Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth."

- Albert Camus

"Show respect even to people who don't deserve it; not as a reflection of their character, but as a reflection of yours."

- Dave Willis

Characteristics of the American Way of War (7 of 13)

7. Focused on Firepower. General Westmoreland, then Commander of MACV, once famously and characteristically told a press conference that the correct approach to counterinsurgency was "firepower."72 It has long been the American way in warfare to send metal in harm's way in place of vulnerable flesh. This admirable expression of the country's machine-mindedness undoubtedly is the single most characteristic feature of American war-making at the sharp end. Needless to say, perhaps, a devotion to firepower, while defensible, indeed necessary, cannot help encouraging the armed forces to rely on it even when other modes of military behavior would be more suitable. In irregular conflicts in particular, heavy and sometimes seemingly indiscriminate, certainly disproportionate, resort to firepower solutions, readily becomes self-defeating. A focus on firepower as the key to a victory defined in classic military terms produces the attitude that what we do in war is service targets. Instead of being considered in his cultural context, the enemy is reduced to the dehumanized status of the object of U.S. firepower.73 At its nadir, this characteristic was demonstrated in action in Vietnam with the prevalence of the U.S. artillery's very extensive practice of conducting unaimed harassment and interdiction fire.74 A notable fraction of that artillery fire was expended for no better reason than that the ammunition was available in embarrassing abundance.

Regular warfare is composed of ever varying mixes of the eternal trinity of fire, movement, and shock. Irregular warfare, however, is different. There can be no decisive military engagement, because an agile, elusive, and competent irregular enemy will decline to expose himself in such a way that he can be obliterated by fire, outmaneuvered to annihilation, or destroyed physically and morally by shock effect. In COIN the rules of engagement broadly are the reverse of those standard in regular combat. When in doubt, one should not fire. Why? Because as a general rule, COIN must be conducted around the civilian population who comprise the center of gravity of the conflict. Trigger-happiness cannot help producing undesirable collateral damage; in other words, dead and wounded civilians and fear of American military behavior. Better that an insurgent should escape or, dare one say it, that an American or allied soldier or official be killed, than that a dozen or so bystanders pay the price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The kind of disciplined self-restraint in the resort to force that is mandatory for success in warfare against irregulars does not come easily or naturally to young people whom we train to be aggressive and to kill when necessary in self-defense. Nor does it come easily to officers who have well-founded anxieties about the career implications of suffering casualties. If the armed forces are serious about supporting policy with high competency in the conduct of war against irregulars, then they will need to curb their traditional, indeed cultural, excessive love affair with firepower.

- Colin Gray, 2006

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 12, 2023

2. ‘Little fissures’: The U.S.-Ukraine war unity is slowly cracking apart

3. Pentagon Puts Priority on Replacing Munitions in 2024 Budget

4. The Liberal Cyber Order

5. How to break the Xi-Putin axis? Biden must engage with Beijing

6. USAGM CEO Describes Efforts to Counter Russian and Chinese Propaganda

7. Analysis | Saudi-Iran Agreement Is Less Than Meets the Eye

8. The Russia That Might Have Been

9. Between deterrence and escalation - The Chinese doom argument

10. The Counterinsurgent’s Curriculum

11. America Is Ceding the Seas to Its Enemies

12. China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal raises red flags for US

13. War by miscalculation or by mistake?

14. Cobra Gold drills expose US-China fight for Thailand

15. In SVB collapse, Asia sees 1997 all over again

16. China's Xi wants bigger global role after Saudi-Iran deal

17. America Is Still Losing the Information War

18. Congress wants to label Wagner group as a terrorist organization. Why is Biden opposed?

19. USSOCOM’s AFSOC Updates on the MC-130J Floatplane’s Status

20. Staring Down the Black Hole of Russia’s Future

21. Look to Korea to See How China Might Fight in the Pacific Today

22. Pentagon’s counter-drone boss tackles rising threat

23. Exclusive: China's Xi plans Russia visit as soon as next week - sources

24. The Rise and Fall of Chris Miller, Trump's Final Defense Secretary

1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 12, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-12-2023

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on March 12:

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed on March 12 that ISW’s March 11 report about her comments acknowledging Kremlin infighting is false and an “informational attack.”[50] ISW used accounts from Russian media sources as well as a Russian milblogger (who claimed to be in attendance) to report on Zakharova’s comments in an altercation with information space entrepreneur Igor Ashmanov during a panel discussion in Moscow.[51] A milblogger who attended the event quoted Zakharova as saying that Kremlin cannot replicate the Stalinist approach of establishing a modern equivalent to the Soviet Information Bureau to centrally control Russia’s internal information space due to infighting among unspecified Kremlin “elites.”[52] The milblogger did not comment on Zakharova’s denial on March 12 but amplified a social media post from another milblogger who claimed that the West (presumably ISW) misrepresented Zakharova’s statements.[53] The social media post, however, also blamed Zakharova and the Kremlin for failing to adopt stronger information space policies. Several other milbloggers confirmed that Ashmanov accused Kremlin organs of failing to create a trusted centralized information campaign but argued about how other attendees attempted to downplay his statements.[54] This milblogger discourse not only confirms that the incident occurred, but also that ultranationalist figures reiterated variants of ISW’s assessment that the Kremlin’s ability to control the Russian information space is diminishing.
Iranian State Media announced on March 11 that Iran has finalized a deal to buy Sukhoi-35 fighter jets from Russia.[55]
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.[56]
Russian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut but have not completed a turning movement, envelopment, or encirclement around the city.[57] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner Group fighters captured parts or all of Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), although Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin stated that Wagner fighters do not control the settlement.[58]
Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Avdiivka and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City.[59] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces entered Krasnohorivka (9km north of Avdiivka), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[60]
A Russian milblogger claimed on March 12 that there is a high desertion rate among SPETSNAZ forces.[61] The Russian milblogger claimed that no SPETSNAZ units are at their full complement and that some SPETSNAZ commanders have fled their units despite having received generous salaries for the past ten years.[62] ISW has no independent confirmation of these assertions. It appears unlikely that most commanders have fled these elite units.
The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on March 12 that Russian military personnel from eastern regions of Russia die in Ukraine at per capita rates up to fortyfold of those of Russian personnel from Moscow City.[63] The UK MoD reported that Kazakh and Tartar minorities make up 75 percent of casualties among Russian military personnel from Astrakhan Oblast.[64]
Deputy Ukrainian Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk stated on March 12 that Russian officials have illegally deported 2,161 Ukrainian orphans to Russia.[65] Vereshchuk also stated that the total number of children deported to Russia may be approximately 150,000.[66]

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 12, 2023

Mar 12, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Kateryna Stepanenko and Frederick W. Kagan

March 12, 8 pm ET

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

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 maps that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

ISW is publishing an abbreviated campaign update today, March 12. This report establishes a comprehensive timeline of the rivalry between Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), which likely reached a boiling point over Bakhmut. The report also analyzes the Russian MoD’s likely intent to expend Wagner forces in Bakhmut and explores Russian President Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of this conflict to maintain the stability of his regime.

The conflict between the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin likely reached its climax against the backdrop of the Battle of Bakhmut. The Russian MoD – specifically Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff General Valery Gerasimov – is likely seizing the opportunity to deliberately expend both elite and convict Wagner forces in Bakhmut in an effort to weaken Prigozhin and derail his ambitions for greater influence in the Kremlin. The Russian MoD had been increasingly restricting Prigozhin’s ability to recruit convicts and secure ammunition, forcing Prigozhin to publicly recognize his dependency on the Russian MoD. Prigozhin, for example, publicly complained that he mailed a letter and tried to send his representative – likely to Shoigu and Gerasimov – with an urgent demand for ammunition, but that the representative was not allowed to present his complaints.[1] Prigozhin had been able to grow his forces by 40,000 convicts likely with the Kremlin’s permission to recruit in prisons in 2022 but lost that permission and access to that manpower pool at the beginning of 2023.[2] Prigozhin has threatened to withdraw Wagner forces from Bakhmut and insinuated that the Russian MoD used Wagner to bear the brunt of the high-intensity attritional urban warfare to seize Bakhmut in order to conserve Russian conventional forces.[3] These threats and complaints indicate that Prigozhin is aware of the gravity of his conflict with the Russian MoD.

The Russian military leadership may be trying to expend Wagner forces – and Prigozhin’s influence – in Bakhmut. Russian forces’ rate of advance in Bakhmut slowed following the Ukrainian withdrawal from eastern Bakhmut around March 7.[4] ISW assessed on March 6 that Wagner had to commit its elite forces to maintain offensive momentum in Bakhmut but may be running out of these forces during direct assaults on eastern, southern, and northern parts of Bakhmut.[5] Geolocated footage published on February 18 showed 43 buses with Wagner mercenaries moving from Crimea via Melitopol possibly to reinforce positions in Bakhmut.[6] Prigozhin complained on March 5 and 6 that Wagner needed additional reinforcements, and Ukrainian military officials observed that Russian forces were suffering a seven-to-one casualty ratio compared to Ukrainian forces.[7]

Prigozhin likely anticipated that Ukrainian forces would entirely withdraw from Bakhmut out of fear of imminent encirclement and hoped that his commitment of Wagner’s elite forces would be sufficient to generate that effect. Prigozhin even offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to allow Ukrainian forces to withdraw from Bakhmut in two days on March 3.[8] Limited information about the Prigozhin’s pleas likely indicates that the Russian military command is intent on expending Wagner forces within the city. Spokesperson of the Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Serhiy Cherevaty also noted on March 11 that Ukrainian forces may be able to severely degrade Wagner and have already thinned out Wagner’s second prisoner formation over the winter.[9] Ukrainian servicemen noted in a social media video from March 12 that they are holding positions in Bakhmut waiting for Russians to “shoot each other.”[10] Russian military leadership may be allowing the Wagner Group to take high casualties in Bakhmut to simultaneously erode Prigozhin’s leverage while capturing the city at the expense of Wagner troops.

The Russian military leadership is likely attempting to avenge itself on Prigozhin for a conflict that he initiated in May 2022. ISW assessed on January 22 and February 26 that the Kremlin likely lent Prigozhin its support when Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to replenish his forces with volunteer recruits to avoid declaring highly unpopular mobilization.[11] Prigozhin likely convinced Putin that he would be able to seize Bakhmut if given access to the Russian MoD’s ammunition stocks and allowed to expand his existing ultranationalist recruitment campaigns to include regular Russians and prisoners.[12] Putin granted Prigozhin access to those resources as he had likely become increasingly disillusioned with the Russian military command that had failed to capture Kyiv and effectively wasted reserves without achieving a tangible result. Putin likely perceived the Russian military command’s appeals for mobilization as a threat to the stability of his regime and placed his confidence in Prigozhin whose forces had already helped seize Popasna, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast.[13] Putin’s decision to side with Prigozhin likely angered Shoigu and Gerasimov, who were then tasked with sharing limited equipment and ammunition with Wagner mercenaries.

Prigozhin has also waged a relentless defamation campaign against the Russian MoD and the military command since May 2022 – first covertly via Wagner-affiliated ultranationalist social media platforms. Wagner-affiliated milbloggers began to boast about Wagner’s successes in assault operations and even spread the idea that Prigozhin could replace Shoigu as defense minister in September 2022.[14] These milbloggers capitalized on the increasing criticism among the Russian ultranationalist communities aimed at the Russian conventional military command that failed to maintain the initiative following the exhausting capture of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. Wagner was able to exploit the greater ultranationalist community because the ultranationalists shared the objective of improving the war effort and saw a common enemy in the Russian MoD and its bureaucracy. The ultranationalist community had also been extremely interconnected over the years prior to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and drew on the same recruitment pools.

Prigozhin overestimated Putin’s reliance on Wagner forces and attempted to replace Russian military and political leadership with Wagner-affiliated figures. Prigozhin exploited the Russian military’s failures during Ukraine’s sweeping counteroffensives in Kharkiv Oblast and Lyman in Donetsk Oblast, and the turbulent reserve mobilization in September-October 2022 to establish Wagner-affiliated personnel in place of disgraced military commanders. Prigozhin made a publicized entrance into the Russian information space in a prisoner recruitment video on September 14, only three days after the Russian loss of much of Kharkiv Oblast.[15] Prigozhin later rode the wave of domestic criticism of the Russian MoD’s inability to properly conduct a reserve call-up on September 21 and used the opportunity to promote recruitment into the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC).[16]

Prigozhin, alongside Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, used the fall of Lyman to push for and ultimately secure the firing of Commander of the Central Military District (CMD) Alexander Lapin who had reportedly commanded the Lyman grouping of forces.[17] Prigozhin and Kadyrov both served alongside Lapin during the battles of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, and Lapin received credit for seizing Lysychansk with Wagner-affiliated Army General Sergey Surovikin on July 3, 2022.[18] US intelligence officials reported that persistent military failures – likely the loss of Kharkiv Oblast and Lyman, faulty mobilization, and the annexation of four partially-occupied Ukrainian regions on September 30 – had ignited a wave of criticism within Putin’s inner circle.[19] US intelligence later revealed that Prigozhin directly addressed Putin regarding these military failures, likely leading to the appointment of Surovikin as the commander of the Russian group of forces in Ukraine.[20] Ukrainian intelligence linked Surovikin with Wagner, and Prigozhin even offered praise to Surovikin in response to his appointment.[21] Reports of Lapin’s dismissal as the commander of the “central” grouping of forces appeared on November 1, shortly following Surovikin’s appointment.[22]

Prigozhin sought to establish Wagner-affiliated military officials partly to secure greater access to Russian MoD ammunition stores and budget. Prigozhin’s ability to sustain and grow Wagner forces tenuously relied on his ability to retain favor with Putin who would order the Russian MoD and other federal institutions to support these mercenaries. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Prigozhin and Kadyrov sought to undermine Shoigu in order to receive access to the Russian MoD budget to pursue other political goals through the growth of their paramilitary organizations.[23] ISW also observed that Prigozhin had extensively targeted St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov and claimed to have contracted his own advisors to the local administration, likely in hopes of gaining political and commercial power in the city.[24] Prigozhin admitted on February 20 that Surovikin had been assisting Wagner in obtaining ammunition, further confirming that Wagner forces benefited from specific connections within the Russian military leadership that Prigozhin had likely helped rise in power.[25]

Prigozhin’s obvious military-political ambitions likely alarmed Putin in October, when his regime was most vulnerable to public scrutiny. Putin likely warned Prigozhin obliquely on October 5, 2022, in an odd allusion to the Pugachev Rebellion that challenged Catherine the Great’s authority in the mid-1770s, for example.[26] Putin noted that the rebellion occurred because Pugachev “claimed to a be tsar” and because of the “weakening of the central power.” Putin’s bizarre public statement, apropos of nothing, may have been a direct response to Prigozhin’s criticism of the war effort and attempts to enhance his own military and political influence. Kremlin officials also confirmed that Putin has been increasingly preferring loyalty over competence within his inner circle, and Putin may have perceived Prigozhin’s critiques a form of disloyalty.[27] Prigozhin likely did not intend to challenge Putin directly, but Putin likely saw Prigozhin’s aggressive self-promotion at the expense of others who had Putin’s trust as a threat. Shoigu and Gerasimov, after all, have been loyal to Putin and his regime structure for years and likely erred by excessive loyalty – failing to tell Putin what Putin did not want to hear – a trait Putin seems willing to forgive.

Putin is a risk-averse and highly calculating actor who likely sought to manage the emerging threat to his control by gradually reintroducing the Russian MoD into prominence and power. The Russian MoD reportedly started recruiting prisoners in October, which likely cut into Prigozhin’s recruitment efforts.[28] Shoigu was allowed to make high-profile contacts with French, Turkish, UK, and US counterparts on October 23 – establishing a level of authority unattainable for Prigozhin, who holds no official position in the Russian government.[29] Gerasimov made similar calls to his UK and US counterparts on October 24 after having been absent from the public eye since the spring of 2022.[30] Putin continued to appease Prigozhin and his ultranationalist community during this period because he likely recognized that the involuntary reserve call-up could not close the gap between Russian force requirements and available manpower in a timely fashion and thus let Wagner expand its recruitment of prisoners and its operations on the frontline until the mobilized personnel could arrive en masse.[31] Putin likely stopped the Russian MoD from directly attacking Prigozhin but instead created conditions in which the Russian military leadership could reassume more authority. Such conditions likely threatened Prigozhin, who began to intensify his criticism of the Russian MoD and further deepened the conflict between Wagner forces and military leadership.

Putin had ultimately allowed the Russian MoD to retake control of the Bakhmut direction from Prigozhin in January as Wagner forces failed to deliver the promised victory over Bakhmut by the end of 2022. Putin appeared in several meetings with Gerasimov and Shoigu in late December 2022, likely indicating that he was not confident that Prigozhin would achieve the promised victory before the end of the year.[32] The Russian military leadership may have also been successful in convincing Putin that Wagner forces were not a good investment of resources as Russia began to run low on shells around the same timeframe.[33] Putin ostentatiously demoted Surovikin and appointed Gerasimov as the theater commander in Ukraine on January 11.[34] Putin similarly appointed Lapin as the Chief of the Russian Ground Forces on January 10 and reshuffled the Russian military command in Ukraine.[35] The Russian MoD claimed responsibility on January 13 for the capture of Soledar and deliberately failed to acknowledge Wagner in the success.[36] Putin himself failed to credit Prigozhin for the capture of Soledar in an unusual TV interview on January 15 and instead attributed the victory to the Russian MoD and General Staff.[37] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also indirectly accused Prigozhin of deliberately manipulating the information space to expose the conflict between Wagner and the Russian MoD.[38] Putin also met with Prigozhin’s long-standing nemesis Beglov on January 18, likely in a deliberate attempt to further marginalize Prigozhin.[39] The Kremlin had cut off Prigozhin’s access to prisoner recruitment since the start of 2023.[40]

Putin and the Russian MoD may use Prigozhin as a scapegoat for the costly drive on Bakhmut once the offensive culminates. ISW assessed on February 5 that Putin relies on a group of scapegoats to publicly take risks in his place and shoulder the blame for Russian military failures and unpopular policies.[41] Putin will likely use Wagner’s high casualties, reports about poor morale, and war crimes to deflect from likely equal or possibly worse problems within the Russian Armed Forces. Kremlin-affiliated milbloggers have ambushed Prigozhin with interviews that exposed numerous Wagner controversies regarding the ineffectiveness and mistreatment of the Wagner convict force – likely in an effort to set conditions in the Russian information space to discredit Wagner.[42] Much of the Russian and Western coverage of Bakhmut already focuses mainly on heavy Wagner losses, allowing the MoD to cover up or downplay other losses suffered by Russian conventional forces. The revelation of high losses among Wagner convicts and mercenaries would not cause as much societal outrage as ongoing reports of casualties and mistreatment of involuntarily mobilized servicemen.

Prigozhin is unlikely to regain Putin’s favor to the same extent as he had between May and October 2022. Unnamed Kremlin officials stated that Putin has been increasingly tightening his inner circle and is unlikely to offer the benefits Prigozhin once had regardless of the severity of the Russian military failures on the frontlines.[43] The Russian MoD still apparently retains favor with Putin despite devastating military failures around Vuhledar in early February.[44] The Kremlin is creating new armed formations under state energy companies likely in an effort to replace Wagner while possibly retaining a counterbalance to the Russian MoD.[45] Prigozhin’s fall from grace will likely scare other Kremlin officials such as Kadyrov into scaling down their ambitions to avoid experiencing Prigozhin’s fate.[46] Putin has likely not decided yet whether he will spare Prigozhin, and Wagner’s fate likely depends on Prigozhin’s ability to convince the Kremlin of his loyalty.

Prigozhin is also unlikely to reach his previous heights regardless of his renewed efforts to recruit mercenaries from 42 different cities in Russia.[47] Prigozhin had earned a bad reputation for the treatment of his forces as cannon fodder and had drained ultranationalist communities of recruits.[48] Prigozhin’s public pleas for ammunition and supplies are also unlikely to make service with Wagner attractive to recruits. Prigozhin has fractured and polarized the previously interconnected ultranationalist community which had aided him in the recruitment of forces earlier in the war and in prior conflicts worldwide.[49]

The conflict between the Russian MoD and Wagner shows that different parties in Putin’s inner circle are competing with one another in potentially zero-sum games that do not further Putin’s overall objectives. The Russian MoD is currently prioritizing eliminating Wagner on the battlefields in Bakhmut, which is likely slowing down the rate of advance in the area. Prigozhin saw Bakhmut as an opportunity to gain leverage on the Russian MoD and likely in the Kremlin in pursuit of his own commercial and political aspirations. Putin used Wagner to protect his regime from detrimental societal ramifications of mobilization, which also continues to inhibit his war efforts in Ukraine.

Key inflections in ongoing military operations on March 12:

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed on March 12 that ISW’s March 11 report about her comments acknowledging Kremlin infighting is false and an “informational attack.”[50] ISW used accounts from Russian media sources as well as a Russian milblogger (who claimed to be in attendance) to report on Zakharova’s comments in an altercation with information space entrepreneur Igor Ashmanov during a panel discussion in Moscow.[51] A milblogger who attended the event quoted Zakharova as saying that Kremlin cannot replicate the Stalinist approach of establishing a modern equivalent to the Soviet Information Bureau to centrally control Russia’s internal information space due to infighting among unspecified Kremlin “elites.”[52] The milblogger did not comment on Zakharova’s denial on March 12 but amplified a social media post from another milblogger who claimed that the West (presumably ISW) misrepresented Zakharova’s statements.[53] The social media post, however, also blamed Zakharova and the Kremlin for failing to adopt stronger information space policies. Several other milbloggers confirmed that Ashmanov accused Kremlin organs of failing to create a trusted centralized information campaign but argued about how other attendees attempted to downplay his statements.[54] This milblogger discourse not only confirms that the incident occurred, but also that ultranationalist figures reiterated variants of ISW’s assessment that the Kremlin’s ability to control the Russian information space is diminishing.
Iranian State Media announced on March 11 that Iran has finalized a deal to buy Sukhoi-35 fighter jets from Russia.[55]
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.[56]
Russian forces continued offensive operations near Bakhmut but have not completed a turning movement, envelopment, or encirclement around the city.[57] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner Group fighters captured parts or all of Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), although Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin stated that Wagner fighters do not control the settlement.[58]
Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Avdiivka and along the western outskirts of Donetsk City.[59] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces entered Krasnohorivka (9km north of Avdiivka), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[60]
A Russian milblogger claimed on March 12 that there is a high desertion rate among SPETSNAZ forces.[61] The Russian milblogger claimed that no SPETSNAZ units are at their full complement and that some SPETSNAZ commanders have fled their units despite having received generous salaries for the past ten years.[62] ISW has no independent confirmation of these assertions. It appears unlikely that most commanders have fled these elite units.
The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on March 12 that Russian military personnel from eastern regions of Russia die in Ukraine at per capita rates up to fortyfold of those of Russian personnel from Moscow City.[63] The UK MoD reported that Kazakh and Tartar minorities make up 75 percent of casualties among Russian military personnel from Astrakhan Oblast.[64]
Deputy Ukrainian Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk stated on March 12 that Russian officials have illegally deported 2,161 Ukrainian orphans to Russia.[65] Vereshchuk also stated that the total number of children deported to Russia may be approximately 150,000.[66]

[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[2] https://isw.pub/UkrWar020923 ; https://t.me/voenkors/318 ; https://w...

[3] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[4] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[5] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[6] https://twitter.com/hochu_dodomu/status/1626881454658420736 ;

https://twitter.com/kargolow/status/1626895231760171008; https://twitte...

https://twitter.com/kargolow/status/1626894695342153728

[7] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[8] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/546; https://t.me/kommunist/16162; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79562; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/22871; https://t.me/grey_zone/17537; https://t.me/sashakots/38729; https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/16...

[9] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/03/11/za-mynulu-dobu-53-boyezitknennya-ta-ponad-pivtory-sotni-artobstriliv-sergij-cherevatyj/

[10] https://www.facebook.com/reel/1151172585568281/?s=single_unit

[11] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[12] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[13] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[14] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[15] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[16] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[17] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[18] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[19] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[20] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... ; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[21] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[22] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[23] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2023/03/06/vagner-vycherpuye-svoyi-syly-na-donbasi-prygozhyn-zvynuvachuye-shojgu/

[24] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[25] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/473

[26] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[27] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[28] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[29] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[30] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[31] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[32] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[33] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[34] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[35] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[36] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[37] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[38] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[39] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[40] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[41] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[42] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[43] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[44] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[45] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...

[46] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[47] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[48] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[49] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[50] https://t.me/MariaVladimirovnaZakharova/4968?single

[51] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[52] https://t.me/notes_veterans/8431

[53] https://t.me/notes_veterans/8452

[54] https://t.me/evgenyprimakov/3065; https://t.me/ghost_of_novorossia/10453

[55] https://twitter.com/IrnaEnglish/status/1634481569300709377

[56] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0jQRBYRBKAnoVRbjxNk9...

[57] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0jQRBYRBKAnoVRbjxNk9...

[58] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/584 ; https://t.me/milchronicles/16...

[59] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0jQRBYRBKAnoVRbjxNk9...

[60] https://t.me/rybar/44537 ; https://t.me/milinfolive/97885

[61] https://t.me/rsotmdivision/5684

[62] https://t.me/rsotmdivision/5684

[63] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1634801422985314304

[64] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1634801422985314304

[65] https://suspilne dot media/411249-rosia-nezakonno-vivezla-2161-ukrainsku-ditinu-sirotu-veresuk/

[66] https://suspilne dot media/411249-rosia-nezakonno-vivezla-2161-ukrainsku-ditinu-sirotu-veresuk/

‘Little fissures’: The U.S.-Ukraine war unity is slowly cracking apart

By JONATHAN LEMIRE and ALEXANDER WARD

03/12/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Politico

A tough week for U.S.-Ukraine news reveals an imperfect harmony.

Though President Joe Biden has pledged steadfast support, the U.S. has been clear with Kyiv that it cannot fund Ukraine indefinitely at this level. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

03/12/2023 07:00 AM EDT

The United States and Ukraine have largely been in lockstep since President Joe Biden’s administration pledged support for “as long as it takes” in resisting Moscow’s relentless invasion.

But more than a year into the war, there are growing differences behind the scenes between Washington and Kyiv on war aims, and potential flashpoints loom on how, and when, the conflict will end.

“The administration doesn’t have a clear policy objective and a clear goal. Is it to drag this thing out, which is precisely what Vladimir Putin wants?” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Is it to just give them enough to survive and not to win? I don’t see a policy for victory right now, and if we don’t have that, then what are we doing?”

Publicly, there has been little separation between Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an alliance on full display last month when the American president made his covert, dramatic visit to Kyiv. But based on conversations with 10 officials, lawmakers and experts, new points of tension are emerging: The sabotage of a natural gas pipeline on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; the brutal, draining defense of a strategically unimportant Ukrainian city; and a plan to fight for a region where Russian forces have been entrenched for nearly a decade.

Senior administration officials maintain that unity between Washington and Kyiv is tight. But the fractures that have appeared are making it harder to credibly claim there’s little daylight between the U.S. and Ukraine as sunbeams streak through the cracks.

For nine months, Russia has laid siege to Bakhmut, though capturing the southeastern Ukrainian city would do little to alter the trajectory of the war. It has become the focal point of the fight in recent weeks, with troops and prisoners from the mercenary Wagner Group leading the combat against Ukrainian forces. Both sides have suffered heavy losses and reduced the city to smoldering ruins.

Ukraine has dug in, refusing to abandon the ruined city even at tremendous cost.

“Each day of the city’s defense allows us to gain time to prepare reserves and prepare for future offensive operations,” said Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces. “At the same time, in the battles for this fortress, the enemy loses the most prepared and combat-capable part of his army — Wagner’s assault troops.”

Multiple administration officials have begun worrying that Ukraine is expending so much manpower and ammunition in Bakhmut that it could sap their ability to mount a major counteroffensive in the spring.

“I certainly don’t want to discount the tremendous work that the Ukrainians’ soldiers and leaders have put into defending Bakhmut — but I think it’s more of a symbolic value than it is a strategic and operational value,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Kyiv, for now, has ignored Washington’s input.

Meanwhile, an assessment by U.S. intelligence suggested that a “pro-Ukraine group” was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines last fall, shedding light on a great mystery. The new intelligence, first reported by The New York Times, was short on details but appeared to knock down a theory that Moscow was responsible for sabotaging the pipelines that delivered Russian gas to Europe.

Intelligence analysts do not believe Zelenskyy or his aides were involved in the sabotage, but the Biden administration has signaled to Kyiv — much like it did when a car bomb in Moscow killed the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist last year — that certain acts of violence outside of Ukraine’s borders will not be tolerated.

There has also been, at times, frustration about Washington’s delivery of weapons to Ukraine. The United States has, by far, sent the most weapons and equipment to the front, but Kyiv has always looked ahead for the next set of supplies. Though most in the administration have been understanding about Kyiv’s desperation to defend itself, there have been grumblings about the constant requests and, at times, Zelenskyy not showing appropriate gratitude, according to two White House officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

“I do think the administration is split, the National Security Council split” on what weapons to send to Ukraine, said McCaul, who’s in constant touch with senior Biden officials. “I talk to a lot of top military brass and they are, in large part, supportive of giving them the ATACMS.”

The administration hasn’t provided those long-range missiles because there are few to spare in America’s own arsenal. There’s also fear that Ukraine might strike faraway Russian targets, potentially escalating the war.

A recent report that the Pentagon was blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence of possible Russian war crimes with the International Criminal Court also put another dent in the unity narrative. White House officials were dismayed when the New York Times story came out, fearful it would damage the moral case the U.S. has made for supporting Ukraine against Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The administration definitively declared the alliance between the United States — and its allies — and Kyiv remained strong, and that it would last as long as the war raged.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the White House is “in constant communication with Ukraine as we support their defense of their sovereignty and territorial integrity.” She added that with Putin showing no signs of ceasing his war, “the best thing we can do is to continue to help Ukraine succeed on the battlefield so they can be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table for when that time comes.”

But the growing disconnects may foreshadow a larger divide over the debate as to how the war will end.

Though Biden has pledged steadfast support, and the coffers remain open for now, the U.S. has been clear with Kyiv that it cannot fund Ukraine indefinitely at this level. Though backing Ukraine has largely been a bipartisan effort, a small but growing number of Republicans have begun to voice skepticism about the use of American treasure to support Kyiv without an end in sight to a distant war.

Among those who have expressed doubt about support for the long haul is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has said that the U.S. would not offer a “blank check” to Ukraine and rejected Zelenskyy’s invitation to travel to Kyiv and learn about the realities of war.

“There is always some friction built in,” said Kurt Volker, a special presidential envoy for Ukraine during the Trump administration. “Zelenskyy also stepped in it a bit with McCarthy — coming across as needing to ‘educate’ him, rather than work with him.”

But many observers credit remarkable transatlantic unity, praising the alliance holding firm despite the economic and political toll the war has taken.

“I see the little fissures, but those have existed with points of disagreement and varied views between the U.S. and Ukraine even before the big February invasion, and since then,” said Shelby Magid, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “Zelenskyy has made pointed remarks before toward the U.S., and the White House has expressed disagreement with him — publicly and privately — on specific aspects, but that hasn’t shifted or eaten away at the overall U.S. support and partnership.”

Points of crisis still hover on the horizon. Zelenskyy’s insistence that all of Ukraine — including Crimea, which has been under Russian control since 2014 — be returned to Ukraine before any peace negotiations begin would only extend the war, U.S. officials believe. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has signaled to Kyiv that Ukraine’s potential recapture of Crimea would be a red line for Putin, possibly leading to a dramatic escalation from Moscow.

Moreover, the Pentagon has consistently expressed doubts whether Ukraine’s forces — despite being armed with sophisticated Western weapons — would be able to dislodge Russia from Crimea, where it has been entrenched for nearly a decade.

For now, Biden continued to stick to his refrain that the United States will leave all decisions about war and peace to Zelenskky. But whispers have begun across Washington as to how tenable that will be as the war grinds on — and another presidential election looms.

“There has never been a war in history without setbacks and challenges,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), an Army veteran and HFAC member. “The question is not whether Ukrainians have setbacks, but how they respond and overcome them. Ukraine will overcome, defeat Russia and remain free.”

POLITICO

Politico

3. Pentagon Puts Priority on Replacing Munitions in 2024 Budget

Pentagon Puts Priority on Replacing Munitions in 2024 Budget

Weapons list also reflects concern of potential China conflict
$170 billion defense budget request will be released on Monday

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-11/pentagon-puts-priority-on-replacing-munitions-in-2024-budget?srnd=premium&sref=hhjZtX76

ByAnthony Capaccio

March 10, 2023 at 7:46 PM ESTUpdated onMarch 11, 2023 at 11:59 AM EST

The Pentagon’s $170 billion procurement request for the new fiscal year focuses on replacing munitions supplied to Ukraine as well as well as weapons like long-range missiles, which would be necessary in a conflict with China, according to an internal budget document.

The Defense Department will ask for $76.8 billion for the Navy and Marines, with $32.8 billion in new ship construction; $61 billion for the Air Force, which includes the US Space Force: and $24.4 billion for the Army, according to the official P-1 summary document obtained by Bloomberg News.

The companion R-1 research and development document requests $145 billion overall, with $46 billion to the Air Force, $27 billion to the Navy and $15.7 billion the Army. The documents are to be released Monday by the Pentagon as part of its detailed disclosure of the budget request for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

Earlier: US Eyes China Competition in Asia With Pentagon Budget Boost

Among the largest research and development recipients are $3.7 billion for the Northrop Grumman Corp.’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, $3 billion for B-21 bomber development and $2.3 billion for the “Next Generation Air Dominance” program designed to replace the F-22 fighter jet.

Highlights of the munitions requests include:

$951 million for 550 Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missiles made by Lockheed Martin Corp.
$928 million for 831 Navy/Air Force Amraam air-to-air missiles from Raytheon Technologies Corp.
$886 million to buy 5,016 GMLRS rockets from Lockheed Martin.
$639 million to buy 91 Navy Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles from Lockheed Martin
$400 million to buy a new version of the Stinger called M-Shorad
$308 million for 78 MK-48 advanced torpedoes from Lockheed Martin
$199 million to buy 541 Javelin anti-armor missiles made by Raytheon-Lockheed and lionized by Ukrainian forces for their lethal efficacy against Russian tanks
$179 million to buy from Lockheed Martin 28 additional Himars mobile rocket systems

Notable non-munitions procurement requests by the Army, Navy and Air Force include:

91 AMPV Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles built by BAE Systems Plc, which replaced the Army workhorse M113 personnel carrier
48 Air Force F-35s built by Lockheed Martin Corp.
42 AH-64E upgraded Apache attack helicopters built by Boeing Co.
34 M1A2 tanks to be upgraded built by General Dynamics Corp.
33 Mobile Protected Firepower light tanks built by General Dynamics
24 Boeing Co. F-15EX fighters
15 additional Boeing KC-46 refueling tankers
10 National Security Space Launch missions for military satellites, which have pitted Elon Musk’s SpaceX against the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance
8 Navy Conventional Prompt Strike ship-launched hypersonic missiles built by Lockheed Martin
7 MH-139A Grey Wolf helicopters built by Boeing, designed to guard US ICBM silos
Two Navy Constellation-class FFG frigates built by Fincantieri/Marinette Marine of Marinette, Wisconsin, up from one this year
Two Virginia-class submarines built by General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls,
Two DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers built by General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls

(Updates with list of major non-munitions requests.)

4. The Liberal Cyber Order

Excerpts:

How will the administration know if it is failing? The easiest method is looking for opposite evidence of the indicators above. If the liberal approach is not working, for example, then we ought to see a reduction in cyberspace activity relative to population. Individuals who are not convinced that the domain is secure will use it less often. They will be less willing to engage in political speech, share financial information with vendors, or otherwise participate. States will push back against regulatory harmonization and cooperation will become superficial. Firms will also reduce their online presence and revert to older methods of doing business, sacrificing efficiency for reliability.

One other problem bears attention. The administration believes that foreign assistance will lead its partners to improve their capabilities and improve everyone’s cybersecurity. Deeper ties will include sharing threat information and technologies and cooperating in joint law enforcement efforts. In some cases, it will require honoring requests to support partners in the aftermath of an offensive cyberspace operation. “Close cooperation with an affected ally or partner demonstrates solidarity in the face of adversary activity,” the administration argues, “and can accelerate efforts to expose counternormative state behavior and impose consequences.”

Despite these benefits, however, the administration does not promise to respond to all such requests. Instead, it promises to “establish policies for determining when it is in the national interest to provide such support.” The strategy suggests that the default answer is yes, but the administration has left itself some wiggle room. Perhaps officials are concerned that foreign partners will outsource their cybersecurity response to the United States rather than build their own capability. If so, then the administration has also suggested a way of measuring the success or failure of its approach to foreign assistance. Careful investigations can assess whether the target country had taken its own cybersecurity seriously in the period before the breach — and whether it was taking serious efforts in the aftermath. Affirmative findings would tend to support the administration’s approach. More critical findings would not.

The ability to measure progress is important, and the administration deserves credit for making the case for self-assessment. Equally important is the willingness to look for signs of failure. The administration is taking a big bet on a liberal grand strategy in cyberspace. We need to know if the bet is paying off.

The Liberal Cyber Order - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Joshua Rovner · March 13, 2023

This month the Biden administration released its National Cybersecurity Strategy, ending months of speculation about its contents. The document focuses on public-private collaboration, which is unsurprising given that the private sector owns and operates most of the internet. Because it calls for stronger regulations, the issue of public-private relations has already received a lot of attention.

But the document also reveals something about the administration’s grand strategy. President Joe Biden’s approach to national security has always blended liberal ideals with realist restraint. He has promoted democracy and pledged his support for international institutions, to be sure, but he also has a long record of resisting calls for military action. Biden’s instincts have been most fully on display in Ukraine. The president describes the war as a clash of democracy and authoritarianism upon which the West depends, yet he has refused to send U.S. troops to fight the Russian invaders, and he has tailored military assistance to avoid provoking Russian escalation.

The administration’s approach to cyberspace is different. It is liberalism unbounded. The White House strategy treats cyberspace as the venue for ideological competition among great-power rivals. The United States and its democratic allies are fighting to sustain a free internet and a “cyber ecosystem” that encourages trade and protects human rights. Russia and China, by contrast, are fighting to dismantle that system, replacing liberal norms with a conception of cyber sovereignty that justifies political oppression at home and political manipulation abroad.

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Biden welcomes the fight. He shows no inclination to restrain American cyber power in the service of liberal ideals. His strategy does not dwell on deterrence, a word that does not appear anywhere in the document. Nor does it express any concern for escalation — that term doesn’t appear either. The military restraint that tempers White House political idealism disappears in cyberspace. The president is a realist in the real world, but a liberal champion online.

Liberal Ideals and American Grand Strategy

Grand strategy is a theory of security, a logical story about how states use the instruments of national power to make themselves safe. The military instrument has long occupied scholars, but intelligence, economic, and diplomatic tools can also play an important role. In addition, practical grand strategies should pay attention to allies abroad, politics at home, available resources, technology, and geography. These factors may enable or constrain policymakers’ choices.

States can choose from a variety of grand strategies. Two are particularly important to the current U.S. debate: restraint and liberal internationalism. Restraint starts from the premise that the United States, by virtue of history and geography, is remarkably secure. It enjoys the natural protection of two oceans and sits atop vast natural resources. It has not faced a serious great-power competitor in the western hemisphere for two centuries. For these reasons, the United States does not have to spend lavishly on defense or undertake high-risk military campaigns. Provocative actions are unnecessary and dangerous.

Restraint treats international politics as a story about power, not ideas. Restraint does not dwell on regime type or ideological differences among different states. Indeed, it is skeptical about arguments that connect national security with ideological intangibles. Restraint also assumes that international markets are largely self-sustaining, and do not need the guidance and protection of America or any other state. Corporations will trade internationally because profit beckons, and they will pay the cost to do business abroad.

A liberal grand strategy is based on different assumptions about world politics. The first is that the spread of liberal values — especially democracy and free trade — will be good for national security. Democracies do not fight other democracies, according to this logic, so the expansion of democracy reduces the risk of conflict. Similarly, trading states have less reason to go to war with each other because the economic consequences would be calamitous. A world of trading democracies would be a world of peace, so the United States should strive to make that world a reality.

Liberal internationalism believes in trade, to be sure, but the theory doubts that commercial markets are self-sustaining. States need to backstop trade in order to see it flourish, providing military protection for international traders. Strong states can deal with pirates who would steal cargo, as well as rogue regimes who would demand exorbitant fees for transiting geographic choke points and visiting foreign ports. Wealthy states can backstop the international economy by acting as lender of last resort and by enacting laws that serve as de facto promises that firms will honor their commitments. International commerce will prove fragile in the absence of state intervention.

Institutions are also essential for coordinating state actions and encouraging cooperation. International institutions provide forums for coordination, dispute resolution, and sharing. They serve as incubators for norms, and they reduce transaction costs. All of this creates a virtuous cycle: States join institutions to solve practical problems, and they stay in them once they discover the material and normative benefits. Institutions outlast the political conditions that caused their creation in the first place, because members come to realize the value of keeping them and the costs of leaving. They provide order and predictability, and they foster collective norms. An international order underwritten by strong institutions is prosperous and calm.

For liberal internationalists, cooperation is essential because “security is indivisible.” Threats to one country tend to ripple outwards, putting everyone at risk. As states become increasingly interdependent, they also become more vulnerable to dangers abroad. The upshot is that states cannot secure themselves by closing their eyes to others’ misfortunes. Contemporary international politics do not allow states to make themselves safe by remaining inconspicuous and hoping that trouble doesn’t come their way.

America Online

The foundations of liberal internationalism are on full display in the National Cybersecurity Strategy. Building on earlier efforts to rally like-minded countries in common cause, it presents a “democratic vision for an open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure digital future.” From the administration’s perspective, robust cybersecurity is essential to bolstering global democracy because a secure internet is the foundation of free speech across borders. But while democracies benefit from the open exchange, the White House warns that illiberal regimes seek to stifle the free flow of ideas and to use the internet for repression and political manipulation. The strategy describes the competition in cyberspace in Manichean terms, a struggle pitting democracies against “autocratic states with revisionist intent” whose “reckless disregard” for liberal norms is a clear threat to national security.

The strategy repeatedly emphasizes the importance of protecting digital trade, which it describes as another element in the broader effort to push back against authoritarianism. It sees cybersecurity and trade as mutually reinforcing. Strengthening encryption, for example, will protect commerce, giving commercial actors a reason to collaborate with the government. Such collaboration is key to the administration’s vision of an internet in which security and prosperity go hand in hand.

Tighter links between public and private cybersecurity efforts, however, speak to the belief that the market is not enough. Indeed, the administration argues that market forces have removed incentives for private firms to invest in cybersecurity, especially in software development. Low-cost and high-speed solutions are appealing to buyers and sellers alike, creating a cyberspace ecosystem where security vulnerabilities abound. Fixing this mess requires a program to “realign incentives to favor long-term investments in security, resilience, and promising new technologies,” and the strategy includes strong language about holding the private sector to account through new regulations. All of this is consistent with a liberal internationalist grand strategy, which is founded on the idea that trade is vital but that markets need guidance and protection.

The administration extends the idea of collaboration to include partnerships with foreign states under the auspices of international institutions, using language that will be very familiar to liberal theorists. It builds on decades of work in the United Nations to develop norms that guide internet governance and set the boundaries of acceptable behavior in cyberspace. But the administration goes further in its campaign to situate cybersecurity in a web of overlapping international institutions. The document discusses a hodgepodge of institutions, formal and informal, that will create “a world where responsible state behavior in cyberspace is expected and rewarded and where irresponsible behavior is isolating and costly.”

Incidentally, this language is strikingly familiar to the British diplomat Shaun Riordan, who argues that cyberspace diplomacy aims to “reduce tensions and negotiate norms of behavior which … provide constraints on states which, wanting to appear virtuous citizens of the international community in physical space, self-impose limitations on their behavior in cyberspace.” I suspect that this is no accident. Instead, the similar constructions reflect an underlying belief among diplomats in the power of institutions to shape national incentives, based on the notion that states understand the benefits of institutional cooperation and don’t want to be left out.

The desire for inclusion also reveals the belief that security is indivisible in cyberspace, more so than in the physical world. The global internet is interdependent by design, a network of networks that only exists because of voluntary cooperation. Open channels of communication enable a remarkable platform for exchanging data, but they also create the danger that cyber attacks against one state will end up damaging others. According to the White House, recent history underscores the problem:

The Internet continues to connect individuals, businesses, communities, and countries on shared platforms that enable scaled business solutions and international exchange. But this accelerating global interconnectivity also introduces risks. An attack on one organization, sector, or state can rapidly spill over to other sectors and regions, as happened during Russia’s 2017 “NotPetya” cyberattack on Ukraine, which spread across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, causing billions of dollars in damage. The potential cost of attacks like this will only grow as interdependencies increase.

Moreover, the specific effects of malware are sometimes hard to predict, creating additional uncertainty about system effects in the digital domain. Malware can spread to unintended targets, causing unintended harm. The administration takes all this as proof that vulnerability anywhere is insecurity everywhere, and it seeks to mitigate threats quickly rather than letting them grow and metastasize. From its perspective, there is no substitute for daily coordination among states under the auspices of international institutions. The security of free-trading democracies depends on it.

Measuring Results

The administration promises to measure the results of its strategy. This promise is laudable, though the process will be difficult. Organizations are not objective about their own work, and savvy bureaucrats may be forgiven for believing that the “self-evaluating organization” is a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, the administration pledges to assess its cybersecurity strategy in annual reports from the National Cyber Director, and through lessons-learned analyses by the Cyber Safety Review Board. Most of the assessment process will focus on public-private collaboration, given its emphasis in the document and the intensity of debates over regulation. But the administration should also evaluate the broader results of its liberal grand strategy in cyberspace.

In the physical world, Biden balances his liberal preferences with concerns about escalation. Confronted by the reality of war, he has been willing to set aside ideology rather than risk new conflicts. In cyberspace, by contrast, the president has declared an unambiguous and unrestrained approach. The White House strategy applauds the Department of Defense’s commitment to Defend Forward, an assertive approach based on the idea that the best way to improve cybersecurity is to mitigate threats as close as possible to their point of origin. Advocates of defending forward are confident that they can operate aggressively without triggering a security dilemma with rivals. The president seems to share their confidence.

What explains the difference between Biden’s cyberspace activism and his real-world restraint? Perhaps administration officials agree with academic research showing that individuals and states are more tolerant of cyberspace operations than violent attacks. Perhaps they are persuaded by arguments that fights over bytes do not escalate like fights over territory. Or maybe they just take comfort from the dogs that haven’t barked. Years of intense cyberspace competition have not led to disaster. If anything, there is some evidence that cyberspace operations have defused crises, not caused them.

Bolstered by this sanguine view, the administration has plans for an aggressively liberal internationalist grand strategy in cyberspace. It will invest in digital trade and internet governance, and help other democracies secure themselves against illiberal attacks. Its goal is an internet that “remains open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure — anchored in universal values that respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. Digital connectivity should be a tool that uplifts and empowers people everywhere, not one used for repression and coercion.”

It is not clear how the administration will assess progress towards these lofty goals, but a number of measures might help. Simple quantitative exercises would include tracking the number of significant cyberspace operations relative to the volume of online communications. The administration’s strategy highlights a few key problems: ransomware, infrastructure attacks, and influence operations. All of these should decline over time as adversaries realize that such efforts will probably fail. The administration believes that a coordinated defense among liberal states, international institutions, and private-sector partners will make it obvious that cyberspace operations are futile. Open-source information can help to put that proposition to the test. Secret intelligence, meanwhile, may look for evidence that foreign adversaries are losing confidence.

Success should mean that more individuals and firms are willing to interact online. Faith in an open and secure internet should encourage more participation. Usage data and public surveys might attest to the success of the liberal approach — though such evidence is not dispositive, given the variety of other factors that affect personal and organizational choices. At a minimum, however, we ought to see broad enthusiasm among users in the community of liberal states, and growing faith in the security of the underlying technology that they use.

Other measures might focus on response times in the aftermath of security breaches. Deeper institutional coordination should make it easier to mitigate threats as soon as they are spotted; accelerate joint law enforcement operations leading to noticeably quicker arrests and indictments; and reduce the time to restore functionality to affected systems and machines.

Political measures are somewhat less tangible but no less important. States ought to become more comfortable with regulatory harmonization over time, even if they are not entirely enthusiastic. States should welcome political discourse online and resist the urge to censor divisive topics. Indeed, if the liberal grand strategy is successful, then foreign influence campaigns should become less frequent and less impactful over time. States will stop worrying about trolls on social media, given evidence that foreign rivals are becoming discouraged about the value of such meddling.

How will the administration know if it is failing? The easiest method is looking for opposite evidence of the indicators above. If the liberal approach is not working, for example, then we ought to see a reduction in cyberspace activity relative to population. Individuals who are not convinced that the domain is secure will use it less often. They will be less willing to engage in political speech, share financial information with vendors, or otherwise participate. States will push back against regulatory harmonization and cooperation will become superficial. Firms will also reduce their online presence and revert to older methods of doing business, sacrificing efficiency for reliability.

One other problem bears attention. The administration believes that foreign assistance will lead its partners to improve their capabilities and improve everyone’s cybersecurity. Deeper ties will include sharing threat information and technologies and cooperating in joint law enforcement efforts. In some cases, it will require honoring requests to support partners in the aftermath of an offensive cyberspace operation. “Close cooperation with an affected ally or partner demonstrates solidarity in the face of adversary activity,” the administration argues, “and can accelerate efforts to expose counternormative state behavior and impose consequences.”

Despite these benefits, however, the administration does not promise to respond to all such requests. Instead, it promises to “establish policies for determining when it is in the national interest to provide such support.” The strategy suggests that the default answer is yes, but the administration has left itself some wiggle room. Perhaps officials are concerned that foreign partners will outsource their cybersecurity response to the United States rather than build their own capability. If so, then the administration has also suggested a way of measuring the success or failure of its approach to foreign assistance. Careful investigations can assess whether the target country had taken its own cybersecurity seriously in the period before the breach — and whether it was taking serious efforts in the aftermath. Affirmative findings would tend to support the administration’s approach. More critical findings would not.

The ability to measure progress is important, and the administration deserves credit for making the case for self-assessment. Equally important is the willingness to look for signs of failure. The administration is taking a big bet on a liberal grand strategy in cyberspace. We need to know if the bet is paying off.

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Joshua Rovner is an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.

Special Series, The Brush Pass

warontherocks.com · by Joshua Rovner · March 13, 2023

5. How to break the Xi-Putin axis? Biden must engage with Beijing

Excerpts:

Yet the problem, ultimately, is not China or Russia or their people. It’s their violent, none-too-bright autocratic leaders and evil systems they represent.

As long as Xi and Putin, with their “no limits” relationship, threaten or use force to impose their will at home and abroad, and encourage other leaders to behave likewise to the detriment of free peoples everywhere, the prospect of an east-west collision grows. To avoid such an outcome, the highly personalised Xi-Putin axis must first be broken.

It’s possible to hope. Autocrats are feared but rarely loved. History teaches that when it all goes wrong – and it will – they are on their own.

How to break the Xi-Putin axis? Biden must engage with Beijing

Beijing is following Vladimir Putin’s aggressive playbook. The US can counter the march of the autocrats, but only if it stops feeding their paranoia

The Guardian · by Simon Tisdall · March 12, 2023

Is there a school for autocrats? As if by rote, authoritarian leaders around the world trot out remarkably similar justifications for their repressive actions, democratic deficits and policy failures. These typically include scary claims that their country is under attack by foreign forces and saboteurs or is the victim of a global conspiracy.

Perhaps they have all taken an online correspondence course for aspiring dictators. Tyrants R Us.

China produced classic examples of the genre last week. Accepting a third term, President Xi Jinping urged the country to unite behind him. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we’re facing will only become more and more numerous and grim,” Xi warned. The US and its allies were trying to “encircle, suppress and contain” China.

Only he, Xi, could ensure victory in the coming “struggle”. “Après moi, le déluge,” as King Louis XV supposedly said.

Qin Gang, China’s hawkish new foreign minister, hammered home the aggressively paranoid message of his all-powerful patron. He accused the Biden administration of orchestrating “hysterical neo-McCarthyism” with the furore over last month’s shooting down of a Chinese balloon and accusations that Beijing is about to supply arms to Russia for its war in Ukraine.

A lot else of what Qin had to say made dismaying listening for analysts who thought they discerned a softening of tone after Xi’s meeting with the US president, Joe Biden, in November.

Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister and a China expert, argued recently that an economic slowdown was forcing Xi to take a conciliatory line and rein in abrasive “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

Confounding such optimistic assessments, Qin claimed Biden’s assertion that Washington sought competition, not conflict with China was a big lie. The US, he said, was bent on “malicious confrontation”. Channelling Vladimir Putin’s unsubtle threats, he hinted this could ultimately lead to nuclear war, placing “the future of humanity” at risk.

“The US side’s so-called competition is ... a zero-sum game where you die and I live. If the US does not hit the brakes but continues to speed down the wrong path ... there will surely be conflict,” Qin warned.

To underline the point, he stressed China would take “all necessary measures” to seize Taiwan, which, he claimed bizarrely, the US was trying to destroy. He said “an invisible hand” – presumably the US and Nato – was deliberately exacerbating the Ukraine war in order to serve its geopolitical agenda. And he accused rearming Japan of colluding in a “new cold war” – even as China raises defence spending by 7.2%.

Again speaking on Xi’s authority, Qin last month also effectively rejected the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which China signed. “The right of all countries to independently choose one’s own path of human rights development should be respected ... Imposing one’s model upon others would entail endless troubles,” he said.

It’s an old line, but it’s the kind of disingenuous thinking that has facilitated horrific abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. Imagine if this approach were applied globally.

All such statements may be seen as pure school-of-autocrats dogma. They reveal a generic mentality that mixes insecurity and hubris, twisted by distorted realities, outright lies, immorality and self-deception. Scapegoating of outsiders for policy own goals is habitual. Oppression, discrimination, censorship and corruption are built in. An Iranian ayatollah, Burmese general or Syrian secret policeman would instantly recognise the paradigm.

Yet these are the internal mechanics of the global model that Xi and his emulators want to foist onto the 21st-century world in place of the autocrat’s pet hate, the UN-endorsed international rules-based order.

And this is why it is so important, as Charles Dunst argues in a new book, Defeating the Dictators, that western democracies fight for their values and fulfil their peoples’ expectations. “How can we become the world’s model once again?” Dunst asks.

In hailing Xi’s “exemplary” alliance with Putin, Qin described a nightmare vision of global hegemony, run on authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-human rights lines. “With China and Russia working together, the world will have a driving force,” he said. “The more unstable the world becomes, the more imperative it is for China and Russia to steadily advance relations ... The strategic partnership will surely grow from strength to strength.” What a truly terrible thought. Is such a Big Brother-ish future inevitable?

A more balanced, mutually respectful multipolar world might better suit American interests

Not if western leaders can positively engage with China rather than feed its paranoia and resentment with more sanctions and sabre-rattling. If Xi feels “contained” and “encircled”, he partly has himself to blame – but he is not technically wrong, commentator Ed Luce argued. Perhaps the US should try harder, post-balloon, to find ways to talk.

Dividing the international community into good and bad guys in a crusade for western-style democracy, as Biden advocates, will not eliminate the threat of a world run by thuggish tyrants – and could make it worse.

Harvard professor Stephen Walt suggests a more balanced, mutually respectful multipolar world might better suit American interests. The US had been “loath to abandon a position of unchallenged primacy” since the Soviet collapse, he wrote. It’s time that changed.

Yet the problem, ultimately, is not China or Russia or their people. It’s their violent, none-too-bright autocratic leaders and evil systems they represent.

As long as Xi and Putin, with their “no limits” relationship, threaten or use force to impose their will at home and abroad, and encourage other leaders to behave likewise to the detriment of free peoples everywhere, the prospect of an east-west collision grows. To avoid such an outcome, the highly personalised Xi-Putin axis must first be broken.

It’s possible to hope. Autocrats are feared but rarely loved. History teaches that when it all goes wrong – and it will – they are on their own.

The Guardian · by Simon Tisdall · March 12, 2023

6. USAGM CEO Describes Efforts to Counter Russian and Chinese Propaganda

Excerpts:

"We are really very aggressively moving towards putting in place structures that will help guarantee that," Bennett told lawmakers. "More aggressive content review to help us look and see what is going out and to assure those high standards through program reviews and basically making sure that there is no tolerance for anything other than the highest standards of journalistic ethics," she said.

Bennett was confirmed for a three-year term as CEO of USAGM last year in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 60-36. She served as the director of Voice of America from 2016-20, when she resigned prior to Trump-appointee Michael Pack taking over as USAGM CEO.

Bennett faced some Republican criticism during her confirmation process due to concerns about the security clearance process for employees during her tenure and a 2017 decision to cut short a VOA Mandarin Service interview with a Chinese dissident. Subsequent investigations into that decision found that the decision was justified.

Prior to her time at VOA, Bennett served as executive editor at Bloomberg News and was managing editor of The Oregonian newspaper. She also was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for more than two decades, wrote six nonfiction books and has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize.

According to USAGM estimates, 394 million people access its programming each week. The federally funded agency overseen by the U.S. Congress has two federal entities, the Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. It also has four nonprofits: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund.

USAGM CEO Describes Efforts to Counter Russian and Chinese Propaganda

March 09, 2023 8:12 PM

Katherine Gypson

voanews.com

WASHINGTON —

The United States Agency for Global Media’s Chief Executive Officer Amanda Bennett said Thursday the agency she leads is facing a critical time globally in which access to credible news is threatened by authoritarian regimes.

During a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Bennett told lawmakers that Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and other news networks overseen by USAGM routinely outperform better-funded Russian and Chinese media operations in many key markets around the world because of their independent journalism.

"If we miss this opportunity to target investments to counter inroads Russia and [China] are making, we run the risk of losing the global information war,” Bennett said.

Bennett discussed efforts to improve journalistic standards at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, described USAGM news networks’ use of satellite and circumvention technologies to reach audiences in places like China and Iran, and she described the reach and impact that USAGM networks have in countering attempts by Russia to block access to credible news.

VOA censorship allegations

Bennett, who led Voice of America for four years until she resigned in 2020, said in response to lawmaker questions that she abides by the agency’s editorial firewall and was not involved in a decision to change a recent VOA article about the agency.

In a March 8 letter to USAGM, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul said he was concerned about alleged censorship at USAGM and Voice of America (VOA) in relation to an article published by VOA about its hiring process.

“As a publicly funded media organization, it is imperative that USAGM and VOA comply with these strict requirements for both integrity and nonpartisanship, keeping USAGM leadership out of the editorial decision-making process,” McCaul said.

The article reported how VOA had placed on paid leave two recently hired journalists in its Russian Service over their prior work at Russian-backed media outlets. It also detailed previous management controversies, including a case involving Seterah Derakhshesh Sieg, the chief of VOA’s Persian Service.

She was removed from her position in the Persian Service in 2020 during the administration of former President Donald Trump, after a USAGM-led investigation concluded Sieg had misrepresented her credentials and abused public funds.

Sieg was moved to a new position after a new USAGM investigation in 2021 during the administration of President Joe Biden exonerated her of those charges. Bennett was not yet confirmed as the CEO of USAGM at that time.

The previous leadership’s investigations of staff are the subject of an Office of Special Counsel investigation being carried out at the agency. The results have not yet been released.

During Thursday’s regular House Appropriations subcommittee hearing overseeing USAGM’s use of government funds, Representative Guy Reschenthaler alleged Bennett’s office had not responded to McCaul’s requests for more information.

Bennett said her office would commit to complying with all required congressional requests.

In response to allegations the article had been edited to remove embarrassing information, Bennett said, “The firewall does not permit me to reach across to influence their decisions in terms of what they do with their journalists.”

When asked about the allegations raised in the hearing, VOA spokesperson Bridget Serchak said, “VOA’s editorial firewall prohibits any interference from USAGM management in news coverage decisions. The updates to the VOA news story in question were made after a standard editorial review of the content by VOA newsroom editors.”

A spokesperson for USAGM also denied that agency was involved in the VOA’s editorial process, calling the firewall “sacrosanct.”

“Neither VOA journalists, nor any journalist at our entities, are given editorial direction from USAGM. Framing this as a 'firewall violation' is factually incorrect and misleading,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

When asked for comment in her personal capacity Thursday, Sieg said she had no comment.

Office of Cuba Broadcasting

Lawmakers also expressed concern about the state of free media in Cuba and suggested U.S. broadcasting could do more to address the problem.

"Cuba is one of the most restrictive media environments in the world," Bennett told lawmakers. "I think it has very successfully cut people off from the rest of the world. And yet at the same time, we do see — as I have some data to show you — that the Cuban people still want and crave that information and will go to lengths to find it.”

USAGM's Office of Cuba Broadcasting has been broadcasting news and information to Cubans since 1985. But in recent years, the Miami-based broadcaster has faced criticism about the journalistic integrity of its staff. Bennett acknowledged there had been significant lapses in the past and said there have been a number of reforms.

"We are really very aggressively moving towards putting in place structures that will help guarantee that," Bennett told lawmakers. "More aggressive content review to help us look and see what is going out and to assure those high standards through program reviews and basically making sure that there is no tolerance for anything other than the highest standards of journalistic ethics," she said.

Bennett was confirmed for a three-year term as CEO of USAGM last year in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 60-36. She served as the director of Voice of America from 2016-20, when she resigned prior to Trump-appointee Michael Pack taking over as USAGM CEO.

Bennett faced some Republican criticism during her confirmation process due to concerns about the security clearance process for employees during her tenure and a 2017 decision to cut short a VOA Mandarin Service interview with a Chinese dissident. Subsequent investigations into that decision found that the decision was justified.

Prior to her time at VOA, Bennett served as executive editor at Bloomberg News and was managing editor of The Oregonian newspaper. She also was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for more than two decades, wrote six nonfiction books and has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize.

According to USAGM estimates, 394 million people access its programming each week. The federally funded agency overseen by the U.S. Congress has two federal entities, the Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. It also has four nonprofits: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund.

voanews.com

7. Analysis | Saudi-Iran Agreement Is Less Than Meets the Eye

Excerpts:

The Saudis will also be keenly aware of the direct threat from Iran, whether through its nuclear ambitions (its uranium enrichment program is now within a whisker of weapons-grade output), its production of ballistic missiles of progressively longer range and its reported purchase of state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets. That is why Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, is now seeking a US security guarantee and access to more American weapons, in exchange for normalization of relations with Israel.

And then there are commercial considerations: Iran’s sanctions-busting exports of crude to China eat into the Saudi share of that market.

Given these hard realities, the agreement announced in Beijing is unlikely to greatly alter the risks of conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But it does give China ownership of a problem nobody else wants. Good luck with that.

Analysis | Saudi-Iran Agreement Is Less Than Meets the Eye

The Washington Post · by Bobby Ghosh | Bloomberg · March 11, 2023

The image is calculated to impress. At a media event in Beijing, China’s top diplomat mugs for the cameras, as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and Saudi Arabia’s national security adviser shake hands. With Chinese encouragement, Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s oldest rivals, agreed to resume diplomatic relations.

The underlying message is calculated to surprise: China, long reluctant to involve itself in other people’s problems, is finally prepared to take on the peacemaking responsibilities of a world power. Diving directly into the diplomatic deep end, Beijing is tackling one of the world’s most intractable enmities.

Who could complain about any of this? Even the Biden administration, which is deeply suspicious of China’s growing global ambitions, was compelled to welcome the announcement. “We support any effort to de-escalate tensions there,” said White House spokesman John Kirby. “We think it’s in our own interests.”

But there is less to this tableau than meets the eye. On closer examination, the mediator’s role is overstated, as is the substance of the agreement. The Iranians and Saudis had been working toward a détente for two years, aided by several intermediaries — notably Iraq and Oman. China entered the picture late, after the terms had been agreed. But it suits Tehran and Riyadh to allow Beijing to supervise the final crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s—and to hog the credit. After all, China is the world’s biggest buyer of what Saudi Arabia and Iran have to sell.

The Chinese stamp of approval gives the deal more gravitas than an Iraqi imprimatur, say. An American sign-off was never on the cards, given the longstanding US-Iran animosities, but the Saudis kept the Biden administration appraised of progress throughout.

Progress toward what, exactly? The two sides have agreed to reopen embassies, the better to “clear up misunderstandings” (as Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s security council, put it) and cooperate over regional security in the Persian Gulf. The first of these is the most certain, ending the standoff that began with the 2016 torching of the Saudi embassy in Tehran by Iranian mobs.

But the presence of full-fledged ambassadors in Tehran and Riyadh did little to ameliorate antagonism in the past. As for regional security, the greatest threat to the Gulf is posed by Iran’s attacks — mostly through proxies in Yemen and Iraq — on Saudi targets. The fox can hardly be trusted to cooperate in the security of the henhouse.

For the agreement to have any substance, the Iranians would have to call off their surrogates in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been bogged down in a conflict with the Tehran-backed Houthi militia. That the announcement in Beijing wasn’t preceded, or even accompanied, by an openly stated Iranian promise to this effect is a measure of Riyadh’s desperation to extract itself from the quagmire. It is conceivable that secret assurances have been given, but the Saudis will know not to trust the word of the party holding the catspaw.

The Saudis will also be keenly aware of the direct threat from Iran, whether through its nuclear ambitions (its uranium enrichment program is now within a whisker of weapons-grade output), its production of ballistic missiles of progressively longer range and its reported purchase of state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets. That is why Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, is now seeking a US security guarantee and access to more American weapons, in exchange for normalization of relations with Israel.

And then there are commercial considerations: Iran’s sanctions-busting exports of crude to China eat into the Saudi share of that market.

Given these hard realities, the agreement announced in Beijing is unlikely to greatly alter the risks of conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But it does give China ownership of a problem nobody else wants. Good luck with that.

More From Bobby Ghosh at Bloomberg Opinion:

• Has MBS Flipped on Abraham Accords? Biden Must Be Wary

• Israel’s Twin Crises Put the UAE in a Double Bind

• Yemen’s Fragile Truce Needs More than Talks to Survive

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs. Previously, he was editor in chief at Hindustan Times, managing editor at Quartz and international editor at Time.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

The Washington Post · by Bobby Ghosh | Bloomberg · March 11, 2023

8. The Russia That Might Have Been

Excerpts:

Putin’s obsession with remaking Russia into a nineteenth century-style great power and his alarmist view of NATO expansion became the building blocks of his quest for dominance of former Soviet lands, starting with Ukraine, one of the largest and most influential of the Soviet republics outside Russia. Apart from Putin’s view that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are “one people,” as he famously claimed in his 2021 article on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, he was driven by the belief—widely shared among Russia’s hard-liners—that without control over Ukraine Russia would never be a great power. Yet Moscow’s desire to exercise political, economic, and cultural dominance over Kyiv was doomed to failure from the start.

Poland’s success after joining NATO and the EU provided a template for many Ukrainian liberals.

First, the Ukrainian elite always wanted to maintain distance from Russia, rather than be integrated into a Russian-led order. Ukraine’s oligarchs knew all too well that, though their Russian peers might be wealthier in absolute terms, a phone call from the Kremlin could lose them their fortunes—unlike in Ukraine, where coalitions of powerful players were constantly reassembling precisely in order to prevent the emergence of someone like Putin. Even Ukraine’s supposedly pro-Russian politicians simply used help from Moscow and pro-Russian sentiment in some Ukrainian regions as a resource in domestic power struggles, as President Viktor Yanukovych did before being ousted by the Maidan protests.

Meanwhile, to the west of Ukraine was Poland, a country that provided a role model for Ukraine’s educated classes. Poland’s success after joining NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004 provided a template for many Ukrainian liberals. Finally, and most important, by the start of 2022, it had been more than 30 years since Ukraine’s independence, and the process of national identity building had advanced significantly. Notwithstanding the divisions between various regions and population groups, Ukraine had already defined itself largely as one nation in 2014—and every step the Kremlin made to disrupt the country in the years that followed only made that identity stronger, and more anti-Russian, culminating in nationwide resistance following the invasion in 2022. That resistance was predicted by Putin’s intelligence services but never taken seriously by the isolated Russian leader, who had become a hostage of his own ideas and led his own country into disaster.

Russia’s window of opportunity to redefine itself in the world order closed when the first Russian bombs and missiles hit Ukraine. It’s impossible to tell how this ugly war will end, but one thing is clear: those missed chances will never return. Even if Ukraine can attain a full-scale victory, as defined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it won’t necessarily result in the democratization of Russia. Given that Putin may order the use of nuclear weapons if he believes that the survival of his regime is threatened, the possibility of a full Ukrainian victory seems slim as long as he remains in charge, which might be for quite some time. Meanwhile, Russia will gradually drift toward an economic and political model resembling Iran’s—and will become increasingly dependent on China. The greater tribulation for Russia may be that such an Iranian-style outcome could be quite durable, and every year that it lasts will further diminish the chances that Russia will resolve the conflict with Ukraine, repent for harm done, restore ties with the outside world, and bring balance and pragmatism to its foreign policy.

The Russia That Might Have Been

How Moscow Squandered Its Power and Influence

By Alexander Gabuev

March 13, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Gabuev · March 13, 2023

In the 12 months since Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, the war has turned into an accelerating disaster for Russia. Although Ukrainians are the primary victims of the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression, the war has already left hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dead or wounded. Unprecedented Western sanctions have squeezed the Russian economy, and Moscow’s large-scale mobilization and wartime crackdown on civil society have caused hundreds of thousands of the country’s high-skilled workers to flee abroad. Yet the greatest long-term cost of the war to Russia may be in permanently foreclosing the promise of Russia occupying a peaceful and prosperous place in the twenty-first-century world order.

The current trajectory of Russia’s foreign policy was not predestined, and there were many chances for the Kremlin to do things differently. For much of the last 20 years—even following the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014—Russia had a historic opening to build a dynamic new place for itself in the international system. When Putin was sworn in as president in May 2000, Russia was entering a period of greater possibility—both within and beyond its borders—than at any other point in its history. Internally, Russia had survived the collapse of the USSR and the tumultuous 1990s to go from an empire to an influential nation-state in the making. Despite the horrendous wars in Chechnya, Russia was, by the turn of the century, largely stable and at peace. Its planned economy had given way to an adaptable market economy. It was an imperfect but vibrant democracy.

Then, around 2003, Russia got lucky. The U.S. invasion of Iraq coupled with China’s spectacular economic boom led to a sharp increase in global commodity prices. The Kremlin’s coffers were suddenly flooded with revenues from the sale of oil, gas, metals, fertilizers, and other products on the global market. This windfall allowed Russia to quickly repay its foreign debts and nearly double its GDP during Putin’s first two presidential terms. Despite mounting corruption, most ordinary Russians found that their incomes were rising. Compared with their troubled imperial and Soviet past, Russians had never been so prosperous and, simultaneously, so free as in the first decade of the twenty-first century. With these strong economic and political foundations, Russia was well positioned to become a global power between East and West—benefiting from its links to both Europe and Asia, and focused on internal development.

Now, Putin has squandered all of that. Driven by his growing appetite for power, Russia has been transformed into an authoritarian regime over the past decade, with Russian society and the country’s elite largely unable and unwilling to hinder the process. That transformation is largely responsible for Moscow’s failure to grasp these opportunities and redefine Russia’s world stature. Instead, Putin’s steady accumulation of power transformed a robust foreign-policy-making process, rooted in impartial analysis and interagency deliberations, into an increasingly personalized one. As a result, Putin and his inner circle succumbed to growing paranoia about perceived military threats from the West, and their decisions did not undergo the intellectual and institutional scrutiny they needed. Ultimately, this drove the nation into the strategic and moral catastrophe of its war in Ukraine.

BRIGHT, CONFIDENT MORNING

When Putin came to power in 1999, the external geopolitical environment was more favorable to Russia than at almost any previous point in the modern era. No neighbor or great power posed a serious threat to Russian security. The collapse of the USSR had not produced territorial disputes between Russia and its neighbors of the sort that would lead to inevitable conflicts. And until the 2014 decision to illegally annex Crimea, Moscow seemed mostly happy with its borders, including with Ukraine. The Cold War was over, and the United States treated Russia as a declining power that no longer constituted a threat to it and its allies. Instead, Washington sought to support Russia in its transition to democracy and a market economy. Foreign investment and technology helped to modernize the Russian economy and started to heal the wounds caused by the country’s traumatic adoption of a new economic model in the 1990s. Exports of Russian commodities were enthusiastically purchased by many European nations.

Moscow’s relations with Germany, as well as with other major European countries such as France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, were at a historic peak. In eastern Europe, there was a Soviet legacy of economic ties and personal connections between Moscow and such countries as Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as the newly independent Baltic states. Consecutive waves of NATO and EU enlargement in the 1990s and 2000s made Russia’s neighbors to its west more prosperous and secure, and thus far less fearful of potential Russian revanchism, and opened the way for a dynamic of pragmatic and mutually beneficial engagement, which persisted for much of the 2000s. During these years, Russia and the EU discussed strengthening trade, as well as economic and energy ties. Although the EU made no invitation to Russia to join the union, it did offer to harmonize trade regulations and remove many of the barriers that limited ties between Moscow and Brussels.

As for its relations with the East, Russia managed to resolve a decades-old territorial dispute with China in 2005, finally putting the relationship with the new superpower on a predictable and productive footing. By then, China was the world’s largest importer of hydrocarbons, providing Russia with a new, enormous, and still expanding market. Meanwhile, with an eye on their own energy security, Japan and South Korea were also interested in helping to bring Russia’s vast hydrocarbon resources in Siberia to the market. In turn, by building ties to these two technologically advanced Asian democracies, as well as to China, Russia had an opportunity to tap into the rapidly modernizing potential of the Asia-Pacific region. For the first time in its history, Moscow was able to sell its commodities to both Europe and Asia, diversifying its trade relationships and cultivating new markets as it accessed money and technology from both the West and the East.

Finally, Russia maintained Soviet-era connections to many developing countries in the diverse “global South.” These ties enabled Russia to keep afloat its Soviet-era industries, particularly its defense sector and civilian nuclear power, by turning contracts with countries like India and Vietnam into sources of revenue that supported domestic manufacturing.

A DARK AND UNNECESSARY TURN

Against this uniquely favorable backdrop, Russia had a chance to pursue an entirely different foreign policy from the one upon which it ultimately embarked. For the first time in its history, Moscow didn’t need to spend the bulk of its precious resources on defending itself against external threats or making a bid for global supremacy. With the end of the Cold War, Russia seemed to be out of the game of seeking global dominance once and for all. It could have focused its foreign policy on one goal: maximizing the prosperity of the Russian people through economic growth while guaranteeing their security at comparatively minimal cost. Given its favorable economic and security relationships, Russia could have evolved into a nation with an economy similar to Canada’s, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and geopolitical neutrality. In short, Russia had the foundations it needed to become a prosperous, confident, secure, and trustworthy major twenty-first century power—a country that could help tackle some of the world’s pressing problems.

Such benevolent geopolitical egoism, grounded in neutrality, was more pragmatic and realistic than the obvious alternatives. After all, the dreams held by some Russian reformers in the 1990s and early 2000s of integrating Russia into European and transatlantic alliances like the EU and NATO were futile. Russia was too large to be absorbed into the EU easily: it would have upset the union’s precarious internal political balance. Russia was an even more unlikely candidate for NATO, a military alliance that was dominated by Washington and subordinated to America’s foreign policy agenda—which even then did not necessarily coincide with Moscow’s. In any case, unlike most European countries, Russia did not need the United States’ guarantees to feel secure. Yet by the same token, the alliance’s expansion to Russia’s doorstep did not present a credible threat to Russian security, given Moscow’s vast nuclear arsenal and substantial conventional forces. Remaining outside the EU and NATO was no hindrance to building a market economy, achieving economic prosperity, and building a political system that would protect human rights—if Russia’s elites and population had wanted such a system. In the early years of this century, the Russian leadership held all the cards for success.

Had Russia embarked on a path of growing ties to East and West, it would have had many chances to strengthen its position in the world. Instead of attacking the United States for its lack of public introspection over the Iraq war, the Russian government could have left critical commentary to experts and pundits. Furthermore, Moscow’s various calls for respect of the UN Charter would have been taken more seriously had Russia itself not unilaterally recognized the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, or annexed Crimea and instigated a war in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014. Instead, Russia could have done some introspection of its own and found ways to start healing its neighbors’ historical wounds. This could have been done by focusing on the fact that Russians themselves had made a decisive contribution to ending the Soviet regime, by admitting a degree of responsibility, as a successor state, for imperial and Soviet misdeeds, by opening up the archives, and by discussing the darker pages of history, including the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 and the Soviets’ 1939 nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany.

Moreover, a Russia that remained friendly to both China and the United States–led West could have remained flexible and pragmatic when deciding how to respond to geoeconomic initiatives like the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2016, or China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the 2010s. The Russian government could also have worked with both Chinese and Western global vendors on cutting-edge technologies like 5G, at the same time as trying to enhance domestic production and play a bigger role in the international supply chain. With its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, vast carbon-dioxide-absorbing forests, and natural resources to produce clean fuels like hydrogen, Russia could have begun to play a leading role in the global response to climate change.

THE ROAD TO UKRAINE

So why didn’t Russia choose this path? Although Putin’s foreign policy in his first term was largely pragmatic and fit broadly into this framework, after 2003 the Kremlin’s course became increasingly focused on revanchism and animosity toward the United States. Moscow’s reset with Washington during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev from 2009 to 2011 was a brief bright spot, in which the United States and Russia managed to find common ground on a variety of issues—from arms control and Iran’s nuclear program to Moscow’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the forging of a new technology partnership. But this rapprochement quickly ended with Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. Feeling betrayed by Western intervention in Libya and support for the Arab Spring, Putin became increasingly fixated upon alleged U.S. efforts to promote regime change in Russia—an obsession that was intensified by waves of street protests in Moscow in late 2011 after a rigged parliamentary election. His overreaction to the Maidan protests of 2014 led to Moscow’s decision to annex Crimea and fuel a brutal war in the Donbas. In the years after 2014, Russia’s relations with the West were on a downward spiral, although even then there still was an opportunity for Russia to pull back and rebuild its relations with the West. Despite significant sanctions, Moscow still had significant energy ties to Europe, and it continued to play a constructive role in nuclear diplomacy with Iran. But once again, Putin chose a darker path, deciding on the full-blown invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The main reason for Russia’s missed opportunities lies in the choices that Putin and the country’s elites have made over the past two decades, and the direct connection of these choices to Russia’s domestic politics. Concerns about U.S. efforts to impose democracy via “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine fed into Putin’s growing suspicions and hostility toward the West. The decision to center Russia’s prosperity on the state-controlled extraction sector instead of building a diversified economy anchored in the rule of law was also a fateful choice that set Russia on its current course. Over the past decade, Putin and his inner circle gradually suppressed the discussions that had been taking place in society and among the elite about a new, more open Russian state and replaced them with propaganda and imperial nostalgia, which fell on fertile ground following the trauma of the Soviet collapse.

In seeking to define itself as a great power in the twenty-first century, Russia has adopted a contemporary version of the Soviet Union’s Cold War standoff with the United States: only by controlling more territory, confronting the West, and opposing Western security alliances, Moscow has decided, can it assert its power in the world. The contrast with what might have been is hard to overstate. Instead of invading Ukraine, the Russian government could have offered a vision of a secure country with a high degree of strategic autonomy and inclusive economic growth, resulting in Norwegian-level wealth, Japanese-level life expectancy, and science that, among other things, would enable it to be a leading power in addressing climate change and pursuing the next frontiers in space exploration. But such a vision, in addition to being utterly new to Russian strategic culture, would also have required robust state institutions and effective checks and balances, both of which have long been anathema to Putin and his entourage.

Putin’s obsession with remaking Russia into a nineteenth century-style great power and his alarmist view of NATO expansion became the building blocks of his quest for dominance of former Soviet lands, starting with Ukraine, one of the largest and most influential of the Soviet republics outside Russia. Apart from Putin’s view that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are “one people,” as he famously claimed in his 2021 article on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, he was driven by the belief—widely shared among Russia’s hard-liners—that without control over Ukraine Russia would never be a great power. Yet Moscow’s desire to exercise political, economic, and cultural dominance over Kyiv was doomed to failure from the start.

Poland’s success after joining NATO and the EU provided a template for many Ukrainian liberals.

First, the Ukrainian elite always wanted to maintain distance from Russia, rather than be integrated into a Russian-led order. Ukraine’s oligarchs knew all too well that, though their Russian peers might be wealthier in absolute terms, a phone call from the Kremlin could lose them their fortunes—unlike in Ukraine, where coalitions of powerful players were constantly reassembling precisely in order to prevent the emergence of someone like Putin. Even Ukraine’s supposedly pro-Russian politicians simply used help from Moscow and pro-Russian sentiment in some Ukrainian regions as a resource in domestic power struggles, as President Viktor Yanukovych did before being ousted by the Maidan protests.

Meanwhile, to the west of Ukraine was Poland, a country that provided a role model for Ukraine’s educated classes. Poland’s success after joining NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004 provided a template for many Ukrainian liberals. Finally, and most important, by the start of 2022, it had been more than 30 years since Ukraine’s independence, and the process of national identity building had advanced significantly. Notwithstanding the divisions between various regions and population groups, Ukraine had already defined itself largely as one nation in 2014—and every step the Kremlin made to disrupt the country in the years that followed only made that identity stronger, and more anti-Russian, culminating in nationwide resistance following the invasion in 2022. That resistance was predicted by Putin’s intelligence services but never taken seriously by the isolated Russian leader, who had become a hostage of his own ideas and led his own country into disaster.

Russia’s window of opportunity to redefine itself in the world order closed when the first Russian bombs and missiles hit Ukraine. It’s impossible to tell how this ugly war will end, but one thing is clear: those missed chances will never return. Even if Ukraine can attain a full-scale victory, as defined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it won’t necessarily result in the democratization of Russia. Given that Putin may order the use of nuclear weapons if he believes that the survival of his regime is threatened, the possibility of a full Ukrainian victory seems slim as long as he remains in charge, which might be for quite some time. Meanwhile, Russia will gradually drift toward an economic and political model resembling Iran’s—and will become increasingly dependent on China. The greater tribulation for Russia may be that such an Iranian-style outcome could be quite durable, and every year that it lasts will further diminish the chances that Russia will resolve the conflict with Ukraine, repent for harm done, restore ties with the outside world, and bring balance and pragmatism to its foreign policy.

ALEXANDER GABUEV is the director of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center in Berlin.
MORE BY ALEXANDER GABUEV

Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Gabuev · March 13, 2023

9. Between deterrence and escalation - The Chinese doom argument

Excerpts:

Throughout this conflict, advocates of increasing U.S. support for Ukraine have made a version of the “fight them over there” argument we heard in the early days of the global war on terror: If we don’t help Ukraine stop Russia now, the thinking goes, Moscow will crush Kyiv and keep on going, attacking NATO nations and therefore forcing us into direct great power conflict. But if avoiding direct conflict is our aim, there must be self-imposed limits to U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Otherwise, we risk starting the very open warfare we are trying to avoid.

An analogous risk is present with the prospect of Chinese involvement in Ukraine. The Biden administration rightfully wants to deter Chinese lethal aid to Russia, but at some point in the process of perpetually scaling up U.S. intervention, we will have left deterrence behind. With U.S. tanks already heading to Ukraine, adding in American-supplied F-16s would be a leap toward the degree of entanglement the president has said he does not want. It was with good reason that Biden rejected calls for a U.S.- or NATO-enforced no-fly zone early on. He needs more of that same prudence now.

Between deterrence and escalation | Bonnie Kristian | The Critic Magazine

The Chinese doom argument

ARTILLERY ROW

Bonnie Kristian

12 March, 2023

thecritic.co.uk · by Katherine Bayford · March 12, 2023

China might send lethal military aid to Moscow for its war in Ukraine, the Biden administration suggested recently — or perhaps, actually, it won’t.

In early February, CIA Director Bill Burns said China has been “very reluctant to provide the kind of lethal weapons to Russia to use in Ukraine,” but by midmonth that story was evolving. From the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Washington’s “deep concern” that Beijing is “strongly considering providing lethal assistance to Russia.” Unnamed U.S. officials in a Wall Street Journal report specified the aid could include “artillery and drones,” and on the following day, Burns declared himself “confident” that the lethal aid plan was under consideration.

But National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and President Joe Biden himself took a different line. Sullivan reiterated on CNN and NBC that no such transfers have happened to date, and in an interview with ABC News, Biden said he doesn’t expect them to happen at all.

So why raise the issue? In Burns’ telling, the point was to send a warning, “to make very clear what the consequences of that would be.” Blinken promised “serious consequences.” Biden pledged he “would respond.” And Sullivan said this “bad mistake” would “come at real cost to China,” including “alienat[ing] them from a number of countries in the world … and [putting] them for square into the center of responsibility for the kinds of war crimes and bombardments of civilians and atrocities that the Russians are committing in Ukraine.” “No limits” partnership or not, the White House team argued, helping Moscow this way would be bad for Beijing.

But surely Beijing already realized that fact. China’s communist government is oppressive, even genocidal — but that doesn’t mean decisionmakers in Beijing are unable to game out the possible effects of getting into proxy (or even open) war with the U.S., the world’s foremost military power. Perhaps the administration simply wanted to give its intel-release-as-deterrence strategy a second shot at success. Regardless, it’s a warning that arguably could have been left unsaid in a time of already fraught U.S.-China relations.

The more worrisome explanation for raising the prospect of Chinese arms in Ukraine is that it could provide an excuse for escalatory action we might well come to regret. Indeed, the suggestion has already been used that way. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is pushing the Biden team “to do two things quickly: Make Russia a state sponsor of terrorism under U.S. law, which would make it harder for China to give weapons to Russia, and we need to start training Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 now.”

And Graham isn’t alone in that position, nor in his linking of the advanced fighter jet idea to the China story. “Now it’s time for the West to escalate its assistance to Ukraine, in ways that will deter China and defeat Russia,” argued The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols in a recent column. To “China, it would say that our commitment to Ukraine and to preserving the international order we helped create is greater than Beijing’s commitment to Moscow.” The West “could fundamentally change the war” by giving Ukraine “combat air power,” said David A. Deptula and Evelyn N. Farkas in The Wall Street Journal, and we should do it before Russia gets “additional aid from Chinese strongman Xi Jinping.”

Whether that aid is coming very much remains to be seen

Whether that aid is coming very much remains to be seen, as Biden and Sullivan made clear. (Beijing has vehemently denied the allegation, in turn accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy given our own record of funneling lethal aid into this conflict.) But if this drive to preemptively increase U.S. aid to Ukraine succeeds — and particularly if we take a major new step like sending F-16s — Washington could occasion the very escalation we hope to deter.

Throughout this conflict, advocates of increasing U.S. support for Ukraine have made a version of the “fight them over there” argument we heard in the early days of the global war on terror: If we don’t help Ukraine stop Russia now, the thinking goes, Moscow will crush Kyiv and keep on going, attacking NATO nations and therefore forcing us into direct great power conflict. But if avoiding direct conflict is our aim, there must be self-imposed limits to U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Otherwise, we risk starting the very open warfare we are trying to avoid.

An analogous risk is present with the prospect of Chinese involvement in Ukraine. The Biden administration rightfully wants to deter Chinese lethal aid to Russia, but at some point in the process of perpetually scaling up U.S. intervention, we will have left deterrence behind. With U.S. tanks already heading to Ukraine, adding in American-supplied F-16s would be a leap toward the degree of entanglement the president has said he does not want. It was with good reason that Biden rejected calls for a U.S.- or NATO-enforced no-fly zone early on. He needs more of that same prudence now.

thecritic.co.uk · by Katherine Bayford · March 12, 2023

10. The Counterinsurgent’s Curriculum

Conclusion:

The U.S. military is not wrong to focus today on potential conflicts with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—the United States’ most dangerous enemies. But U.S. military leaders should not ignore the equally likely scenario that they will need to fight small-scale battles against shadowy organizations. If officers and senior noncommissioned officers are educated for the full gamut of threats the country might face in the years ahead, including counterinsurgency warfare, the soldiers they lead can quickly adapt to situations on the ground. Keeping counterinsurgency and small-scale warfare curricula in command and general staff courses and war colleges is a small price to pay to prevent a rude shock in the future. But it would be a tragedy if senior U.S. military leaders, like their late Cold War counterparts in the post-Vietnam years, decided to jettison lessons learned the hard way in Iraq by assuming the United States supposedly will never fight that kind of war again. U.S. military history suggests otherwise.

The Counterinsurgent’s Curriculum

Why American Troops Should Study the Iraq War

By Peter R. Mansoor

Foreign Affairs · by Peter R. Mansoor · March 13, 2023

Twenty years ago, the United States invaded Iraq and unwittingly ushered in a lengthy struggle for stability and security in the country. U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expected a short, sharp war that would end once U.S. forces expelled the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The U.S. military was primed to rapidly and surgically cut through the Iraqi army with its high-tech forces, a swift intervention that would culminate in the seizing of Baghdad. Instead, faulty assumptions, mistakes after Saddam’s ouster, and an invasion force that was too small to secure the country allowed the growth of a virulent insurgency that proved difficult to defeat.

Following the initial invasion, the U.S. military found itself embroiled in combat that resembled its fighting in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. But several decades after that war, many of the lessons learned in Vietnam—at such great cost—had been forgotten. After the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, the U.S. military shifted its focus to the threat from the Soviet Union. It stopped teaching its troops how to combat insurgencies, and those capabilities began to atrophy. As a result, it took the U.S. military several years to work out the best way to fight in Iraq. Today, the United States has once again prioritized great-power competition. But it should not make the same mistake of turning its back on preparing to fight insurgencies. The armed forces must be ready for the range of conflicts that may arise in the coming century, and counterinsurgency will surely be in the mix.

THINKING BIG

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army battled both regular North Vietnamese units and Vietcong guerrillas. By the time U.S. forces withdrew from the conflict, they had learned a great deal about counterinsurgency warfare, stability operations, and nation-building. In subsequent years, the army let that experience wane, with what little expertise that remained concentrated at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. The bulk of the armed forces turned instead to preparation for high-intensity combat against Warsaw Pact forces in Europe.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 set the U.S. military adrift. Great-power conflict was unlikely for the foreseeable future, and military leaders struggled to define their mission and determine how best to organize their forces. Some policymakers embraced the use of the armed forces for small-scale contingencies, peacekeeping operations, and “military operations other than war,” a phrase popular among policymakers in the 1990s. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was among them, famously quipping to Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What's the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Indeed, in the 1990s, Washington deployed the military to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. These operations enabled the distribution of food aid, forced a dictator from power, helped stop a civil war, and ultimately birthed a new country, but they did not come without cost. The American public was quick to question the goals of U.S. military deployments once they incurred casualties.

Despite these largely successful small deployments, U.S. military leaders remained wedded to planning for large-scale combat operations. U.S. Navy admirals and Air Force generals viewed a rising China as the next great threat. Army trainers continued to pit combat teams at the National Training Center against an opposing force that looked suspiciously like the Soviet army in desert camouflage. The U.S. Joint Forces Command went further, training for operations against imaginary enemies akin to the United States—mirror-imaged adversaries that did not exist in the real world. The armed forces bought into a revolution in military affairs, using new technology, doctrine, and organizations that coupled guided munitions with cutting-edge intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems that would theoretically dispel the fog of war, reduce friction on the battlefield, and enable victory in future wars at a low cost. Wars against great-power adversaries and less powerful states such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea would be quick, inexpensive, and decisive.

For a brief moment after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it appeared that the theorists were right. In both countries, regime change was accomplished quickly and with limited expenditure of blood and treasure. But little thought had been put into what would follow, and the resulting occupations turned into messy nation-building affairs for which the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were ill prepared. Destroying the Iraqi armed forces and the Taliban was far easier than installing new governments and stabilizing countries that had been traumatized by years of misrule. As the U.S. military faltered, virulent insurgencies erupted, supported by neighboring states with agendas that ran counter to American interests.

LEARNING BY DOING

For several years, operations in Iraq floundered as military leaders came to grips with the type of war they had to fight. Commanders were initially encouraged to conduct offensive operations against both jihadi terrorists and stubborn holdouts from Saddam’s regime, whatever the costs for the Iraqi people. General John Abizaid, then the head of U.S. Central Command, worried that U.S. and other foreign forces were “antibodies” that would create more insurgents than they would suppress. He ordered U.S. forces to pull out of Iraqi cities to limit the provocations that could stoke resentment and stir further violence. But since the new Iraqi army and police lacked personnel and were not yet ready, that withdrawal allowed Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to take over neighborhoods. Sectarian tensions erupted when al Qaeda terrorists bombed the al-Askari shrine, a Shiite holy site in Samarra, in February 2006, leading to a civil war that threatened to tear Iraq apart.

Even as senior commanders remained wedded to existing strategic and operational concepts, midlevel leaders such as Colonel H. R. McMaster, Lieutenant Colonel Dale Alford, and Colonel Sean MacFarland experimented with counterinsurgency operations in Tal Afar, al-Qaim, and Ramadi. They positioned their forces in smaller outposts in urban areas and allied with local tribes and leaders to oppose al Qaeda and other insurgent groups. In December 2006, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and the Marine Corps Combat Development Command jointly published a new counterinsurgency manual that focused on protecting the local population from insurgent intimidation and violence as the key to success. In addition, Bush revamped the military’s leadership, dismissing Rumsfeld and his battlefield commander, General George Casey, and replacing them with Bob Gates and General David Petraeus, who were determined to prosecute a robust counterinsurgency campaign to improve the coalition’s fortunes in Iraq. Bush provided them with the resources to do so during the troop surge of 2007–8, going all in to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq and stabilize the country.

Destroying armies is far easier than installing new governments.

Aided by the Sunni Awakening, a U.S.-backed tribal revolt against al Qaeda in Anbar Province, the surge succeeded beyond all expectations. The United States changed its objective from creating a Jeffersonian democracy to the more manageable goal of “sustainable stability,” providing a safe environment in Iraq that would create the conditions for democracy in the long term. U.S. forces shifted their focus to conducting counterinsurgency operations centered on securing Baghdad and the belts of territory surrounding it and destroying al Qaeda in Iraq. By this point, U.S. troops—many with multiple tours under their belts—had learned new counterinsurgency tactics, techniques, and procedures at the sharp end of combat. The ranks of the Iraqi security forces swelled as well, growing to more than 350,000 soldiers and police officers, with U.S. advisers now embedded in most formations. And more than 100,000 local citizens, the so-called Sons of Iraq, stepped forward to guard their communities against the depredations of terrorists, insurgents, and Shiite militias alike.

By the end of the surge in the summer of 2008, security incidents in Iraq had declined by more than 90 percent from pre-surge levels. This relative calm enabled successful elections in 2009 and 2010, which backfired when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had been defeated at the polls in the latter election and was in danger of being turned out of office, retaliated by targeting his political enemies, rekindling the fires of civil war. Maliki and the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama could not agree on renewing the agreement that governed the conduct of American forces in Iraq, leading to the withdrawal of U.S. troops at the end of 2011. Without the tutelage of U.S. advisers, the Iraqi security forces began to deteriorate as Maliki removed competent commanders and allowed corruption to hollow out the army.

After the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invaded Iraq in 2014, U.S. forces returned, this time in a supporting role to the Iraqi Army and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led militia. The proxy fight against ISIS worked well. Backed by robust airpower, limited numbers of U.S. Special Forces, ground troops, and advisers teamed up with Iraqi and SDF forces to crush ISIS.

FORGET ME NOT

Conflicts do not end with the destruction of an adversary’s armed forces. Through years of trial and error in Iraq, the U.S. military figured out ways to secure and control local populations, conduct precision counterterror operations, create effective local security forces, gather intelligence, prevent disinformation from spreading, engage neighboring states to eliminate sanctuaries for insurgents, stabilize the local economy, and set up effective governments—so-called nation-building operations.

With the global war on terror now in the rearview mirror, the U.S. military is no longer rigorously training its soldiers and officers in the prosecution of counterinsurgency warfare. The U.S. military has closed its Counterinsurgency Center, reduced the number of hours devoted to counterinsurgency training in professional military educational institutions, and stopped counterinsurgency training at its combat training centers.

After the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army did its best to forget the lessons of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict all but disappeared from the curriculum of professional military education. From the mid-1970s until the September 11 attacks in 2001, the army assumed that most of its soldiers, save for a small number of special forces, could ignore counterinsurgency warfare. With the defeat of ISIS and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the likelihood of counterinsurgency disappearing from U.S. military education and training was already high. The invasion of Ukraine and the potential return of great-power conflict makes it all but certain.

The U.S. military is not wrong to focus today on potential conflicts with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—the United States’ most dangerous enemies. But U.S. military leaders should not ignore the equally likely scenario that they will need to fight small-scale battles against shadowy organizations. If officers and senior noncommissioned officers are educated for the full gamut of threats the country might face in the years ahead, including counterinsurgency warfare, the soldiers they lead can quickly adapt to situations on the ground. Keeping counterinsurgency and small-scale warfare curricula in command and general staff courses and war colleges is a small price to pay to prevent a rude shock in the future. But it would be a tragedy if senior U.S. military leaders, like their late Cold War counterparts in the post-Vietnam years, decided to jettison lessons learned the hard way in Iraq by assuming the United States supposedly will never fight that kind of war again. U.S. military history suggests otherwise.

PETER R. MANSOOR, a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army, is Raymond E. Mason, Jr., Chair in Military History at the Ohio State University. He served as a Brigade Commander in Iraq in 2003–4 and as Executive Officer to General David Petraeus, Commander of the Multinational Force–Iraq, in 2007–8.
MORE BY PETER R. MANSOOR

Foreign Affairs · by Peter R. Mansoor · March 13, 2023

11. America Is Ceding the Seas to Its Enemies

Excerpts:

Some voices, of course, will argue that America’s interests, diffuse and global, might best be served by expanding our commitments of land forces to places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Korea as demonstrations of American resolve, and that air and naval forces should be diminished to pay for such commitments. Others—those in the “divest to invest” school—believe in the promise of future technology, arguing that more traditional warfare platforms and missions should be phased out to fund their newer and more efficient missiles or cybersystems. The first approach continues a path of unnecessary entanglements. The second proceeds along a path of promise without proof.

A seapower-focused national-security strategy would give new advantages to the United States. It would not too subtly encourage allies and partners in Eurasia to increase investment in land forces and to work more closely together. If they build more tanks and fully staff their armies, the United States could guarantee transoceanic supply lines from the Western Hemisphere. The 70-year practice of stationing our land forces in allied countries, using Americans as trip wires and offering allies a convenient excuse not to spend on their own defense, should come to an end.

A seapower strategy, pursued deliberately, would put America back on course for global leadership. We must shun entanglements in other nations’ land wars—resisting the urge to solve every problem—and seek instead to project influence from the sea. We must re-create an industrialized, middle-class America that builds and exports manufactured goods that can be carried on U.S.-built ships to the global market.

We knew all this in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Chinese are showing us that they know it now. The United States needs to relearn the lessons of strategy, geography, and history. We must look outward across the oceans, and find our place upon them, again.

America Is Ceding the Seas to Its Enemies

To avoid catastrophe, we need more ships.

By Jerry Hendrix

Photo-illustrations by Oliver Munday

MARCH 13, 2023, 6 AM E

The Atlantic · by Jerry Hendrix · March 13, 2023

Very few Americans—or, for that matter, very few people on the planet—can remember a time when freedom of the seas was in question. But for most of human history, there was no such guarantee. Pirates, predatory states, and the fleets of great powers did as they pleased. The current reality, which dates only to the end of World War II, makes possible the commercial shipping that handles more than 80 percent of all global trade by volume—oil and natural gas, grain and raw ores, manufactured goods of every kind. Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.

But what if the safe transit of ships could no longer be assumed? What if the oceans were no longer free?

Every now and again, Americans are suddenly reminded of how much they depend on the uninterrupted movement of ships around the world for their lifestyle, their livelihood, even their life. In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, forcing vessels shuttling between Asia and Europe to divert around Africa, delaying their passage and driving up costs. A few months later, largely because of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 container ships were stacked up outside the California Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, snarling supply chains throughout the country.

Read: The ship stuck in the Suez Canal is glorious

These events were temporary, if expensive. Imagine, though, a more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters, twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes. Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently equipped to resist such a gambit.

Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to speed their passage.

Read: The world’s most important body of water

Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.

The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry. Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.

If oceanic trade declines, markets would turn inward, perhaps setting off a second Great Depression. Nations would be reduced to living off their own natural resources, or those they could buy—or take—from their immediate neighbors. The world’s oceans, for 70 years assumed to be a global commons, would become a no-man’s-land. This is the state of affairs that, without a moment’s thought, we have invited.

Everywhere I look, I observe sea power manifesting itself—unacknowledged—in American life. When I drive past a Walmart, a BJ’s Wholesale Club, a Lowe’s, or a Home Depot, in my mind I see the container ships moving products from where they can be produced at a low price in bulk form to markets where they can be sold at a higher price to consumers. Our economy and security rely on the sea—a fact so fundamental that it should be at the center of our approach to the world.

It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instruments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participation in land wars, large or small. There have been only a few true seapower nations in history—notably Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Venice, and Carthage.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana and spent 26 years on active duty in the Navy, deploying in support of combat operations in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, both at sea and in the air. I did postgraduate work at several universities and served as a strategist and an adviser to senior officials in the Pentagon. Yet I have always remained, in terms of interests and outlook, a son of the Midwest. In my writings I have sought to underscore sea power’s importance and the reliance of our economy on the sea.

“If you like Walmart,” I often told my mother, “then you ought to love the U.S. Navy. It’s the Navy that makes Walmart possible.”

Despite my experience, I was never able to convince my mother. She spent the last years of her working life at the Walmart in my hometown, first at the checkout counter and then in accounting. My mother followed the news and was sharply curious about the world; we were close, and spoke often. She was glad that I was in the Navy, but not because she saw my work as essential to her own life. “If you like Walmart,” I often told her, “then you ought to love the U.S. Navy. It’s the Navy that makes Walmart possible.” But to her, as a mother, my naval service mostly meant that, unlike friends and cousins who deployed with the Army or Marine Corps to Iraq or Afghanistan, I probably wasn’t going to be shot at. Her perspective is consistent with a phenomenon that the strategist Seth Cropsey has called seablindness.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate the scale or speed of the transformation wrought after World War II. The war destroyed or left destitute all of the world powers opposed to the concept of a mare liberum—a “free sea”—first enunciated by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in 1609. The United States and Great Britain, the two traditional proponents of a free sea, had emerged not only triumphant but also in a position of overwhelming naval dominance. Their navies were together larger than all of the other navies of the world combined. A free sea was no longer an idea. It was now a reality.

In this secure environment, trade flourished. The globalizing economy, which allowed easier and cheaper access to food, energy, labor, and commodities of every kind, grew from nearly $8 trillion in 1940 to more than $100 trillion 75 years later, adjusted for inflation. With prosperity, other improvements followed. During roughly this same period, from the war to the present, the share of the world’s population in extreme poverty, getting by on less than $1.90 a day, dropped from more than 60 percent to about 10 percent. Global literacy doubled, to more than 85 percent. Global life expectancy in 1950 was 46 years. By 2019, it had risen to 73 years.

All of this has depended on freedom of the seas, which in turn has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the United States—that believe in such freedom.

But the very success of this project now threatens its future. Seablindness has become endemic.

The United States is no longer investing in the instruments of sea power as it once did. America’s commercial shipbuilding industry began losing its share of the global market in the 1960s to countries with lower labor costs, and to those that had rebuilt their industrial capacity after the war. The drop in American shipbuilding accelerated after President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981. The administration, in a nod to free-market principles, began to shrink government subsidies that had supported the industry. That was a choice; it might have gone the other way. Aircraft manufacturers in the United States, citing national-security concerns, successfully lobbied for continued, and even increased, subsidies for their industry in the decades that followed—and got them.

It is never to a nation’s advantage to depend on others for crucial links in its supply chain. But that is where we are. In 1977, American shipbuilders produced more than 1 million gross tons of merchant ships. By 2005, that number had fallen to 300,000. Today, most commercial ships built in the United States are constructed for government customers such as the Maritime Administration or for private entities that are required to ship their goods between U.S. ports in U.S.-flagged vessels, under the provisions of the 1920 Jones Act.

The U.S. Navy, too, has been shrinking. After the Second World War, the Navy scrapped many of its ships and sent many more into a ready-reserve “mothball” fleet. For the next two decades, the active naval fleet hovered at about 1,000 ships. But beginning in 1969, the total began to fall. By 1971, the fleet had been reduced to 750 ships. Ten years later, it was down to 521. Reagan, who had campaigned in 1980 on a promise to rebuild the Navy to 600 ships, nearly did so under the able leadership of his secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. During Reagan’s eight years in office, the size of the Navy’s fleet climbed to just over 590 ships.

Then the Cold War ended. The administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slashed troops, ships, aircraft, and shore-based infrastructure. During the Obama administration, the Navy’s battle force bottomed out at 271 ships. Meanwhile, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free trade on the high seas.

Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oceanic link between NATO nations in Europe and North America. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth, expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capacities. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to control the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are trying to close the global commons.

Today the United States is financially constrained by debt, and psychologically burdened by recent military conflicts—for the most part, land-based actions in Iraq and Afghanistan fought primarily by a large standing army operating far from home—that turned into costly quagmires. We can no longer afford to be both a continentalist power and an oceanic power. But we can still exert influence, and at the same time avoid getting caught up in the affairs of other nations. Our strategic future lies at sea.

Americans used to know this. The United States began its life purposefully as a seapower: The Constitution explicitly directed Congress “to provide and maintain a Navy.” In contrast, the same article of the Constitution instructed the legislature “to raise and support Armies,” but stipulated that no appropriation for the army “shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” The Founders had an aversion to large standing armies.

George Washington pushed through the Naval Act of 1794, funding the Navy’s original six frigates. (One of these was the famous USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” which remains in active commission to this day.) In his final address to the American people, Washington advocated for a navalist foreign policy, warning against “attachments and entanglements” with foreign powers that might draw the young nation into continental European wars. The strategy he advised instead was to protect American trade on the high seas, and advance America’s interests through temporary agreements, not permanent alliances. This seapower approach to the world became the sine qua non of early American foreign policy.

In time, conditions changed. The U.S. was preoccupied by sectional conflict and by conquest of the continent. It turned inward, becoming a continental power. But by the end of the 19th century, that era had come to a close.

In 1890, a U.S. Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan published an article in The Atlantic titled “The United States Looking Outward.” Mahan argued that, with the closing of the frontier, the United States had in essence become an island nation looking eastward and westward across oceans. The nation’s energies should therefore be focused externally: on the seas, on maritime trade, and on a larger role in the world.

In the end, the Second World War was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base.

Mahan sought to end the long-standing policy of protectionism for American industries, because they had become strong enough to compete in the global market. By extension, Mahan also sought a larger merchant fleet to carry goods from American factories to foreign lands, and for a larger Navy to protect that merchant fleet. In a few thousand words, Mahan made a coherent strategic argument that the United States should once again become a true seapower.

From the December 1890 issue: The United States looking outward

Mahan’s vision was profoundly influential. Politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge advocated for larger merchant and naval fleets (and for a canal through Central America). Mahan, Roosevelt, and Lodge believed that sea power was the catalyst for national power, and they wanted the United States to become the preeminent nation of the 20th century. The swift expansion of the Navy, particularly in battleships and cruisers, paralleled the growing fleets of other global powers. Leaders in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy had also read Mahan, and they wanted to protect commercial access to their overseas empires. The resulting arms race at sea helped destabilize the balance of power in the years leading up to the First World War.

This is not the place to relate every development in the evolution of America’s naval capability, much less that of other nations. Suffice to say that, by the 1930s, new technologies were transforming the seas. Aircraft, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault craft, and submarines had all been developed into more effective weapons. During the Second World War, the oceans once again became battlefields. The fighting proceeded in a way Mahan himself had never envisioned, as fleets faced off against ships they could not even see, launching waves of aircraft against each other. In the end, the war was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base. The United States began the war with 790 ships in its battle force; when the war ended, it had more than 6,700.

Alfred Thayer Mahan (Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Source: HUM Images / Universal Images Group / Getty.)

No nation could come close to challenging the American fleet, commercial or naval, on the high seas after the war. So great was its advantage that, for decades, no one even tried to match it. In concert with allies, the United States created an international system based on free and unhindered trade. It was the culmination of the Mahanist Age.

From the June 1919 issue: The future of sea-power

For the first time in history, open access to the seas was assumed—and so people naturally gave little thought to its importance and challenges.

A new seapower strategy involves more than adding ships to the Navy. A new strategy must start with the economy.

For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue-collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones, for its national-security needs.

In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry invited the executives of leading defense contractors to a dinner in Washington—a meal that would enter national-security lore as the “Last Supper.” Perry spelled out projected cuts in defense spending. His message was clear: If the American defense industrial base was going to survive, then mergers would be required. Soon after, the Northrop Corporation acquired the Grumman Corporation to form Northrop Grumman. The Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin. A few years later, Boeing combined with McDonnell Douglas, itself the product of a previous merger. Among the shipbuilders, General Dynamics, which manufactures submarines through its Electric Boat subsidiary, bought Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard, and the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.

From the October 2007 issue: The Navy’s new flat-Earth strategy

These mergers preserved the defense industries, but at a price: a dramatic reduction in our overall industrial capacity. During World War II, the United States could claim more than 50 graving docks—heavy-industrial locations where ships are assembled—that were greater than 150 meters in length, each one able to build merchant craft and naval warships. Today, the U.S. has 23 graving docks, only a dozen of which are certified to work on Navy ships.

The United States will need to implement a seapower industrial policy that meets its national-security needs: building steel plants and microchip foundries, developing hypersonic glide bodies and autonomous unmanned undersea vehicles. We will need to foster new start-ups using targeted tax laws, the Defense Production Act, and perhaps even a “Ships Act” akin to the recent CHIPS Act, which seeks to bring back the crucial semiconductor industry.

We also need to tell the companies we once encouraged to merge that it’s time for them to spin off key industrial subsidiaries in order to encourage competition and resilience—and we need to reward them for following through. In 2011, for example, the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman spun off its shipbuilding holdings to form Huntington Ingalls, in Newport News, Virginia, and Pascagoula, Mississippi. Adding more such spin-offs would not only increase the nation’s industrial depth but also encourage the growth of parts suppliers for heavy industries, companies that have endured three decades of consolidation or extinction.

Shipbuilding, in particular, is a jobs multiplier. For every job created in a shipyard, five jobs, on average, are created at downstream suppliers—well-paid blue-collar jobs in the mining, manufacturing, and energy sectors.

Most of the civilian merchant ships, container ships, ore carriers, and supertankers that dock in American ports are built overseas and fly foreign flags. We have ignored the linkage between the ability to build commercial ships and the ability to build Navy ships—one reason the latter cost twice as much as they did in 1989. The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us vulnerable. Today we remember the recent backlog of container ships in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but tomorrow we could face the shock of no container ships arriving at all should China prohibit its large fleet from visiting U.S. ports. Today we’re proud to ship liquefied natural gas to our allies in Europe, but tomorrow we might not be able to export that energy to our friends, because we don’t own the ships that would carry it. We need to bring back civilian shipbuilding as a matter of national security.

To revive our merchant-shipbuilding base, we will need to offer government subsidies on a par with those provided to European and Asian shipbuilders. Subsidies have flowed to commercial aviation since the establishment of commercial airlines in the 1920s; Elon Musk’s SpaceX would not be enjoying its present success were it not for strong initial support from the U.S. government. Shipbuilding is no less vital.

Reindustrialization, in particular the restoration of merchant-shipbuilding capacity and export-oriented industries, will support the emergence of a new, more technologically advanced Navy. The cost of building Navy ships could be coaxed downward by increasing competition, expanding the number of downstream suppliers, and recruiting new shipyard workers to the industry.

Wherever American trade goes, the flag traditionally follows—usually in the form of the Navy. But the new Navy must not look like the old Navy. If it does, we will have made a strategic mistake. As rival powers develop ships and missiles that target our aircraft carriers and other large surface vessels, we should make greater investments in advanced submarines equipped with the latest in long-range maneuvering hypersonic missiles. We should pursue a future in which our submarines cannot be found and our hypersonic missiles cannot be defeated.

Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business

The Navy, however, is not just a wartime force. It has a peacetime mission unique among the military services: showing the flag and defending American interests by means of a consistent and credible forward presence. Commanders have identified 18 maritime regions of the world that require the near-continuous deployment of American ships to demonstrate our resolve. During the Cold War, the Navy maintained approximately 150 ships at sea on any given day. As the size of the fleet has fallen—to its present 293—the Navy has struggled to keep even 100 ships at sea at all times. The service’s admirals recently suggested a goal of having 75 ships “mission capable” at any given moment. Right now the fleet has about 20 ships going through training workups and only about 40 actively deployed under regional combatant commanders. This has created vacuums in vital areas such as the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, which our enemies have been eager to fill.

The chief of naval operations recently called for a fleet of some 500 ships. He quickly pointed out that this would include about 50 new guided-missile frigates—small surface vessels able to operate closely with allies and partners—as well as 150 unmanned surface and subsurface platforms that would revolutionize the way wartime naval operations are conducted. The frigates are being assembled on the shores of Lake Michigan. The construction of the unmanned ships, owing to their nontraditional designs and smaller sizes, could be dispersed to smaller shipyards, including yards on the Gulf Coast, along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and on the Great Lakes, where ships and submarines were built for the Navy during World War II. These types of ships, combined with advanced submarines, will allow us to exert influence and project power with equal vigor.

Across the 50 years of my life, I have watched the importance of the oceans and the idea of freedom of the seas largely fade from national awareness. The next great military challenge we face will likely come from a confrontation on the sea. Great powers, especially nuclear-equipped great powers, dare not attack one another directly. Instead, they will confront one another in the commons: cyberspace, outer space, and, most crucially, at sea. The oceans would be battlefields again, and we, and the world, are simply not ready for that.

Our economy and security rely on the sea—a fact so fundamental that it should be at the center of our approach to the world.

Some voices, of course, will argue that America’s interests, diffuse and global, might best be served by expanding our commitments of land forces to places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Korea as demonstrations of American resolve, and that air and naval forces should be diminished to pay for such commitments. Others—those in the “divest to invest” school—believe in the promise of future technology, arguing that more traditional warfare platforms and missions should be phased out to fund their newer and more efficient missiles or cybersystems. The first approach continues a path of unnecessary entanglements. The second proceeds along a path of promise without proof.

A seapower-focused national-security strategy would give new advantages to the United States. It would not too subtly encourage allies and partners in Eurasia to increase investment in land forces and to work more closely together. If they build more tanks and fully staff their armies, the United States could guarantee transoceanic supply lines from the Western Hemisphere. The 70-year practice of stationing our land forces in allied countries, using Americans as trip wires and offering allies a convenient excuse not to spend on their own defense, should come to an end.

A seapower strategy, pursued deliberately, would put America back on course for global leadership. We must shun entanglements in other nations’ land wars—resisting the urge to solve every problem—and seek instead to project influence from the sea. We must re-create an industrialized, middle-class America that builds and exports manufactured goods that can be carried on U.S.-built ships to the global market.

We knew all this in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Chinese are showing us that they know it now. The United States needs to relearn the lessons of strategy, geography, and history. We must look outward across the oceans, and find our place upon them, again.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “America’s Future Is at Sea.”

The Atlantic · by Jerry Hendrix · March 13, 2023

12. China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal raises red flags for US

Excerpts:

“It should be a warning to U.S. policymakers: Leave the Middle East and abandon ties with sometimes frustrating, even barbarous, but long-standing allies, and you’ll simply be leaving a vacuum for China to fill,” Panikoff wrote in a Friday analysis.

Middle East politics has become more strained for the U.S. as Israel clashes with Palestinians seeking a free state in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank. The ongoing civil war in Syria, violence in Yemen, heightened tensions over Iranian support for Russia and a scrapped nuclear deal with Tehran have added to complications.

President Biden also traveled to Saudi Arabia last summer amid high gas prices in the U.S. and was seen fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been criticized for overseeing human rights abuses and for the killing of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A few months after the visit, the White House was angered when the Saudi-led oil alliance OPEC+ slashed oil production output.

Still, during comments on Friday on the economy, Biden appeared welcoming of the diplomatic agreement. “Better relations between Israel and their Arab neighbors are better for everybody,” the president said.

China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal raises red flags for US

BY BRAD DRESS - 03/11/23 8:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3894627-china-brokered-iran-saudi-deal-raises-red-flags-for-us/

An agreement struck by Iran and Saudi Arabia on Friday to re-establish relations has shifted concerns back to the state of the U.S. role in the Middle East — especially since the deal was brokered by Washington’s main adversary, China.

The diplomatic agreement, reached after four days of talks with senior security officials in Beijing, eases tensions between the Middle East powers after seven years of hostilities.

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia announced they will resume diplomatic relations and open up embassies once again in their respective nations within two months, according to a joint statement.

Alex Vatanka, the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute, said the Iran-Saudi Arabia deal was an important agreement for the region but questioned whether it would put an end to any violence, including in war-torn Yemen.

“It remains to be seen if they can have a meaningful dialogue. Opening up embassies is not the same as having a meaningful dialogue,” Vatanka said. “There will be a steep journey ahead.”

Saudi Arabia, a dominant Sunni Muslim country, cut ties with Iran in 2016 after protesters stormed the nation’s embassy in Iran after the execution of a Shiite Muslim cleric along with the execution of other prisoners.

Both nations have also been on opposing sides of the deadly civil war in Yemen, with Saudi Arabia supporting Yemen’s government and Iran backing the opposition Houthis.

The news on Friday was a diplomatic and political success for Beijing, which also recently published a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine.

China’s top diplomat Wang Yi quickly hailed the agreement as a “victory” on Friday and said his country would continue to address global issues, according to statements carried by several Chinese newspapers.

But the agreement undercuts the posture of the U.S. in the region. The U.S. has downsized in Syria after withdrawing forces in 2021 from Afghanistan.

The deal also comes as Saudi Arabia is demanding certain security guarantees, a steady flow of arms shipments and assistance with its civilian nuclear program in order to normalize relations with Israel, a major U.S. ally, the White House confirmed on Friday.

Speaking to reporters, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the U.S. was “informed” about the Saudi Arabia-Iran talks but played no role in them.

Kirby welcomed the normalization of relations between the two countries should it ease violence in the Middle East.

“To the degree that it could deescalate tensions, all that’s to the good side of the ledger,” Kirby said, adding the U.S. is not stepping back from its role in the Middle East.

Vatanka, from the Middle East Institute, said both Iran and Saudi Arabia have been seeking to ease tensions for the past couple of years.

While he was surprised by China’s role as a mediator, Vatanka said the deal does not constitute “a major loss” for Washington in the long-term.

“It symbolically makes the United States look like it’s not able to be a key player,” he said. “But it’s not going to be a Chinese-dominated Middle East.”

China is a large buyer of Saudi oil and maintains close relations with Iran.

Conversely, the U.S. has had strained relations with Iran for decades and a similar normalization agreement would have been next to impossible for Washington to mediate.

Some experts have cautioned that China is beginning a new era of diplomatic engagement in the Middle East, where it before mostly had economic ties.

Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative in the Middle East Programs for The Atlantic Council, warned of an “emergence of China’s political role in the region.”

“It should be a warning to U.S. policymakers: Leave the Middle East and abandon ties with sometimes frustrating, even barbarous, but long-standing allies, and you’ll simply be leaving a vacuum for China to fill,” Panikoff wrote in a Friday analysis.

Middle East politics has become more strained for the U.S. as Israel clashes with Palestinians seeking a free state in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank. The ongoing civil war in Syria, violence in Yemen, heightened tensions over Iranian support for Russia and a scrapped nuclear deal with Tehran have added to complications.

President Biden also traveled to Saudi Arabia last summer amid high gas prices in the U.S. and was seen fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been criticized for overseeing human rights abuses and for the killing of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A few months after the visit, the White House was angered when the Saudi-led oil alliance OPEC+ slashed oil production output.

Still, during comments on Friday on the economy, Biden appeared welcoming of the diplomatic agreement. “Better relations between Israel and their Arab neighbors are better for everybody,” the president said.

13. War by miscalculation or by mistake?

Excerpts:

Even a cursory reading of these and other possible scenarios leads to one overriding question: Is the U.S. prepared for any of these scenarios and even thinking about them in a careful, thoughtful way? Given that the government did not react well to a Chinese “spy” balloon sailing across its borders, this is not an idle question.

No doubt the U.S. military and intelligence communities have heavily invested in this contingency thinking and planning as well as many universities and think tanks. But are we really ready if one erupts? That question needs answers and needs them now.

War by miscalculation or by mistake?

BY HARLAN ULLMAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 03/13/23 8:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3895679-war-by-miscalculation-or-by-mistake/

Is a major war in which thermonuclear weapons could obliterate most of society no longer unthinkable? Is it even possible? As the old bipolar strategic balance of the Cold War now has a third pole – an increasingly nuclear armed China – is the infamous Doomsday Clock one tick closer to Armageddon?

Many believe that the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was the closest brush with nuclear war so far. While that may be true, at least two other incidents cannot be dismissed. In 1979, the then-commander of the strategic air command was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha, Neb., and informed that radar had picked up some 200 incoming Soviet warheads.

The general, a lawyer by training, knew first reports were invariably wrong. Before going to a higher defense condition, the general told the watch officer to double and triple check the alert. With a time of flight of Soviet warheads to target of less than 30 minutes, seconds counted. Fortunately, it was a false alarm. The outgoing watch team failed to scrub its computers after a test. But suppose the general had panicked.

Possibly much closer to danger was NATO’s Able Archer command post exercise in November 1983. For a short time, the Soviets misbelieved that Able Archer could be a cover for a first strike. Given President Reagan’s rhetoric about the “evil empire” and his Star Wars program announced that February, the already paranoid Soviets needed little to feed those fears. Fortunately, the Soviets finally stood down.

Forty years later, while there are many times fewer nuclear weapons, there are more nuclear armed states. Among them are India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and potential “break out” states such as Iran. And the United Kingdom and France each possess more than 200 nuclear warheads.

These realities raise many profound and deeply troubling questions. Do the nuclear deterrence theories and practices developed during the Cold and post-Cold War apply? How should the U.S., China and Russia approach this three-way standoff? Given Russian suspension of the New START Treaty and China’s refusal even to discuss nuclear weapons, is arms control dead? And what crisis management arrangements are in place to prevent any situation from escalating or leading to war?

Some scenarios would make Herman Khan’s “Thinking the Unthinkable” and his escalatory ladders to thermonuclear war seem mild. And many can be of miscalculation or misjudgment as in Able Archer. The more obvious ones could include nuclear states outside China, Russia and the U.S.

While Pakistani nuclear weapons are indeed secure with a three key system to prevent unauthorized use, a conflict with India is not impossible. Suppose Kim Jung Un believed his regime were at risk. Would he use nuclear weapons to remain in power — the Putin question over Ukraine? And how would South Korea and Japan respond given that both have advanced civilian nuclear capabilities?

If Iran moved closer to developing nuclear weapons, or was about to test one, would Israel tolerate that situation? Or would Jerusalem pre-empt? If Israel did, and a war broke out with Iran, would it be limited to both states? Or would it spread? And in those circumstances, would Saudi Arabia or Egypt consider a nuclear weapons options?

In the first months of the George W. Bush administration, Chinese F-8 fighters collided with a U.S. Navy reconnaissance aircraft, forcing it to crash land on Hainan Island. That incident was resolved peacefully. Suppose China’s continued violation of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) leads to a shoot down or collision.

Could any of these or other events happen? In August 1964, one did. A local North Vietnamese commander authorized an attack on two U.S. Navy destroyers operating in the Tonkin Gulf, mistakenly concluding both were part of a naval raid north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). They were not. But that plunged the U.S. into the Vietnam War.

Even a cursory reading of these and other possible scenarios leads to one overriding question: Is the U.S. prepared for any of these scenarios and even thinking about them in a careful, thoughtful way? Given that the government did not react well to a Chinese “spy” balloon sailing across its borders, this is not an idle question.

No doubt the U.S. military and intelligence communities have heavily invested in this contingency thinking and planning as well as many universities and think tanks. But are we really ready if one erupts? That question needs answers and needs them now.

Harlan Ullman is senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of “shock and awe.” His latest book is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.” Follow him on Twitter @harlankullman.

14. Cobra Gold drills expose US-China fight for Thailand

Thailand and the US are treaty allies.

Excerpts:

Since 1982, Cobra Gold has swollen from a US and Thai maritime drill to its current land, amphibious, and airborne warfare including combined arms live-fire, command staff instruction, public relief work and other activities.

“In 2003, President Bush designated Thailand as a major non-NATO ally,” Kasit said. “Cobra Gold joint military exercise is still a major event in the US-Thai relationships.”

Exercise Cobra Gold’s official 2023 uniform patch displays a drawing of a white American eagle, with a stars-and-stripes breast shield, standing on a tiny Earth’s North Pole.

A goldish-colored, hooded and coiled cobra rises from under the South Pole – the head touching southeast Australia.

Cobra Gold drills expose US-China fight for Thailand

US-Thai military exercise still the biggest in Asia but China is making steady economic and technology inroads to the kingdom

asiatimes.com · by Richard S Ehrlich · March 13, 2023

BANGKOK – More than 3,800 US troops led 30 countries’ forces and observers through Cobra Gold, the Pentagon’s biggest Asian military exercise, which came to a live-fire drill end on March 10.

The 42nd iteration of Exercise Cobra Gold is robust again after dwindling for three years during Covid’s spread. Reports indicate the US sent the most troops in a decade to this year’s exercises.

“New to the annual exercise is the Combined Space Forces Coordination Center, where partner nations come together to integrate space capabilities,” said the US Defense Department’s DVIDS (Defense VI) website.

Military personnel from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia joined the co-hosts – 3,000 Royal Thai Armed Forces personnel and more than 3,800 US Indo-Pacific Command troops – as full participants during the two weeks of planning and field exercises.

Drill partners and observers from 23 other countries bring this year’s total to more than 7,000 personnel on the land, sea and in the air for warfare and other scenarios.

Disaster and other humanitarian exercises include China, India and Australia, plus events involving Bangladesh, Brunei, Canada, France, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, the Philippines, Fiji and the United Kingdom.

Brazil, Cambodia, Germany Greece, Kuwait, Laos, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam are observers at this year’s Cobra Gold.

“It brings together 30 countries from around the world to solve complex challenges that no single country can solve alone,” US Ambassador to Thailand Robert Godec said at Cobra Gold’s opening in eastern Rayong province on February 28.

The drills also aim to keep Thailand’s coup-empowered army allied with Washington, significantly at a time Beijing increases its political, economic, technological and cultural influence in the kingdom.

Military personnel in a drill at Cobra Gold 2023 in Chonburi, Thailand, March 3, 2023. Image: Facebook

“There has been resentment among Thai military officers and conservative politicians because of what is perceived as [Washington’s] high-handed, tutelary policy about what Thailand should and should not do – with regard to coups,” said Paul Chambers, a Southeast Asian Studies lecturer at Naresuan University in Thailand.

“The negative policy in Washington toward coups [in 2006 and 2014]…contributed to some extent in Bangkok moving toward a realist policy of “hedging” whereby a state creates balance between two great powers, in this case China versus the US,” Chambers said in an interview.

“The Thai military establishment does not like the United States for talking and pressing about military non-intervention in politics, and for the need to return democracy to the Thai people,” former foreign minister Kasit Piromya said in an interview.

“[The] Chinese, on the other hand, love to deal with authoritarian regimes,” said Kasit, who is also an ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) board member.

“Its [Beijing’s] not-interference posture makes the Thai military establishment feel at ease and comfortable. Once the Chinese side got hold of the Thai military establishment, things got easier for them to influence.

“One-party system has some currency in the Thai conservative establishment, especially the military, but the question of freedom and a democratic way of life is quite widespread in Thai society,” Kasit said.

Another former foreign minister, Kantathi Suphamongkhon, suggested in an interview:

“The US should increase its engagement with Thailand and the Thai people in multidimensional ways – easier access for Thai diplomats in Washington to high-level US administration officials, as well as members of Congress and Senate,” Kantathi said.

Thailand, a long-time US strategic ally, is trying to purchase two US-built F-35 fighter jets, a procurement that is awaiting Washington’s approval.

Ten US-made Stryker armored personnel carriers purchased by the Thai Royal Army arrived in August 2022, bringing the military’s total to 130 Strykers since 2019.

Meanwhile, US-based Chevron Offshore Thailand, along with Thai and Japanese petroleum corporations, are studying how to inexpensively exploit possible oil and natural gas deposits off the southeastern coast, under the shallow Gulf of Thailand.

Similarly, off Thailand’s southwestern shores, “the US eyes the areas around the Bay of Bengal, particularly Myanmar (Burma) which is strategically located and endowed with natural resources,” said Piti Srisangham, director of Chulalongkorn University’s ASEAN center in Bangkok.

Previous Cobra Gold exercises included assaults against mock terrorists occupying offshore oil and gas platforms.

On the economic front, the US Commerce Department is bringing representatives from more than 100 US businesses to a Trade Winds ASEAN forum from March 13-15 in Bangkok to schmooze counterparts and others from more than 20 Asian countries.

Not to be outdone, more than 4,000 business leaders from China, plus the Chinese diaspora in other countries, are expected to flock to the 16th World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention (WCEC) in Bangkok June 24-26, according to the Thai-Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

Technology is at the forefront of Thai-China business relations. China’s great leap forward into Thailand’s telecommunications includes installing high-tech Huawei systems, Beijing-inspired firewalls and other advanced cyber abilities.

Huawei is frequently boosted by local media and Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha’s government which evolved from then-General Prayut’s 2014 coup when he was the army commander-in-chief.

Huawei is collaborating with Thailand’s Siriraj Hospital. Image: Facebook

A Huawei forum in Bangkok on October 2022, led by current Huawei chairman Ken Hu, trumpeted its ultra-fast 5G telecommunication’s ability to optimize TikTok and other video streams.

“We need to work together to fully unleash the power of 5G networks and expand into services like cloud and system integration,” Hu said.

In August 2022, the Thai government’s increasingly media-savvy Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) inked a “Digital Transformation and Innovation Development for Smart Tourism” memorandum of understanding to partner with the Huawei Technologies Thailand unit.

“Huawei is committed to leveraging advanced technologies to heighten TAT’s position as the strategic leader driving Thailand towards being a world-class tourism destination,” said Huawei’s chief executive officer for Thailand, Abel Deng.

During a Bangkok visit in 2022, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said: “China and Thailand are not strangers, but siblings.”

That traditional slogan is based on Chinese immigrants, intermarriages, their shared ancestors, plus geographic proximity, economic ties and cultural links.

“I think the people of the two countries will believe in our attempt to develop closer ties,” Wang said after meeting Prime Minister Prayut, according to press reports at the time.

In August 2022, China and Thailand conducted a 10-day Falcon Strike, their fourth joint air warfare exercise above this Southeast Asian nation since 2015. The drill, while tiny compared to Cobra Gold, was nonetheless indicative of growing China-Thailand strategic ties.

Since 1982, Cobra Gold has swollen from a US and Thai maritime drill to its current land, amphibious, and airborne warfare including combined arms live-fire, command staff instruction, public relief work and other activities.

“In 2003, President Bush designated Thailand as a major non-NATO ally,” Kasit said. “Cobra Gold joint military exercise is still a major event in the US-Thai relationships.”

Exercise Cobra Gold’s official 2023 uniform patch displays a drawing of a white American eagle, with a stars-and-stripes breast shield, standing on a tiny Earth’s North Pole.

A goldish-colored, hooded and coiled cobra rises from under the South Pole – the head touching southeast Australia.

Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978.

Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books, “Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. — Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York” and “Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks” are available here.

asiatimes.com · by Richard S Ehrlich · March 13, 2023

15. In SVB collapse, Asia sees 1997 all over again

I recall our front row seat to this crisis in Asia in 1997. But how similar are the conditions?

Excerpts:

Continued tight Fed policies pose their own risks to Xi Jinping’s China, just as the Communist Party leader is beginning his third term. Rising US rates put China’s vital export engine at risk and add to the strains facing highly indebted mainland property developers struggling to avoid default.

Fed overtightening is also a direct threat to the roughly $1 trillion of Chinese state wealth parked in US government debt.

The yen’s dwindling value, thanks to a strong dollar, is a crisis in slow motion for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and outgoing Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda. Asia’s No 2 economy is importing increasing waves of inflation via food and energy markets.

For governments in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and Putrajaya, currencies under downward pressure make US debt harder to service. That also raises the costs of food and other vital items.

Recently, says economist Jonathan Fortun at the Institute of International Finance, “we see clouds forming on the horizon. A renewed hawkish Federal Reserve sentiment is spilling over into some emerging markets, causing short-dated receivers to struggle as interest-rate expectations are pushed further back in time. Monetary policy uncertainty may boost demand for dollar protection, as the relationship between EM currency and US interest-rate volatility continues to strengthen.”

For now, few think the SVB debacle will trigger a 2008-like global financial meltdown. But the speed with which Asian officials have swung from guarded optimism over the US financial system to worrying about another 1997 is its own economic indicator for the year ahead. And not a good one.

In SVB collapse, Asia sees 1997 all over again

Silicon Valley Bank panic now sweeping global markets suggests more destabilizing financial events are likely around the corner

asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · March 13, 2023

To understand the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse spooking markets, look no further than events in Jakarta.

The Indonesian rupiah’s 3.2% drop since February 1 demonstrates how quickly Asia has resigned itself to the fact that the US Federal Reserve isn’t done tightening. Another batch of too-strong-for-Fed-comfort US employment figures in February only increased the risk.

Episodes of extreme dollar strength tend to hit Southeast Asia particularly hard. And while Indonesia’s financial system is far healthier than it was amid the Asian financial crisis 25 years ago, vulnerabilities abound. Not surprisingly, the region’s dollar-centric economies tend to see another potential 1997-like crisis around every corner.

Case in point: the Fed’s most aggressive tightening cycle since the mid-1990s, an episode that still haunts leaders from Jakarta to Tokyo. As the Fed doubled short-term rates in just 12 months between 1994 and 1995, the collateral damage really started to rack up.

Victims included Mexico, which plunged into the peso’s “tequila crisis.” Orange County, California veered into bankruptcy. Wall Street securities giant Kidder, Peabody & Co went extinct. Then the most spectacular pileup of all: Asia.

As the dollar skyrocketed, currency pegs became impossible to defend in Bangkok, Jakarta and Seoul. Fallout from the barrage of devaluations paved the way for the late 1997 collapse of the 100-year-old Yamaichi Securities, one of Japan’s fabled big-four brokerages.

Yamaichi’s demise panicked officials in Washington. Both the US Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund worried not that Japan was too big to fail. They worried it was too big to save.

China, too. In 1997 and 1998, US officials all but begged Beijing not to devalue the yuan. That, they feared, would spark a new wave of competitive currency devaluations and drag Malaysia and the Philippines, two nations that hadn’t devalued, into the fray.

All this explains why the SVB collapse is triggering Asia’s post-traumatic stress disorder over Fed austerity from the late 1990s. That PTSD was on display back in 2013 amid the Fed “taper tantrum.” Back then, Morgan Stanley included India and Indonesia in its “Fragile Five” list of economies on the brink along with Brazil, South Africa and Turkey.

At the time, Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett warned of a “repeat of the 1994 moment.” Then-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein admitted that “I worry now as I look out of the corner of my eye to the 1994 period.”

This is the minefield that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is struggling to navigate.

Silicon Valley Bank’s troubles could be the tip of the iceberg for US banks. Image: Screengrab / Twitter / TechCrunch

“Hence the canary-in-the-coal-mine fear, which has caused US bank stocks to plunge more than 15% in a week and market volatility to surge,” says analyst Tan Kai Xian at Gavekal Research.

“These travails were only reinforced by Powell’s Congressional testimony last week, amounting to a ‘whatever it takes’ declaration to crush inflation, even if that means upping the pace of rate hikes and putting people out of work.”

Over the weekend, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the Powell-led Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation unveiled steps to contain the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.

With all SVB depositors being paid back in full, averting a potential collapse of the US financial system, it now falls to Powell’s team to devise a way forward. And preferably one that won’t send markets from Indonesia to Japan reeling.

The “action dramatically reduces the risk of further contagion,” says analyst Thomas Simons at Jefferies. It’s heartening, too, that SVB’s mistakes in managing its balance sheet are seen as “highly idiosyncratic” to analysts at Morgan Stanley, reducing risks of broader US financial contagion.

Erik Nielsen, economic adviser at UniCredit Bank, calls SVB “a rather special case of poor balance-sheet management, holding massive amounts of long-duration bonds funded by short-term liabilities.”

Economist Paul Ashworth at Capital Economics notes that “rationally, this should be enough to stop any contagion from spreading and taking down more banks, which can happen in the blink of an eye in the digital age. But contagion has always been more about irrational fear, so we would stress that there is no guarantee this will work.”

Indeed, the underlying problem is that the Fed is trying to tame inflation with tools that won’t get the job done. Much of this inflation is better addressed with supply-side reforms that President Joe Biden and Congress have been slow to implement. Anyone who thought driving the US into a controlled recession might work just had a brutal wake-up call from California.

“While the Fed wants tighter financial conditions to restrain aggregate demand, they don’t want that to occur in a non-linear fashion that can quickly spiral out of control,” says economist Michael Feroli at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “If they indeed have used the right tool to address financial contagion risks – time will tell – then they can also use the right tool to continue to address inflation risks: higher interest rates.”

The mini-panic on global markets suggests many aren’t buying the SVB-is-an-isolated-case argument. That has economists at Barclays Plc thinking the Fed rate that had been widely expected later this month is now on hold.

US Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has a potential bank crisis on his hands. Photo: AFP / Bill O’Leary

“It raises risks of broader distress within the banking system that could make the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) reluctant to return to 50bp hikes in March,” they wrote. “Indeed, the possibility of capital losses at other institutions cannot be completely dismissed, with rising policy rates raising banks’ funding costs.”

Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius agrees. “In light of the stress in the banking system, we no longer expect the FOMC to deliver a rate hike at its next meeting on March 22,” he says. More likely, the Fed will do smaller 25 basis point hikes in May, June and July, boosting rates as high as 5.5%.

Yet the fallout from SVB could further stymie America’s innovative animal spirits in ways that leave the world’s biggest economy even less productive and nimble.

“It certainly is going to have very substantial consequences for Silicon Valley — and for the economy of the whole venture sector, which has been dynamic — unless the government is able to assure that this situation is worked through,” former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told Bloomberg.

It’s already having substantial consequences for Asian markets trying to read the Washington policy tea leaves. The 1990s vibe emanating from Fed headquarters in Washington is becoming harder and harder for dollar bulls to dismiss.

The more upward pressure there is on the US currency, the less capital that flows to Indonesia and other Southeast Asian economies that need investment to finance giant infrastructure projects.

Continued tight Fed policies pose their own risks to Xi Jinping’s China, just as the Communist Party leader is beginning his third term. Rising US rates put China’s vital export engine at risk and add to the strains facing highly indebted mainland property developers struggling to avoid default.

Fed overtightening is also a direct threat to the roughly $1 trillion of Chinese state wealth parked in US government debt.

The yen’s dwindling value, thanks to a strong dollar, is a crisis in slow motion for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and outgoing Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda. Asia’s No 2 economy is importing increasing waves of inflation via food and energy markets.

A customer holds Philippine peso notes during a bank transaction in Manila. Photo: AFP / Romeo Gacad

For governments in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and Putrajaya, currencies under downward pressure make US debt harder to service. That also raises the costs of food and other vital items.

Recently, says economist Jonathan Fortun at the Institute of International Finance, “we see clouds forming on the horizon. A renewed hawkish Federal Reserve sentiment is spilling over into some emerging markets, causing short-dated receivers to struggle as interest-rate expectations are pushed further back in time. Monetary policy uncertainty may boost demand for dollar protection, as the relationship between EM currency and US interest-rate volatility continues to strengthen.”

For now, few think the SVB debacle will trigger a 2008-like global financial meltdown. But the speed with which Asian officials have swung from guarded optimism over the US financial system to worrying about another 1997 is its own economic indicator for the year ahead. And not a good one.

Follow William Pesek on Twitter at @WilliamPesek

asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · March 13, 2023

16. China's Xi wants bigger global role after Saudi-Iran deal

Xi feeling his oats?

Excerpts:

He said that before the ruling party took power in 1949, China was “reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country, subject to bullying by foreign countries.”

“We have finally washed away the national humiliation, and Chinese people are the master of their own destiny,” Xi said. “The Chinese nation has stood up, become rich and is becoming strong.”

Xi also called for the country to “unswervingly achieve” the goal of “national reunification,” a reference to Beijing’s claim that Taiwan, the self-ruled island democracy, is part of its territory and is obliged to unite with China, by force if necessary.

The president of Micronesia, a group of islands east of the Philippines, in a letter dated March 9 and obtained by The Associated Press, accused China of “political warfare.” David Panuelo said Beijing used spying and bribes in an effort to ensure Micronesia would side with China or stay neutral in a possible conflict with Taiwan.

The Chinese foreign ministry denied the allegations.

China's Xi wants bigger global role after Saudi-Iran deal

AP · by JOE McDONALD · March 13, 2023

BEJIING (AP) — President Xi Jinping called Monday for China to play a bigger role in managing global affairs after Beijing scored a diplomatic coup as the host of talks that produced an agreement by Saudi Arabia and Iran to reopen diplomatic relations.

Xi gave no details of the ruling Communist Party’s plans in a speech to China’s ceremonial legislature. But Beijing has been increasingly assertive since he took power in 2012 and called for changes in the International Monetary Fund and other entities it says fail to reflect the desires of developing countries.

China should “actively participate in the reform and construction of the global governance system” and promote “global security initiatives,” said Xi, the country’s most powerful leader in decades.

That will add “positive energy to world peace and development,” Xi said.

On Friday, Xi was named to another term in the ceremonial presidency after breaking with tradition in October and awarding himself a third-five year term as general secretary of the ruling party, putting himself on track to become leader for life.

The National People’s Congress on Sunday cemented Xi’s dominance by endorsing the appointment of his loyalists as premier and other government leaders in a once-a-decade change. Xi has sidelined potential rivals and loaded the top ranks of the ruling party with his supporters.

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The new premier, Li Qiang, tried Monday to reassure entrepreneurs but gave no details of possible plans to improve conditions after Xi’s government spent the past decade building up state companies that control banking, energy, steel, telecoms and other industries.

Li’s comments echoed promises by other Chinese leaders over the past six months to support entrepreneurs who generate jobs and wealth. They have vowed to simplify regulations and taxes but have given no indication they plan to rein in state companies that entrepreneurs complain drain away their profits.

The ruling party will “treat enterprises of all types of ownership equally” and “support the development and growth of private enterprises,” Li said.

“Our leading cadres at all levels must sincerely care about and serve private enterprises,” he said.

Chinese officials earlier indicated anti-monopoly and data security crackdowns that knocked tens of billions of dollars off the stock market value of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and other tech companies were ending. But entrepreneurs were rattled anew in February when a star banker who played a leading role in tech deals disappeared. Bao Fan’s company said he was “cooperating in an investigation” but gave no details.

Li said Beijing will make a priority of job creation as it tries to revive economic growth that sank to 3% last year, the second-lowest level in decades. This year’s official growth target is “around 5%.”

The premier expressed confidence China can cope as its workforce shrinks. The number of potential workers age 15 to 59 has fallen by more than 5% from its 2011 peak, an unusually abrupt decline for a middle-income country.

Li said that while China is losing its “demographic dividend” of young workers, better education means it is gaining a “talent dividend.” He said some 15 million people still enter the workforce every year.

“Abundant human resources is still China’s outstanding advantage,” he said.

Abroad, Beijing also has built on China’s growing heft as the second-largest economy to promote trade and construction initiatives that Washington, Tokyo, Moscow and New Delhi worry will expand its strategic influence at their expanse.

Those include the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to construct ports, railways and other trade-related infrastructure across an arc of countries from the South Pacific through Asia to Africa and Europe. China also is promoting trade and security initiatives.

A “Global Security Initiative” issued in February said China is “ready to conduct bilateral and multilateral security cooperation with all countries.” It offered to help African countries resolve disputes and to set up a “new security framework in the Middle East.”

Also last month, Beijing called for a cease-fire in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed Chinese involvement but said success would require action in addition to words. Beijing has refused to criticize President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and has accused Western governments of provoking the invasion.

Xi’s government rattled the United States and Australia in early 2022 when it signed an agreement with the Solomon Islands that would allow Chinese navy ships and security forces to be stationed in the South Pacific nation.

The foreign minister, Qin Gang, warned Washington last week of possible “conflict and confrontation” if the United States doesn’t change course in relations that have been strained by conflicts over Taiwan, human rights, Hong Kong, security and technology.

Xi called Monday for faster technology development and more self-reliance in a speech loaded with nationalistic terms. He referred eight times to “national rejuvenation,” or restoring China to its rightful place as an economic, cultural and political leader.

He said that before the ruling party took power in 1949, China was “reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country, subject to bullying by foreign countries.”

“We have finally washed away the national humiliation, and Chinese people are the master of their own destiny,” Xi said. “The Chinese nation has stood up, become rich and is becoming strong.”

Xi also called for the country to “unswervingly achieve” the goal of “national reunification,” a reference to Beijing’s claim that Taiwan, the self-ruled island democracy, is part of its territory and is obliged to unite with China, by force if necessary.

The president of Micronesia, a group of islands east of the Philippines, in a letter dated March 9 and obtained by The Associated Press, accused China of “political warfare.” David Panuelo said Beijing used spying and bribes in an effort to ensure Micronesia would side with China or stay neutral in a possible conflict with Taiwan.

The Chinese foreign ministry denied the allegations.

___

AP writer Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed.

AP · by JOE McDONALD · March 13, 2023

17. America Is Still Losing the Information War

Effective influence operations requires aggressive leadership.

We do have have lessons from history that achieved some effects (though not perfect), e.g., The Active Measures Working Group:

Deception, Disinformation, and Strategic Communications: How One Interagency Group Made a Major Difference

By Fletcher Schoen and Christopher J. Lamb

https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/693590/deception-disinformation-and-strategic-communications-how-one-interagency-group/

But the fundamental problem is our risk averseness and our failure to recognize our adversaries' political warfare strategy and our inability to craft our own political warfare . Paul Smith's "On Political War" is instructive here:

Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations.

...

The partisan nature of foreign policy discourse continued to cloud the issue. Those inclined toward a global-humanist perception of the world asserted. despite the historical record, that propaganda was unworthy and un-American. Power realists sometimes advocated propaganda, usually on the grounds that "the Soviets practice it." Often, what they seemed to have in mind were forms of mass counterpropaganda for American domestic audiences. Such efforts seldom elicited any solid congressional support, and often generated sharp controversy. America-but not the world-had returned to normal.

Smith, Paul A., On Political War (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1989)

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a233501.pdf

Our failure to understand and accept this is the root of all the problems outlined below.

Excerpts:

Finally, it is even more important for Western governments to put Russia on the defensive in the information space. When the Kremlin is on the defensive, it will spend time, energy, and resources defending itself in the information space instead of attacking the West. For example, the United States should craft new ways to amplify the truth about Russia’s existing bioweapons program and violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has been reluctant to use information campaigns to its full advantage in fighting the country’s adversaries, which has yielded the information space to anti-U.S. propaganda. While outrageous claims about the United States crafting pandemics or using birds to spread diseases may seem unbelievable, Washington’s silence lends credibility to Kremlin-spun narratives. The United States urgently needs a 21st-century information strategy focused specifically on Russia’s activities—and give Putin a taste of his own medicine.

America Is Still Losing the Information War

Washington urgently needs a 21st-century communication strategy.

By Ivana Stradner, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Anthony Ruggiero, the senior director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Foreign Policy · by Ivana Stradner, Anthony Ruggiero · March 10, 2023

In late January, the Russian Foreign Ministry launched its latest disinformation campaign, claiming that Moscow had acquired more than 20,000 documents about a supposed secret U.S. biological weapons program in Ukraine. Spreading this fake news via its official Twitter account, the ministry also claimed the U.S. Defense Department “aimed at creating elements of a biological weapon, & testing it on the population of Ukraine.” This tweet alone received more than 2 million views. The Russian Embassy in Washington stepped up next, recycling the Kremlin conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon by the U.S. government.

All of this is part of a familiar deluge of fake news coming out of Moscow, and the obvious absurdity of these claims could prompt U.S. officials to dismiss them. Such complacency, however, would be a mistake. The problem is that they draw attention away from Russia’s genocidal war and other actions, not least because articles such as this one need to be written to debunk them. Even the most far-fetched charges against the United States are taken seriously in some parts of the world—and, increasingly, among Americans beholden to pro-Russian propagandists such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. The long history of Russian and Soviet disinformation campaigns shows that they are far more successful than one might think in spreading doubt about U.S. actions and intentions, and Moscow scores a win if even a small fraction of people fall for what, to most observers, appears patently ludicrous.

It is therefore a dangerous omission that Washington still has no counter-disinformation strategy beyond the occasional official denial of Moscow’s claims.

Russian propaganda inventions can be quite elaborate. In December, the Russian military’s head of radiation, chemical, and biological defense, Igor Kirillov, claimed Russia had discovered a “large-scale burial of the remains of biomaterials” in Lysychansk, a Russian-occupied city in eastern Ukraine. It had supposedly been put there by the U.S. Defense Department as part of a secret program. Kirillov then fabulated that Russia’s discovery had led the Pentagon to move this supposed bioweapons research from Ukraine to Central Asia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Last year, Russia requested a formal meeting of the Biological Weapons Convention to accuse the United States of operating biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. Most participants who spoke during the meeting rejected Russia’s assertions.

At a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Russia accused Ukraine and the United States of a plot to use migratory birds and bats to spread pathogens. The Pentagon, Russia claimed, was also collecting blood samples from Ukrainian COVID-19 patients to develop biological weapons genetically targeted at “the Slavic ethnicity” as part of a larger plot whereby the United States manufactured COVID-19 to retain its international power. In that vein, Kirillov also thought it was suspicious how quickly the United States was able to produce mRNA vaccines to treat COVID-19. Actual facts are obviously not the point for the Kremlin’s information warriors, who run a sophisticated operation weaving together misleading and often unrelated narratives to spread rumors and sow doubt.

The Kremlin honed many of these techniques in the Cold War, when the KGB conducted Operation Denver, a successful disinformation campaign that blamed the U.S. government for creating and releasing HIV, the virus that causes AIDS and killed millions of people worldwide before treatments were developed. This fake news was picked up and spread by media around the world, especially in developing countries. This narrative and others like it were part of Moscow’s agenda to systematically frame Washington as a nefarious actor with a secret agenda to subjugate—and even exterminate—populations, especially in the developing world.

More recently, the Russian ministries of defense and foreign affairs accused the United States and Britain of chemical attacks in Syria, a grotesque inversion of the truth. Russia was using a well-worn playbook, accusing adversaries of crimes against humanity that Moscow’s own close ally was committing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda operatives recognize that Russia’s own state media and government officials lack credibility in the West. Just like the Soviets used left-wing journalists and protest groups as useful idiots or willing intermediaries, Russia today focuses on infiltrating Western far-right networks, right-wing media, and populist parties to spread its narratives. Atlantic Council fellow Jared Holt has described how Russian disinformation trolls exploit far-right groups’ existing obsession with secret government plots, for example by piggy-backing on conspiracy theories popular with QAnon. In this paranoid underworld, secret government bioweapons are a recurring theme.

Russian disinformation then capitalizes on the viral spread of these narratives from secluded circles to broader audiences via social and mainstream media. For instance, after a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing confirmed the well-known fact that the United States supports epidemiological institutes in former Soviet countries—part of a post-Cold War disarmament agreement that turned military labs into civilian public health institutions—a number of far-right channels and platforms spun this information through a pro-Russian lens. On Fox News, Carlson claimed the hearing “just confirmed that the Russian disinformation … is, in fact, totally and completely true.” Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast trumpeted the “U.S. biolabs in Ukraine” narrative as well. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out to his audience of 9.7 million that the bioweapons story went “from conspiracy theory to fact.”

Many other governments have begun fighting back against the Kremlin’s disinformation trolls this way—Ukraine’s social media strategy is just one example.Russia has pursued similar tactics in Europe. In the days leading up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin spread bioweapons disinformation around Europe to help rationalize the impending war. After a Russian Telegram channel posted documents showing supposed evidence of Ukrainian plans to use bioweapons, German pro-Russia channels and organizations, such as Anti-Spiegel, amplified the narrative. Eventually, the disinformation attracted the attention of political figures. Steffen Kotré, a member of the German parliament for the pro-Russian Alternative for Germany party, demanded that parliament debate “bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine.” A study later found that almost 7 percent of Germans believed the bioweapons disinformation.

The first step in countering Russia’s narrative begins with explaining the truth to global audiences. At the most recent Biological Weapons Convention review conference in Geneva, the U.S. delegate accused Moscow of hiding an active biological weapons program, a blatant violation of the convention. He also pointed out Russia had continued Soviet-era biological weapons programs rather than dismantling them, as Moscow claims to have done. The case perfectly illustrates the four steps in the Russian disinformation playbook: deny everything, unleash false narratives, accuse others of what Russia is doing, and repeat. Unfortunately, Washington has not amplified these messages any further. This is a lost opportunity, as more Americans and Europeans have probably heard Russia’s disinformation narrative than the U.S. government’s rebuttal.

Second, the U.S. government should finally enter the world of 21st-century media. Too much of its engagement with Russian disinformation is still based on stodgy diplomatic statements and policy reports. Russia has been engaged in a successful information operations campaign adapted to social media and other contemporary communications channels, and the United States should respond. While reports and fact sheets debunking Russian lies are valuable for, say, journalists engaging in research, these tools will not reach ordinary people. Instead, a smart U.S. campaign would, for example, mock the Kremlin on social media with sharp commentary and humorous memes about Russian bioweapons programs. Many other governments have begun fighting back against the Kremlin’s disinformation trolls this way—Ukraine’s social media strategy is just one example.

The Kremlin despises being mocked, and Russia responds to direct condemnation—even if it is produced in Hollywood. In 2019, HBO released a miniseries on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. The series’ negative portrayal of Soviet authorities angered Putin to such an extent that the Kremlin immediately banned the series. State news media, such as Sputnik, attempted to discredit the show. Russia’s NTV even announced plans for its own series about the disaster. (And we wouldn’t be surprised if the channel blamed the United States.) Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin’s heavy-handed efforts to censor the show have only increased Russians’ interest in watching it—a well-known result of censorship known as the Streisand effect.

Finally, it is even more important for Western governments to put Russia on the defensive in the information space. When the Kremlin is on the defensive, it will spend time, energy, and resources defending itself in the information space instead of attacking the West. For example, the United States should craft new ways to amplify the truth about Russia’s existing bioweapons program and violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has been reluctant to use information campaigns to its full advantage in fighting the country’s adversaries, which has yielded the information space to anti-U.S. propaganda. While outrageous claims about the United States crafting pandemics or using birds to spread diseases may seem unbelievable, Washington’s silence lends credibility to Kremlin-spun narratives. The United States urgently needs a 21st-century information strategy focused specifically on Russia’s activities—and give Putin a taste of his own medicine.

Foreign Policy · by Ivana Stradner, Anthony Ruggiero · March 10, 2023

18. Congress wants to label Wagner group as a terrorist organization. Why is Biden opposed?

Excerpts:

The congressional aide who spoke with The Hill said that the legislation is unlikely to move quickly, facing a difficult, uphill battle by nature of Senate procedures – between challenges to getting it on the calendar for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in general, and the chance the Banking Committee may exercise jurisdiction because of the sanctions piece of the legislation.

“Also, marking something up in the committee or passing it on the Senate floor does not immediately mean it’s a law that would be implemented,” the aide said.

“And particularly because the administration doesn’t want it, it could disappear, in the dark of night, on a [National Defense Authorization Act] discussion next December.”

Congress wants to label Wagner group as a terrorist organization. Why is Biden opposed?

BY LAURA KELLY - 03/12/23 2:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/international/3894376-congress-wants-to-label-wagner-group-as-a-terrorist-organization-why-is-biden-opposed/

A fight is brewing between Congress and President Biden over whether to designate as a terrorist organization the private Russian military company Wagner, which is on the front lines of aggression against Ukraine and accused of heinous atrocities there and across the world.

While the Biden administration has sanctioned the Wagner group as a global criminal organization, lawmakers are pushing the State Department to go further by imposing the foreign terrorist designation.

The split underscores a long-running tension: Congress has criticized the Biden administration as slow-walking its support for Ukraine, while the administration says it is managing a delicate escalation ladder and safeguarding against potential, negative blowback.

“We’ve seen that again and again in terms of this support for the Ukrainians and this war, where Congress has been out ahead of the White House,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Hill.

“It’s been true since Russia invaded Ukraine. I remember in 2014 supporting lethal weapons for Ukraine, and the White House refused to support that. I don’t see this as unusual. I hope the administration and the State Department comes on board.”

Shaheen is a sponsor, along with six other Democratic and Republican senators, of legislation called the Holding Accountable Russian Mercenaries (HARM) Act, which would force the State Department to label Wagner as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

Supporters of the FTO designation say it imposes significantly more costs on Wagner compared to its current label as a transnational criminal organization.

The FTO designation would increase U.S. resources to target and disrupt Wagner’s activities, serve as a strong deterrent against people or governments doing business with the group and open new pathways for legal action.

“This would be a game changer,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and one of the co-sponsors of the bill.

The National Security Council and the State Department did not respond to questions from The Hill over its specific issues with labeling Wagner an FTO.

Complications with Wagner FTO label

But a congressional aide, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations, told The Hill that the administration opposes the legislation over concerns it could impede U.S. efforts to convince and work with African nations to end their associations with or dependency on Wagner.

Expert analyses have tied the Wagner group’s activities to countries including Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Chad. The private security company is often used as a supplement force for those countries’ weak militaries.

“[The State Department] is concerned that if suddenly the FTO designation lands on Wagner, that those governments, where there’s various officials that deal with them [Wagner], that they would all, immediately be blocked from travel to the United States and have their assets seized for coming into contact with the FTO. So that’s the nature of their concern,” the aide said.

“They claim they’re not opposed to it on Ukraine grounds, but they’re opposed to it on Africa grounds.”

This undated photograph handed out by French military shows three Russian mercenaries, right, in northern Mali. Russia’s Wagner Group, a private military company led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a rogue millionaire with longtime links to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, has played a key role in the fighting in Ukraine and also deployed its personnel to Syria, Central African Republic, Libya and Mali. (French Army via AP, File)

But supporters of the HARM bill say passing the legislation sends an important political signal while also giving the president authority to delay carrying out the letter of the law.

The bill text includes an authority for the president to waive the sanctions requirements over national security concerns.

“The messaging that comes from passing a bill like this, I think, is valuable and we would want that. I think it can have both worlds,” the aide said.

And supporters of the FTO designation say that the Wagner group, in particular, fulfills criteria separate from the transnational criminal organization label. Wagner’s close ties to the Kremlin make it more than just a criminal organization operating for profit, as opposed to other transnational criminal groups like drug cartels in Central and South America.

Wagner is “ostensibly a private outfit, but actually functions as an arm proxy of the Kremlin,” Justyna Gudzowska, a former Treasury sanctions official, testified to lawmakers Thursday during a hearing of the Helsinki Commission.

Gudzowska, the director of illicit financing at the investigative and policy organization The Sentry, said that the organization has tracked Wagner spending money in the Central African Republican on “sophisticated Hollywood-style propaganda glorifying Russia.”

This “makes it clear that the group is not there just for economic spoils, but also to project Russian power abroad,” she told lawmakers.

Still, Gudzowska also warned that an FTO designation on Wagner could harm humanitarian groups working in these countries, another unintended consequence of such a designation, and called for lawmakers to ensure such issues “are properly mitigated.”

What has Wagner allegedly done?

The alleged atrocities committed by the Wagner group make up a long list and are difficult to stomach. In Ukraine, the Wagner group is accused of employing the tactic of human wave attacks to overwhelm front-line positions, throwing bodies to be killed.

Wagner forces are also accused of carrying out the rape, torture and massacre of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, in March 2022.

In countries in Africa, Gudzowska testified bluntly that “Wagner targets civilians,” and said that Wagner forces and Wagner-trained Central African soldiers use terror as a weapon against the civilian population.

“They have committed mass rape, torture, forced disappearance and dislocation, and they have killed thousands of civilians,” Gudzowska said.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is focused on Wagner atrocities in Africa and has talked with officials in Ukraine about the group’s atrocities, said he is supportive of labeling the group as an FTO but is not committed to any one piece of legislation.

“I am trying to make sure that I understand what the consequences might be,” he told The Hill. “But I think this is something we need to move on.”

A move to change Russia’s status

Supporters of the FTO designation also hope it lays the groundwork for labeling Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, a move the Biden administration has also resisted over concerns for unintended consequences, like making it harder to move grain out of Ukraine while it is under a Russian naval blockade.

Graham had earlier tried to work with the administration on legislation to label Russia as an “aggressor state,” in a compromise over the state sponsor of terrorism designation, but that fell apart.

“I’ve worked with the administration — how can you say Russia’s committing crimes against humanity and you won’t label them a state sponsor of terrorism?” Graham told The Hill.

“I don’t like this crime of aggression crap, I want to go to what they are, a state sponsor of terrorism.”

He continued that he is focused on designating Wagner an FTO, followed by becoming “a real vocal, unrelenting force to get Russia labeled as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), co-sponsor of the HARM Act and co-sponsor of the “Aggressor” legislation with Graham, agreed that designating Wagner an FTO “could help lead to” designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Blumenthal expressed confidence that the HARM Act would be brought to the Senate floor for a vote in a “week or two,” and suggested it could bypass the normal committee procedure, although his colleagues didn’t entirely agree.

“I don’t know about not going through committee, but I don’t think it will have much problem getting through there either,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), co-sponsor of the bill and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where the bill has been referred.

“I think Wagner at this point is the definition of a Foreign Terrorist Organization and they just happen to operate for profit.”

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he supported designating Wagner an FTO but said he had not seen the legislation.

The congressional aide who spoke with The Hill said that the legislation is unlikely to move quickly, facing a difficult, uphill battle by nature of Senate procedures – between challenges to getting it on the calendar for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in general, and the chance the Banking Committee may exercise jurisdiction because of the sanctions piece of the legislation.

“Also, marking something up in the committee or passing it on the Senate floor does not immediately mean it’s a law that would be implemented,” the aide said.

“And particularly because the administration doesn’t want it, it could disappear, in the dark of night, on a [National Defense Authorization Act] discussion next December.”

Graham, however, was upbeat and said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) appeared to be on board. Schumer’s office did not return a request for comment.

“I talked to Sen. Schumer, he said he thought it was a good idea … I think Sen. Schumer is going to make it happen,” he said.

19. USSOCOM’s AFSOC Updates on the MC-130J Floatplane’s Status

USSOCOM’s AFSOC Updates on the MC-130J Floatplane’s Status - Naval News

Naval News reached out to the U.S. Air Force’s Special Operations Command (AFSOC) in February 2023 for an update on the MC-130J amphibious floatplane conversion kit. This add-on pontoon kit (pictured above) is meant to convert existing AFSOC MC-130Js and give them the capability to take off and land on land and water.

navalnews.com · by Peter Ong · March 9, 2023

Naval News has been following this kit’s development for some time with the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) as told here and here. The first news story on this amphibious MC-130J concept can be found here.

Since 2021, the U.S. Air Force’s Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has been developing the amphibious MC-130J and media and public speculation rose as to how the plane would look and function. The answers came to light when AFSOC published graphical renders of the MC-130J amphibious capability (MAC) aircraft resting on two massive pontoons with landing gear sticking out on the bottom for land taxiing and takeoff. Rich Rodriguez, USSOCOM’s Tech Director in Emerging Technologies, spoke at the U.S. Special Operations Forces Industry Conference 2022 (SOFIC 2022 held May 16-19 of that year) and alluded that the MAC will look very similar to the MC-130J graphical renders shown here.

The USSOCOM MC-130J amphibious capability (MAC) concept adds pontoon floats and its structural supports to existing MC-130Js and in theory appears very similar to the graphical representation above. Graphic:USSOCOM

“In terms of amphibious MC-130 demonstration, USSOCOM is actually going through some market research, currently, to see if we can identify any potential amphibious capacities to meet some of the SOF Requirements that are existing. And currently AFSOC is also doing an experimental demonstration where they are planning on putting some float assemblies on a C-130 platform. They use digital engineering as a major factor of reducing some of that risk and making some of those changes, and they have gone through some hydrotesting and some aero testing on a subscale factor.”

Rich Rodriguez, USSOCOM’s Tech Director in Emerging Technologies, SOFIC 2022

Details on the MAC have been scarce since 2021 with USSOCOM and AFSOC providing no additional graphics or information. When queried by Naval News, USSOCOM Public Affairs said that the MAC is not an official Program of Record unlike the DARPA “Liberty Lifter” and no contract exists to construct anything. USSOCOM did admit that the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force’s ShinMaywa Industries US-2, a four-engine propeller seaplane with the primary role of Search and Rescue (SAR), contingency operations, and Humanitarian Disaster Relief, was market researched as a possible contender. However, the Japanese ShinMaywa US-2 lacks a spacious cargo hold and a rear cargo ramp, ingress and egress being through a fuselage side door.

The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force’s ShinMaywa US-2 seaplane was a contender for the USSOCOM MAC, but ultimately, it was not selected. Photo: ShinMayWa Industries Ltd

ShinMaywa Industries Ltd. did tell Naval News in September 2022 that it is able and confident that it can build the US-2 for USSOCOM if ordered and the main differences would be English instrumentation, software, and technical manuals for any USSOCOM US-2s.

Naval News inquired USSOCOM again in early 2023 on the MAC status, its scheduled fielding, expected performance, and the pontoon kit’s install time. AFSOC’s Public Affairs replied via email on February 13, 2023 with the following statement:

“There is no capability demonstration scheduled for CY23 [calendar year] for reasons that vary from funding challenges to a prioritization of capabilities. The MC-130J Amphibious Capability (MAC) remains an important initiative for AFSOC, and we are still working on bringing this capability for the Joint Force and AFSOC. Sub-scale testing and several risk-reduction activities have been accomplished to date, including advanced digital engineering activities. We are not able to provide specific information regarding when it may reach initial operating capability. And we cannot speculate on any performance issues or provide an accurate length of time it would take to modify the MC-130Js until we reach later phases of the development of this capability. However, we can certainly provide updates in the future as the program progresses.”

Naval News and Author’s Comments

If built and put into service, the MAC would offer USSOCOM and the Joint Force a tremendous advantage in flexible mobility and tactics since the MC-130J can land on and takeoff from water and land. However, as Naval News has previously reported on the MAC, how any internal mobile tactical watercraft (jetskis, combat rubber raiding crafts, small boats, etc.) can enter and exit the rear ramp of a MAC resting so high up on pontoons is unclear and unknown on if the ramp would even touch the water or if the pontoons can ballast the fuselage down to sea level. Also unknown is if the interior can be flooded for roll-on/roll-off of tactical watercraft.

Naval News attended an online Navy webinar held virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic and asked about the U.S. Navy’s interest in the MAC for distributed maritime operations. The U.S. Navy officers present during the session told the media that the Navy is also interested in an amphibious C-130, but the webinar officers have not seen any prototype or official program yet. If the U.S. Navy and the Joint Force branch services can fund the MAC similar to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is uncertain, or if the MAC is entirely a USSOCOM/AFSOC initiative. The U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Coast Guard do have and fly C-130s although these lack the specialized USSOCOM/AFSOC features such as forward looking infrared (FLIR) turret ball, inflight refueling receptable, sensors, radar, and other U.S. special operations government furnished equipment (GFE). Nonetheless, speculatively, the pontoon kit is supposed to be adapted to any C-130 since it fits on the bottom of the C-130 although it might not be a simple conversion to do and might require many hours to modify a C-130 into a MAC.

To not have a C-130 floatplane affects the future distributed maritime operations and lethality of the Joint Force for the United States, especially in remote regions where a landing strip is scarce. While the technical feasibility and capability of a MC-130J MAC remains to be seen, DARPA and ShinMaywa offer seaplane alternatives that could be beneficial for the U.S. naval forces if built for the former and acquired for the latter despite both seaplanes not being the same size or capabilities as the AFSOC MAC.

In a time of great peer nation competition, delays or funding issues that affect innovative concepts and stalls enhanced maritime mobility might come back to haunt the United States’ Department of Defense as the future world might become more unpredictable and uncertain due to changing times, shifting political climates, turbulent weather, shaky economies, and increased instability of regional global tensions. A MAC offers the Joint Force more options and tactical unpredictability for deploying small watercraft from a distance.

Stayed tuned to Naval News for future updates on the AFSOC MAC program.

navalnews.com · by Peter Ong · March 9, 2023

20. Staring Down the Black Hole of Russia’s Future

Excerpts:

Russia has become a democracy supernova that never fulfilled its promise, collapsing in on itself, spreading death and destruction to those within its orbit.

This is a far cry from the Russia that people shaped by perestroika had hoped for. Instead, Russia has become a democracy supernova that never fulfilled its promise, collapsing in on itself, spreading death and destruction to those within its orbit.

But nothing lasts forever, not even a black hole. The decline is slow, but one day a black hole runs out of matter to consume and starts losing its mass, exhaling tiny particles back into the universe. They escape faster and faster, until the black hole’s center is small and unstable. In the final tenth of a second of its long life, all that is left evacuates at once in a huge flash of light and energy. What was once thought to be eternal becomes a memory.

No one—not the best experts, the Kremlin’s innermost circle, or even Putin himself—can predict conclusively whether Russia’s own demise will come in the form of a huge explosion, a slow decay, or some combination of the two. But after years of consuming and destroying all the light in its path, perhaps the bigger question is whether Putin’s Russia can transform what it has consumed into something viable.

For Russia itself, Ukraine’s victory may be the only chance. In the words of Gudkov, “It’ll bring some future back.”

Staring Down the Black Hole of Russia’s Future

A Ukrainian victory may be the country’s only chance at long-term salvation.

Foreign Policy · by Anastasia Edel · March 10, 2023

By Anastasia Edel, a writer and social historian.

We used to live in a world where large-scale conventional wars that left thousands of dead and wounded existed only in video games and books. A world where mutually beneficial commercial activity was guaranteed by a global security order, to which the world’s leading nations adhered in exchange for membership in a shared civilization. A world trending irreversibly toward liberal democracy.

Russia’s war of choice shattered these assumptions. In the heart of Europe, at least 18,000 civilians are dead, 14.5 million displaced, and thousands more tortured, mutilated, forcefully resettled. The trauma and misfortune Russia has wrought, unprovoked, on Ukraine is akin to those depicted in the tragedies of antiquity—advanced weapons such as drones and missiles notwithstanding. The barbarity of Russian warfare defies everything modernity stands for.

When this war is over, though, there is still hope that Ukraine will take its place in a brighter and honorable future, earned through the heroism of its people. The same cannot be said for Russia, which now finds itself staring down the inevitable black hole of its future.

I came of age as the borders of the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia embraced the West. I was one of those euphoric young Russians standing amid the ruins of communism, looking forward to a life free of ideology, oppression, and untruths. Back then, it seemed that after a decades-long totalitarian detour, Russia had finally found its true path—that of a free, democratic country. Now I’m forced to revise, yet again, my assumptions about what Russia is and what it will become.

This time, I, like many others, struggle to see any light in Russia’s future. I asked a group of military experts, sociologists, journalists, and economists who think about Russia professionally to help me envision the future. If there’s any agreement among them, it is that Russia as we knew it—a semi-mythical Eurasian nation that, according to its own lore, had saved the world from the Mongols and Nazis, endured a communist experiment, and then reunited itself with the West—is no longer there. Should Russia endure as a state within its current borders, we might as well come up with a new name for it.

So deep is the country’s malaise that even Russian President Vladimir Putin’s exit from the Russian political stage, whenever it occurs, is unlikely to change the country’s current trajectory. Too many red lines have been crossed, too many points of no return passed. Increasingly lawless, economically doomed, and morally bankrupt, Russia is running out of good endings, as though caught in a reenactment of its own sad folk tale in which the only choices available to the protagonist are to lose his horse, lose his life, or lose his soul.

Police officers detain a woman as she protests against Russia's invasion of Ukraine in central Moscow in 2022.

Police officers detain a woman as she protests against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in central Moscow on March 20, 2022. AFP via Getty Images

War is a great catalyzer: It sharpens trends already in place and hastens their inevitable denouement. Russia’s descent into authoritarianism started a long time ago, but until Feb. 24, 2022, Putin felt compelled to at least maintain the semblance of a managed democracy.

Not anymore. “War has accelerated Russia’s descent from autocracy and into a totalitarian state,” said Mark Feygin, a former Russian opposition politician and lawyer who now runs a popular YouTube channel tracking the war. Russians’ two remaining freedoms—the ability to leave the country and to access alternative sources of information—can be shut down at any moment. Lev Gudkov, a prominent Moscow-based sociologist and director of Russia’s last independent pollster, the Levada-Center, described Putin’s regime as “totalitarianism 2.0,” under which key repressive instruments of the Soviet Union, including a politicized police force, subservient courts, and media censorship, have been reinstituted in a reversal of 1990s liberalism.

One clear break from its Soviet past is the Kremlin’s willingness to operate outside of any legal boundaries, or even its own societal norms. The distance between prison and success has always been short in Russia, but Russia today is a country where private individuals such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the infamous Wagner Group, can recruit convicts, arm them with weapons supplied by the Russian Ministry of Defense, and throw them to the frontlines. Those who manage to survive are granted amnesty and hailed as heroes, despite their criminal pasts.

It will be a country of warlords and criminals, where force is the only argument and crimes are not crimes so long as they are committed for the Motherland.

Exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man before Putin imprisoned him, said Putin had “reset the rules of the game towards pure violence.” Russians never expected much from their historically weak legal system, but now they can be punished outside of the court of law in a positively medieval fashion.

This brutal “justice” isn’t limited by Russia’s borders, or battlefield lines. In case it wasn’t already clear by the poisoning of Alexey Navalny or Sergei Skripal, Russian agents’ suspected involvement in the recent Spanish letter bomb campaign—whose targets included the Spanish prime and defense ministers, and foreign diplomats—is yet another indication that Russia will resort to terrorism to achieve its goals, a hallmark of a failed state.

Whatever Russia emerges after the war, it won’t be the Russia of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, the country that once tantalized Western intellectuals with its perennial quest for meaning and capacity for the sublime. It will be a country of warlords and criminals, where force is the only argument and crimes are not crimes so long as they are committed for the Motherland.

Russian soldiers run along Red Square in central Moscow.

Russian soldiers run along Red Square in central Moscow on Sept. 29, 2022, as the square is sealed prior to a ceremony of the incorporation of new territories into Russia. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images

If this metamorphosis worries Russians, they show few signs of it. Having once considered themselves part of a peace-loving nation that picks up arms only to defend itself, the population has now closed ranks around its war-waging president. “If at the start of the invasion we saw fear and disorientation, towards the end of 2022 our polls showed increased public support for the authorities,” Gudkov told me.

In a repressive state, polls may not accurately reflect the true sentiment behind perfunctory answers, and samples may be biased towards pro-government participants, because those who don’t agree are afraid to participate. But they do indicate an overall trend. Of the 72 percent indicating their support for the government, 20 to 25 percent are actively pro-war—either because they have bought into Putin’s ressentiment narrative or been convinced that Russia really is surrounded by enemies. Propaganda pours daily from every TV screen in the country, and it is effective in manufacturing a form of organized mass consensus.

Many Russians likely share some psychological propensity to justify the war because if what they believe—that their country is engaged in a righteous war against forces of evil—is untrue, then the alternative is being complicit in, and thus culpable for, its crimes. Still, the majority may simply be afraid to protest given the scale of repression they experience and the regime’s track record of brutality against dissenters. “People feel impotent to influence the regime, so they adapt,” said Mikhail Fishman, a Russian independent journalist and host of a popular analytical show that is blocked in Russia.

As economic conditions worsen, Russians will simply be told to tighten their belts further and make sacrifices for Russia’s “great victory.” Those sacrifices won’t be small. Sergei Guriev, a professor of economics at Sciences Po in Paris, warned of the “catastrophic” economic impact of Western sanctions on the Russian oil and gas sector, the main source of funding for the federal budget.

Equally bad for Russia’s economic prospects is its unprecedented brain drain. Since the start of the invasion, more than a million people, or 1.5 percent of the country’s labor force, have fled. Whether afraid of being drafted or repulsed by Putin’s war against a nation with which Russia shares centuries of common past, those who leave tend to be more educated and productive. Their absence will prevent Russia from developing knowledge-based industries or diversifying from an oil- and gas-based economy in the future. Likely a long-term pariah state, Russia will continue to be cut off from cross-border trade and investment while it hemorrhages cash and resources into a bottomless war effort—instead of, say, schools or hospitals. Taken together, these trends indicate a bleak economic future, the brunt of which will be carried by the Russian people. The only trajectory available to their country is that of irreversible economic decline.

A municipal worker breaks off the ice from a World War I monument in western Moscow, Russia.

A municipal worker breaks off the ice from a World War I monument in western Moscow on Jan. 20. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images

What of the Russian elites, whose hedonistic pre-war lifestyles, replete with yachts and villas on the French Riviera, are a far cry from the stringent demands imposed by their boss? They can’t be happy, yet there have been no high-profile government resignations or criticisms of the war from this group. The oligarchs, too, are silent, even though many have ended up under Western sanctions. “Putin has done a lot to make sure they all know he can persecute any lack of loyalty,” Guriev said. According to Gudkov’s data, 12 percent of Russia’s high-ranking officials have been arrested over the past five to six years.

This reality creates the same mood of fear among elites as it does among regular people. Arkady Babchenko, a journalist who staged his own death to thwart an alleged assassination plot by Russian security services, put it more bluntly: “Anyone showing dissent will simply fall out of the window”—a nod to a string of unexplained deaths of Russian businessmen over the past few months. “Putin rules Russia as if with a joystick,” Babchenko said. “It’ll go wherever he turns it.”

Can Russia survive as a state? Many experts—and a growing portion of world leaders—think not.

Lawless, declining in population and talent, and stuck in a resource-draining war against the collective West, it’s difficult to avoid the question much longer: Can Russia survive as a state? Many experts—and a growing portion of world leaders—think not.

Retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army Europe, told me that the West should be preparing for the federation’s imminent breakup. What—or who—would emerge after the current regime is anyone’s guess, he said. “The Kremlin has always been opaque, but in the old days we knew who the next three or four guys were,” Hodges said. “Now I don’t think anybody has confidence in what would regime change look like.”

If the breakup is imminent, how soon will it come? In an assessment created for the U.S. military a few years ago, Alexander Vindman, former director for European affairs for the U.S. National Security Council, forecasted Russia’s decline over the course of decades; now, the calculus has shifted to years. It’s possible, he said, that the beginning of Russia’s breakup may be seen in the next five to 10 years, particularly on the state’s margins. Vindman has studied Russia for years, but even for him it is hard “to break out of the confines of the notion that Russia will always be there, that it’s an enduring state,” he said.

Unlikely as Russia’s disintegration might sound, breaking the country into national “successor states” may be the only way to put an end to its pattern of predatory, consumptive despotism against its neighbors. For centuries, Russia has cast itself as a metropole, and its playbook for success has been based on the contributions of its provinces and republics, which act as an economic engine and talent farm for Moscow. That arrangement collapsed in 1991, and since then, Russia has failed to replace it with a more sustainable or productive model. It can’t quite shake its raiding mentality.

Vladimir Putin speaks during the Preliminary Draw of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia at The Konstantin Palace on July 25, 2015 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

What Putin Got Right

The Russian president got many things wrong about invading Ukraine—but not everything.

A portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin on a tombstone.

An End to the War Doesn’t Mean the End of Putin

Russia may well emerge from the war poor, belligerent, and with President Vladimir Putin still in power.

A poster of Russian President Vladimir Putin is used as target practice near Zolote, Ukraine, on Jan. 21, 2022.

Can Russia Ever Become a ‘Normal’ European Nation?

Ironically, a defeat by Ukraine could trigger Russians to reexamine their national identity.

Alexander Etkind, a historian at the European University Institute, thinks in terms of “de-federalization,” a process in which Russia’s ethnic regions sue for sovereignty to reclaim their wealth. Most of Russia’s oil and gas, Etkind said, is extracted in two autonomous ethnic regions in Siberia: Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi. From there, oil and gas are piped to Europe, but the hundreds of billions of dollars of profit go to Moscow, which then doles out payments to its regions. Disruption of that model by Western sanctions may prompt resource-rich regions to challenge Moscow’s control. Why can’t the Republic of Sakha sell its diamonds itself? Why does the Chechen Republic need a battled, isolated Moscow to sell its oil?

In the post-colonial world, Russia’s modus operandi of plundering territories in its domain is not only amoral but outdated. “The problem with the Russian empire,” Feygin said, “is that it doesn’t produce anything. Let it finish falling apart.”

Can anything be built on the territory once called Russia that isn’t a prison? Despite the country’s failure to do so in 1917 and 1991, Khodorkovsky—the exiled businessman and head of the Open Russia opposition coalition—believes that Russia could be rebuilt as a parliamentary republic. In his manifesto How Do You Slay a Dragon?, a riff on the anti-totalitarianism fable by Soviet writer Evgeny Schwartz, Khodorkovsky sees the transition to a decentralized, de-personified parliamentary model with self-governed regions as a way for Russia to break free of its autocratic curse. The idea seems to be shared among other opposition politicians, including Navalny and Ilya Yashin, both of whom are now in prison. A change of this magnitude, however, will require a radical overhaul of Russia’s entrenched bureaucracy and a way out of the inertia inherent to a country of Russia’s size.

People leave after a patriotic concert dedicated to the upcoming Defender of the Fatherland Day in Moscow, Russia.

People leave after a patriotic concert dedicated to the upcoming Defender of the Fatherland Day in Moscow on Feb. 22. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images

This and any other remotely optimistic scenario for Russia have one important condition: Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat. Though in the short term, likely the next two to three years, the defeat would only lead to more repression, it would weaken Putin politically and open the possibility for change. That doesn’t mean there will be a revolution. Russian people have long abandoned attempts to influence their government (elections in Russia are “managed” from above, just like everything else), but a more moderate faction within Russia’s current ruling elite may be able to steer the regime toward a lite version of Khrushchev’s Thaw, the period of relative liberalization that followed denunciation of Stalin’s terror. It could even be that, after a temporary revanchist swing toward “national patriots,” a democratic coalition would get another chance at rebuilding Russia, as is the hope of Khodorkovsky.

It isn’t clear, though, how eager Putin’s elite will be to give up their wealth or even freedom, as they’re likely to someday face criminal charges for their involvement in his war. Just as Putin was once the guarantor of their wealth, his rule may be their only chance to avoid persecution.

Russia still has plenty of sympathizers who see it as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony.

Putin may even convince his underlings that being shunned by the West is not the end of the world and that money, the raison d’être of his regime, can be made elsewhere. Russia still has plenty of sympathizers who see it as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony. The unfolding geopolitical realignment may even weaken the effect of Western sanctions, as Russia could switch its supply sources and develop alternative markets for its oil, gas, and other natural resources.

One year into the invasion, with Russian casualties mounting, it is clear Putin has decided to win this war no matter the cost. He’s urgently switched Russia’s economy onto military tracks and directed factories to work day and night to produce artillery shells and guns. The Russian army is expected to mobilize more troops in the spring. They may be untrained and unequipped, but they will still be thousands of men thrown into a fight.

Drawing out this war is Putin’s only hope, Hodges says. Today, Western support for Ukraine is strong. Yet it is not inconceivable that if the war goes on for too long, at some point the West may be forced to address other pressing domestic or international issues instead. In this less hopeful scenario, a battered and outnumbered Ukraine will be forced to negotiate. And Putin’s regime will be allowed to survive, regroup, and pursue its next target.

A damaged bust of Communist Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin rests in the street of Lyman, Ukraine.

A damaged bust of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin rests in the street of Lyman, Ukraine, on March 1. In the year since Russia invaded, many statues and monuments to Russian and Soviet leaders have been damaged or removed from public spaces throughout Ukraine. John Moore/Getty Images

There seem to be three paths available for a post-war Russia under Putin or whomever may succeed him: break up into smaller pieces, turn further toward tyranny to keep what’s left of the realm together, or endure a long period of slow decline.

The common thread in all three is violence. A breakup means re-distribution of power and assets, which won’t happen peacefully. A weakened, anachronistic empire, whether in its tyrannical or slow decline incarnation, means a Russia severed from its foundational myths and struggling to stay economically relevant—a dark, unpromising place.

Russia has become a democracy supernova that never fulfilled its promise, collapsing in on itself, spreading death and destruction to those within its orbit.

This is a far cry from the Russia that people shaped by perestroika had hoped for. Instead, Russia has become a democracy supernova that never fulfilled its promise, collapsing in on itself, spreading death and destruction to those within its orbit.

But nothing lasts forever, not even a black hole. The decline is slow, but one day a black hole runs out of matter to consume and starts losing its mass, exhaling tiny particles back into the universe. They escape faster and faster, until the black hole’s center is small and unstable. In the final tenth of a second of its long life, all that is left evacuates at once in a huge flash of light and energy. What was once thought to be eternal becomes a memory.

No one—not the best experts, the Kremlin’s innermost circle, or even Putin himself—can predict conclusively whether Russia’s own demise will come in the form of a huge explosion, a slow decay, or some combination of the two. But after years of consuming and destroying all the light in its path, perhaps the bigger question is whether Putin’s Russia can transform what it has consumed into something viable.

For Russia itself, Ukraine’s victory may be the only chance. In the words of Gudkov, “It’ll bring some future back.”

Foreign Policy · by Anastasia Edel · March 10, 2023

21. Look to Korea to See How China Might Fight in the Pacific Today

Excerpts:

But that doesn’t mean the campaign was fated to succeed. It’s no accident that Chinese forces fared relatively well during the opening phase of the intervention late in 1950. Northern Korea, a predominantly continental theater, constituted the arena for the ground-war phase. The Chinese host was thrown back when it made its own lunge toward the far reaches of the peninsula. Sea power—carrier aviation, ship-launched ordnance, amphibious forces—can make its weight felt far more easily south of the narrow neck than in the wide, mountainous north.

And it did. The PLA had little ability to oppose allied maritime operations around southern Korea, either by dispatching barely existent seagoing forces or by using shore-based forces to sling antiship and antiair weapons out to sea. That’s a deficit the PLA has worked feverishly—and with a considerable measure of success—to correct over the past quarter-century or thereabouts.

Our Chinese friends are students of history, and they do their homework. You can bet they will do their utmost to avoid repeating the mistakes their forebears committed in Korea.

Maybe Korea shouldn’t be a forgotten war after all.

Look to Korea to See How China Might Fight in the Pacific Today

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · March 13, 2023

This week I returned to the mothership for the first time in a dozen years, to take part in a conference at Vanderbilt University asking whether Chinese strategy is “universal or unique?”

My answer: Chinese maritime strategy is novel but not unique. Chinese strategists excel at combining and recombining the same concepts available to everyone, and to do so in ways that often baffle outsiders. Confounding prospective foes is a feature for them, not a bug.

The presentations made me think. Thinking is good.

China, the Korean War, and Modern Warfare

During the proceedings something dawned on me with regard to the Korean War. Namely that the forgotten war could furnish future combatants clues as to how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may wage war in maritime Asia. The China seas and Western Pacific comprise an oceanic battleground, but then the Korean Peninsula south of the “narrow neck” that roughly coincides with the inter-Korean border is a maritime theater in its own right.

Sea power can range all across it.

In geostrategic terms southern Korea is a half-island grafted onto continental Asia. In effect it’s part of the first island chain that plays such a prominent part in regional politics and strategy. It’s worthwhile mining the war for lessons applicable to today. The main thing PLA commanders must have learned from studying the conflict: it’s hard and perilous to fight on an island unless you command the air and sea around it.

Fresh off its victory in the Chinese Civil War, Communist China intervened on the peninsula to stem General Douglas MacArthur’s offensive short of the Yalu River. Whether Mao Zedong’s motives for intervening in the forgotten war were more strategically offensive or strategically defensive in outlook is debatable. Mao (and his successors) invariably cast their strategies as defensive. And, of course, the founding Chinese Communist Party chairman was an exponent of the doctrine—which verged and verges on dogma for the PLA—of “active defense.”

Long story short, active defense is a weaker combatant’s method for flipping the script on on stronger foe. The weak start off on the strategic defensive, buying time to tap their military potential. In the meantime they seek out opportunities to engage and annihilate isolated enemy units, enfeebling the foe by increments. Active defense portends strategic defense through offensive tactics and operations. It narrows, then reverses, an adverse military balance.

To borrow from boxing legend Jack Dempsey, the best strategic defense for Maoists is a good tactical offense.

But it can be a forward defense as well. China is not strategically autistic. It need not—and will not—mindlessly rerun the Maoist script in all future contingencies. Nor will it forever condemn itself to resisting foreign forces that invade the country. It will adapt time-honored practices to the realities of great power. Even for a contender with China’s leanings, then, it is possible to dispatch forces into unguarded or lightly guarded geographic space and defend it by harnessing active-defense principles.

In fact, the Prussian martial guru Moltke the Elder once pronounced strategic offense coupled with tactical defense the strongest form of warfare. You grab something and hold it—daring an assailant to come and take it while fighting at a tactical disadvantage. In warfare as in ordinary life, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

For Communist China, fighting in Korea deployed active defense with an offensive twist. But the expedition didn’t flout Maoist orthodoxy. Nothing in Mao’s writings proscribes going on the strategic offensive. In fact, the very point of active defense is to set the conditions to unleash a conventional counteroffensive culminating in a crushing battlefield victory. Active defense simply defers the counteroffensive till a more propitious time, once the correlation of forces has come to favor the active defender. There’s no reason to postpone the offensive if the PLA already commands battlefield parity or superiority. You can skip the strategic defensive.

That was the case in northern Korea after MacArthur and his U.S./UN army overshot their ability to sustain offensive operations. Intervening in Korea was not some outlandish abandonment of active defense.

But that doesn’t mean the campaign was fated to succeed. It’s no accident that Chinese forces fared relatively well during the opening phase of the intervention late in 1950. Northern Korea, a predominantly continental theater, constituted the arena for the ground-war phase. The Chinese host was thrown back when it made its own lunge toward the far reaches of the peninsula. Sea power—carrier aviation, ship-launched ordnance, amphibious forces—can make its weight felt far more easily south of the narrow neck than in the wide, mountainous north.

And it did. The PLA had little ability to oppose allied maritime operations around southern Korea, either by dispatching barely existent seagoing forces or by using shore-based forces to sling antiship and antiair weapons out to sea. That’s a deficit the PLA has worked feverishly—and with a considerable measure of success—to correct over the past quarter-century or thereabouts.

Our Chinese friends are students of history, and they do their homework. You can bet they will do their utmost to avoid repeating the mistakes their forebears committed in Korea.

Maybe Korea shouldn’t be a forgotten war after all.

Author Expertise and Biography

Dr. James Holmes, a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.”

19fortyfive.com · by James Holmes · March 13, 2023

22. Pentagon’s counter-drone boss tackles rising threat

Pentagon’s counter-drone boss tackles rising threat

Defense News · by Jen Judson · March 10, 2023

WASHINGTON — The internet is awash in videos claiming to show Russian and Ukrainian forces dropping shells and grenades on each other from small commercial drones. And while the veracity of the footage can’t be proved in every case, Pentagon officials say there’s no question the threat of small unmanned aerial systems is growing.

Indeed, the problem existed in the Middle East well before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but DoD leaders say the European theater is making clear the importance of effectively countering drones.

The Pentagon established the Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO, in 2019 to develop enduring solutions to address the problem.

Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey is the JCO’s first director and has led the new office through a variety of demonstrations to evaluate technology. He has also established a new process to train soldiers how to effectively counter drones.

Defense News sat down with Gainey at the Pentagon on Feb. 24 to talk about the JCO’s progress and what comes next. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How is the threat of drones influencing the development of countermeasures?

The Defense Department made a decision a few years ago to make the Army the executive agent to essentially frame this problem set, have a service lead and direct the effort with all of the services. In that process, we essentially focused on three areas: developing a joint materiel solution, joint training and joint doctrine. We want to ensure we are not just going after the materiel solution, but putting a framework around the materiel solution with training and doctrine so there is a holistic capability when fielding to the warfighter.

Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey

So specifically, what are we doing? What we decided earlier is having a system-of-systems, layered approach to a common command-and-control method is the best way to get after this type of threat. There is no one capability that will defeat the range of threats that you will see with these unmanned systems out there, whether they’re small quadcopters, or a large, one-way attack.

What have you learned from the Russian invasion of Ukraine about the use of drones in battle? Has the capacity exceeded your expectations?

What we’ve seen is the validation that the threat is real, the threat is evolving. And we at the DoD are taking this seriously. What we’re seeing in Ukraine really is a validation of what we’re seeing inside of U.S. Central Command’s [area of responsibility]. And our methodology of how to get after this threat is a layered approach integrated in a common C2.

Globally, we’re seeing the threat continues to grow, and you’ll see a range of employment of that threat from large to small amounts, depending on where you are.

The U.S. Army is starting to evaluate how to deploy its own drone swarms, which are already a threat. But is that technology overhyped?

I wouldn’t say “overhyped.” Anytime you can saturate an operator with the capability is something you have to take seriously, and we’re taking counter-swarm seriously. In one of our recent demonstrations, we demonstrated how to get after a swarm using a high-power microwave.

And we’re looking at other ways, from an operator-overload perspective, to be able to get after this threat and then provide the operator the tools to be able to defeat this threat.

You’ve held several rodeos and demonstrations to find counter-UAS technology for different requirements — to address gaps or fulfill operational needs, for example — while acknowledging there’s no silver bullet. How have those rodeos gone?

We decided early that giving industry an opportunity to come out every six months or so to show us what they’re doing and focus it on a capability gap area has been extremely helpful. If you look at the three demonstrations that we’ve executed to date, the first one was a dismounted hand-held capability. We are seeing some of those capabilities perform well with the services.

A drone shot down with a laser is seen during a Pentagon event in 2019. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

The next demonstration, working with the Air Force, we did a low-collateral intercept demonstration. That capability is also out with the services right now. And I talked to you about the high-power microwave; in looking at the future threat of things like swarming, we found a [high-power microwave] capability that performed better than some of the other capabilities, and the Army purchased four prototypes after the demonstration that will eventually get into the Army system for us to try and decide if we want to move forward with that capability.

And our next demonstration is focused on Group 3 one-way attack. So we are looking at different areas out there and inviting industry into the process to help us get after this in a more expedient manner.

[Editor’s note: The U.S. Army defines Group 3 UAS as featuring a maximum gross takeoff weight of less than 1,320 pounds.]

What technologies and capability areas are you yet to evaluate but would like to do so?

One of the areas that I didn’t highlight is that we did a demonstration on counter-UAS as a service. This involved taking another look at how to employ capability, not in your traditional acquisition manner, but pay industry as a service to employ the capability, to spiral that capability as necessary.

We identified five industry partners that performed well and met the criteria we were looking for. I essentially signed a memorandum, and highlighted to the services and [combatant commands] that these are some of the partners that we’ve looked at and can provide a sound business model for you to do that.

We then funded the Marines; they are now doing a pilot on behalf of the DoD, employing this capability at some of their sites. The Army is also planning a pilot to deploy to a couple of sites, and then the Air Force has a few sites. So that’s a model where we’ve taken the demonstration and then looked to the services to employ that capability. So we are studying it through a pilot lens.

As you talk swarming, directed energy sounds like a great way — if you get the technology to a point and have the magazine depth — to be able to get after multiple and not have to shoot a lot of interceptors. We’ve selected the Air Force as our service lead, working closely with the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office to deliver a directed-energy capability. We have that capability out in the field for operational assessment; now we’re just seeing what wattage is right for this particular problem set.

How will individual soldiers contend with or defeat drones? How are you training them?

Every soldier needs to have that baseline knowledge of how to employ counter-UAS capability; how to do passive measures; and how to understand what the threat can do, and see from their perspective, and what you can do to prepare yourself.

Providing the individual soldier a capability, which we’re doing now, to be able to defeat this threat is critical; but not only that — also providing them the training. We’ve done a lot of work in developing Joint Knowledge Online modules. Those are focused on operator understanding, overall orientation to the problem set and orientation to the systems, with an intent of eventually making that a mandatory class for every soldier.

More importantly, we’ve also stood up the joint counter-UAS academy that’s currently at Yuma, Arizona, but will move to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the air defense school and fires schoolhouse, and really consolidate a joint school where all the services will be able to provide an operator’s [course] and a planner’s course to give the warfighter that ability to not only execute the system, but also to plan it out, which we haven’t had in the past.

How do you plan to adapt technology not necessarily designed to counter drones, like active protection systems for combat vehicles, for such a mission?

We’re looking at different platforms, different technology. For example, with the high-power microwave, right now it sits on a gimbal. The Army purchased four of those, but also through the Navy, working with the Marines, we’re looking at different ways to employ that same type of technology on vehicles.

Industry is doing a really good job of saying: “Hey, here’s an innovative way to employ this to maximize the use all the way down to the operator level.”

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

23. Exclusive: China's Xi plans Russia visit as soon as next week - sources

Exclusive: China's Xi plans Russia visit as soon as next week - sources

Reuters · by Reuters

March 13 (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping plans to travel to Russia to meet his counterpart Vladimir Putin as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter said, which would be sooner than previously expected.

Plans for a visit come as China has been offering to broker peace in Ukraine, an effort that has been met with scepticism in the West given Beijing's diplomatic support for Russia.

Putin said last month that a Xi visit had been agreed, though the Kremlin chief gave no date for a possible visit. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that a visit to Moscow could take place in April or early May.

China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the possibility of Xi going to Moscow.

When asked about the Reuters report, the Kremlin said it had nothing to say on the matter.

"As a rule, announcements of official foreign visits are coordinated synchronously by mutual agreement of the parties," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

"When there is such readiness, we will let you know."

No other details were immediately available.

The sources briefed on the matter declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the issue.

Last month, Putin hosted China's top diplomat Wang Yi on a visit to Moscow. One source said that Wang's trip to Moscow was to help prepare for Xi's visit.

China and Russia struck a "no limits" partnership in February of 2022, when Putin was visiting Beijing for the opening of the Winter Olympics, weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. The two sides have continued to reaffirm the strength of their ties.

Xi has met Putin in person 39 times since becoming president, most recently in September during a summit in central Asia.

On Monday, Xi wrapped up the annual session of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, during which he was unanimously confirmed in a precedent-breaking third term as president.

Reporting by the Hong Kong, Beijing and Moscow newsrooms; Editing by Robert Birsel, Guy Faulconbridge

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

24. The Rise and Fall of Chris Miller, Trump's Final Defense Secretary

The Rise and Fall of Chris Miller, Trump's Final Defense Secretary

Trump's Last Defense Secretary Has Regrets - But Not About Jan.6

The Intercept · by Peter Maass · March 11, 2023

When bureaucrats get big promotions, they tend to receive congratulations from their friends, but after Christopher Miller landed the biggest job of his life, his wife and some of his colleagues were horrified.

It was November 9, 2020, the day President Donald Trump fired his secretary of defense, Mark Esper. It was widely assumed that Trump would install an acolyte who would do whatever was needed to help the defeated president stay in power. Esper, just days before, had confided to a journalist, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real yes man. And then God help us.”

Trump appointed Miller, an unknown whose rise was so far-fetched that the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, had to Google his new boss to figure out who he was. Wikipedia was useless because at the time, Miller didn’t merit an entry.

After retiring from the Army as a Special Forces colonel in 2014, Miller moved from one mid-level job to another in Washington, D.C., a nobody in a city of somebodies. Things began to pick up after Trump’s election, and by August 2020, he was promoted to director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Just three months later, he was summoned to the Oval Office and put in charge of the world’s most powerful military.

“I’m at work on a Monday morning, and the phone rings, and they’re like, ‘Get your ass down here,’” Miller said in an interview, referring to the moment he was called to the White House. “I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’”

Miller knew his name was circulating in the White House, but the announcement came abruptly and was not greeted with warmth by his life partner. “Yeah, my wife is like, ‘The only thing we have is our name and you’re ruining it,’” Miller recalled. “She’s like, ‘You’re an idiot. I think this is the stupidest thing that’s ever happened.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes dear, I know that.’”

Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and his wife Kathryn make prerecorded remarks for the Military Spouse Employment Partnership New Partner Induction Ceremony at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 4, 2020.

Photo: Department of Defense

As improbable Washington stories go, Miller’s blink-and-it’s-over journey from Beltway nothingness to what his detractors regard as a semi-witting participant in a plot to overthrow the constitutional order — well, it’s quite something. Miller was in charge of the Pentagon on January 6, 2021, and is accused of delaying the deployment of National Guard troops so the mob that beat its way into the Capitol might succeed in creating more than a pause in the Senate’s count of Electoral College votes. At a combative oversight hearing a few months later, Democratic members of Congress derided Miller as “AWOL,” “disgusting,” and “ridiculous,” to which he responded, “Thank you for your thoughts.”

As is customary, Miller has written a memoir of his extremely brief time in power, “Soldier Secretary,” published last month by Center Street, whose other authors include Newt Gingrich and Betsy DeVos. It’s a typical Washington book in many ways — revealing at times, suspect at others. For instance, Miller describes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as suffering a “total nuclear meltdown” during a phone call with him on January 6, but there is no evidence for that characterization. His book sticks closely to the Beltway norm of having a principal character who displays calmness and reason while others go nuts; the principal character is the author.

His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

But just as Miller’s journey to the top is atypical, so too is his obscenity-flecked memoir, because the retired soldier emerges as a scorched-earth critic of the institution he served for more than three decades and presided over for 73 days. He wants to fire most of the generals at the Pentagon, slash defense spending by half, shut down the military academies, break up the military-industrial complex, and he describes the invasion of Iraq as an unjust war based on lies. His rhetoric is a profane blend of MAGA and Noam Chomsky.

“Today, there are virtually no brakes on the American war machine,” Miller writes. “Military leaders are always predisposed to see war as a solution, because when you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail. The establishments of both major political parties are overwhelmingly dominated by interventionists and internationalists who believe that America can and should police the world. Even the press — once so skeptical of war during the Vietnam era — is today little more than a brood of bloodthirsty vampires cheering on American missile strikes and urging greater involvement in conflicts America has no business fighting.”

I was as surprised as everyone else when I heard the news about Miller’s appointment, but it’s not because I had to Google him. I knew who he was. We first met in Afghanistan in 2001, when he was a leader of the Special Forces unit that chased the Taliban out of their final stronghold, and I was reporting on that for the New York Times Magazine. I got to know him and wrote an article in 2002 about his Afghan combat and his preparations for the Iraq invasion the following year. With the publication of his memoir, Miller is now making the media rounds, so we got together again.

After more than two decades of the forever wars, Miller is pissed off in the way a lot of former soldiers are pissed off — and, I have to say, in the way a lot of former war reporters are pissed off too. It’s hard to have been a participant in those calamities and not feel betrayed in some fashion, as pundits attempt to whitewash the disaster and promotions are announced for officials who masterminded it. Miller’s evolution from Special Forces operator to Trump Cabinet member is a forever wars parable that helps us understand the moral injury festering in our political corpus.

Christopher Miller displays his recently published book “Soldier Secretary” on his home bookshelf on Feb. 7, 2023.

Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

A Historic Error

Miller’s 9/11 journey got into literal high gear when he roared into Kandahar in a Toyota pickup with blown-out windows. It was December 2001, he was a 36-year-old major in the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, and this was his first combat deployment.

I spotted Miller at the entrance to a compound on the outskirts of the city. Until a few days earlier, it had been the residence of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban who, after Osama bin Laden, was the most hunted man in the country. The scene was surreal because the compound was now the temporary home of Hamid Karzai, the soon-to-be leader of Afghanistan, whose security was guaranteed by Miller’s soldiers. These just-arrived Americans were dressed half in camouflage, half in fleece jackets, and they sported the types of accessories that ordinary GIs were prohibited from having, such as beards and long hair. Mixed among them were Afghan fighters with AK-47s who had fought with the Taliban not long ago but switched loyalties, which is an accepted practice in Afghanistan when your team is losing.

I struck up a conversation with Miller, a tall officer with bushy red hair and a wicked-looking assault weapon slung over his shoulder. Most of his soldiers were silent and grim — they weren’t happy about the journalists who had shown up — but Miller, who recognized my name because he had read my memoir on the Bosnian war, was friendly and answered a few questions. I asked if he had been to Bosnia, and he gave me a vague special operator laugh and said, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” As it turned out, he’d worked undercover in Bosnia in the late 1990s alongside CIA operatives tracking Serb war criminals.

I stayed in Kandahar for a while longer, as did Miller. We were both spending time around the city’s U.S.-installed warlord, Gul Agha Shirzai, whom Miller describes in his book as “a self-serving piece of shit,” which is totally accurate. After we both returned to America, I got Miller to invite me to spend a few days at his battalion’s headquarters at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We talked for hours about what happened in Afghanistan, about the soldiers he lost, about the Al Qaeda fighters he helped kill, and about the next war on the horizon (this was a year before the illegal invasion of Iraq). Miller was as friendly and transparent as I could hope for from a Special Forces officer. His favorite word was “knucklehead,” which he sometimes used to describe himself.

Miller didn’t know it at the time, but he was at the cusp of a profound disenchantment with the country’s military and political leaders, a disillusionment he shared with a lot of soldiers, thanks to the deceptions and errors embedded in the wars they fought. Miller is exceptional only in his Cabinet-level end point. While it’s important to remember that the vast bulk of these veterans are law-abiding, a small but influential group have been radicalized to violence rather than government service.

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Veterans are one of the key subjects in historian Kathleen Belew’s lauded book about right-wing extremism, titled “Bring the War Home.” American history teaches us a consistent lesson: There will almost always be blowback at home from wars fought elsewhere. Of 968 people indicted after the storming of the Capitol, 131 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Due to the respect military service generates among civilians in right-wing movements, veterans composed a disproportionately large number of the ringleaders on January 6, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy last year.

Soon after we met in 2001, Miller noticed omens of dysfunction in the American war machine. It began, he wrote in his book, with a visit to the airport that U.S. Marines seized outside Kandahar a few days after the Special Forces sped into town in their four-wheel-drive vehicles. Miller and one of his sergeants had to pick up supplies at the airport, and they saw Marines putting up a big tent. The sergeant told Miller, “Sir, it’s time for us to get the fuck out of here.” Miller asked why, and the sergeant replied, “They’re building the PX. It’s time for the Green Berets to leave.”

“We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater.”

He meant the military was settling in for the long haul. Sprawling bases would be constructed with Burger King and Pizza Hut outlets, staffed by workers flown in from Nepal, Kenya, and other countries. There would be more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the peak of President Barack Obama’s surge, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the country, yielding decades of full employment for generals and executives in the weapons industry. Miller had a front-row seat at this carnival. “We should have kept it to about 500 people, just let that be the special operations theater,” he told me. In other words, quickly arrange a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban rather than try to eliminate the Taliban and leave a small number of special operators to find and kill Osama bin Laden and the remnants of Al Qaeda.

I don’t think Miller sensed all this when he saw that tent going up; nobody knew what was going to happen that early in the game. And remember, you can’t trust Beltway memoirs; they’re a racket of myth construction. But locating the exact moment of Miller’s awareness is less important than the fact he eventually recognized, as most of us did, a historic error that he blamed on his leadership. “As soon as we went conventional, that war was lost,” Miller said. “That’s what I’ll take to my grave. As soon as we brought in the Army generals and all their big ideas — war was over at that point.”

Christopher Miller in old photos from his time in Afghanistan, left, and Iraq, right.Photos: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

The Betrayal

Like many veterans, Miller participated in not just the Afghanistan disaster, but also the one in Iraq. There he had an even stronger sense of betrayal.

As the invasion neared, Miller was responsible for operational planning for his Special Forces battalion, and he put together a blueprint for seizing an airfield southwest of Baghdad as an advance position for the capture of Iraq’s capital. He thought the buildup was a bluff to coerce Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein into giving up the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration insisted he possessed (though he did not). In Miller’s telling, it wasn’t until he was geared up in an MH-53 helicopter at night, heading deep into Iraq, that he knew it was on. The future acting defense secretary turned to a soldier next to him and said, “We’re really doing this. I can’t believe we’re fucking doing this.” According to Miller, the soldier replied, “Me neither.”

Miller and I were sitting in a café at the public library in Westport, Connecticut — he lives in northern Virginia and was visiting this wealthy suburb for a fundraiser for a play about the Special Forces. He was dressed in khaki pants and a casual shirt, and his shag of red hair from 20 years ago was gone; it had thinned out to a distinguished-looking silver. He is 57 years old now and looks no different from any other close-to-senior citizen killing time at a library (same goes for me, I should confess). He sipped his coffee and continued, “Invading a sovereign country is a big deal, you know. We typically don’t do that except in extenuating circumstances. I thought it was all coercive diplomacy. Then when it goes down, you’re like, ‘Damn.’” As he writes in his book, “I had been an active participant in an unjust war. We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a god-damned lie.”

“You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army. But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If your nation calls on you to send your comrades to their deaths in battle, you expect it will be for a good reason; soldiers have a lot more at stake than Beltway hawks for whom a bad day consists of getting bumped from their hit on CNN or Fox. That’s why Miller describes himself as “white-hot” angry toward the leaders who lied or dissembled and suffered no consequences; many have profited in retirement, thanks to amply compensated speaking gigs and board seats. “You can mess up a piece of paperwork and get run out of the Army,” Miller told me. “But you can lose a damn war and nobody is held accountable.”

If that line came from a pundit, it would be a platitude. But Miller described to me the case of a soldier he knew well who was forced out of the military for not having the paperwork for a machine gun he left in Afghanistan for troops replacing his unit. The soldier was trying to help other soldiers who didn’t have all the weapons they needed. It didn’t matter; he was gone, and Miller couldn’t stop it.

Miller trembled a bit as he narrated this story. Maybe he was on the verge of tears; I couldn’t be sure. There’s a saying in journalism that if your mother says she loves you, check it out. Never trust a source, especially one selling a book and an image of himself. As these things always are, our conversation was a bit of a performance by each of us, both trying to get out of the other as much as we could. Miller’s intentions were hard to pin down, but his anger was not. I had seen some of what he had seen.

In 2014, after three decades in the Army and more than a dozen deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Bosnia, and elsewhere, Miller retired. He had a lot of baggage to deal with. As he writes, “For years I had been cramming unpleasant memories into a box and storing them on a shelf deep in the recesses of my psyche, knowing that someday I’d have to unpack each one.”

He set a goal: Complete a marathon in less than three hours. His long practice runs of 15-25 miles were, as he put it, therapy sessions to work through the wreckage of the wars he fought and “a simmering sense of betrayal that every veteran today must feel — the recognition that so many sacrifices were ultimately made in the service of a lie, as in Iraq, or to further a delusion.” After running that marathon, he entered a 50-mile race on the Appalachian Trail and finished in less than eight hours, ranking second in his age group.

There were no epiphanies at the end. Physical exhaustion would not eliminate his bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan. “It still makes my blood boil,” he writes, “and it probably will until the day I die.”

Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, center left, walks with Lt. Gen. John Deedrick after arriving to Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 22, 2020.

Photo: Staff Sgt. Jack Sanders/DoD

More Juice

While Miller describes himself as falling “ass-backwards” into the job of acting secretary of defense, you don’t rise to the top by mistake in Washington, and people who run ultramarathons don’t tend to be lily pads just floating along. Miller has a gosh-darn way of talking, and even his detractors describe him as affable, but he’s a special operator, and you shouldn’t forget that. After retiring from the military, he made a series of canny moves to join the National Security Council, at the White House and pair up with a key figure in Trump’s orbit, Kash Patel.

Patel became Washington famous in the first years of the Trump era because, as an aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, he played a behind-the-scenes role in the GOP effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In early 2019, Patel was rewarded with a job on the NSC, reportedly on direct orders from Trump. Miller had joined the NSC the previous year as senior director for counterterrorism and transnational threats, and Patel became his deputy. Miller claims that initially, he was wary.

“I got online and Wikipedia’d him, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is the crazy guy,” he told me with a laugh.

What happened next could be a how-to guide for Beltway strivers.

“I just had convening authority,” Miller recalled of his time at the NSC. “I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit.’ So I went to the Pentagon and took a job as a political appointee because I needed to have money and people.”

It was early 2020 when he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism. This gave him greater influence over the hunt for ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, which had been his obsession at the NSC. Yet it wasn’t enough. As Miller describes it, “Now I had people, now I had money, but still not being very successful. … I still need more juice.”

Kash Patel, former chief of staff to then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, departs from a deposition meeting on Capitol Hill with the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack, on Dec. 9, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

One of his friends in the administration made a suggestion: Why don’t you shoot for a Senate-confirmed position?

“I was like, ‘That gives me more wasta, right?’” Miller said, using an Arabic word for clout. “And I’m like, ‘Shit yeah.’”

Trump nominated him to head the National Counterterrorism Center, and on August 6, the Senate confirmed him in a unanimous voice vote.

“So now I’ve got more fucking throw weight,” Miller continued. “Patel’s working in the National Security Council with the president. We’re starting to grind down the resistors.” The resistance, he said, was against a heightened effort he and Patel advocated to finish off the remaining leaders of Al Qaeda and rescue a handful of remaining American hostages.

Miller was invited for a talk with Johnny McEntee, the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. In the twilight of the Trump era, McEntee was one of the president’s most loyal confidantes; though just 29 years old at the time, he was described, in a magazine article, as the “deputy president.” Miller knew through the grapevine that he might be in line for Esper’s job because the administration had just a few Senate-confirmed officials with national security credentials. McEntee was sizing him up.

“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,’ because I didn’t want the job,” Miller told me.

This was part of Miller’s “ass-backwards” shtick. Why grind as hard as he did to stop short of the biggest prize of all? I pushed back, and he acknowledged that while the job might “suck really, really badly,” it could be worthwhile even if Trump lost the election. “I had a work list,” Miller said. “I thought, ‘I can get a lot of shit done.’” His main tasks, he told me, included stabilizing the Pentagon after Esper’s ouster; withdrawing the remaining U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia; and elevating special operations forces in the Department of Defense’s hierarchy.

Just before the election, he heard the shuffle was imminent.

“The word comes down: They’re getting rid of Esper, win or lose,” Miller said. “It’s payback time.”

On Monday morning, six days after Trump lost the election, Miller’s phone rang. Come to the White House, now.

Pictured, from left, Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, Vice Adm. Sean Buck, President Donald Trump, Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams, and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley before the start of a game at Michie Stadium on Dec. 12, 2020, in West Point, N.Y.

Photo: Dustin Satloff/Getty Images

Murderer’s Row

Miller suffered a literal misstep his first day on the job: Walking into the Pentagon, he tripped and nearly fell on the steps in front of the mammoth building. That prompted laughs online, but the bigger issue was the entourage that surrounded him as he took charge of the nearly 3 million soldiers and civilians in the Department of Defense.

He was accompanied by a murderer’s row of Trump loyalists. Patel was his chief of staff. Ezra Cohen, a controversial analyst, got a top intelligence post. Douglas Macgregor, a Fox News pundit, became a special assistant. Anthony Tata, a retired general who called Obama a “terrorist leader,” was appointed policy chief. Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was reportedly so alarmed that he told Patel and Cohen, “Life looks really shitty from behind bars. … And if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.”

Miller, when I asked about his advisers, waved off the concerns and said, “Complete misappreciation of those people.”

Cutting the U.S. footprint overseas was one of his top priorities, the residue of his long journey through the forever wars. It was a big part of his support for Trump, who was far more critical of those wars than most politicians. In the 2016 primaries, Trump distanced himself from other Republicans by accusing the George W. Bush administration of manufacturing evidence to justify the Iraq invasion. “They lied,” Trump declared at a debate in South Carolina, drawing boos from the Republican audience. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.” This was an occasion on which Trump’s political interests — trying to embarrass front-runner Jeb Bush, the brother of the former president — aligned with something that was actually true.

Once he got to the White House, though, Trump didn’t make a lot of changes. Since 9/11, the generals who oversaw America’s wars had resisted when civilian leaders said it was time to scale back. And Trump actually quickened the tempo of some military operations by offering greater support to the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and taking an especially hawkish position on Iran. But he was stymied on Iraq and Afghanistan, not just by active-duty generals at the Pentagon, but also by the retired ones he appointed to such key posts as national security adviser, chief of staff, and secretary of defense. They were all gone by the final act of his presidency.

By the time Miller left the Pentagon when President Joe Biden was sworn in, U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq had been cut to 2,500 troops in each country (from about 4,000 in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq). The approximately 700 soldiers based in Somalia were withdrawn. But that would not be Miller’s most memorable legacy.

The Phantom Meltdown

It was mid-afternoon on January 6, 2021. A pro-Trump mob had bashed its way through police barricades and invaded the Capitol. Ashli Babbitt had been shot dead. The rioters who occupied the Senate chamber included a half-naked shaman wearing a horned helmet and carrying a spear. Where was the National Guard?

Miller was the one to know, which is why he was on the phone with Nancy Pelosi at 3:44 p.m.

I’m in

“I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon holding a phone six inches away from my ear, trying my best to make sense of the incoherent shrieking blasting out of the receiver,” he writes on the first page of his book. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on the line, and she was in a state of total nuclear meltdown. To be fair, the other members of congressional leadership on the call weren’t exactly composed either. Every time Pelosi paused to catch her breath, Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator Chuck Schumer, and Congressman Steny Hoyer took turns hyperventilating into the phone.”

That passage in Miller’s five-page introduction got a bit of attention on social media when it was first excerpted in January, and not all of it was positive. Wonkette described Miller’s account as “verifiably false” and pointed its readers to a video released by the January 6 committee showing Pelosi and other congressional leaders speaking in urgent but calm voices with Miller. They asked him to send troops immediately and demanded to know why it was taking so long. Pelosi is intense but not melting down; McConnell, Schumer, and Hoyer are not hyperventilating.

When I met Miller in Westport, I asked if he was aware of this discrepancy. He became slightly agitated.

“The one they show is a different call,” he replied. “The one used [by] the January 6 committee is a later phone call where they’re much calmer. The first call was frantic. Like literally losing their shit. … So that’s bullshit, dude.”

He told me to look into it.

The January 6 committee released partial footage of two calls that show Pelosi speaking with Miller. The first call, according to the time stamp on the committee’s video, occurred at 3 p.m. The sequence begins with Pelosi sitting near Schumer, who is holding a cellphone and saying, “I’m going to call up the effing secretary of DOD.” The next shot shows Schumer, Pelosi, and Hoyer huddled around the phone talking with Miller in measured voices; McConnell is not shown in this clip. The second call for which the committee released some footage is the one Wonkette pointed to. The participants in this second call are the ones mentioned by Miller in his book: McConnell is in this footage, along with Pelosi, Schumer, and Hoyer. There are no meltdowns. The committee’s time stamp for this call is 3:46 p.m., which is a nearly exact match for the time Miller provides in his book: 3:44 p.m.

What this means is that the phone call Miller described in his book almost certainly is the one Wonkette pointed to and did not occur the way Miller describes, unless there is an incriminating portion of the video we have not seen, which is what Miller claims. Yet that seems unlikely because there is no mention, in the multitude of testimonies and articles about that day, of Pelosi melting down at any moment. And that makes another passage in Miller’s introduction problematic too.

“I had never seen anyone — not even the greenest, pimple-faced 19-year-old Army private — panic like our nation’s elder statesmen did on January 6 and in the months that followed,” Miller wrote. “For the American people, and for our enemies watching overseas, the events of that day undeniably laid bare the true character of our ruling class. Here were the most powerful men and women in the world — the leaders of the legislative branch of the mightiest nation in history — cowering like frightened children for all the world to see.”

Except they weren’t cowering. They had been evacuated by security guards to Fort McNair because a mob of thousands had broken into the Capitol screaming “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Pence!” Miller makes no mention in his book of the speech Trump delivered on January 6 that encouraged his followers to march on the Capitol. There is no mention of the fact that while Pelosi and others, including Vice President Mike Pence, urged Miller to send troops, Trump did not; the commander in chief did not speak with his defense secretary that day. Although Miller has elsewhere gently described Trump’s speech as not helping matters, his book mocks the targets of the crime rather than criticizing the person who inspired and abetted it.

“Prior to that very moment, the Speaker and her Democrat colleagues had spent months decrying the use of National Guard troops to quell left-wing riots following the death of George Floyd that caused countless deaths and billions of dollars in property damage nationwide,” he writes. “But as soon as it was her ass on the line, Pelosi had been miraculously born again as a passionate, if less than altruistic, champion of law and order.”

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

This is unbalanced because the violence in the summer of 2020 — on the margins of nationwide protests that were overwhelmingly peaceful — did not endanger the transfer of power from a defeated president to his duly elected successor. The buildings that were attacked were not the seat of national government. And there weren’t “countless deaths” — there were about 25, including two men killed by far-right vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The rhetoric in Miller’s book has the aroma of reheated spots from Fox News.

The contours of his political anger comes into clearer focus after reading a passage from his chapter on Iraq. He recalled his pride in the swift capture of Baghdad, but as he flew home in a C-17 aircraft, he couldn’t fully enjoy the triumph, couldn’t really unwind. “The further we got from the war zone, the more my stress turned into burning white-hot anger,” he wrote. He returned to an empty house in North Carolina — his family was in Massachusetts for the July 4 holiday — so he worked out, drank some beer, and read a lot. It didn’t help much. There was, as he put it, “a rage building inside me” that was directed at two groups. The first was the group he regards as the instigators, “the neoconservatives who bullied us into an unjust and unwinnable war.” The second was Congress “for abrogating its constitutional duties regarding the declaring, funding, and overseeing of our nation’s wars.”

Miller’s homecoming was reenacted by a generation of bitter soldiers, aid workers, and journalists. His list of culprits is a good one, though I would add the names of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the top, because they issued the orders that destroyed Iraq. Their omission from Miller’s list, combined with his rant against Pelosi, reveals how his outrage follows a strange path, focusing on a political party that, while energetically backing the wars, was not the one that started them. And Democrats did not foment the storming of the Capitol either.

Miller’s anger is real, but his target is poorly chosen, which is the story of America after 9/11.

A video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on a phone call with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, is played during a hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, in Washington, D.C. on October 13, 2022.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Clusterfuck

Just as the Watergate scandal had its 18-minute gap, there’s a now-infamous gap of more than four hours between the storming of the Capitol and the arrival of National Guard troops around 5:30 p.m. Miller is at the center of the controversy because the singular status of the District of Columbia means the Pentagon controls its National Guard — and Miller was the Pentagon boss on January 6.

The January 6 committee, which deposed Miller and other military and police officials, said in its 814-page final report that it “found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard.” The committee blamed the delay on “a likely miscommunication” between multiple layers of civilian and military officials. The abundant depositions reveal that the committee was being extremely kind when it chose the word “miscommunication.” Soldiers have a special word to describe what seems to have happened at the Pentagon: a clusterfuck.

At 1:49 p.m., as pro-Trump demonstrators beat their way past police lines, the head of the U.S. Capitol Police force called the commander of the D.C. National Guard, Gen. William Walker, and notified him there was a “dire emergency” and troops were needed immediately. Walker alerted the Pentagon, and a video conference convened at 2:22 p.m. among generals and civilian officials, though not Miller. Walker told the January 6 committee that generals at the Pentagon “started talking about they didn’t have the authority, wouldn’t be their best military advice or guidance to suggest to the Secretary that we have uniformed presence at the Capitol. … They were concerned about how it would look, the optics.”

The “optics” refers to the Pentagon being sharply criticized after National Guard soldiers helped suppress Black Lives Matters protests in the capital on June 1, 2020. Lafayette Square, just outside the White House, was violently cleared in a controversial operation that even involved military helicopters flying low at night to disperse protesters. At one point, Trump triumphantly emerged from the White House with a retinue that included Defense Secretary Esper and Milley; later, both men apologized for allowing themselves to be connected to the crackdown. After that debacle, the Pentagon was reluctant to involve troops in any crowd control in the capital, and local leaders made clear that they opposed it too; there was no appetite to amass troops that Trump might misuse.

Yet the storming of the Capitol, taking law enforcement by surprise, created an emergency that justified using the Guard. As Walker told the committee, “I just couldn’t believe nobody was saying, ‘Hey, go.’” Walker testified that he admonished the generals and officials on the 2:22 p.m. call: “Aren’t you watching the news? Can’t you see what’s going on? We need to get there.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy — who two months earlier had to Google Miller’s name to figure out who he was — testified that he joined the 2:22 p.m. call and then ran a quarter mile through Pentagon hallways to Miller’s office, arriving there out of breath (“I’m a middle-aged man now,” he told the committee. “I was in a suit and leather shoes.”). At 3:04 p.m., Miller gave a verbal order for the mobilization of the D.C. Guard. It was an hour-and-a-quarter since the Capitol Police’s first plea for help, but it would take more than two additional hours for the troops to get there. This is the delay Miller has been particularly blamed for, though it does not appear to have been his fault alone.

Miller regarded his 3:04 p.m. order as final; Walker and his direct civilian commander, McCarthy, now had a green light to move troops to the Capitol, Miller testified. Some troops were already prepared to go there, according to the committee report. A ground officer, Col. Craig Hunter, was ready to move with a quick reaction force of 40 soldiers and about 95 others who were mostly at traffic control points in the area. Despite Miller’s 3:04 p.m. order, it would be hours before Hunter would be told to roll.

Members of the Washington D.C. National Guard arrive to keep rioters away from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The committee’s report includes a 45-page appendix that’s a catalogue of recriminations among Walker, McCarthy, Miller, and others. Their depositions offer conflicting accounts of what was said in chaotic conversations that day, and they even disagree about whether certain conversations took place. They also express contrary views on who had the authority to issue orders, precisely what orders were needed, and what some orders even meant. The depositions were taken under oath, so despite their contradictions, they are the best record we have about what happened and far more reliable than most of the books and interviews that some of the principals have produced.

McCarthy prioritized the time-consuming task of drawing up an operational plan that doesn’t appear to have been necessary because Hunter’s troops were already equipped for riot control and knew what to do and where to go. McCarthy also spent a lot of time talking on the phone to politicians and journalists, as well as joining a press conference. As he told the committee, “So it went into the next 25 minutes of literally standing there, people handing me telephones, whether it was the media or it was Congress. And I had to explain to all of them, ‘No, we’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming.’ So that chewed up a great deal of time.”

Meanwhile, Walker said he couldn’t reach McCarthy to find out whether he had permission to send his troops to the Capitol. Testifying on April 21, 2022, Walker said he was never called by McCarthy and was unable to contact him directly because the work number he had for McCarthy didn’t function: An automated message said, “This phone is out of service.” One of his officers happened to have McCarthy’s private cellphone number, but there was no answer on it. “The story we were told is that he is running through the Pentagon looking for the secretary of defense,” Walker testified. “That’s why he wasn’t answering his phone.” (McCarthy insisted in his testimony that they had talked.)

The delay wasn’t due to faulty telecommunications alone. McCarthy told the committee that he believed he needed another order from Miller, beyond the one issued at 3:04 p.m., before he could tell Walker to move. Miller issued an additional order at 4:32 p.m., but McCarthy failed to immediately inform Walker; the order didn’t reach the National Guard commander until 5:09 p.m., when a four-star general happened to notice Walker in a conference room and said, “Hey, we have a green light, you’re approved to go.” By the time Walker’s troops arrived at the Capitol, the fighting was over, and they were asked to watch over rioters already arrested by the bloodied police.

Toward the end of his testimony to the January 6 committee, Miller was asked why Walker had not scrambled his troops sooner. “Why didn’t he launch them?” Miller replied. “I’d love to know. That’s a question I was hoping you’d find out. … Beats me.”

Christopher Miller poses for a portrait in between media interviews at his home office on Tuesday, February 7, 2023. His book “Soldier Secretary” was released that day.

Photo: Alyssa Schukar for The Intercept

“Blah Blah Bluh Blah”

One of the people I interviewed for this story was Paul Yingling, who, in 2007, became famous in military circles for writing an article titled “A Failure in Generalship.” Yingling was serving as an Army officer at the time and broke the fourth wall of martial protocol by calling out his wartime commanders. In a line that’s been quoted many times since — Miller repeated a variation of it to me — Yingling wrote, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Yingling wasn’t particularly flattered by Miller’s embrace of his idea. Miller is right about the generals, Yingling said, but “much of the criticism he’s made has been made elsewhere earlier and better. … It’s not original work.” That wasn’t Yingling’s main beef with Miller; he was incensed over what he regards as a fellow officer’s involvement in an effort to overturn a presidential election. “I don’t think he is aware of his role to this day,” Yingling said. “He has spun a narrative for himself that justifies his actions on J6. He was in over his head in a political world that to this day he doesn’t understand.”

Yingling mentioned the story of Caligula appointing his horse as a consul in ancient Rome. That myth goes to the strategy of discrediting and disempowering institutions by filling them with incompetent leaders (or beloved equines). And Yingling is certainly right that Trump appointed D-list characters to sensitive positions: the internet troll Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, for instance, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser.

It’s also true that the January 6 clusterfuck seems to have had less to do with malignant decisions by Miller than with a parade of errors by officials under his command. As acting secretary of defense, he failed to ensure that his orders at 3:04 p.m. and again at 4:32 p.m. were carried out with greater speed, though Miller says he didn’t want to micromanage his subordinates. There may have been an element of subconscious bias, too.

“I’m African American,” Walker told the committee. “Child of the ’60s. I think it would have been a vastly different response if those were African Americans trying to breach the Capitol.”

Yet I hesitate to ignite the tinder around Miller. If we drop a match at his feet and walk away with a sense of satisfaction about the justice we think we’ve delivered, we have not changed or even recognized the political culture that gave us the forever wars and everything that flowed from them, including January 6. At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

At some point in the future, we’ll just have more of what we’ve already endured, and perhaps it will be a variant of militarism and racism that’s more potent still.

Look, for instance, at who Joe Biden chose to fill the seat kept warm by Miller: Lloyd Austin, a retired general who earned millions of dollars as a board member of defense contractors Raytheon Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton. Look at Esper, who preceded Miller: He was a lobbyist for Raytheon Technologies, earning more than $1.5 million in salary and bonuses. Look at who came before Esper: Jim Mattis, who was on the board of General Dynamics (as well as Theranos, the fraudulent blood-testing firm). And take a moment to read a few pages of Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers,” which uses government documents to reveal a generation of lies from America’s top generals and officials. The professional interests of these people have been closely connected to exorbitant defense spending and “overseas contingency operations” that account for the U.S. devoting more money to its military than the next nine countries combined — all while school teachers drive Ubers at night and people in Mississippi have to drink bottled water because the municipal system has collapsed.

Where are their bonfires?

A year ago, before Biden’s State of the Union address, Miller joined a press conference outside the Capitol that was organized by the GOP’s far-right Freedom Caucus and featured speakers against mask and vaccine mandates. The last to talk, Miller riffed for seven minutes, saying nothing about Covid-19 and focusing on Afghanistan instead. As he recalled being on a mountainside where an errant American bomb killed nearly two dozen U.S. and Afghan soldiers, a woman behind him shifted with visible unease as he angrily described in graphic terms what you don’t often hear from former Cabinet members: “I stood there and it looked as if someone had taken a pail of ground meat, of hamburger meat, and thrown it onto that hill. And those were the remains of so many who gave their lives on that day.”

Let’s agree, then, that Miller is a bit askew. One of his encounters with reporters in his final days as defense secretary was described by a British correspondent as a “gobsmacking incoherent briefing” that included the phrase “blah blah bluh blah,” according to the Pentagon’s official transcript. But if you’re not askew after going through the mindfuck of the forever wars, there’s probably something wrong with you. It’s an inversion of the “Catch-22” scenario in which the novel’s protagonist, Capt. John Yossarian, tries to be declared insane so that he can get out of the bomber missions that he knows are nearly suicidal, but his desire to get out of them proves he’s sane, so he’s not excused. In an opposite way, generals and politicians who emerge from the carnage of the forever wars without coarse passions, who speak in modulated tones about staying the course and shoveling more money to the Pentagon — they are cracked ones who should not operate the machinery of war.

So here we are, just a few days away from the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion on March 19, a cataclysm that killed hundreds of thousands of people, cost trillions of dollars, and began with lies. The Pentagon just decided to name a warship the USS Fallujah, after the city that suffered more violence at the hands of American forces than any other place in Iraq. And Harvard University has just decided to give a prominent position to Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bush administration official who helped design the invasion and occupation of Iraq and since 2017 has been a board member of — you may have heard this one before — Raytheon Technologies (for which she was paid $321,387 in 2021). It’s been 20 years and thanks in part to journalists who were complicit in spreading the first lies and were rewarded professionally for doing so, there has been neither accountability nor learning.

Individual pathologies determine how we medicate ourselves after traumatic events, and I think the politics we choose are forms of medication. Miller opted for service in the Trump administration, and while it strikes me as the least-admirable segment of his life since we met in Kandahar, he’s not an outlier among veterans. For as long as our nation is subordinate to its war machine, we’ll be hearing more from them. Forever wars do not end when soldiers come home.

The Intercept · by Peter Maass · March 11, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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