing to Win the First Fight of the Next War - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Curt Taylor · February 23, 2024

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A half century ago, on October 6, 1973, two foreign armies invaded the nation of Israel and, in a matter of hours, one of the most sophisticated armies in the world was brought to the brink of destruction. As Syrian tanks attacked in the Golan Heights and Egyptian forces poured across the Suez Canal, Israel’s small but highly capable army struggled to adapt to a form of warfare that had substantially evolved in just over six years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Antitank guided munitions and highly mobile air defense systems created new, unanticipated challenges that demanded a change in tactics and made old ways of employing armor and airpower obsolete. The Israelis adapted quickly, learned from early miscalculations, and were eventually able to turn the tide, but only by the thinnest of margins. The 1973 Yom Kippur War provided clear and convincing proof that the character of modern armored warfare had changed forever.

The Israeli experience drove General William DePuy, commander of the newly formed US Army Training and Doctrine Command, to commission an in-depth study of the war as the US Army was emerging from a decade of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Fundamental changes were needed in the Army’s doctrine, equipment, and training. One of the greatest observations from this study was the conclusion that the Israelis, though initially caught off guard by novel weapons, were able to win because of their superior combined arms doctrine and emphasis on training. This study, along with other currents moving in the post-Vietnam Army, eventually led to the Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine, the Big Five weapons programs, and the creation of the combat training centers.

US soldiers assigned to 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division maneuver M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks through a breach area during Rotation 23-08 at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, June 10, 2023. (Credit: Spc. Casey Auman, Operations Group, National Training Center)

Major General Paul Gorman, director of training for General DePuy, argued that the Army must provide a facility to audit the readiness of units against the unforgiving reality of the future battlefield so that US soldiers would never go into battle unprepared for the first fight. His 1976 white paper recommended Fort Irwin, California as the location for America’s premier facility. Thus, in 1981, the National Training Center (NTC) was born as the world’s foremost mounted combat training center with the mantra to “win the first battle of the next war.”

While history does not repeat itself, as Mark Twain is said to remind us, it often rhymes. The ongoing war in Ukraine presents a momentous change to the character of warfare, akin to the Yom Kippur War a half century ago. Everything from ubiquitous commercial satellite technology to handheld drones and sensors has rendered the battlefield transparent to any competent adversary. The battle for and control of the electromagnetic spectrum presents an opportunity for either side to capture a critical advantage. The ability to mass precision weapons at extended distances behind the front lines prohibits the concentration of logistics and combat power, complicates combined arms maneuver, and forces the prioritization of protection. Finally, small tactical actions (often at the platoon and company level) are uploaded and spread on social media in real time, weaving a narrative that is vulnerable to being quickly co-opted by our adversaries to drive strategic outcomes.

If NTC is to keep faith with the founding vision of General DePuy and Major General Gorman, then the lessons of the war in Ukraine should inform the continuous and steady evolution of the way that we replicate the first battle of the next war. Adapting to this unfamiliar environment and incorporating the steady flow of observations from Ukraine is our number one focus and top priority here at NTC. Thus far, this adaptation has manifested in four ways: the transparent battlefield, greater use of mass precision strikes, greater synchronization required above the brigade level, and the battle of the narrative. This article, as part one of a two-part series, will provide an overview of how NTC is adapting to each of these emerging trends. Part two will provide specific recommendations for unit command teams as they prepare their units for this emerging operational environment.

The Transparent Battlefield

The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, fighting on its home turf as the opposing force (OPFOR) at NTC, has long exploited its inherent advantage to emplace scouts, partisans, and unarmed observers around and among rotational training unit (RTU) formations as they deploy into an unfamiliar desert. Building on observations from Ukraine, NTC has expanded this capability significantly with a dedicated intelligence fusion cell that collects commercially purchased satellite imagery (often less than twelve hours old), open-source intelligence from an internal social media network, electronic signals, and drone footage to achieve and maintain target custody of the high-payoff targets across the RTU. Where units are located but not identified, unarmed scouts in plain clothes approach unit formations with commercially available radio frequency tag readers, seeking out unit designations to inform the OPFOR situational template. Social media posts from local role players are also culled for intelligence value. To closely mirror conditions in Ukraine, most communication among OPFOR scouts and partisans occurs over a civilian cellular network that is limited to exercise-only traffic but enables reliable long-range communication vulnerable to exploitation by RTU forces. Satellite imagery and peculiar radio frequency signal profiles are used to direct a plethora of unmanned aircraft systems at echelon to find and fix high-value targets.

The key to survival for US forces in this environment is to mask indicators that betray unique or critical capabilities. In today’s battle of signatures, you can’t be invisible, but you can look unimportant. Large, static command posts accompanied by large, obvious satellite dishes are quickly identified and rapidly destroyed. The most effective command posts in this environment are small and mobile and appear insignificant—not entirely invisible but easily confused for battalion combat trains or a small group of supply trucks. During a recent rotation at NTC, battalion command posts adapted quickly to the constant strikes and several battalions learned how to make their command posts look like anything but a command post by dispersing vehicles, hiding antennas, and reducing signatures. As a result, the OPFOR misidentified three out of five command posts it sought to target with artillery strikes on the final day of the rotation. We cannot stop the enemy from detecting us, but we can stop him from understanding us.

Along these lines, the OPFOR from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment has adapted to this transparent battlefield by often hiding in plain sight in urban terrain or among the abandoned forward operating bases left over from NTC’s counterinsurgency days. Their vehicles are consistently parked at great distance from the command posts or covered with tarps draped between buildings. Antennas are concealed in courtyards or mixed with urban clutter. A recent OPFOR command post was hidden in a building with all the doors and windows boarded up and accessible only through a tunnel from an adjacent building. When operating in rural terrain, command posts are often fifteen kilometers or further from the front lines with carefully selected retransmission sites placed throughout the area. OPFOR commanders utilize microterrain to embed their command posts within the existing landscape and tuck in behind steep terrain to shield against artillery attack from low-angle fires. The OPFOR also seeks to hide by giving the appearance of being elsewhere, employing deception command posts that mirror the size and electromagnetic signature of a brigade tactical group. These deception operations are supported by both plastic and inflatable decoy vehicles that emit realistic signals.

11th Armored Cavalry Regiment “Blackhorse” opposing force command post established with dispersion and concealed within microterrain, September 2023. (Credit: Lt. Col. Rick Ferrell, National Training Center)

Mass Precision Strikes

A second adaptation at NTC based on our early observations of the war in Ukraine is the increase in quantity and effectiveness of OPFOR artillery. The king of battle has returned to Fort Irwin. In a typical rotation, units experience over one hundred separate artillery strikes per day. With the long reach of OPFOR artillery, casualties are no longer confined to the maneuver battalions but spread throughout all elements of the formation. Consistent with observations in Ukraine, the majority of OPFOR artillery strikes are observed with OPFOR unmanned aircraft systems.

In addition to drones for surveillance, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment has recently been fielded with over one hundred TS-M800 quadcopter drones. Each drone is equipped with a single simulated 40-millimeter grenade round and a MILES (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) sensor enabling it to be defeated by small arms fire or electronic warfare jamming. Often employed in swarms of twenty to eighty drones, these attacks are intended to rapidly overwhelm and disrupt a unit’s defenses while striking fixed targets identified from previous live OPFOR reconnaissance. Upon arrival at NTC, the rotational training unit is issued a complement of handheld DroneDefenders—a directed-energy counter-drone tool—and a two-vehicle M-LIDS system to help defend against this threat.

This growth, in both unmanned aircraft systems and fires capability, enables the OPFOR to hold rotational training unit forces well behind the front lines at significant risk of not just disruption, but also complete annihilation. Commanders must prepare for this by devoting greater attention and effort to rear-area protection.

Effective units understand that the keys to defeating the OPFOR precision-strike capability are, first, raising its cost through rapid counter-fire and, second, lowering its reward through signature masking and wide dispersion of vehicles. Current US doctrine is clear that the primary responsibility for the counter-fire fight is the division counter-fire headquarters often led by the division artillery commander. NTC’s 52nd Infantry Division replicates this by applying simulated rocket fires against enemy artillery originating beyond the brigade’s forward boundary.

Effective counter-fire at the brigade level starts with the mundane but important task of properly constructing a digital fires kill chain that flows from an intelligence collection system to the firing batteries. This takes time, practice, and technical expertise. The Army Intelligence and Security Command system known as FADE-MIST provides US units with a gold mine of timely and relevant targeting data on OPFOR systems. When this system is properly trained and integrated with DCGS (Distributed Common Ground System) and AFATDS (Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System) servers, we have observed tactical intelligence data on valuable time-sensitive targets move from an observer to a fire direction center and on to a firing battalion in a matter of seconds. When this system is not effective, manual processing times are rarely fast enough to defeat OPFOR displacement. In one particularly noteworthy example, a young Army specialist was credited with stopping an OPFOR attack in the central corridor when he correctly identified, after extensive home-station training, the unique signature of a 2S6 air defense system using the FADE-MIST tool. Passing this data digitally to a properly configured AFATDS system enabled the rapid destruction of this high-value target moving within the enemy main attack. The attack became vulnerable to Apache helicopters and failed to meet its objective once the OPFOR air defense was destroyed.

US soldiers assigned to 4th Battalion, 1st Field Artillery Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division prepare to conduct live-fire operations during Decisive Action Rotation 23-06 at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, April 5, 2023. (Credit: Pfc. Anastasiya Ludchenko, Operations Group, National Training Center)

Even with its highly effective detection technology, the OPFOR has learned that it is a dangerous proposition to fire artillery at a US brigade combat team. OPFOR artillery that is destroyed by rotational training unit counter-fire is not reconstituted and ammunition is not replenished. To be effective, the OPFOR must have strict target selection standards and minimal target location error. OPFOR artillery cannot afford to miss. This is why masking of signatures is so important and why the key to rotational training unit survival is quite often as simple as looking unimportant. As an example, a recent aviation battalion at NTC established a fake command post within a widely dispersed tactical assembly area. The command post was fully equipped with nets, vehicles, and even the unit’s guidon proudly posted outside while the real command post resided over one hundred meters away in a small, inconspicuous building. An OPFOR drone swarm attacked the wrong target at great cost in resources and with the limited effect of a single US guidon destroyed.

Habits from our counterinsurgency experience have taught many junior leaders to concentrate vehicles into tight formations behind long strands of poorly constructed wire barriers and protected by a dismounted guard force. This posture does little to protect against the greatest threat to our forces today: high concentration of enemy drones and artillery. In the case of our logistics formations, such a posture often neatly packages our most valuable commodities, fuel and artillery ammunition, in dense concentrations to form lucrative targets for OPFOR drone and artillery strikes. Effective units, by contrast, grow comfortable with wide dispersion of critical assets even as this complicates command and control, lines of communication, and unit security. A brigade combat team commander offered a simple rule of thumb during a recent rotation: “If you can throw a football between two vehicles, you’re too close together.” In response to this environment, we are seeing more units form base clusters in their rear areas, with widely dispersed groupings of vehicle and individual fighting positions that allow soldiers to get below ground in the event of an artillery strike.

Division-Level Synchronization

Operations in Ukraine have made it clear that attacking a prepared defense on today’s lethal battlefield requires the full synchronization of effects in multiple domains to degrade integrated air defense, electronic warfare, and artillery systems. The recently published Field Manual 3-0, Operations changes the US Army’s foundational doctrine by defining the division as the principle tactical warfighting echelon. As a result, brigade combat teams are no longer self-contained units of combat power able to operate independently. They are inextricably tied to the movement of the brigade combat teams on their flanks and, most importantly, to the conditions set by the division and corps under which they operate. Brigade combat teams require and are dependent on the convergence effects of their higher headquarters to degrade or disintegrate the integrated fires and air defense networks that are so lethal to the concentration of combat power necessary for combined arms operations. NTC replicates this approach by providing dedicated convergence windows for the brigade combat team, during which the division provides maximum protection from enemy artillery for brief windows to enable decisive operations. Brigade combat teams must plan and organize transitions to synchronize these windows and remain closely coordinated with units on either flank.

In addition, US Forces Command has recently directed division headquarters to deploy to both NTC and the Joint Readiness Training Center several times per year as a training audience. At NTC, these division-level rotations occur either in front of or alongside a BCT rotation and stress the prosecution of a robust deep fight and sustainment operation in a live environment over extended distances.

The Fight for the Narrative

The fourth area where NTC has adapted to emerging observations from the war in Ukraine is in the growing importance of social media and the strategic narrative. The widespread adoption of social media in every corner of the globe has changed the way information moves on the battlefield. Tactically insignificant events at the squad and platoon levels take on strategic importance when they are filmed and rapidly uploaded to social media, where they feed competing narratives in a global conversation. The United States has historically struggled to operate effectively in this important layer of the information environment. By comparison, Ukraine’s effective use of this new tool of strategic influence over the last two years has profoundly improved its position on the world stage.

NTC replicates this reality by creating a robust social media environment where civilian role players are equipped with government cell phones that operate exclusively on an internal training network. Role players use these “box phones” with instructions to photograph and post information about both rotational training unit and OPFOR troop movements, activities, and command posts. As a result, the social media environment at NTC rapidly fills with timely and tactical intelligence ripe for exploitation by either side.

Rotational training unit soldier interacts with role players on the battlefield during Force on Force, May 2022. (Credit: Sgt. Hunter Xue, Operations Group, National Training Center)

In addition, the OPFOR carefully scripts events, even forfeiting tactical success in some cases, to reinforce a narrative of the rotational training unit’s war crimes, abuse, and incompetence. The training objective is not to force the rotational training unit staff to engage in a public relations battle with the enemy but to force it to identify false narratives and “be first with the truth.” Rotational training units’ public affairs officers must provide compelling information to their higher headquarters to counter false but seemingly credible claims by the enemy. In a particularly common example, the OPFOR commander will order the destruction of a town by artillery to allow the surviving defenders from the OPFOR unit to safely retrograde. This destruction will be filmed by rearguard elements so that it appears that US forces have caused the damage and resulting civilian casualties. When the story splashes across social media and begins to be reported by the local INN news team (role players acting as journalists), the 52nd Infantry Division headquarters will require the brigade combat team to provide a response. Effective units will quickly assemble radar and artillery data to confidently show that US forces did not cause the damage to the town.

Although no commander wants to be dragged into a public relations struggle while also fighting an existential battle for survival against a peer adversary, it is naive to assume that strategic leaders will be able to wait patiently for the facts while credible claims of US atrocities circulate on the global media. This is a reality of future war and something that staffs at every tactical echelon will have to be prepared to address.

The global nature of communications also raises the issue of personal cell phone use on the future battlefield. There have been a myriad of instances of both Ukrainian and Russian soldiers getting themselves and their units obliterated through the undisciplined use of personal cell phones to communicate with families back home. Worse, these devices pull innocent loved ones into the conflict by making them potential direct information operations targets rendered vulnerable in the battle of signatures.

52nd Infantry Division policy at NTC forbids the use of personal cell phones in the division area of operations but we know that soldiers depend heavily on these devices for all manner of personal needs and parting with them is often socially difficult and inadequately enforced. Recently, NTC has begun purchasing the same advertising technology data used by commercial advertisers to track device locations over time. While individual identities remain masked, simple aggregated operational security analysis can quickly reveal which company or battalion is where throughout the area of operations by correlating clusters of devices with unit headquarters locations back at home station. As a recent example, data purchased by NTC showed a cell phone taking a circuitous path across the desert in excess of 120 miles per hour. Analysis of this device correlated it with an attack aviation battalion headquarters at home station. We were then able to determine the exact route an Apache took to evade OPFOR air defense systems because one of the pilots presumably carried an active cell phone in the cockpit.

NTC has also recently purchased commercial cell phone detectors to help units identify unauthorized cell phone use in their formations. In World War II, the simple act of lighting a cigarette at night in a foxhole could cost American GIs their lives. Today’s soldier is as dependent on a cell phone as many GIs of 1944 were on nicotine, and we need to learn to train without this risk in our midst.

The four categories above outline and describe the preliminary steps that the National Training Center is taking to adapt to our observations from the war in Ukraine. These adaptations are just steps in what must be a continuous process. The conflict in Ukraine is still far from over and we have much more to learn about not just the events that have already taken place, but those that still lie in the future, as well.

As NTC continues to adapt we are looking at ways to replicate the challenge of loitering munitions, like the Russian Lancet system, more effectively. We are developing mechanisms to more realistically constrain artillery consumption rates to reflect both the limited availability of these systems and the tube life limitations that are constraining the use of artillery in Europe. Finally, NTC has recently added trenches, hedgehogs, and dragon’s teeth to many of the OPFOR defensive positions to prepare units to breach these kinds of obstacles.

The National Training Center’s mandate since our founding forty-two years ago is to prepare the Army’s combined arms formations to win the first battle of the next war. The current conflict in Europe has provided us an unmistakable glimpse of the outlines of that future fight. The preliminary adaptations listed above are our first attempt, consistent with emerging Army doctrine and Forces Command training guidance, to adapt for that fight. In part two of this article series, we will provide recommendations on how unit commanders can effectively prepare their formations to succeed in this evolving environment.

We still have much to learn.

Major General Curt Taylor has commanded the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California since April 2021. This is his third assignment at a combat training center, having served as an observer coach-trainer as a captain and a lieutenant colonel. Prior to taking command of NTC, Taylor activated and deployed the 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade in training operations with allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific region. Additionally, he commanded a Stryker brigade at NTC in 2017 and deployed an Armor battalion to Afghanistan in 2012.

Special thanks to Captain Joe Davey for his assistance with and editing of this article. The secretary of the general staff for the National Training Center and Fort Irwin since May 2023, Captain Davey previously served as an observer coach-trainer on the Cobra Team as a part of Operations Group. Prior to his assignments at Fort Irwin, he served as the commander for Apache Troop and later Hatchet Troop in 2-13 CAV, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division.

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

Image credit: Spc. Duke Edwards, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Curt Taylor · February 23, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com