Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"China is not destined to win primacy in the 21st-century, but America could certainly lose it through strategic incoherence, miscalculation, and trust-squandering gambits. To remain a great power, fit to win any superpower rivalry, American leaders would be well advised to remember that our country still needs to be seen not just as a good power, but a better power than the alternative.”

– Mike Studeman. Extract from forthcoming Tufts Fletcher School Security Review article (spring edition)

"Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."

– Ambrose Bierce

"Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others' success, and then standing back and letting them shine."

– Chris Hadfield

1. An Open Letter to His Excellency Volodymyr Zelenskyy

2. A Past U.S. Security Pact Is a Cautionary Tale for Ukraine’s Mineral Deal

3. Inside the Frantic Diplomacy to Repair U.S.-Ukraine Relations

4. Ukraine Peace Is Not at Hand

5. Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy

6. Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Continues the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy

7. Russia’s so-called “Pravda” network expands worldwide

8. Radio Free Asia set to furlough most US-based staff due to government funding freeze

9. U.S. Military Brokers Deals to Bring Syrian Factions Together

10. How Interagency Campaigns Can Counter Chinese Gray Zone Incursions in the Pacific

11. In Gaza, Trump Embraces Private Military Contractors

12. This psychological ‘booster’ could help people resist misinformation, a new study finds

13. What military members need to hear from their leaders now

14. Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research

15. For Want of a Nail, the Kingdom was Lost: The Struggle to Understand Irregular Warfare

16. History of the Nisei ‘Go For Broke’ WWII unit removed from Army website

17. Foreign State-Sponsored Disinformation in the Pacific Islands

18. Navigating the Gray Zone—Strategies to Address Hybrid Warfare (Council on Foreign Relations forum)

19. It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot.

20. The Cost of Ignoring Geopolitics

21. Death From Above: US Missile Strike Wipes Out ISIS Chief Of Global Ops

22. Inside the US War Plans to Invade Canada

23 Flynn: Kennedy brought clarity, integrity to foreign policy

24. OUR WWII STORY: Legion founder helped lead the OSS

1. An Open Letter to His Excellency Volodymyr Zelenskyy

An Open Letter to His Excellency Volodymyr Zelenskyy

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/15/an-open-letter-to-his-excellency-volodymyr-zelenskyy/

by Yurij Holowinsky, by Keith D. Dickson

03.15.2025 at 11:54am

At this crucial time in Ukraine’s history, it is useful to draw upon an historical example to help inform your next very important strategic decisions. We ask you to consider the example of another Commander-in-Chief, Gustav Mannerheim of Finland, who led that nation’s defense against a Soviet attack. The parallels between Ukraine’s war against Russia and the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-1940 are instructive:

The aggressor heavily outnumbered the defenders and on paper it appeared that the war would be quickly won.
The aggressor relied on operational level combined arms maneuver warfare to win quickly, but inept leaders and poor quality troops led to failure, forcing the aggressor to rely on simplistic, but effective, mass assaults that resulted in over 208,000 casualties in one year.
Western forces were never sent.
England, France, the United States, Italy, and Sweden provided material assistance.
Facing culmination and defeat, the aggressor reorganized and renewed its assault by relying on firepower to overwhelm the defender’s positions.

By early 1940, it was clear that the aggressor forces would keep what they currently held and continue a relentless war of attrition, whatever the cost. The defense of the Finns was epic, and still remembered to this day with awe and great respect. The Finns had done the impossible and were in a position militarily and strategically to save Finland from destruction.

It was a bitter and temporary peace. The Russians gained all of their original demands plus some additional concessions. The losses of population, economic resources, and defensible terrain in the Karelian Isthmus-Viipuri area were especially serious. Yet, it gave the Finns the means to survive, and in another year, conduct offensive operations against the enemy. Mannerheim had saved his country, built alliances and set the stage for a long-term peace treaty in 1948, allowing Finland incrementally to move closer to the West, and by 2023, become a member of NATO.

As Commander-in-Chief, you have the same military-strategic opportunity as Mannerheim did in 1940. You, like Mannerheim, have demonstrated inspiring leadership, the courage and skill of your soldiers and the resolute response of your citizens has won the world’s admiration and respect. Mannerheim chose to preserve his country’s long-term survival in the face of unrelenting attacks. Finland had to fight again and had to accommodate its aggressor neighbor, but that opened the path to eventual integration with Europe and peace along a shared border with a former aggressor. After 1948, it took 45 years for Finland to join the European Union and 75 years for Finland to realize its strategic position as a member of NATO. Without that initial peace of 1940, none of these outcomes could have been possible.

The lesson is clear: strategic decisions made in the present have consequences that guide policy, strategy, and military defense to the ultimate benefit of future generations. The history of your own family, as well the history of tens of thousands of Ukrainians who lived through the terrible years of Bolshevik and Nazi terror, know that what is ultimately important is to survive to fight another day. Ukraine, like Finland, may not achieve its desired strategic objectives in the near term, but future leaders, guided by your example, may achieve those goals in the future.

With Mannerheim as your inspiration and Finland’s success as your objective, seek your best position to gain a respite, build capabilities and allies, and stand ready to repel any future threat to the homeland. In doing so, you will pass on your strategic vision to future presidents to the ultimate benefit of your nation.

With deepest respect,

Keith D. Dickson & Yurij Holowinsky

Tags: Finland War, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine

About The Authors

Yurij Holowinsky
Yurij Holowinsky is a retired national intelligence officer and holds a Ph.D. in Russian history.
View all posts
Keith D. Dickson
Keith D. Dickson is Professor Emeritus, National Defense University and a retired Army officer.

2. A Past U.S. Security Pact Is a Cautionary Tale for Ukraine’s Mineral Deal

A Past U.S. Security Pact Is a Cautionary Tale for Ukraine’s Mineral Deal

Decades-old U.S. commitment to protect Persian Gulf oil is breaking down, with the Saudis and Emiratis seeking more concrete term

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/a-past-u-s-security-pact-is-a-cautionary-tale-for-ukraines-mineral-deal-1cc8933f?mod=hp_lead_pos5

An open-pit titanium mine in Ukraine last month. Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephen Kalin

Updated March 15, 2025 12:01 am ET

A mineral-rights deal that the Trump administration says will make the U.S. vested in Ukraine’s defense has an instructive historical precedent in Washington’s unofficial oil-for-security pact with Saudi Arabia.

For decades after World War II, Saudi security was bolstered by the presence in the kingdom of U.S. oil companies pumping crude that fueled America’s expansion, backed by an American air base. President Jimmy Carter kept the oil-for-security arrangement alive even after the Saudis nationalized their energy industry in 1980, with a new foreign-policy doctrine that guarded Persian Gulf oil-supply lines with U.S. military might.

Now the Saudis are finding economics don’t always drive Washington’s calculus about when to deploy military force, and are seeking codified defense guarantees. That is because U.S. economic interests can shift dramatically, geopolitical analysts said.

“The argument that the Ukrainians can rely on American implicit security guarantees because of American economic interest in their rare earths is a thin reed for their security,” said Greg Gause, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington.

In 2019, during President Trump’s first term, a suspected Iranian drone and missile attack that disrupted Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation passed without a direct response. That deepened growing uncertainty about whether Riyadh and other Gulf capitals could still count on the U.S. to come to their aid. They have since felt out Russia and China as additional security partners.

The U.S. did protect the Saudis in 1990, sending half a million troops to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which threatened Saudi oil fields, the stability of global energy markets and America’s ally, Israel.

President Jimmy Carter, giving the State of the Union address in 1980, made it U.S. policy to commit military power to guarding Persian Gulf oil-supply lines. Photo: Jim Moore/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

Iraqi soldiers and military vehicles in Kuwait City in August 1990, two days after Saddam Hussein invaded. Photo: Stephanie McGehee/Associated Press

In the lead-up to Saddam’s invasion, the U.S. still saw the Persian Gulf through a Cold War prism as a strategic asset that needed to be protected, Gause said. Three decades later when the Saudi facilities were hit, the U.S. had shed that perspective and largely weaned itself off oil coming from the Middle East, while tiring of seemingly endless conflicts in the region.

Washington and Kyiv are now close to completing a minerals deal ahead of separate U.S.-mediated talks with Moscow on ending the war. A signing ceremony was pushed back after last month’s Oval Office blowup between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vice President JD Vance. Zelensky initially said any mineral-rights deal would need security guarantees for Ukraine, but he later seemed to soften that stance and become amenable to signing it without such explicit assurances, saying they would come later.

“If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine,” Vance told Fox News a few days after the acrimonious meeting.

Even if a cease-fire is secured, Ukraine will likely continue to face an existential threat from Russia, which has stated its intention to end Ukrainian sovereignty. But when even America’s formal commitments—such as those enshrined in the NATO alliance—are being called into question, there may be no alternative.

Under the terms of the proposed U.S.-Ukraine agreement, Ukraine would pay some proceeds from future mineral-resource development into a fund that would invest in projects in Ukraine. The size of the U.S.’s stake in the fund and joint ownership deals would be hashed out in future agreements.

The deal doesn’t include explicit security guarantees, though Trump has said that there would be international peacekeepers in Ukraine. Getting American companies to invest in Ukraine’s mining sector, he argues, is the best possible guarantee of the country’s security.

Environmental scientists at the site of an undeveloped lithium deposit in central Ukraine last month. Photo: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Workers operating machinery at an open-pit titanium mine in Ukraine. A U.S.-Ukraine mineral-development agreement could bring investment. Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images

“I wouldn’t couch it as a security guarantee,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 12 after meeting with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia. “But certainly if the United States has a vested economic interest that’s generating revenue for our people as well as for the people of Ukraine, we’d have a vested interest in protecting it if it were to be challenged or threatened.”

Ukraine is already predisposed to be wary of international promises. The country gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union after the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which the U.S., the U.K. and Russia provided security assurances that force wouldn’t be used against Ukraine’s territorial integrity or independence. Twenty years later, Russia illegally annexed Crimea and faced little international resistance.

In comparison with Saudi Arabia’s security pact with the U.S., Ukraine would be starting off behind. The American and Saudi oil sectors and militaries were closely intertwined for decades before the Carter Doctrine was established.

By contrast, Ukraine’s commodities industry faced major obstacles to foreign investment, even before the war left 40% of its critical mineral deposits under Russian control. If U.S. companies do eventually go into Ukraine, it would take years for them to start operating. And even then, there is no guarantee they would be profitable, which could jeopardize any U.S. security commitments.

Extractive industries in foreign countries have historically produced U.S. security relationships, including in parts of Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia. But that usually happens organically over the span of decades, said Michael Wahid Hanna, U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group. Ukraine probably doesn’t have that much time, and the mechanics of a minerals-for-security pact are still hazy and hard to map out.

“They want security guarantees and this isn’t it. This is an idea of perhaps if things develop in a certain way the U.S. will be invested in Ukrainian security and stability,” he said. “That might be as much as they can get, but it’s not a security guarantee and it’s pretty speculative all the way around.”

“It’s hard to imagine it all coming together in such a way that produces that investment, security and stability,” Hanna said.

Even if the stars were to align for American mining companies in Ukraine, changes in the global economy could shift the emphasis away from the commodities there or make another location more attractive to investors, upending the accompanying U.S. security commitments.

Workers repaired damage at a state-owned oil-processing facility in Saudi Arabia in 2019 after a suspected Iranian attack. Photo: Amr Nabil/Associated Press

President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in 1994, after signing a trilateral pact that provided security assurances to Ukraine. Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Trump has also said he wants the U.S. to be independent of foreign sources of energy, which could reasonably be extended to include critical minerals amid a global scramble against China, the main rival for scarce resources.

And skeptics say that Trump, who has already spoken publicly about doing deals in Russia, could easily strike a counterdeal with Putin that would undermine any security commitments to Ukraine coming from a minerals agreement.

H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow in geopolitics and security at the Center for American Progress think tank in Washington, said it seemed unlikely that the mineral deal would shore up security across all of Ukraine.

“It wouldn’t be the source of a security backstop as much as it would be a way to tell the Russians, ‘Can you avoid doing stuff around these areas or avoid attacking the lines that would connect American business to those particular points?’ ” he said.

Some argue that Trump’s realpolitik approach is more effective than one based on preserving the U.S.-led rules-based order set up after World War II. But historian Daniel Immerwahr points out that the U.S. has often expended tremendous amounts of blood and treasure, including in its longest wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, to preserve a particular global system without an immediate transactional economic benefit on offer.

“If you could get on the right side of that,” he said, “you could be sure the U.S. would fight for 20 years rather than lose face and prestige.”

Write to Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com

3. Inside the Frantic Diplomacy to Repair U.S.-Ukraine Relations

Excerpts:

On the advice of senior British and French diplomats, Zelensky sent a public apology message ahead of Trump’s Congressional address, saying Ukraine was ready to sign the minerals deal and acknowledging that the Oval Office meeting didn’t go as planned.

“It is regrettable that it happened this way,” he wrote on X, in a style that sounded akin to British diplomatic démarche.

The Ukrainian leader separately sent a letter to Trump, which American officials later said included an apology for the White House bust-up that Zelensky hadn’t included in his public remarks. Trump read aloud part of the text in his congressional address.

“I think that it was an important step and there’s been a lot of discussion between our teams and the Ukrainians and the Europeans who are relevant to this discussion as well,” President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News this week.

Inside the Frantic Diplomacy to Repair U.S.-Ukraine Relations

Britain and France encouraged Zelensky to apologize for White House blowup that threatened American aid

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/inside-the-frantic-european-negotiations-behind-ukraines-cease-fire-deal-f4ad538c?mod=hp_listb_pos3

By Max Colchester

and Laurence Norman

March 14, 2025 2:13 pm ET

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron in London on March 2. Photo: Justin Tallis/Zuma Press

LONDON—Hours after his Oval Office fallout with President Trump last month, Volodymyr Zelensky flew to London to be greeted by cheering crowds and an embrace from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Once the pair were inside 10 Downing Street, however, Starmer delivered a more sober message to the Ukrainian leader during a private meeting: It was time to make amends with Trump.

Starmer urged an emotionally raw Zelensky to focus on getting Trump to face off with the Kremlin, not Kyiv, according to officials familiar with the matter.

“We told him to keep his eye on the prize,” said one official. British and French officials encouraged Zelensky to apologize to the U.S. president and advised Ukrainian officials on how best to pen a public mea culpa.

For Ukraine’s European allies, the stakes were high. Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron had spent weeks meeting and calling Trump in a carefully choreographed diplomatic dance aimed at ensuring the White House understood it couldn’t let Russia steamroll Ukraine during peace talks. But after Zelensky’s White House meeting, that plan seemed to lay in ruins.

Ukraine Peace Is Not at Hand

In future dealings with Putin, Trump might seek help from America’s intelligence professionals.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ukraine-peace-is-not-at-hand-putin-trump-intelligence-agencies-cf3cce70?mod=latest_headlines

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

March 14, 2025 5:18 pm ET

Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting at a Russian presidential estate outside Moscow, March 14. Photo: Mikhail Metzel/Associated Press

A faint air of the circus act begins to exude from the Trump administration’s Russia negotiations, though a close reading of “The Art of the Deal” suggests the underlying logic of the situation will dictate the outcome.

Namely, there won’t be a deal anytime soon. Vladimir Putin has received no reason to stop pushing for more concessions to see where the limit, if any, exists. Neither has he received any message from the administration that now is the time to cut a deal because Donald Trump will open the floodgates and make the war more painful and costly than Mr. Putin would find it useful to bear.

So there’s hope yet for a suggestion I made here shortly after the election: Strike a “deep state peace deal” between the incoming Trump administration and the U.S. intelligence agencies. Bring the best of the U.S. to bear on the problem of managing our Ukraine involvement to an acceptable outcome, if not in 24 hours then when Round Two begins six months or a year from now.

Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer and New York crony of Mr. Trump’s, is flying around on his personal plane, perhaps using his personal phone, while shuttling to Moscow to sample the latest peace musings of Mr. Putin. How many intelligence agencies are listening in, including those who usually agree not to spy on us when we agree not spy on them? Four of the Five Eyes—U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand—might understandably make an exception for a U.S. administration that itself so gleefully upsets all the time-honored expectations of how a U.S. administration should behave.

Mr. Trump wouldn’t be the first to outsource a job to a loyalist. But his doing so in the case of his Putin dealings suggests he and our official intelligence agencies still need some reconciling after the latter’s undeclared war against him in his first term.

Had I thought of it in November, I would have suggested keeping around former U.S. ambassador to Moscow William Burns, then serving as Joe Biden’s head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Burns’s most famous utterance was one we weren’t meant to hear, warning State Department colleagues in 2008 that NATO membership for Ukraine was the “brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite,” a sensitivity that seems to coincide with Mr. Trump’s instincts on Russia.

Mr. Burns’s expertise and capabilities, and those of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, would be handy now for the biggest, riskiest, high-flyingest of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises, his commitment to use his deal-making prowess to end the Ukraine war.

At a Thursday night meeting in Moscow, Mr. Witkoff, a veteran of many property financings, was kept waiting hours, a typical Putin stratagem. Explained Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov: “Additional information was provided to the Russian side. Putin asked Witkoff to convey information and additional messages to President Trump.”

Hoo boy. Even the Trumpiest must know that Mr. Putin prevaricates, conceals and manipulates. It’s hard to believe Mr. Witkoff would be blessed with any special insight about what’s going on behind Mr. Putin’s botoxed visage. If Mr. Witkoff speaks Russian, it hasn’t been reported. After the White House explosion involving Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, I mentioned the difference between a political realist and a business rationalist—the latter being the natural category in which you expect to find top-tier real-estate entrepreneurs like Messrs. Trump and Witkoff.

Business rationalists are about minimizing costs and risks, about the time value of money, about reaching an agreement and moving on to the next thing. If this described Mr. Putin, he would have cut his Ukraine losses on day three.

For a political realist, the incentives compute differently. Failure must be hugged and doubled down on. Admitting error invites a knife in the back from one’s nearest and dearest. If the public is allowed to sniff weakness, they might soon be in the streets in numbers greater than the security forces would be able or willing to put down.

A possibility might have existed of cheaply coaxing Mr. Putin into a settlement in the first days of his failed war, before sunk costs. Even then, the Biden administration could hardly be gainsaid if it judged Mr. Putin already in so deep that he would have been willing to risk direct conflict with NATO.

My guess now is that no deal can satisfy both the Moscow and Kyiv governments even if both capitals could benefit from a formal stop to the fighting. The next wrangle for Mr. Trump, then, will be over a division of labor with Europe to keep Ukraine afloat and maintain military pressure on Moscow.

The simple solution: The U.S. will continue to supply weapons and intelligence but European taxpayers and Ukrainian minerals will be mobilized so Mr. Trump can say the U.S. is getting paid just the way Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall.

Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · March 15, 2025

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/continuing-the-reduction-of-the-federal-bureaucracy/

Presidential Actions

CONTINUING THE REDUCTION OF THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY

March 14, 2025

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. This order continues the reduction in the elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.

Sec. 2. Reducing the Scope of the Federal Bureaucracy.

(a) Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, the non-statutory components and functions of the following governmental entities shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law:

(i) the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service;

(ii) the United States Agency for Global Media;

(iii) the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution;

(iv) the Institute of Museum and Library Services;

(v) the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness;

(vi) the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund; and

(vii) the Minority Business Development Agency.

(b) Within 7 days of the date of this order, the head of each governmental entity listed in subsection (a) of this section shall submit a report to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget confirming full compliance with this order and explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.

(c) In reviewing budget requests submitted by the governmental entities listed in subsection (a) of this section, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget or the head of any executive department or agency charged with reviewing grant requests by such entities shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law and except insofar as necessary to effectuate an expected termination, reject funding requests for such governmental entities to the extent they are inconsistent with this order.

Sec. 3. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department, agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

THE WHITE HOUSE,

March 14, 2025.

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · March 15, 2025

6. Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Continues the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy

Again, if this is done on good faith it could be a good thing. I am skeptical that either the "cutters" or the "protectors" will be acting on good faith but rather on emotion and political agendas.

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Continues the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · March 15, 2025

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-continues-the-reduction-of-the-federal-bureaucracy/

Fact Sheets

March 14, 2025

ELIMINATING WASTE AND REDUCING GOVERNMENT OVERREACH: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order continuing the reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.

This Executive Order eliminates non-statutory functions and reduces statutory functions of unnecessary governmental entities to what is required by law.
Affected entities include the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, United States Agency for Global Media, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Institute of Museum and Library Services, United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, Minority Business Development Agency, and Arctic Research Commission.
This action builds on an Executive Order President Trump previously signed to reduce unnecessary governmental entities and Federal advisory committees.

REDUCING GOVERNMENT OVERREACH: With this Executive Order, President Trump is further decreasing the size of the Federal Government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and promote innovation.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already identified billions in waste, fraud, and abuse.
Cutting these governmental entities will save taxpayer dollars, reduce unnecessary government spending, and streamline government priorities.
By reducing the Federal footprint, President Trump is returning power to local communities and state governments.

REFORMING THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY: The American people elected President Trump to drain the swamp and end ineffective government programs that empower government without achieving measurable results.

The government wastes billions of dollars each year on duplicative programs and frivolous expenditures that fail to align with American values or address the needs of the American people.
President Trump eliminated the Federal Executive Institute, a government program purportedly designed to provide bureaucratic leadership training.
President Trump established the “Department of Government Efficiency” to examine how to streamline the Federal Government, eliminate unnecessary programs, and reduce bureaucratic inefficiency.
President Trump launched a 10-to-1 deregulation initiative, ensuring every new rule is justified by clear benefits.

Through these actions, President Trump is keeping his promise to restore

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · March 15, 2025

7. Russia’s so-called “Pravda” network expands worldwide

We are going to minimize or perhaps eliminate the US Agency for Global media (the parent organization of Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Eurpe/Radio Liberty) while Russia expands Pravda. Go figure.

Russia’s so-called “Pravda” network expands worldwide

dfrlab.org · by acarvin · February 24, 2025

Banner: VK videos distributed by the Pravda network focusing on Ukraine, the US and the UK. (Source: news-pravda.com)

An investigation by the DFRLab and Finland-based company CheckFirst has found that the Russian website ecosystem known as “Pravda” expanded its infrastructure over the course of 2024. The operation, previously dubbed “Portal Kombat,” has evolved to encompass more countries and launder content in more languages across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Website forensic analysis linked the operation to the Crimea-based IT company TigerWeb, as well as its owner, who shares dubious links with the Russian-backed government of occupied Crimea.

The Pravda ecosystem encompasses several hundred news aggregators, or portals, that repost content from Russian news sources, social media and Telegram channels. Since 2022, a new iteration of websites featuring the word “Pravda” – Russian for “the truth” – emerged primarily targeting Ukrainian and Western audiences. The portals appear to be fully automated and do not feature original content, but repost videos and translate publications in an effort to reach a wider audience and circumvent sanctions.

Despite its name, the Pravda ecosystem does not share links with the Russian media outlets with the same name.

New domains, wider target

A February 2024 report by the French disinformation watchdog Viginum exposed an inauthentic set of news portals laundering pro-Kremlin narratives across multiple cities in Ukraine and translated into multiple European languages, including English, German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. At the time, the operators of the fraudulent new portals used domains that included “pravda-” with specific hyphenated country codes.

In the leadup to the 2024 European parliamentary elections, the Pravda ecosystem evolved and launched new domains targeting almost every member country of the European Union, as well as countries of the European Eastern Partnership. In addition, a series of multiple websites emerged targeting French-speaking countries in Africa’s Sahel region, which has recently experienced a series of coups d’état. Similar websites were registered in the leadup to the Georgian parliament election of October 2024. Amidst efforts to regroup all domains under one domain (news-pravda[.]com), in the fall of 2024 and in early 2025, the network utilized 140 subdomains targeting more than eighty-three countries and regions across the globe.

Following Viginum’s February 2024 report, and two months before the European parliament elections of 2024, we observed that the ecosystem attempted multiple times to create country-specific domains. In April 2024, a first series of four domains registered on April 26, 2024, targeted the Baltic states and the Republic of Moldova. Contrary to the first installments of the campaign, where the websites operated in domestic and official national languages, this subset of four websites operates in Russian, in a likely attempt to appeal to the Russian-speaking minorities in these countries. The websites were also spread across two IP addresses.

DomainRegistration dateIPmoldova-news.com 4/26/2024 108.162.192.67latvia-news.com 4/26/2024104.21.82.102lithuania-news.com4/26/2024104.21.30.198news-estonia.com4/26/2024108.162.192.67

Source: DNSLytics

On August 3, 2024, twenty-one new domains appeared, targeting cities throughout Ukraine. The domains operate in Russian and appear on the IP address 178.21.15.41, which is hosted by the Russian registrar reg.ru and located in the Moscow region.

A screen capture showing the registrar, domains hosted and location of the IP address 178.21.15.41. (Source: @DFRLab via DNSLytics)

A screen capture showing the twenty-one domains of Pravda ecosystem targeting cities throughout Ukraine. (Source: @DFRLab via host.io/archive)

Similarly, two months before the Georgian parliament elections of October 2024, we observed that two new websites appeared targeting Georgia and Armenia within a two-day window. Similarly to the above websites, this subset exclusively operates in Russian and uses the same IP address as the news-estonia[.]com and moldova-news[.]com websites.

DomainRegistration dateIP addressgeorgia-news.com7/30/2024108.162.192.67news-armenia.com7/28/2024108.162.192.67

Source: DNSLytics

In the fall of 2024, the Pravda ecosystem reverted to one top-level domain portal, news-pravda[.]com, which redirects traffic to a series of sixty-three subdomains focusing on a staggering forty-nine countries around the world.

Screen captures of URLScan.io scans showing the resolved domain of former Pravda websites, squared out in red, redirect to the top-level domain news-pravda[.]com, squared out in blue, with new language and country-specific subdomain, squared out in green. (Sources: @DFRLab via URLScan.io)

A US-specific domain, us.news-pravda[.]com, appeared on November 4, 2024, one day before the 2024 US presidential election. On November 8, three additional domains appeared. These domains began targeting the US, EU, NATO, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and President-Elect Donald Trump.

DomainIPFirst seenusa.news-pravda.com172.67.137.1442024-11-04, 16:26trump.news-pravda.com104.21.62.1722024-11-08, 20:32macron.news-pravda.com104.21.62.1722024-11-08, 19:54eu.news-pravda.com104.21.62.1722024-11-08, 22:26nato.news-pravda.com104.21.62.1722024-11-08, 21:32

Source: DomainTools

Between December 3, 2024 and January 8, 2025, twenty-eight new subdomains appeared, targeting a wide array of countries in Europe, including Malta, Iceland, Ireland, the Balkans, Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, and Montenegro. They produced content in minority languages such as Catalan, Galician, Basque, Welsh, and Scottish). Additional subdomains targeted Africa (Algeria, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Guinea, Gambia, Eritrea, Egypt, Mauritania, Nigeria, Chad, South-Sudan and Sudan), the Caucasus (Ossetia, Abkhazia) and Maori-speaking New Zealand audiences. More recently, the network expanded its reach to focus on countries across Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore.

Earliest occurrences of the Pravda ecosystem point at Crimea-based Russian IT company

Our investigation also confirmed the 2024 findings of Viginum, connecting the operation to a digital agency based in Russian-occupied Crimea. Records of the first websites linked to Portal Kombat found on the Internet Archive show that they displayed the logo of an agency called Tiger Web. The logo was found in two instances on archived pages of crimea-news[.]com and sochi-news[.]com.

Additionally, we identified one instance of a review left by news portal crimea-news[.]com on the website Rating of Runet. The review, titled Лента новостей Крыма (“Crimea News Feed”), connects TigerWeb to a Russian client. The review states, “I ordered the creation of a news aggregator of Crimea. The guys are pleasant to talk to and all the comments I made were taken into account.[…]”

A screen capture of the reviews left on Рейтинг рунета (Rating of Runet) about Tigerweb. Squared out in green is the review linked to crimea-news[.]com (Source: ratingruneta.ru/archive)

Web forensics also confirmed the above findings. We identified that the website tigerweb[.]ru, which belongs to the agency, shared a Google AdSense code with multiple websites that spread news in Russian between 2016 and 2024 targeting cities across Russia and Ukraine. The websites identified in this subset targeted the Ukrainian cities of Volyn and Kharkiv in Ukrainian. These are suspected to be the first iterations of the Portal Kombat operation.

A screen capture showing an identical Google AdSense code operating on fourteen news sites, four of which posted content in Ukrainian (in blue), linking to tigerweb[.]ru (in red). (Source: @DFRLab via DNSLytics)

DNS records from 2015 also show that Tigerweb shared an IP address with the website uanews.crimea[.]ua, another fraudulent news portal that shared the same website schemes and news content as those flagged throughout 2016 until 2024. Other websites found during that period also include news portals targeting the Russian cities of Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Sochi, and Ufa.

A screen capture of domains hosted on the IP address 77.120.105.80 in 2015 showing both Tigerweb’s domain (in red) and the domain of a fraudulent news portal operating in language (in blue). (Source: @DFRLab via DNSLytics)

News aggregators turned into an influence operation

The origins of this operation can be traced back to the activities of the founder, Yevgeny Shevchenko. As early as 2011, Shevchenko was involved in the creation of Crimea News– an endeavor documented on his personal blog – which we consider as the precursor or Pravda v0 of the network. The website is a news aggregator referencing multiple sources of content into a single website; lenta[.]crimea[.]ua. The first establishment of TigerWeb as an “agency” occurred in 2013, despite the organization only formally registering in Russia in 2019. By 2014, the first versions of the Pravda network began to emerge, hosted on the same IP as tigerweb[.]ru. For instance, websites such as vladivostok-news[.]net and yaroslavl-news[.]net exhibit significant overlaps, not least in the use of a shared Google Analytics account (UA-47448818-*) as evidenced in archived source code.

The earliest articles in the network are dated from March 2014 on crimea-news[.]com. We were able to trace activities on yaroslavl-news[.]net back to July 2014, further demonstrating that these websites were operational well before later iterations of the network were established.

Analysis of Shevchenko’s website provides additional evidence of the usage of the domain “crimea[.]ua” to host his projects, on the same IP address as other elements of the network. In 2018, the agency name TigerWeb reappeared in the footers of some websites, such as vladimir-news[.]net , thereby reinforcing the agency’s persistent involvement across multiple platforms.

Over the years, the Pravda ecosystem has continued to evolve. Official corporate registration of TigerWeb in Russia was completed in 2019 and its trademark was registered in 2020. New websites adopting the Pravda look and feel have been registered, such as alchevsk-news[.]ru and dnr-news[.]ru, focusing on Ukraine and the Donbas. Evidence from the Internet Archive demonstrates that these sites follow the domain naming conventions of the previous Russian network. The domain dnr-news[.]ru, first observed in 2015, targeting the self-proclaimed Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, experienced technical issues in 2019.

In 2022, dnr-news[.]ru reappeared with a distinctly updated Pravda aesthetic, signaling a significant shift in both design and operational strategy. The website now utilizes the ColorMag theme—a modern, responsive design developed by ThemeGrill—which is recognized for its sleek appearance and user-friendly functionality. This theme not only enhances the visual appeal of the site but also aligns it with contemporary European digital media standards, ensuring that the platform remains competitive and accessible.

Alongside the technical overhaul, the website introduced in 2024 a new editorial team to reinforce its apparent commitment to quality content, appointing editors Viktor Artemyev and Yuri Vlasenko, with their names prominently featured on the site’s “About Us” page alongside contact information. The presence of these new editors suggests that the operation is trying to look more professional and transparent.

It is important to note that a technical link connects the ‘-news’ network, developed primarily for Russian and Ukrainian audiences, with the Pravda network. Both networks utilize a Content Management System (CMS) to manage the content of their respective websites. Importantly, to display content on the client side, both types of websites use an internal API that is identical across both the old and new versions of the platforms, employing the same endpoint and parameters. This uniformity in API usage suggests that the development team behind these operations has employed a standardized framework, effectively unifying the disparate networks under a single technical architecture.

In order to try to determine the different servers used by Tigerweb we ran a script across all known REG.ru IP ranges, including 176.99.*.*, 178.21.9.*, 185.38.18.*, 188.93.208.1.*, 188.93.213.*, 193.227.134.*, 194.67.64.*, 194.67.76.*, 194.67.77.*, 194.67.106.*, 213.189.199.*, 62.113.93.*, 176.99.4.*, 178.21.12.*, 185.38.18.*, 193.227.134.*, 194.67.106.*, and 213.189.199.*. The script processed each IP address with a valid HTTP response to retrieve their attached SSL certificate details.

Four certificates associated to Tigerweb were discovered:

IPSSL certificate domain value176.99.4.13“176-99-4-13.tigerweb.ru;www.176-99-4-13.tigerweb.ru”176.99.4.42“176-99-4-42.tigerweb.ru;www.176-99-4-42.tigerweb.ru”176.99.6.16“176-99-6-16.tigerweb.ru;www.176-99-6-16.tigerweb.ru”176.99.6.116“176-99-6-116.tigerweb.ru;www.176-99-6-116.tigerweb.ru”

Tigerweb, Shevchenko, and the Russian-backed Crimean power

On multiple occasions, Shevchenko seems to have worked with the Russian-backed government of the Republic of Crimea, since the takeover of the peninsula in March 2014. In 2013 TigerWeb launched the website crimea-news.com, which was part of the “topnews” network, a prior iteration of news aggregators that focused originally on Ukrainian towns. According to information retrieved on DomainTools, crimea-news.com and topnews.volyn.ua existed on the same IP address between 2013 and 2016. In its report, Viginum also points out that the email address topnewsua7@gmail[.]com appears on archived records of multiple websites of the network.

A screen capture showing topnews.volyn.ua and crimea-news.com hosted on the IP address 77.120.105.277 since 2013. (Source @DFRLab via DomainTools)

On the Russia social media VK, the page associated with crimea-news.com has been active since November 2013 and also features an “A+” rank, meaning it is approved by Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor. According to Roskomnadzor’s online registry of approved pages and channels, the website’s affiliated page on Odnoklassniki (OK) and Telegram are also approved.

A screen capture of the VK page associated with crimea-news.com. (Source: @DFRLab via VK)

Screen captures showing registration of the social media pages and the Telegram channel affiliated with crimea-news.com. (Source: @DFRLab via Gosuslugi)

According to an online resume published on namebook.club, Shevchenko worked as a project manager between 2015 and 2016 for the state-owned company Krymtekhnologii (“Crimea Technology”). The now-privatized state company has notably created the portal of the Russian-backed government of Crimea, as well as Russian Spring, which spreads pro-Kremlin narratives justifying the 2014 annexation. Krymtekhnologii is also responsible for public tenders of IT services.

In 2014, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council issued a ban against the company’s website, rtech.ru, and two other websites affiliated with promoting Russia’s unlawful annexation of the peninsula. Ukraine introduced new sanctions in 2018 against the company and its director, Aleskandr Ilich Uzbek. The company’s leadership is also suspected of corruption, and owns real-estate businesses throughout Crimea. One of Krymtekhnologii’s co-founders, Arsen Sidakov, is also part of a Saint Petersburg based business with links to Russian oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, a longtime supporter and financier of Putin.

TigerWeb currently still works for clients affiliated with the Russian-backed government of Crimea. In 2021, TigerWeb created an online portal dedicated to the Republican Center of Estimation (RCO in Russian for Республиканский Центр Оценки), a private business that estimates the prices of land and real estate in the region of Crimea. A December 2022 document published on the website of the Russian occupation government of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region appointed the RCO for “Valuation services: A. Determining the market value of the valuation object; determining the market value of the right of temporary use and ownership of the leased object (market annual rent); B. Drawing up floor plans of buildings, structures, premises.” The RCO proposal was allegedly funded at a cost of 1,350 million rubles, or approximately USD $15.2 million. RCO also indicates on its website that it allegedly provides similar services for the Kherson region under Russian occupation, although the DFRLab did not find documents corroborating this.

Amaury Lesplingart is co-founder and CTO of CheckFirst.

Cite this case study:

Amaury Lesplingart and Valentin Châtelet, “Russia’s so-called “Pravda” network expands worldwide,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), February 24, 2025, https://dfrlab.org/2025/02/24/russia-pravda-network-expands-worldwide/.

dfrlab.org · by acarvin · February 24, 2025

8. Radio Free Asia set to furlough most US-based staff due to government funding freeze

This is so sad and so effing frustrating to see this take place.

This is one of our most important tools in strategic competition with China and the other authoritarian nations.

Excerpts:

If RFA ends up shuttering, it would also eliminate a valuable source of analysis of political and military developments in authoritarian countries in Asia including China and North Korea, said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an expert on Beijing’s foreign influence operations.

“RFA reporting from countries like China has been great for our foreign policy leaders and our elected officials, because we get better insight into what’s happening there, which serves the American interest. We don’t do this just out of the goodness of our hearts,” Sobolik said.

Radio Free Asia set to furlough most US-based staff due to government funding freeze

Politico

Financial support suspension pushes government-funded broadcaster toward “skeleton staff” operations.

Kari Lake is the new special adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which supervises Radio Free Asia, and who cut the media platform's access to content from Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France Press on Thursday. | Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

03/14/2025 06:44 PM EDT

The U.S. government-backed broadcaster Radio Free Asia expects to start furloughing most of its 300-odd U.S.-based staff next week due to a suspension in funding by its parent agency, according to the outlet.

“If this situation continues into next week, we have little choice but to begin furloughing the majority of our staff starting Friday,” said an RFA spokesperson granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the organization’s budget crisis. The media platform’s overseas operations won’t be affected, he added.

While the furloughs are in keeping with ongoing mass staff reductions across the federal bureaucracy under the Trump administration, the cuts at Radio Free Asia are notable because they will effectively shut down one of the few tools the U.S. government has to combat Chinese propaganda and reach people living under authoritarian regimes across Asia.

“Staff were told on Thursday that furloughs will begin as early as next Friday because of the funding cut” said one of two people familiar with the broadcaster’s plan, adding that the broadcaster will try to continue operations with a “skeleton staff.” Both people were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the broadcaster’s funding troubles.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media — which oversees RFA and other media platforms including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The furloughs are imminent unless AGM delivers in the next few days on the funding it owes the broadcaster for its March operations, the broadcaster’s spokesperson said.

Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government efficiency imposed a 30-day freeze on funding to RFA and other AGM outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Network earlier this month as a possible first step to a permanent cut in government support to those outlets. RFA has informed AGM about the urgency of the RFA’s finances but has yet to get a response. DOGE didn’t respond to a request for comment.

If RFA ends up shuttering, it would also eliminate a valuable source of analysis of political and military developments in authoritarian countries in Asia including China and North Korea, said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and an expert on Beijing’s foreign influence operations.

“RFA reporting from countries like China has been great for our foreign policy leaders and our elected officials, because we get better insight into what’s happening there, which serves the American interest. We don’t do this just out of the goodness of our hearts,” Sobolik said.

RFA has other problems even if government funding resumes. AGM special adviser Kari Lake canceled $53 million in contracts that supply the media platforms it supervises, including RFA, with wire service content from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France Press. Lake called those contracts “expensive and unnecessary” in an X post Thursday. Lake didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That cancellation has serious implications for RFA’s news operations.

“If you’re a reporter out there in Phnom Penh, Jakarta or even Taiwan, you need the wires just to find out what happened overnight or in some other country, so that you can then decide where to focus your attention,” said an RFA adviser granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of their remarks.

Politico

9. U.S. Military Brokers Deals to Bring Syrian Factions Together

Excerpts:

The deal, if implemented, could help remove a source of tension between the U.S. and its ally Turkey, which regards the Kurdish militias in Syria as terrorists. The U.S. also says the Kurdistan Workers’ Party is a terrorist organization but draws a distinction between that group and members of its Syrian branch that joined the SDF.

The military is itself in direct contact with Sharaa’s office and the Defense Ministry in Damascus, mainly to keep U.S. and Syrian forces from coming into conflict.

Last week, the U.S.-led coalition almost bombed an Iranian-linked group’s abandoned rocket launcher site but first called the Syrian Defense Ministry, which sent a team to dismantle it, avoiding a strike that could have risked collateral damage, one of the senior U.S. military officials said.

“They’ve been responsive, cooperative,” the official said. “If we weren’t talking, we’d have all sorts of random encounters that wouldn’t go well.”

U.S. Military Brokers Deals to Bring Syrian Factions Together

Aim is to head off a return to civil conflict that could complicate efforts to curb radical Islamist groups

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-military-brokers-deals-to-bring-syrian-factions-together-185e3887?mod=hp_listb_pos2

By Jared Malsin

, Stephen Kalin

and Nancy A. Youssef

Updated March 15, 2025 12:01 am ET

Syrians celebrate after the Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces signed a deal to integrate into the country’s new state institutions. Photo: khalil ashawi/Reuters

The U.S. military has been playing an important, behind-the-scenes diplomatic role in Syria, helping broker deals between militia groups and the country’s new government, American officers said.

U.S. forces, deployed in Syria to combat a resurgence of Islamic State, brokered talks that brought together the new Damascus government and U.S.-supported Kurdish-led fighters who control a swath of the country’s northeast, they said.

The American officers also encouraged another rebel group the U.S. works with in Syria’s southeast near its military base in al-Tanf, the Syrian Free Army, to make peace with the Islamist former rebels who overthrew half a century of Assad family rule late last year and now control the government.

The moves are aimed at stabilizing the country and heading off a return to civil conflict that could complicate efforts to curb the radical Islamic State group, which operates largely in sparsely populated desert areas of Syria, the officers said. They are also meant to give the U.S. a seat at the table as Syria shapes its future.

The U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for America’s military activity in the Middle East, declined to comment on the U.S. role in the negotiations. The Syrian government and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces militia didn’t reply to requests for comment on the American role. Syrian state media said the deal was an important one to avoid a partition of the country. The leader of the SDF said on X that the deal offered an opportunity to build a new Syria.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday welcomed this week’s agreement, saying the U.S. “reaffirms its support for a political transition that demonstrates credible, nonsectarian governance as the best path to avoid further conflict.”

A U.S. military convoy in northeastern Syria. Photo: Bernat Armangue/Associated Press

The Trump administration has been cool toward Syria’s new leaders—many of whom are from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group that cut its past ties with al Qaeda—and urged them to form a more inclusive government. Some senior officials have criticized them as jihadists and are suspicious of their intentions.

Trump officials have put the brakes on a tentative effort under the Biden administration to reach out to the new government in Damascus.

The U.S. has about 2,000 troops posted across eight bases in Syria, more than double the acknowledged number in the country before the Pentagon sent in reinforcements as the regime began to crumble.

President Bashar al-Assad’s defeat swept away military forces loyal to Iran and sent Russia, a staunch ally that propped up the regime and had military forces in the country, into retreat. The U.S. has used that opening to step up its attacks on jihadist militias, with a series of strikes against Islamic State and an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Hurras al-Din, which announced its dissolution in January.

The possibility of a future U.S. troop withdrawal helped pressure the SDF to reach an agreement with Damascus, the U.S. military officials said. “That is a piece of leverage,” one of them said. “The threat of us departing, I think, has helped make it more urgent.”

President Trump decided to remove American troops from Syria in his first term, before reversing the decision.

The deal signed on Monday night between Syria’s president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, and the SDF’s commander, Gen. Mazloum Abdi, ended a three-month standoff between the two sides and paves the way for a vast swath of territory to come under the government’s control.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, right, and Gen. Mazloum Abdi after reaching an agreement. Photo: sana/Reuters

“There was a lot of back and forth, and we kind of acted as an intermediary to help them have this discussion,” a senior U.S. military official said. “We kind of went back and forth until finally we got something they were all amenable to, and multiple iterations and finally got them to this point.”

In the end, the deal came together suddenly, with the U.S.-led coalition flying Abdi on a helicopter to an airfield near Damascus, where he signed the document with Sharaa.

The agreement was an important victory for Sharaa’s government as it sought to contain the damage from a bout of intense fighting between government forces and Assad loyalists.

Bringing the SDF into the government fold is useful for ensuring the U.S. military’s ability to operate in Syria, one of the U.S. military officials said.

“Russia still has people they work with. Turkey have people they work with,” the official said. “If the U.S. doesn’t have people we work with, we have no seat at the table, and next thing you know we can’t do strikes.”

Syrian security forces at a checkpoint in the coastal province of Latakia. Photo: omar haj kadour/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Syrian refugees cross a river into Lebanon to flee violence. Photo: Marwan Naamani/Zuma Press

The deal, if implemented, could help remove a source of tension between the U.S. and its ally Turkey, which regards the Kurdish militias in Syria as terrorists. The U.S. also says the Kurdistan Workers’ Party is a terrorist organization but draws a distinction between that group and members of its Syrian branch that joined the SDF.

The military is itself in direct contact with Sharaa’s office and the Defense Ministry in Damascus, mainly to keep U.S. and Syrian forces from coming into conflict.

Last week, the U.S.-led coalition almost bombed an Iranian-linked group’s abandoned rocket launcher site but first called the Syrian Defense Ministry, which sent a team to dismantle it, avoiding a strike that could have risked collateral damage, one of the senior U.S. military officials said.

“They’ve been responsive, cooperative,” the official said. “If we weren’t talking, we’d have all sorts of random encounters that wouldn’t go well.”

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com, Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

Appeared in the March 15, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Brokers Deals in Syria'.

10. How Interagency Campaigns Can Counter Chinese Gray Zone Incursions in the Pacific

Excerpts:

Conclusion: A New Model for Sustained Competition

The Pacific is where China is testing the edges of U.S. resistance, refining its ability to exploit gaps in governance, security, and perception management. The United States doesn’t need a reactive strategy—it needs a sustained, proactive approach to deny China the ability to shape the competitive space unchallenged.

An interagency construct like a JIATF that is focused on understanding and shaping the environment is a necessary step. But the real shift must come from embracing competition as a continuous condition, not a crisis-driven response. This means calibrating operations, activities, and investments in ways that deny China strategic openings and reinforce U.S. advantages across the board. It’s not just about blocking Chinese influence—it’s about making the Indo-Pacific a space where U.S. alliances, institutions, and economic frameworks make CCP subversion infeasible.

Strategic competition in the gray zone isn’t about waiting for the next move—it’s about making sure the board is set in your favor before the game even starts.

After attending an Asymmetric Warfare conference in Taiwan in 2017 I included this in my recommendations for our Taiwan partners but it could apply to us:

A. The IA process at national level was not discussed. It is generally weak in all nations as the military has very good planners and the civilian agencies do not have comparable levels of expertise (or the manpower and time to develop plans). Look to the US PDD 56 example as a way to create interagency synergy.

Anecdote: The US had a difficult time in the 1990’s managing complex contingencies in the Interagency. A retired Army Colonel on the NSC (Len Hawley) developed PDD 56 for the Management of Complex Contingency Operations. In effect he “civilianized” the military decision making process to provide a process with intellectual rigor to drive the interagency to plan and synchronize activities. When it was published the US Commander in Korea recommended to the SECDEF that it be employed for contingency planning for instability and collapse in north Korea. Detailed integrated and synchronized planning was conducted by the interagency that resulted in the development of contingency plans that continue to be revised to this day. Unfortunately, since this was Clinton era PDD it was excised when the Bush Administration came into office. There has been no process developed that is as good since.

PDD/NSC 56

Managing Complex Contingency Operations

Presidential Decision Directive

May 1997

Purpose

This White Paper explains key elements of the Clinton Administration's policy on managing complex contingency operations. This unclassified document is promulgated for use by government officials as a handy reference for interagency planning of future complex contingency operations. Also, it is intended for use in U.S. Government professional education institutions, such as the National Defense University and the National Foreign Affairs Training Center, for coursework and exercises on interagency practices and procedures. Regarding this paper's utility as representation of the President's Directive, it contains all the key elements of the original PDD that are needed for effective implementation by agency officials. Therefore, wide dissemination of this unclassified White Paper is encouraged by all agencies of the U.S. Government. Note that while this White Paper explains the PDD, it does not override the official PDD.

https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd56.htm

How Interagency Campaigns Can Counter Chinese Gray Zone Incursions in the Pacific

Commentary by Benjamin Jensen, Kathleen McInnis, and Audrey Aldisert

Published March 13, 2025

csis.org

Remote Visualization

China’s approach to competition in the Pacific isn’t about a single confrontation or dramatic escalation—it’s a steady grind, a long game of positioning and influence designed to erode U.S. advantages without triggering a kinetic response. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advances without attacking using a mix of coercive diplomacy and—stealing a playbook from their authoritarian allies in Moscow—using weaponized migration and underworld elements to gain a position of advantage.

The latest incursions into the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam fit a well-documented pattern: Leveraging legal loopholes, economic penetration, criminal networks, and information warfare to create conditions favorable to the CCP. This is how Beijing competes—moving the needle incrementally, shifting balances of power without firing a shot. Left unchecked, this activity does more than test U.S. responses; it establishes pathways for future sabotage, influence operations, and strategic denial. As a result, the new Trump administration has an opportunity to harmonize how it integrates different instruments of power to confront Chinese gray zone activity.

A New Codex for Strategic Competition

The United States has spent decades refining its approach to high-end warfighting, but strategic competition in the gray zone demands a different mindset. The codex for thinking about competition isn’t about preparing for the next fight—it’s about shaping the battlespace so that conflict never becomes necessary. The challenge isn’t just about countering Chinese activity; it’s about aligning U.S. operations, activities, and investments across multiple authorities—not just Title 10 (Department of Defense)—to create advantage.

As seen in how it approaches everything from Taiwan and maritime incursions to espionage, the CCP’s model is comprehensive, integrating statecraft, economic leverage, and irregular warfare into a whole. It’s a campaign, not a collection of isolated actions. U.S. responses must follow suit. This means coordinating across the interagency, leveraging law enforcement, intelligence, and economic tools to systematically close off CCP avenues of advantage.

The Marianas as a Testbed for CCP Gray Zone Operations

Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands are frontline territories in this competition, not just for their military significance but for what they represent: the soft underbelly of U.S. defenses. The visa waiver program in the Northern Mariana Islands has become a convenient loophole, exploited by Chinese nationals attempting to gain unauthorized access to Guam. The problem manifested in the December 2024 apprehension of seven Chinese citizens near Andersen Air Force Base during a U.S. missile test.

This isn’t an isolated case—it’s part of a broader pattern. Between 2022 and 2024, Guam’s Customs and Quarantine Agency reported 118 cases of Chinese citizens either illegally or illegally attempting to enter Guam from the Mariana Islands. The CCP’s playbook involves embedding personnel in key regions, whether through economic investments, illicit business fronts, or outright illegal migration. These footholds provide logistical and intelligence advantages, allowing Beijing to map critical infrastructure, test security responses, and prepare for future contingencies. It’s a patient strategy, but an effective one.

Beyond the Marianas: A Web of Influence and Subversion

The Pacific isn’t just a geographic space; it’s a contested information and economic battlespace. In the Philippines, authorities are now investigating how CCP-linked entities provided donations—including cash and motorbikes—to local officials and police forces. These are not goodwill gestures—they are investments in access, influence, and coercion.

China’s economic statecraft follows the same logic. In Palau, Chinese-backed companies are positioning themselves to control strategic infrastructure, while illicit finance networks tied to Beijing are active across the Pacific, funneling resources through casino operations, cyber fraud rings, and organized crime syndicates. These activities fund influence operations, bribe officials, and provide cover for espionage.

Parallel to these physical operations, China’s computational propaganda campaigns saturate the region, shaping narratives, drowning out opposition voices, and setting conditions to neutralize resistance to its expansionist aims. Information dominance is just as critical as physical access.

Campaigning to Compete: Understanding the Environment and Acting with Precision

Countering Chinese gray zone activity starts with understanding the environment. A Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) must do more than just react—it must map the operational space, identify CCP lines of effort, and calibrate U.S. responses to both block known incursions and disrupt future avenues of exploitation.

The first step isn’t just kinetic or even diplomatic; it’s analytical. A JIATF, or JIATIF-like construct, must integrate intelligence, law enforcement, and economic tracking mechanisms to identify CCP influence corridors in real time. The goal isn’t just to shut down documented incursions—it’s to shape the environment so that China loses its ability to leverage migration, illicit finance, and cyber operations as tools of competition. This means tightening security loopholes in the Mariana Islands, but it also means deploying targeted counterintelligence and economic measures across the Pacific. It means leveraging the Department of the Treasury’s tools to disrupt illicit Chinese financial networks. It means expanding the use of contracted intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to avoid straining existing military collection capabilities. And it means crafting an influence campaign to expose and undermine CCP operations in the information space before they gain traction.

A success story can be attributed to Jade Spear, an interagency initiative that targeted Chinese illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. With 15 U.S. departments involved, it addressed a specific problem using a diverse array of government authorities and practices. These included targeting labor violations and human trafficking, enacting sanctions, revoking Chinese visas and licenses, inspecting fishing vessels, and conducting campaigns against fishing companies. Jade Spear reimaged the spectrum of engagement with the CCP—it’s not just about use of kinetic action, but the entire arsenal of U.S. bureaucracy can be called to action.

A competitive strategy also requires action beyond government channels. The private sector plays a critical role—financial institutions, tech companies, and media platforms must be mobilized to prevent CCP actors from exploiting digital spaces and economic systems. This is a campaign that requires synchronization across multiple domains, not just the military.

Conclusion: A New Model for Sustained Competition

The Pacific is where China is testing the edges of U.S. resistance, refining its ability to exploit gaps in governance, security, and perception management. The United States doesn’t need a reactive strategy—it needs a sustained, proactive approach to deny China the ability to shape the competitive space unchallenged.

An interagency construct like a JIATF that is focused on understanding and shaping the environment is a necessary step. But the real shift must come from embracing competition as a continuous condition, not a crisis-driven response. This means calibrating operations, activities, and investments in ways that deny China strategic openings and reinforce U.S. advantages across the board. It’s not just about blocking Chinese influence—it’s about making the Indo-Pacific a space where U.S. alliances, institutions, and economic frameworks make CCP subversion infeasible.

Strategic competition in the gray zone isn’t about waiting for the next move—it’s about making sure the board is set in your favor before the game even starts.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Kathleen McInnis is a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at CSIS. Audrey Aldisert is a research associate with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

csis.org

11. In Gaza, Trump Embraces Private Military Contractors

Excerpts:

Using shady PMSCs as a foreign policy tool also comes with hidden costs in the long run. Selecting companies like UG Solutions encourages other companies to operate in the dark and avoid accountability, which would reverse two decades of painful lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan about the dangers of unaccountable contractors. It will also fuel perceptions that the US sponsors mercenary activities even when this isn’t the case — such as with Operation Gideon.

Most importantly, the use of shadowy PMSCs could further normalize such groups as a semi-legitimate tool of statecraft to other governments. This comes as countries like Russia, Turkey, the UAE, and China are increasingly using such groups to advance their interests in destabilized countries. If the second Trump administration leans into this shifting paradigm, the next several years could bring a surge in mercenary-like activities in an increasingly complex and conflict-prone world.

In Gaza, Trump Embraces Private Military Contractors

Trump’s first presidency showed that such contractors often come with a bad track record and hidden costs.

https://inkstickmedia.com/in-gaza-trump-embraces-private-military-contractors/

Words: Michael Picard

Pictures: Mohammed Ibrahim

Date: March 12, 2025

This article is a collaboration between Inkstick Media and the Greece-based Incubator for Media Education and Development (iMEdD). A Greek-language version of this article first appeared in print in the weekend edition of the Ta Nea newspaper on Feb. 22.

A little-known American private military security company (PMSC) will reportedly operate a checkpoint in the middle of the Gaza Strip as part of the fragile ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. Donald Trump’s first presidency showed that such contractors come with a bad track record and hidden costs.

Reuters and multiple other media outlets have reported that an American military contractor called UG Solutions will manage a checkpoint in Gaza. The contractor’s purpose is to ensure that vehicles moving into the northern half of the Strip aren’t transporting weapons. This checkpoint is a key provision of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

To understand what kind of company UG Solutions is, it’s helpful to think about the PMSC industry as having four size categories. There are the giants — like Amentum or G4S — which operate globally and have subsidiaries in many if not most countries. Then there are large companies with a national or regional presence, followed by midsize contractors that run out of a central facility and are often subcontractors for the giants.

Then there are the small operators — usually shell companies for what are essentially informal networks of veterans with overlapping service histories. They exist to provide a corporate instrument for whatever work — above board or not — comes their way. The owners usually pursue other lines of work to make ends meet, and so these companies often intersect and share DNA with other entities.

UG Solutions resembles a shell company. Its website contains no information — only a message form and a generic stock image of a military-like command post. Its registered address is a PO box in North Carolina, and it was incorporated in early 2023 by Jameson Govoni, a special forces veteran.

UG Solutions is closely tied to the Sentinel Foundation, which can only be described as a military NGO. Sentinel claims to be an outfit of special forces veterans hunting down child traffickers and saving the needy. It partners with a mix of Christian charities and gun stores. Sentinel is similar to other charity groups that sprang up following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

UG’s founder Govoni also founded Sentinel alongside fellow veteran Glenn Devitt. The two also had another venture selling hangover cures they claim to have developed when they were required to get drunk while undercover. Govoni has incorporated several other businesses and entities, including what appeared to be a cannabis business.

UG Solutions would be unremarkable if it didn’t land a contract at the heart of the world’s most closely watched ceasefire. While there are arguments for using a PMSC to implement this arrangement, it is unclear why a seemingly unknown company with no apparent experience in managing checkpoints landed this highly sensitive, dangerous job.

For Dr. Jovana Ranito, Chair of the United Nation Working Group on the use of Mercenaries and Professor at the University of Twente, PMSCs that have no demonstrated experience in their portfolio to sustain and execute a certain contract is normally a red flag. She also noted that small PMSCs often struggle to comply with international standards on the quality of their services as they lack the resources for human rights trainings and other safeguards.

Yet, UG Solutions’ deployment matches a pattern that emerged during the first Trump administration (unsurprisingly, both Govoni and Devitt appear to be Trump fans). Between 2017 and 2020, small, hard-to-trace US-linked contractors showed up in several hot spots with varying (albeit ambiguous) degrees of official approval.

One such case was Delta Crescent Energy, an oil company that was set up in 2019 to export crude oil from the Kurdish part of Syria. One of its co-founders previously owned a PMSC called TigerSwan, which ran security operations for US government contractors in Iraq and Syria. The company received a coveted sanctions exemption from the Trump administration to export Syrian oil. The deal apparently failed due to extortionate demands by the Iraqi Kurdish regional government, which would have processed and exported the crude.

Several cases involved US contractors operating on behalf of or in close connection to the UAE. One infamous case involved a failed plan to furnish Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar with an elite airborne unit capable of abducting high value targets in 2019-2020. The plan was allegedly promoted by Erik Prince — Blackwater founder and brother of Trump’s then-Education Secretary — and implemented by a UAE-based PMSC called Lancastar6. Prince’s alleged involvement would have required a US arms export license as he apparently brokered an arms transfer to a heavily embargoed conflict zone.

Then there was the failed Operation Gideon (or “bay of piglets” incident) in which an outfit of US special forces veterans and Venezuelan dissidents attempted to depose the Maduro regime in 2020. The operation was a spectacular failure as regime forces managed to capture the participants, including the American contractors. The founder of the involved PMSC, Silvercorp USA, claimed to have high-level support from the Trump administration, though the US government strongly denied any involvement.

These incidents are part of a global trend of increasing PMSC activity as states pivot away from former security partnerships, according to Dr. Ladd Serwat, senior analyst at ACLED, an NGO that monitors armed violence. Negative public attitudes toward such partnerships, such as UN peacekeeping operations and bilateral cooperation with western militaries, have created openings for PMSCs, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

Governments may find small PMSCs appealing as they provide a layer of separation and deniability, Dr. Serwat said. States can take credit when they are successful and disown them when they fail. They operate in a poorly regulated global market and can exploit loopholes and grey areas that states can’t. They can provide a mechanism for shadowy transactions, such as arms transfers, resource concessions, or off-the-books payments, and they can dissolve when the job is done.

But the costs of using PMSCs should outweigh the appeal. They often fail, as all the above cases did, as ambitious adventurers often find themselves in over their heads. If the Gaza ceasefire deteriorates, UG Solutions’ personnel could quickly find themselves at risk of death or capture.

At the same time, private contractors could also cause great civilian harm, akin to Blackwater’s 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq, which left dozens dead and injured. Dr. Serwat pointed out that outside contractors can improperly target civilians in conflict zones as they often operate with a rudimentary framework for determining hostile actors. Dr. Ranito also found that former military personnel may struggle in their new roles as private security contractors as they cannot handle complex situations as they did in the past.

Using shady PMSCs as a foreign policy tool also comes with hidden costs in the long run. Selecting companies like UG Solutions encourages other companies to operate in the dark and avoid accountability, which would reverse two decades of painful lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan about the dangers of unaccountable contractors. It will also fuel perceptions that the US sponsors mercenary activities even when this isn’t the case — such as with Operation Gideon.

Most importantly, the use of shadowy PMSCs could further normalize such groups as a semi-legitimate tool of statecraft to other governments. This comes as countries like Russia, Turkey, the UAE, and China are increasingly using such groups to advance their interests in destabilized countries. If the second Trump administration leans into this shifting paradigm, the next several years could bring a surge in mercenary-like activities in an increasingly complex and conflict-prone world.

12. This psychological ‘booster’ could help people resist misinformation, a new study finds

Excerpts:

Researchers have been studying inoculation — a process used to resist persuasive messages — for decades. However, this study dove deeper into the concept of “pre-bunking” compared with debunking, the authors said.

Unlike debunking, which tends to be highly ineffective because false information can still influence behaviors and attitudes, pre-bunking helps individuals build an immunity to manipulation before they are exposed to false claims, Nisbet said.

All of the inoculation interventions seemed to work across all demographic groups, according to Maertens.

The continuing effects of the training depend on how long people want the intervention results to last and how memorable the initial intervention was to them.

Receiving a “booster” or reminder one week after the initial inoculation might result in misinformation detection that lasts up to one month, and with another booster at the four-week mark, the effects could last months, according to the study.

“Although it has not been tested, based on the model presented in the paper, we could expect that after 3 to 5 boosters, some of the effectiveness may remain for more than a year, or even multiple years,” Maertens said via email.

This psychological ‘booster’ could help people resist misinformation, a new study finds | CNN

CNN · by Julianna Bragg · March 11, 2025

Consistent psychological exercises can help people spot and reject misinformation claims they see online, new research reveals.

FreshSplash/E+/Getty Images

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CNN —

If you’ve ever been fooled by oversimplified or misleading claims online, there is more that you can do to protect yourself, a new study finds.

Misinformation training can be an effective tool for helping people identify and reject fake news in as little as one month.

“This is the first study that systematically explores how long the effects of these modern inoculation interventions actually last, why they decay over time, and most importantly, how we can remedy their effect decay,” said Dr. Rakoen Maertens, lead study author and Juliana Cuyler Matthews Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, involved more than 11,000 participants who underwent one of three types of training designed to help detect misinformation.

The training methods included reviewing a short article to identify misinformation tactics, watching a brief video demonstrating common misinformation strategies or playing a game in which participants created misleading news to better understand how misinformation is generated.

Researchers aimed to measure not only how well participants remembered the training, but also how effectively they could identify fake news and whether they then felt motivated to safeguard themselves from misleading information.

Oscar Wong/Moment RF/Getty Images

Participants were tested immediately after training, again after 10 days and finally 30 days later, to evaluate whether their ability to spot misinformation survived over time, particularly in response to misleading social media posts.

People who received any of the three methods of misinformation training performed better than those who did not, the results showed.

Participants who read the short article saw the longest effects — lasting around one month — which was significantly longer than those who tried gamified or video-based formats, the effects of which only lasted around two weeks. However, memory retention proved to be the key factor in helping participants resist misleading news.

Those who felt a greater sense of threat from misinformation were more likely to engage with and remember the training, but “booster” interventions to remind participants of the content they previously learned in all of the training were still essential for fully processing and retaining what they learned.

“The combined model (suggesting that) memory and motivation help sustain memories makes sense because we remember things that often have a high emotional resonance,” said Dr. Erik Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication and the founding director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy in the School of Communication at Northwestern University in Illinois. Nisbet was not involved in the study.

To ensure the long-term impact of the training, though, consistent reminders after all three forms of intervention were necessary in helping participants retain the information and continue to reject false claims.

Debunking vs. ‘pre-bunking’

Researchers have been studying inoculation — a process used to resist persuasive messages — for decades. However, this study dove deeper into the concept of “pre-bunking” compared with debunking, the authors said.

Unlike debunking, which tends to be highly ineffective because false information can still influence behaviors and attitudes, pre-bunking helps individuals build an immunity to manipulation before they are exposed to false claims, Nisbet said.

All of the inoculation interventions seemed to work across all demographic groups, according to Maertens.

The continuing effects of the training depend on how long people want the intervention results to last and how memorable the initial intervention was to them.

Receiving a “booster” or reminder one week after the initial inoculation might result in misinformation detection that lasts up to one month, and with another booster at the four-week mark, the effects could last months, according to the study.

“Although it has not been tested, based on the model presented in the paper, we could expect that after 3 to 5 boosters, some of the effectiveness may remain for more than a year, or even multiple years,” Maertens said via email.

March 18, 2020 - Kabaty, Poland: teen boy in looking over shoulder at his friend's phone, wearing green hoodie, sharing, bonding, being together, concentrated

ARTindividual/iStockphoto/Getty Images

Are there broader implications?

While it’s promising to know that people can unlearn misinformation-related behaviors, Nisbet cautioned that this research is unlikely to play a significant role at a national level.

“At least in the United States, there is no political will to either fund or run these (misinformation or disinformation) campaigns,” Nisbet said.

However, lower-level efforts are possible. For example, the Illinois General Assembly passed a public act in 2021 requiring media literacy instruction in public high school curriculums, which includes training on evaluating the trustworthiness of sources.

Nisbet also encouraged people to check out local resources to find others who might be interested in fighting against online misinformation.

How to spot misinformation on your own

If you’re looking to reduce the risk of falling for misinformation, there are steps you can take independently.

Nisbet advised people to slow down when they encounter a new story online and process the information carefully before reacting emotionally.

Many misinformation campaigns aim to create distrust and fuel polarization, Maertens emphasized.

However, since open-minded thinking plays a critical role in detecting disinformation, he suggests reflecting on content that has made you feel angry toward others. Then, consider reaching out to those individuals or groups to engage on a more personal level.

For an entertainment-oriented solution, test your knowledge of misinformation online and chat about it with others you know to see how your results compare. Maertens even encourages people to download apps designed to help identify misleading claims and sharpen your misinformation detection abilities.

CNN · by Julianna Bragg · March 11, 2025

13. What military members need to hear from their leaders now

Excerpts:

It's difficult to say how pervasive the self-imposed silence is among military leaders. People I have served with and taught over the years tell me it is widespread, starting at the highest ranks and cascading down to battalion level and below. Its causes likely vary, among other things, by service, by unit, and by mission. Certainly, some leaders have communicated vigorously with their people, but some significant portion has not.

Everyone in uniform is a volunteer. Whether they serve for three or thirty-three years, they have a right to understand what is happening to them and to their military. Persistent, sincere communication brings clarity, enhances morale, and improves mission effectiveness.

General and flag officers must set the example for their subordinates, reaffirming core values of service while providing guidance about how to respond to the defense secretary’s policy changes. Once these leaders set the tone, field-grade officers can add context and guidance related to the new policies—including how they affect Defense Department civilians assigned to their units. These actions can be accomplished in a straightforward, nonpartisan fashion that keeps the force informed, connected, and focused on the mission.

What military members need to hear from their leaders now

defenseone.com · by Paula Thornhill

U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Lindsay Mathwick, commanding officer of Combat Logistics Battalion 15, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, speaks with her Marines aboard the amphibious transport dock USS Somerset (LPD 25) in the Indian Ocean on March 16, 2024. U.S. Marine Corps / Cpl. Aidan Hekker

Policy guidance, to be sure—but also timeless messages that transcend administrations.

March 14, 2025 10:33 AM ET

By Paula Thornhill

Associate Professor, School of Advanced International Studies

March 14, 2025 10:33 AM ET

The four-star firings, anti-DEI campaign, and flurry of directives and counter-directives from the Pentagon have sown confusion within the ranks—and among their leaders, many of whom are grappling with how, when, and even if they should discuss these actions and their implications with their subordinate units.

Some leaders have chosen to do no more than pass along these sweeping, hastily issued, and, in some cases, poorly explained orders. Their reasons for remaining quiet range from uncertainty over what to say to their people, to being misunderstood if they speak, to fearing retribution for having spoken incorrectly. At a minimum, this approach confuses the force, invites speculation, and potentially leads to discontent.

Now more than ever, leaders at all levels must communicate clearly and routinely with those they lead. This means providing detailed guidance for implementing new policies. But it also means reaffirming timeless messages that transcend presidential administrations and partisan politics.

First, leaders need to communicate ceaselessly about what they know and what they do not know, making it clear in the process that they will protect their people as much as possible from external events and actors. In particular, they should reiterate to those under their leadership that a unit only thrives when everyone does their job, works together, and looks after each other. By taking care of one another, members put their unit well on the way to mission accomplishment.

Second, leaders must remind their troops that they volunteered to serve. Servicemembers consciously joined an organization that puts their unit, their military, and their country ahead of themselves. In return, they have the right to expect reasonable and responsible leadership that uses the military to provide for the nation’s defense. As American citizens, they retain the right to reevaluate why they serve, and whether they wish to continue to do so. Assuming they served honorably, they have a right to decide when and why they take off the uniform. Whether they stay for a career or leave after their initial commitment, they should take pride in their service.

Third, servicemembers should be reminded of the importance of trust in creating and sustaining a healthy unit. After every election, there are some who delight in its outcome and some who despair. Those in each group must remember that the others are their teammates. Without this trust among teammates, the bonds essential to unit cohesion and military effectiveness are strained and, eventually, broken. Leaders at all levels must reassure their soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and guardians that—regardless of how they voted, what they do, or what they look like—they are all on the same team.

Fourth, everyone wearing a uniform must understand that partisanship has no place in America’s military. Partisanship in the ranks produces a toxic mixture of chaos and dissent, when the focus belongs squarely on building cohesion and trust. Anyone in uniform advancing a partisan agenda needs to be redirected to focus on the mission and the unit. Lower-level leaders can address most such issues, but they need to know that those up the chain of command will back their guidance and actions if anyone complains.

Finally, leaders and followers alike should think about the shared implications of their oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. Many others take a similar oath, including members of Congress, the president, and senior members of the executive branch. This means that a variety of people and institutions are responsible for the health and performance of the American military. If any branch of government abrogates its responsibilities, the other could feel overly empowered to act unilaterally. Servicemembers have a right to expect anyone who swears to support and defend the Constitution to take their oaths as seriously as those in uniform do, since executive and legislative decisions could come at the expense of their lives.

It's difficult to say how pervasive the self-imposed silence is among military leaders. People I have served with and taught over the years tell me it is widespread, starting at the highest ranks and cascading down to battalion level and below. Its causes likely vary, among other things, by service, by unit, and by mission. Certainly, some leaders have communicated vigorously with their people, but some significant portion has not.

Everyone in uniform is a volunteer. Whether they serve for three or thirty-three years, they have a right to understand what is happening to them and to their military. Persistent, sincere communication brings clarity, enhances morale, and improves mission effectiveness.

General and flag officers must set the example for their subordinates, reaffirming core values of service while providing guidance about how to respond to the defense secretary’s policy changes. Once these leaders set the tone, field-grade officers can add context and guidance related to the new policies—including how they affect Defense Department civilians assigned to their units. These actions can be accomplished in a straightforward, nonpartisan fashion that keeps the force informed, connected, and focused on the mission.

14. Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research

Anti-intellectualism is the prevailing philosophy. Let's dumb down DOD and the US government.

I know the counter to this will be a list of all the suspect and stupid studies people see. And it is those that make the news and not the important work that is done to help us gain deep understanding of the threats and conditions we face around the world. Because of their disbelief in the science of climate change they are going to throw out everything else.

All the algorithms in the world that the DOGE wiz kids tout will not provide us with the necessary understanding of the human domain.

Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research

More than 90 studies on threats such as climate change, extremism, and disinformation are halted

science.org · by Share on X

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is ending all of its funding for social science research, stopping 91 ongoing studies related to threats such as climate change, extremism, and disinformation. In a press release issued late on Friday, the department wrote that it would “focus on the most impactful technologies” and that research it funds “must address pressing needs to develop and field advanced military capabilities.”

“[DOD] does not do climate change crap,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Sunday. “We do training and war fighting.”

The cuts include the entire Minerva Research Initiative, a landmark project established in 2008 “to help DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges.” (ScienceInsider first reported on cuts to Minerva on 2 March.) The initiative’s website, including reports on finished and ongoing projects, has since gone dark.

“The Pentagon’s decision to scrap its social science research portfolio … is short-sighted and harmful to U.S. national security,” says Jason Lyall, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Many of the canceled projects focused on how new technologies such as artificial intelligence are shaping modern battlefields, Lyall notes. “How do you know what’s ‘impactful’ if you don’t do the research? How do you anticipate countermeasures and consequences of their use?” he asks. “I’m worried that without this portfolio, we lose a critical source of impartial evidence about national security, leaving the Pentagon more susceptible to companies selling ‘revolutionary’ but unproven technologies.”

The move “suggests they don’t care about better understanding threats the U.S. faces,” says Josh Busby, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior adviser for climate at DOD in 2021–22. Busby had a small grant to study the U.S. dependence on critical minerals from China for the clean energy transition, a project scheduled to wrap up this summer after a tabletop exercise at the U.S. Naval War College. That is now unlikely to happen, Busby says. “It’s baffling that our project was terminated early since the focus on critical minerals and dependence on China is what they say they care about.”

DOD has said cutting the research projects will save more than $30 million in the first year, but that’s “a rounding error in the Pentagon’s massive budget,” Lyall says. “Any savings will be outweighed by new gaps and blind spots in our knowledge about current and emerging threats.”

science.org · by Share on X

15. For Want of a Nail, the Kingdom was Lost: The Struggle to Understand Irregular Warfare

Bob Jones' epic opus on Irregular Warfare. Take the rest of the weekend to read and digest this.

For Want of a Nail, the Kingdom was Lost: The Struggle to Understand Irregular Warfare

We have a new definition of irregular warfare, and to paraphrase Winston Churchill, we are “perhaps, at the end of the beginning.” Now, the real work begins—improving how we think about the many diverse challenges and activities encompassed within irregular warfare (IW). Ultimately, IW is a manmade, largely administrative construct created by the Department of Defense (DoD) for the DoD. Within IW, however, resides a diverse collection of naturally occurring human dynamics. These cannot be defined to suit our biases; rather, we must strive to understand them for what they are. At some point, we must ask: Are our manmade constructs and their definitions the problem? Or are we more hindered by our flawed understanding of the nature of the challenges we face and the growing limitations of state power to control them? This article argues that the latter is the greater issue—but both must be addressed.

https://interpopulum.org/for-want-of-a-nail-the-kingdom-was-lost-the-struggle-to-understand-irregular-warfare/

Robert C. Jones

Published

3 days ago

Robert C. Jones, U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill AFB, Florida, USA

“Look deep into Nature, and you will understand everything better.” —Albert Einstein

CONTACT Robert C. Jones | robert.jones@socom.mil

The views expressed in this publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of the United States Government, Department of Defense, or United States Special Operations Command. © 2025 Arizona State University

The principal reason the United States struggles with irregular warfare (IW) is its deeply flawed understanding of insurgency. Getting insurgency right is perhaps the most important intellectual challenge facing the Joint Force today. If we find ourselves in a war with a peer competitor, the centrality of insurgency will fade—but in the current era of increasingly contentious competition, effectively relieving or leveraging insurgency is key to nearly everything: from greater stability at home to reducing the threat of violent extremists abroad and more effectively deterring problematic acts of state competition. Getting insurgency right is indeed the proverbial nail, for want of which the kingdom might be lost.

In literature and doctrine, insurgency is a chameleon with a dozen names and infinite manifestations. Whether we call it “insurgency,” “insurrection,” “rebellion,” “revolution,” “resistance,” “instability,” “resilience,” “stability,” “civil resistance,” or even “violent extremist organizations,” we are ultimately describing shades of the same fundamental human dynamic. At its core, insurgency arises when a population, formed around a distinct identity, perceives itself to be in existential conditions of legally irreconcilable political grievance. An active insurgency occurs when that same population then acts illegally—under the laws of the government they are challenging—through violent or nonviolent means to address those conditions. Our world today is rife with both latent and active conditions of insurgency. The nation that best understands and addresses these conditions will hold the advantage in the current competition.

So, why is no one talking about insurgency? Frankly, we have moved on. State challengers like China, Russia, and Iran took full advantage of a United States distracted by the attacks of 9/11 to press their positions “around the edges”^[1] of the empire. The Joint Force is now appropriately focused on deterring and, if necessary, confronting these major state actors. Meanwhile, insurgency has been tucked away, bundled into the much larger collective construct of IW.

One of the goals of this article is to clarify the role of IW as an organizing framework and highlight the critical importance of understanding, as clearly as possible, the fundamental nature of insurgency. This article is built around a proposed critical distinction between the nature of a problem and its character. One way to think about this distinction is that the nature of a problem encompasses everything that it must be—and nothing that it need not be. In 1905, Albert Einstein disrupted the world of physical nature by publishing works based on “thought experiments” rather than physical ones.[2] In thought experiments, he used his imagination to visualize how the variables in nature interacted with the constants to devise new theories to explain the challenges of our physical world. Here, we apply the same logic to human nature. If the constants of a problem constitute its nature, then the variables of the same problem provide its character. The doctrine and literature of the challenges associated with IW are heavily premised on the character, as historically, the application of overwhelming state power could typically shape the character of a situation into one deemed acceptable by the state. However, as the modern information age shifts relative power from states to populations, these character-based approaches are proving too difficult, costly, provocative, and fleeting. By first determining the distinct nature of a problem, we can better imagine how the variables of character might interact and then develop more accurate theories for understanding the myriad human dynamics within the family of challenges we call “irregular warfare.”

Let Us Be Clear: “Irregular Warfare” Is Not Something We Do; Irregular Warfare Is Something We Made

We are free to name and define manmade conceptual constructs like IW as we please. However, such is not the case with natural dynamics such as those found within IW. Fundamental human dynamics, such as insurgency, are rooted in the nature of mankind. These must be studied carefully, guarding against the pull of bias, emotion, and popular trends. Ultimately, we must understand our way to greater success, but if we are not mindful, we run the risk of defining our way to failure. The Department of Defense (DoD) has redefined IW yet again, yet efforts to develop a more accurate understanding of the diverse human dynamics within IW remain largely unchallenged and unexplored.

IW is a bureaucratic fiction—but is it a useful one? To know the definitions[3] of IW is a straightforward task. Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has paved a meandering path of definitions and doctrine to support this body of knowledge, and experts on IW abound. Yet, during this same era—guided, advised, and led by these experts—the U.S. has struggled mightily with a wide range of irregular challenges and adversaries. This is as true domestically as it is abroad and applies as much to state actors as to non-state actors. Clearly, a substantial gap remains between our knowledge of IW and our understanding of the diverse human dynamics bundled within. This is the gap between “the right answer” and “the good answer.” And in an era of unprecedented change, that gap between doing things right and doing things well has never loomed larger.

When creating a strategic construct, it should be simple, logical, necessary, and helpful to its intended purpose. It should provide a figurative table where diverse parties with shared problems but divergent missions can gather. It should stimulate new understanding, synergy, and opportunities for greater success. Unfortunately, IW has never quite met that standard. With the non-negotiable requirement that it be a form of warfare, the latest rendition of IW was purposely created by the DoD for the DoD. Rather than creating a table to gather around, it builds a wall that divides. Rather than fostering a greater understanding of the diverse dynamics within, it creates a false sense that IW is somehow a distinct entity unto itself.

The prescient challenge with IW lies in our understanding of the problems it seeks to address. These problems cannot be defined into submission, nor can our struggles in implementing IW solutions be redefined into success. Naturally occurring human dynamics are indifferent to what we wish them to be. Efforts to conform nature to bias are perhaps our greatest folly—and the central problem of conflicts inaccurately described as “endless wars the Generals can’t win.” These were not wars that could not be won; they were policies that could not be enforced. The essential failure occurred at the moments of decision but played out over decades of bloody, expensive, frustrating execution. A better understanding of underlying problems will inform better decisions.

Why? Because IW is not any one thing—it is a collection of things. While many of these share important characteristics, they vary tremendously in their nature. These nuances are becoming increasingly important, yet they are often ignored or misunderstood in doctrine. In a bygone era—prior to electronic communications, when much of our IW knowledge was formed—states could typically ignore and overcome these distinctions through the application of power and a monopoly on legal violence. And yes, through warfare. But that era has long since passed.[4] In truth, this has not been the case for some time. Show me an “endless war the Generals can’t win,” and I will show you a situation where military power was applied in vain attempts to coerce a government or population into accepting policies or laws they deemed illegitimate, inappropriate, unjust, or intolerable. The inertia of outdated doctrine, literature, and experiences is strong, and we have yet to fully grasp this modern reality: where policy is impossible, all approaches are infeasible. Our challenges are as much a matter of obsolete direction as they are outdated definitions. And in the military’s “can do” culture, these two forces feed upon each other.

Evolving Conditions, Shifting Definitions

Rarely has the adage, “where one stands depends upon where one sits,”[5] been more relevant than in the realm of IW definitions. This is reflected in the many redefinitions of IW by the DoD in recent years. For centuries, IW was simply warfare not conducted by regular forces. The DoD resurrected and repurposed the term to address the frustrations of the post-9/11 era.

In the early 2000s, we focused on the character of the contest at that time. In 2007, frustration set in, leading to the admission that “IW is a complex, messy, and ambiguous social phenomenon that does not lend itself to clean, neat, concise, or precise definition.”[6] By 2010, an attempt was made to impose a tighter framework, defining IW[7] as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s).” This definition, like many before it, included embedded explanations: “Irregular warfare favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.” At its core, IW was effectively defined as a violent struggle for legitimacy and influence.

By 2020, however, the emphasis on “violence” became problematic in the context of a new National Defense Strategy[8] that emphasized “competition below armed conflict” and mandated the application of IW[9] across every aspect of that competition. The solution was simple: delete the “violence” requirement. The new definition read, “Irregular warfare is a struggle among state and non-state actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy,” while keeping the second sentence unchanged. At this point, IW was essentially everything—and therefore explained nothing. It was now framed as a struggle to influence populations and affect legitimacy. At this point, IW was beginning to sound more like democracy than warfare, while including both. The growing population within the Department of Defense who see everything as some form of warfare, and warfare as what the Department of Defense does, were unhappy with this definition. With the coming of a new administration, two things were made clear: IW would be redefined yet again, and any Pentagon definition of IW would emphasize the “warfare” aspect of the concept.

The latest effort to redefine IW is now complete. The all is warfare,[10] and warfare is all we do contingent won out. Now, IW is “a form of warfare where state and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.”[11] Nearly every aspect of this definition raises cause for concern. It overstates the role of warfare, redundantly highlights the inclusivity of the concept, and artificially categorizes the ways in which IW must be conducted. To be fair, this definition will likely serve its intended administrative purpose. To take definitions like this literally for what they convey, however, is problematic. After 20 years of struggling with mis-framed problems, obsolete doctrine, and overly symptomatic solutions yielding few durable, desired strategic effects, this is probably not the definition the nation needs to effectively address the challenges IW is intended to address.

Crossing the Rubicon: Not So Much Irregular as Illicit

We continue to struggle with the critical first step: identifying the problem. As a legitimate entity confronting illegal and often violent challenges, we carry an inherent bias. Viewing these challenges through a warfare lens naturally leads us to look for threats to defeat as a critical step to solving the problem. Too often, this results in waging warfare against symptoms while leaving underlying issues unaddressed—or worse, exacerbating them. We need to do better in understanding the challenges of IW.

The current landscape of IW challenges can be divided into four distinct categories: (1) transnational crime, (2) gray zone challenges, (3) insurgency-based challenges, (4) and terrorism. Each of these categories is fundamentally different by its nature but often overlaps or appears similar in character. Understanding these distinctions is critical for formulating the right strategic responses.

Transnational Crime:[12] Illegal for profit. These activities, conducted by state or non-state actors, are illegal under the laws of the systems being challenged. Their primary purpose is for profit. Regardless of how violent or disruptive governance crime may become, it is not warfare or insurgency and cannot be resolved through warfare or counterinsurgency (COIN) approaches.
Gray Zone Challenges:[13] Illegal to expand one’s sovereignty. These activities, conducted by state actors, are illegal under the laws of the systems being challenged. Their purpose is to advance sovereign privilege. When conducted legally, these challenges constitute competition, regardless of how frustrating they may be.
Insurgency-based Challenges:[14] Illegal for politics. These are population-based activities leveraged by state or non-state actors. They are illegal under the laws of the system being challenged.[15]
Terrorism: Illegal to coerce through fear. These activities, carried out by discrete organizations or individuals, are illegal under the laws of the system being challenged. Their purpose is to generate fear to affect changes in law or behavior. Despite expansive lists of terrorist organizations, true terrorist entities are rare.[16] Notably, organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are accurately classified as insurgency-based challenges rather than terrorism-based, as they wage unconventional warfare (UW) campaigns reliant on preexisting insurgencies.

Most of these challenges do not manifest as warfare, nor are their methods particularly irregular. However, these activities are problematic to U.S. interests and security, and the DoD must remain prepared to counter such activities.

To frame challenges accurately, we need to explore better questions. The nature of a challenge should drive policy and strategy, whereas its character (symptoms) should inform effective tactics. Certain questions are essential for understanding the nature of problems. When faced with a new situation, we should ask ourselves a series of framing questions:

How much does this issue threaten or advance U.S. interests?
Is this challenge legal under the laws of the system being challenged?
Is this conflict within a single system of governance or between two or more?
What is the primary purpose for the challenger(s)’s actions?
What are the relationships between the parties?
Are the laws and norms being violated necessary and just?
What are the critical identities relevant populations are forming around?
Have recent events shifted the priority of identities in significant ways?
Do affected populations recognize both the legitimacy and character of the governance affecting their lives?
How do populations feel about the governance affecting their lives and whom do they blame and/or credit?
Do affected parties believe they have trusted, legal, and effective mechanisms to address their grievances or interests?

By asking better questions, we can more accurately classify and understand IW challenges to set the conditions for arriving at better answers.

A Pragmatic Alternative: An Alternative Definition and Recommendations

In pragmatic terms, IW is perhaps best understood as a collection of problematic, illicit challenges deemed important by the Department of Defense and their legitimate solutions. This perspective removes loaded, subjective words like “warfare” or “legitimacy” and instead focuses on the single, common aspect of the four distinct types of challenges bundled under the IW banner: legality—or, more accurately, their illegality under the laws of the system being challenged.

Shifting the focus to illicit activity moves attention away from a particular threat or preferred solution, opening the door to a more holistic and effective analysis of the fundamental problems at hand. The military is no longer a “hammer” that has preidentified “nails” with an implied leadership role. Instead, the military becomes a tremendous source of resources and capabilities, postured to support and advance U.S. national interests in this era of restive peace. Viewed through this lens, the following recommendations emerge:

Shift the focus from the problematic symptoms labeled as “threats” and work to better understand the fundamental nature of the problems driving the current surge in illicit challenges.
Clearly communicate that collectively, IW is much more an administrative construct than an operational one. IW ensures that the DoD remains prepared to assist in addressing illicit challenges today while maintaining the readiness to fight and win in potential future conflicts.
Emphasize that most of these challenges are rarely acts of war and cannot be resolved through the application of warfare. These are not threats to “defeat,” nor are these conflicts to “win.” The primary role of the military is to help create time and space for relevant authorities to make appropriate adjustments, provide additional capacity where requested, and help deter, mitigate, and disrupt high-end illicit violence.
Clarify that, outside the context of formal war, effective IW solutions are typically led by agencies other than the DoD or by other nations. The U.S. military does not “wage” IW; it conducts IW activities.

To this end, we must, to the best of our abilities, attempt to understand the implications of this rapidly evolving strategic environment—particularly, how these changes are shaping the character of competition and conflict. Most importantly, we must ensure that we understand the nature of the unique challenges we face.

What is nature? The nature of a situation is a capture of everything it must be, and the release of everything it need not be. However, determining the nature of a problem is not a reductionist process, it is a refining one. A refined understanding, free of unnecessary character-based impurities, serves as the foundation for durable, simple, and effective strategic concepts. Ultimately, all these challenges are human dynamics, and as such, like warfare, their strategic nature is rooted in human nature. The best safeguard against institutional, emotional, and situational bias is a clear understanding of the distinct and fundamental nature of various types of challenges. There is no substitute for getting the problem right from the outset. Why? Because standing in the emotional wake of events like 9/11, January 6, or October 7 is not the time to craft unbiased understanding or develop measured, effective responses given the outrageous character of what has occurred.

We stand at a historic inflection point, living in an era of unprecedented change where the advantage currently lies with the revisionists. Unlike the United States, which is wedded to sustaining a waning and increasingly challenged status quo, our revisionist adversaries recognize the opportunities inherent in the emergent strategic environment far better than we do. They intentionally dodge hard “red lines” and seek to provoke predictable responses to validate their narratives and advance their respective causes. When we cling to flawed or obsolete perspectives on the challenges we face, we accelerate our own decline. We must shift our efforts from redefining our solutions to reframing our problems. Once a problem is clear, new solutions will naturally follow.

Legitimate Solutions: Our Current Menu of IW Activities

Once we have identified the problems, we can then turn to the family of solutions. The latest version of IW includes a set of IW activities—each akin to musical notes that must be arranged and orchestrated to fit the nature and character of the problem at hand. Nuance is everything, and it begins with a fundamental understanding of the problem. Only once the problem is understood, and its objectives are clear and feasible, can we begin to design a campaign that purposefully orchestrates these activities. To say one “conducts irregular warfare” is a dangerous oversimplification—but we absolutely conduct IW activities and those must be tailored in ends, ways, and means for modern realities. These activities include:

Civil Affairs Operations (CA)
Counter Threat Network
Security Cooperation
Counter Threat Finance
Security Force Assistance (SFA)
Civil-Military Operations
Military Information Support Operations (MISO)
Counterinsurgency (COIN)
Counterterrorism (CT)
Foreign Internal Defense (FID)
Stability Operations
Unconventional Warfare (UW)

Each of these activities is defined and described in U.S. military doctrine. In this era of tremendous change, doctrine will naturally lag behind reality. Just as governments everywhere struggle with the friction of a governance gap, so too do militaries everywhere suffer from a doctrine gap. If our understanding of insurgency is indeed flawed, then the way we think about nearly all of these activities is flawed as well. Now is the time to ensure we understand the problems we seek to address in the most fundamental terms possible, by their respective natures. This will then allow us to tailor our activities to mitigate the problematic symptoms surrounding these problems while patiently advancing durable, desired solutions.

The Pursuit of Understanding

Figuratively speaking, the old playbook is obsolete. Throughout recorded history, nations have employed their power to exercise some degree of control over the people and places where they perceived their interests to lie. They aligned with, coerced, bought, or created governments willing to prioritize those foreign interests over those of their own people—and then protected those governments against all challengers, foreign or domestic. We think of ourselves as “exceptional,”[17] but this distinction lies more in the character of our actions than in the nature of our approach. The character of one’s actions can soften the sting and mitigate the response, but it is the nature of those actions that shape the nature of the response. For example, until we can appreciate how the failed U.S. involvement in Afghanistan shares fundamental similarities with the failed Soviet involvement in the 1980s, we will learn little from our experience. Some argue that we need to execute the old playbook more vigorously.[18] Certainly, we have the power to force our will upon whomever we please, but is that the nation we imagine ourselves to be? Instead, we need to understand why modern efforts fall short, and adjust our ends, ways, and means accordingly.

The definition of “winning,”[19] for most irregular problems has traditionally been defined as defeating a bad actor while ensuring challenged governments remain in power, unchanged, and uncoerced. This is not solving the problem; this is merely suppressing the symptoms. It is a measure of success drawn from 500 years of Western colonialism. Once success is framed in this context, it is natural to fixate on the problematic symptoms rather than the deeper causes. What was once, literally, “good enough for government work,” is no longer adequate to serve our interests at home or abroad. In fact, the pursuit of some degree of control has become an expensive, provocative, and unnecessary liability. The good news is that we can serve our interests far more effectively through relative positive influence, and the rules-based order advanced by the U.S. is uniquely suited to an influence-based approach. However, the bad news is that our current toolkit of IW activities is built on obsolete understandings of the problems they were designed to address. These tools are overly employed to create degrees of control rather than to foster shades of influence. If we are to remain effective in the modern era, we must update our toolkit, as well as our playbook.

A Hypothesis and Some Insights

A decade ago, when General Joseph Votel was the Commander of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), he faced a problem. With a growing gray zone challenge facing the nation, he had to find a way to shift Special Operations Forces (SOF) engagement to be less reactive. The challenge, however, was how to validate shifting efforts to the “left of bang” when the Special Operations Forces were already operating at full capacity—100 percent committed right of bang while meeting 50 percent of operational requirements. It was in this environment that Doctor Tom Nagle and I prepared the Strategic Appreciation[20] signed by General Votel in 2015. To achieve better answers, we needed to ask better questions. We needed a new theory of the case.

Our hypothesis was simple: we were living in an era of rapidly shifting power while wrestling with the friction caused by slowly adjusting policies, governance, and redistribution of sovereign privilege. In simple terms, we were in a governance gap. The resultant grievances from these perceived imbalances were creating a growing energy for conflict both within and between states. These challenges were as old as humankind, but in the modern information age, the speed, scope, and scale were unprecedented. Traditional approaches were proving too controlling, more provocative, and less effective. Governments everywhere were struggling to adapt, and revisionist actors saw opportunities where status quo actors saw threats. To get in front of these problems we had to think like a revisionist.

Thinking like a revisionist and conducting “thought experiments,” I have come to the following insights on population-based conflicts. Many of these perspectives challenge long-held positions and are difficult to prove correct—but they could easily be proven wrong if flawed. They are presented here for consideration, discussion, and challenge. These insights also inform the attached chart (see Figure 1) and are shaped, but not constrained, by U.S. military doctrine, professional literature on insurgency, and my experience as a Special Operator.

Conflict within a single system is fundamentally different from conflict between two or more systems. This distinction is a function of the relationships between the parties. War theory is rooted in conflicts between two or more systems and is largely sound. Where we run into trouble is applying war theory to non-war problems, particularly those occurring within a single system of governance, where relationships endure. Revolutionary insurgency, for example, may look like warfare by its character, but by its nature, internal revolution is more akin to democracy, albeit illegal democracy. While perhaps violent, it is an expression of democracy all the same. Revolutionary symptoms can be suppressed through warfare, but the drivers of revolutionary problems are invariably made worse by such efforts. Fully appreciating this single point of understanding is arguably the keystone to resolving most of our IW challenges.
Population-based challenges are like water. The character of water can be gas, liquid, or solid within a very narrow range of conditions. The same is true of challenges rooted in a population perceiving itself to be in legally irreconcilable political grievance. These conditions can shift rapidly in character—ranging from artificially stable to active illicit challenges to full-scale civil war. It is far easier to change the character of the conflict than it is to resolve the nature of the problem—particularly when solutions are designed to treat the population’s symptoms rather than addressing governance as the primary cause.
The vast majority of IW is a derivative of insurgency. Our doctrine and literature on insurgency are a collage of loose terms and overly descriptive definitions, replete with gaps and overlaps. We describe how things look, rather than seeking to understand what they are and why they occur. The heavy bias of colonialism and the outrage of governments and populations facing illegal, often violent challenges have historically cast the state as the victim, rather than the provocateur.[21] Getting to a better understanding of the nature of insurgency is the most vital task for improving our ability to resolve irregular problems or implement irregular campaigns of our own.

Figure 1: Insurgency-Based Activities

Some Insights on Insurgency

If one looks at insurgency in the way framed above, certain things become clear. First, all insurgencies must possess the following three characteristics: illegal under the laws of the system being challenged; primarily political in purpose; and population-based in nature. Though the character of insurgency takes on myriad forms, they fundamentally fall into two distinct types (along with a hybrid form):

Revolutionary insurgency: Internal to a single system of governance and therefore best understood and addressed as an act of illegal democracy. If war is the final argument of kings, then revolution is the final vote of the people. Revolution is within. Perhaps the most critical insight for IW may be this: the only fundamental difference between revolutionary insurgency and democracy is legality!
Resistance insurgency: Insurgency provoked by external sources of governance, and therefore a form of irregular war. Resistance is between.
Hybrid insurgency: A fusion of revolutionary and resistance causation and reaction among the same populations. This demands recognizing both distinct problems in forming policy and solving for each in strategy. Tactically, it all looks the same on the ground. To solve for only one is folly (e.g., Afghanistan, 2001-2021).
Center of Gravity: The driving energy behind insurgency is a population perceiving itself in existential conditions of legally irreconcilable political grievance. Understanding causation allows for early assessment of a population’s relative resilience or exploitability long before conflict exists. A greater appreciation of political grievance allows governments to proactively reduce unnecessary provocations and foster natural stability.[22]
Ideology: A critical requirement to enhance, direct, or accelerate grievances, but is rarely causal in and of itself. An effective ideology speaks to the culture and grievances of the target population(s) and takes positions the challenged government(s) are unable or unwilling to adopt. (Therefore, the most effective way to disempower an insurgent narrative is not to “counter” it, but rather to agree with the rational aspects, incorporating them into one’s own narratives and actions.)
Character: Variable factors, such as geography, history, culture, the use of violence, the type of ideology employed, and the stated goals of the insurgent group all appear to be merely aspects of the character of an insurgency. These factors are important for refining tactics but are largely irrelevant in determining the nature of the problem at hand, or in shaping feasible policies or effective strategies.
Civil War: Too often linked to the scale of a conflict or the degree of violence, civil war begins when a proto-state emerges from insurgency with its own territory, population, governance, and security. This is the “ice” (solid) form of insurgency. To defeat the character of a civil war by deconstructing the proto-state, simply convert the conflict back to “liquid” (active insurgency) or “gaseous” (latent insurgency) forms—e.g., The Islamic State in Syria/Iraq.
Winning: For a challenged government to truly win, it must address the governance factors driving the insurgency. Historically, focusing on defeating the insurgents while preserving an unchanged status quo has merely suppressed the symptoms of insurgency rather than resolving its root causes, an approach rarely viable in the modern information age. This is a lesson the U.S. should have learned from its post-9/11 misadventures, and one that Israel needs to strongly consider today as they respond to the attacks of October 7, 2023. While insurgents can win at any point in the contest if they can coerce the challenged government to change, a government can only win once it evolves sufficiently to bring grievance and trust within manageable norms.
Popular Legitimacy: This is the recognition of a governing authority’s right to affect people’s lives. This is perhaps the most significant factor in the cure/cause of insurgency. U.S. doctrine overly fixates on legal legitimacy, which is the recognition of a government by external institutions and actors. This has been a particularly problematic issue for the U.S. in recent conflicts. Believing the foreign governments, we attempt to create and protect are legitimate, rather than appreciating them as collaborative, has blinded us to the infeasibility of policy decisions for regime change or nation-building. The reality is that any government born of a foreign power is de facto illegitimate—making it a natural target for revolutionary insurgency. Likewise, our own efforts as foreign actors are equally de facto provocative of resistance insurgency towards ourselves. While our valid motivations for engaging in such behavior, our good intentions, and efforts to avoid excessive violence and collateral damage are noble – it is the nature of our actions that drove the nature of the affected population’s response.

On the bottom half of Figure 1, proposed reimagined solutions are presented. Here, I apply the fundamental understanding of insurgency, as captured in the upper half of the figure, to the goals and guidance of our most recent strategic documents—all within the context of the modern information age. Viewed in this manner, IW—particularly the insurgency-based aspects of irregular warfare—becomes a powerful array of activities for advancing and securing interests in competition, as well as deterring gray zone challenges and major conflicts. These break out under three major headings: Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Unconventional Warfare (UW), and Counterinsurgency (COIN).

Historically, FID has been focused on preserving a partner government or keeping an ally in power, typically over the objections of a significant segment of its own population. This approach, straight out of the old colonial playbook, is premised on maintaining control to preserve foreign governments in power we see as favorable to our interests. However, in today’s modern world, this has been an increasingly expensive, confrontational, and unnecessary provocation. FID to control foreign political outcomes is nearly fully obsolete in the post-Cold War era. Moving forward, FID must be more about fostering positive influence, respecting sovereignty, and promoting self-determination. It should be focused on empowering partners to become better, more inclusive versions of themselves—not lesser versions of us.

Additionally, SFA has historically sought to foster durable relationships through training, equipping, and advising foreign military. Yet, when conducted in developing countries, this approach too often resulted in creating smaller, lesser versions of U.S. forces that tended to be culturally unsuitable and fiscally unsustainable. When these forces were crafted for governments lacking a broad writ of popular legitimacy, they rarely possessed the fighting spirit of the insurgent forces they were meant to counter. One observation from Operation Enduring Freedom–Philippines was the power of respecting host nation sovereignty and focusing on improving the relationship between security forces and the populations they encounter. Our SFA efforts, severely constrained by narrow authorities, permissions, and funding, forced us to be more strategic than we otherwise wanted to be.[23] It turns out that showing a greater respect for the sovereignty of the host nation forced us to empower, rather than transform, thereby reducing the resistance-producing provocations of our efforts. Simply improving the professionalism and character of the interactions between Philippine security forces and the populations in remote areas soon resulted in dramatic improvements in the stability of the region.

There is also support to resilience. Historically, resilience efforts have tended to focus on basic human needs, and while this remains a vital area of assistance, moving forward, we must be far more attuned to political resilience. The former relates more to the lower half of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, while the latter aligns with the upper half. Improving our understanding of the fundamental nature of insurgency allows us to more accurately assess whether a population is resilient or exploitable and adjust our efforts accordingly. Invariably, the political resilience of a society is far less about the conditions in which a population lives and far more about how they feel about living in those conditions—and whom they blame for their situation.

Next up is COIN. Our COIN successes are typically fleeting at best, and our COIN failures are humiliating disasters of epic proportions. Why? Because we relied on flawed and obsolete perspectives and applied the same term—“COIN”—to the activities of both the host nation and the external nations or forces involved. This may seem like a minor point, but the negative consequences of this conflation of roles cannot be overstated. When the roles are conflated, it is far too easy for a more capable external power to take an inappropriate leading role. This subjugation of the host nation invariably serves to validate the grievances of the relevant populations, amplify the narratives of the insurgent or UW organizations supporting those populations, and foster resistance energy towards the external power.

This is precisely why COIN is best thought of as a civilian-led, domestic operation, in which the role of the military is the same as in any civil emergency: to be last in and first out; to provide the necessary extra capacity; to never supplant civil authorities; and to always remember there is no military victory to be had. The military serves primarily to mitigate and disrupt the high end of violence and to help create the time and space civil authorities need to adjust their governance, as necessary, to reduce provocations and restore order. Foreign powers do not conduct COIN, they conduct FID and must do so in a manner designed to foster positive influence, always careful not to provoke resistance or inadvertently enhance revolutionary grievances against the host nation.

UW – Leveraging Insurgency for Purpose

Perhaps the most misunderstood activity of all is UW. The reasons for this misunderstanding fall primarily on the special operations community. We have become so enamored with and trapped by our historical applications of UW that we struggle to free our understanding from the artificial constraints imposed by that bold history. While there are a handful of variations of the UW definition, they typically involve several artificial constraints drawn from historical examples, such as those in occupied Europe during WWII or the bold “horse soldiers” who leveraged the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The standard components of these definitions focus on activities occurring in a denied space, working with some blend of local underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla organizations, and efforts to coerce or overthrow adversary regimes. But UW is far more than just supporting a resistance or revolutionary insurgency.

To fully appreciate both the challenges and opportunities of UW, we must first free this concept from unnecessary factors of its historic character and come instead to understand it in terms of its fundamental nature. We must capture everything it must be and release everything it need not be. UW is perhaps the most powerful tool in our IW activities tool kit and is simply, fundamentally, naturally, just this: UW is any activity designed to leverage the legally irreconcilable political grievance in a population governed by someone else, to advance one’s own interests.

There is no adversary approach more frustrating to the U.S. in the post-Cold War era than the modern application of UW. The Russians employed UW when they seized Crimea without a fight and again through its use of social media to inflame political grievances, shape elections, or foster instability in the United States. Both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have waged UW since their respective inceptions. Iran conducts UW in their support of Hamas in Gaza or the Houthis in Yemen. Yet, none of these adversaries care a whit what our special operations doctrine writers or senior leaders wish our nostalgic vision of UW to be. Our definitions and doctrine have become a trap we have built for ourselves and willingly climbed inside. The certainty of our knowledge blinds us to the unconstrained approaches applied with tremendous success by our adversaries. We are trapped by the “right answer,” while alternative approaches are in practice all around us.

One such alternative approach is unconventional deterrence.[24] In simple terms, this is posturing to create a credible threat of UW in the mind of an adversary. Traditional approaches to deterrence are of little use in deterring the illicit “gray zone” acts of competition that erode the sovereignty of important partners and allies and undermine the credibility of the rules-based international order. However, illicit competition and the corruption it fosters are also powerful sources of legally irreconcilable political grievances that SOF is uniquely trained to identify and leverage. This capability can be used to help an at-risk partner foster greater resilience or to create uncertainty in adversaries about SOF’s abilities to destabilize dozens of global efforts they see as essential to their ambitions. By freeing UW from its artificial constraints, we empower SOF to create new lines of deterrence. These new forms of irregular deterrence help shrink the gray zone and integrate into broader deterrence strategies designed to reduce the risk of war.

Labeling organizations like al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as “terrorist” groups is perhaps our greatest modern example of framing a problem for how it looks, rather than for what it is. By recognizing that these Violent Extremist Organizations (VEOs) are most accurately illegal, non-state political action groups, waging sophisticated, distributed, and networked approaches to UW (and yes, employing terrorist tactics), we free our minds to craft new and more promising solutions.

VEO campaigns are wholly reliant upon hybrid insurgency. This involves a combination of populations desperate for help in addressing their revolutionary grievances with domestic governance, then uniting around common resistance grievances against foreign governance. Recognizing the nature of this problem empowers us to shift our focus from the problematic symptoms associated with these campaigns, focusing instead on solving the actual problems of obsolete and inappropriate policies and governance. We must disrupt these campaigns and mitigate their violence—but do so in ways that create time and space for civil authorities to address the policy and governance failures that resistance and revolutionary insurgency-based VEO UW campaigns exploit. We must create better narratives, rather than simply countering theirs. A key approach is to co-opt effective elements of the VEO narrative while presenting a superior alternative. Lastly, we must outcompete these organizations as the partner of choice for advancing the evolution of better and more inclusive governance for disenfranchised populations around the planet. We must counter their UW campaigns, not just their terrorist tactics.

One powerful way to improve IW, therefore, is to reframe and expand UW. Ultimately, whether one is conducting UW to coerce or overthrow some adversary; create new lines of deterrence; become more strategically effective in dealing with VEOs; or foster resilient populations at home and abroad, these actions are all rooted in insurgency and variations on a fundamental perspective of UW.

Special Warfare – That Distinct Subset of Irregular Warfare Unique to SOF

Competition is the framework for a whole-of-society effort to advance and secure our national interests. Irregular warfare nests within this framework as a responsibility of the entire Joint Force. One way to appreciate the role of SOF is to view special warfare as a distinct subset of IW. To be clear, special warfare is not a form of warfare, per se, but rather a mechanism for clarifying roles, missions, and activities appropriately tasked to our Special Operations Forces from those better executed by conventional forces or other entities.

From inception, USSOCOM was directed by law to focus only on certain activities “in so far as it relates to special operations.”[25] Joint Doctrine clarifies this mandate by explaining how “special” is situational and rooted in a unique set of conditions that must combine to make any activity a “special operation.”[26] This is enlightening on several levels. First, no operation is inherently “special” simply because of the character of the unit performing the task or the type of task being performed. Secondly, this perspective challenges the idea that the conventional force somehow became “more SOF-like” during the post-9/11 era. As missions traditionally assigned to SOF units expanded to the rest of the Joint Force, it was SOF that inadvertently became more conventional, rather than the other way around.

By the time the U.S. left Afghanistan, SOF had evolved, taking on a hyper-conventional focus. We were far more focused on threats than problems, and our population-based roots had atrophied. USSOCOM was giving the nation the SOF it wanted, but were we giving the nation the SOF it needed? Even today the demand signal from our nation’s capital remains weighed toward the hyper-conventional. The challenges in breaking this inertia of expectations are significant. Yet, the question facing USSOCOM today is: What modern roles, missions, and activities are not only “special” but also relevant to addressing emerging challenges and serving current strategic guidance? Reshaping and refocusing our SOF presents challenges wholly distinct from the one of reimagining irregular warfare, but ones also demanding a firm grasp of the fundamental nature of the problems facing our nation and the world.

Conclusion

To be clear, man-made, administrative constructs like “integrated deterrence” or “irregular warfare” are all vitally important to the defense community. They help highlight challenges and organize our thinking. But when we create these constructs, they must be accurate, simple, and helpful for their intended purposes. We must also remain humble in our thinking and pragmatic in our actions. Too often we lose sight of this—particularly when the challenges before us appear overwhelming and unresponsive to our efforts. This is why we must strive to see through complexity and understand the fundamental aspects of these challenges. These are challenges that cannot be defined into submission, nor do they care a whit about our biases, fears, or preferences. They simply are, and we have a duty to understand them for what they are and address them accordingly. In the current environment—in the current era of competition—the most important human dynamic to understand accurately is that of “insurgency.” This is truly that proverbial nail, for want of which the kingdom might be lost.

Insurgency is a dynamic with many closely related cousins. Here, I write for the defense community in the context of irregular warfare, so I focus on the insurgency variant. If writing for other audiences, I could just as easily focus on resilience or political stability. Ultimately, we look at similar problems, describing them in differing terms, but we must understand them for what they truly are. When people perceive themselves to be in existential conditions of legally irreconcilable political grievances, a force for instability grows within them. These conditions cannot be wished or defined away, or solely attributed to our adversaries—but they are conditions we can understand, resolve, or leverage for purpose.

Governments around the world are struggling with the growing challenge of populations, formed around discrete identities, perceiving themselves as trapped in conditions of legally irreconcilable political grievance. When these conditions exist, the exploiters of grievance will emerge. Armed with clever narratives designed to raise those perceptions to existential levels, these exploiters seek to mobilize at-risk populations for malign purposes. It is natural to cast blame, perpetuate victimhood, and seek to punish, suppress, or defeat the actors, rather than to defuse the conditions. After all, the state will always be the legal actor and has the right and duty to enforce the rule of law. However, shifting blame and attacking only the symptoms primarily serves to validate exploiters’ narratives and deepen the population’s grievances. In the past, suppression of symptoms was often good enough. Increasingly, it is not.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle in getting good answers to modern challenges is the guardians of the right answers derived from pre-information age experiences. Recently, when General Fenton suggested that USSOCOM’s contribution to a comprehensive scheme of integrated deterrence included fostering new lines of irregular deterrence,[27] it sent Pentagon staff officers scrambling for their military dictionaries. Because it was not in “the book,” the concept was dismissed and left to whither. It is time to challenge “the book.” It is time to re-examine long-standing assumptions –ideas believed to be facts—and question whether they are merely calcified assumptions colored by the biases of a bygone era. As the modern information age shifts the balance of power, new truths are being revealed, and many old practices are rendered obsolete.

At no time in history has there been a larger gap between the “right answers” of the past and the “good answers” needed for the future. This is particularly true in the inherently human dynamics of governance, competition, and conflict. Now is not the time to draw false comfort from doctrine and definitions. Now is the time to understand how the current information age is affecting the character of these dynamics and to craft new approaches that foster stability, which increasingly eludes our efforts. Ultimately, human dynamics are shaped by human nature and played out across countless scenarios—indifferent to what we wish them to be or what side we are on. Make no mistake: the challenges and solutions bundled within IW are incredibly important. We have a new definition but let us be clear-eyed about the work that remains. Now is the time to shift our focus to understanding problems for what they are—and to designing and applying solutions that will produce the results our security and interests demand.

Robert C. Jones is a retired Army Special Forces Colonel, serving the past ten years as a senior strategist for the U.S. Special Operations Command. He holds a Juris Doctorate Degree from the Willamette University College of Law, a Master’s in Strategic Studies from the Army War College, and is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS).

[1] Admiral Eric T. Olson and Michele Flournoy, “Back to the Future: Resetting Special Operations Forces for Great Power Competition,” Podcast, Irregular Warfare Initiative, 2020.

[2] Norton, John (1991), “Thought Experiments in Einstein’s Work,” in Horowitz, Tamara; Massey, Gerald J. (eds.), Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy (Maryland; Rowman & Littlefield; November 1991), 129–148. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 June 2012.

[3] Jared M. Tracy, “From “irregular warfare” to Irregular Warfare – History of a Term,” Veritas, Vol. 19, no. 1, (2023), https://arsof-history.org/articles/v19n1_history_of_irregular_warfare_page_1.html.

[4] Lawrence Korb, “The Real Reason We Can’t Win Wars Anymore,” National Review, 21 March 2021, https://news.yahoo.com/real-reasons-u-t-win-103057654.html?guccounter=2.

[5] Rufus Miles, “The Origin and Meaning of Miles’ Law,” Public Administration Review. 38 (5): 399–403, September 1978.

[6] IW Joint Operating Concept (JOC) 1.0, 2007.

[7] “Irregular Warfare: Countering Irregular Threats,” Joint Operating Concept, Version 2.0, 17 May 2010, /https:/www.jcs.mil/portals/36/documents/doctrine/concepts/joc_iw_v2.pdf?ver=2017-12-28-162021-510.

[8] “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America – Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge.”

https:/dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf

[9] “Summary of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy,” 2020. https:/media.defense.gov/2020/Oct/02/2002510472/-1/-1/0/Irregular-Warfare-Annex-to-the-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.PDF

[10] Micah Zenko, “How Everything Became War: A Conversation With Rosa Brooks,” Council on Foreign Relations, 7 November 2016, https://www.cfr.org/blog/how-everything-became-war-conversation-rosa-brooks.

[11] Joint Publication 1, Vol 1: Joint Warfighting (CJCS, August 2023).

[12] U.S. Department of Defense, DoD Counter-Drug and Counter-Transnational Organized Crime Policy, DoD Instruction 3000.14, (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2020) https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/

300014p.pdf?ver=2020-08-28-112340-617.

[13] Summer Myatt, “2022 National Defense Strategy to Prioritize Gray Zone and Hybrid Warfare Plan, Optimized Data Sharing,” GovConWire, 25 January 2022, https://www.govconwire.com/2022/01/

2022-national-defense-strategy-to-prioritize-gray-zone-hybrid-warfare-and-data/.

[14] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Counterinsurgency, JP 3-24 (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 2008), https://www.jcs.milPortals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_24.pdf?ver=

giaAj5fgP4SGt_BdkOrkNA%3d%3d.

[15] Robert C. Jones, “Deterring ‘Competition Short Of War’: Are Gray Zones The Ardennes of Our Modern Maginot Line of Traditional Deterrence?” Small Wars Journal, 14 May 2019. https://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/deterring-competition-short-war-are-gray-zones-ardennes-our-modern-maginot-line

[16] Terrorist Designations and State Sponsors of Terrorism – United States Department of State https://www.state.gov/terrorist-designations-and-state-sponsors-of-terrorism/

[17] Mary McMahon, “What is American Exceptionalism”? United States Now, 6 November 2023, https://www.unitedstatesnow.org/what-is-american-exceptionalism.htm.

[18] Jacqueline L. Hazelton, “Book Excerpt, ‘Bullets Not Ballots, Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare,’” Military Times, 17 May 2021, https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/commentary/

2021/05/17/book-excerpt-bullets-not-ballots-success-in-counterinsurgency-warfare/.

[19] Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, and Beth Grill, “Victory has a Thousand Fathers: Success in Counterinsurgency,” Rand Corporation, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG964.html.

[20] United States Special Operations Command, “Strategic Appreciation,” 2015,

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzrcfrqF8zFVUXMydGUydWgzeVU?resourcekey=0-GmUlIUGWEp9LxmI4VL9u3w

[21] Joint Publication 3-24, “Counterinsurgency,” 25 April 2018.

[22] Robert C. Jones, “Lies, Damn Lies and Assessments,” pp. 9-17, Strategic Multilayer Assessment White Paper “What Do Others Think and How Do We Know What They Are Thinking?”, Joint Staff J39, March 2018.

[23] David P. Fridovich and Fred T. Krawchuk, “Special Operations Forces: Indirect Approach,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 2007.

[24] Robert C. Jones, “Strategic Influence: Applying the Principles of Unconventional Warfare in Peace,” Strategic Multilayer Assessment, Joint Staff J39, June 2021.

[25] U.S. Code Title 10, Section 167: “special operations activities include each of the following insofar as it relates to special operations.”

[26] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Special Operations, JP 3-05 (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, July 2014), GL-11, https://irp.fas.org/doddir/dod/jp3_05.pdf. Special Operations is defined as “Operations requiring unique modes of employment, tactical techniques, equipment and training, often conducted in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments and characterized by one or more of the following: time sensitive, clandestine, low visibility, conducted with and/or through indigenous forces, requiring regional expertise, and/or a high degree of risk.”

[27] Katie Crombe, Steve Ferenzi and Robert Jones, “Integrating Deterrence Across the Gray – Making it More Than Words,” Military Times, 8 December 2021, https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/

commentary/2021/12/08/integrating-deterrence-across-the-gray-making-it-more-than-words/.

In this article:

deterrence, Featured, governance, influence, insurgency, Irregular Warfare, populations, special operations, Unconventional Warfare

16. History of the Nisei ‘Go For Broke’ WWII unit removed from Army website

What is the matter with us?

Are we okay with erasing our history in the name of anti-DEI? (Yes I see the caveat that they were be rewritten and reorganized and republished later)

I suppose we need to close the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies because it is named after a member of the 442d, the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye.

But its web site is still online. Probably because it uses an ".edu" suffix rather than a ".mil" suffix.

The Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (DKI APCSS) is a U.S. Department of Defense institute that officially opened Sept. 4, 1995, in Honolulu, Hawaii. DKI APCSS addresses regional and global security issues, inviting military and civilian representatives of the United States and Asia-Pacific nations to its comprehensive program of executive education and workshops, both in Hawaii and throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

https://dkiapcss.edu/#

Is the Asia-Pacific center a DEI institute? Why do we need an Asia-Pacific Center in America? (note my bitter sarcasm).

History of the Nisei ‘Go For Broke’ WWII unit removed from Army website

hawaiinewsnow.com · by Ben Gutierrez · March 14, 2025

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - A webpage detailing the history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team has been removed from the U.S. Army’s official website.

The 442nd, combined with the 100th Infantry Battalion, remains the most decorated combat unit in history for its size and length of service. The World War II unit was made up mostly of second generation Japanese-Americans.

The Army website had the history of the 442nd before President Trump’s executive order ending what he called “radical” diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI initiatives.

The web address to the page that detailed the 442nd now goes to the army.mil homepage.

“Disappointed and sad, to say the least,” said Val Matsunaga of Maui. Her father, Toshio Kubota, was a member of the 442nd. He lost a leg in a bloody battle in Italy in 1944.

“As a daughter of a veteran, I feel like it’s my personal mission to carry on that legacy so that we can educate people about that honor,” she said.

In the years after the Pearl Harbor attack, when Japanese-Americans faced intense racism, about 800 of them gave their lives for this country fighting with the 442nd.

U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye lost an arm as a member of the combat team. Japanese-American soldiers were honored on a postage stamp, with the unit’s motto, “Go For Broke.”

Bo Mahoe is a board member of the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center on Maui, and wants to make sure they are not forgotten.

“We cannot lose this history of the stepping stones that our generation and future generations will step into,” said Mahoe, who’s also a Vietnam war veteran.

“This purge of DEI, of which our nationalities, I’m Hawaiian-Chinese-Japanese, so I fit in all those different groups,” he added.

In a statement emailed to Hawaii News Now, U.S. Army spokesperson Christopher Surridge said:

“Content on the 442nd Infantry Regiment and Nisei Soldiers were featured on the Army’s Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders heritage webpage, which has been taken down in accordance with Presidential Executive Orders and OSD guidance. Articles related to the 442nd Infantry Regiment will be republished once we have had the opportunity to redesign and reorganize content to better align with current guidance. For more information, please visit Digital Content Refresh.”

Hawaii U.S. Rep. Ed Case wrote a letter to Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, asking him to explain the apparent deletion of the web page.

“Erasing history one website at a time is no different than the tragic practices of the authoritarian regimes throughout history that so many of our own have sacrificed to oppose,” Case said.

“It not only diminishes public access to crucial historical information but also risks erasing the sacrifices and contributions of these American heroes from the digital archive of our nation’s military legacy,” he added.

California Congressman Mark Takano, the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and First Vice-Chair of the Congressional Asian American Pacific Islander Caucus, also had a great uncle who served in the 442nd.

“This Administration knows no shame in scrubbing the history of servicemembers who fought for our country. My Great Uncle Mon fought and died in the 442nd while other members of my family were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps,” said Takano in an email to Hawaii News Now.

“For his sake, for the families of other Nisei soldiers, and for the other fighting units who are having their history erased — I will fight to restore their place and dignity in our military’s history,” he said.

While the Army’s webpage is gone, the group Sons and Daughters of the 442nd has its own site, 442sd.org, with a rich history of the unit and its accomplishments.

“You can take webpages down, you can put webpages up. It doesn’t change history,” said group member Bill Wright.

“I don’t think that they can start retrieving medals that have been awarded to men who are now dead, and their combat and what they did and how they did it,” Wright added.

“While I am disappointed and hurt personally, I take it personal because I’m a daughter. We don’t have to stay suppressed,” said Matsunaga. “We can tell the story our way.”

hawaiinewsnow.com · by Ben Gutierrez · March 14, 2025

17. Foreign State-Sponsored Disinformation in the Pacific Islands

Excerpts:

These are short-term tactical failures, however, which should be set against longer term strategic interests. The interests of foreign states such as China and Indonesia in disinformation in the Pacific will continue and even intensify as conflicts unfold. West Papua has become increasingly militarised in recent years and election of former military general Prabowo Subianto, who has been accused of human rights abuses in West Papua and East Timor, is likely to lead to an escalation of tensions. Likewise, China-Taiwan tensions are high, and the Pacific also holds three of the 11 UN member countries globally that still recognise Taiwan, making them a battleground for the “One China” principle. Northern Pacific countries could be more adversely affected by a future conflict over Taiwan and currently China-linked cyber-attacks are common in Palau.

Longer term goals of foreign disinformation are to discredit individuals and institutions that speak critically—in particular, of Taiwan, Chinese influence, and West Papua—and to diminish the emotive or cultural ties people feel to these causes. Psychological studies have suggested that repeated exposure to false information makes people more receptive to disinformation narratives. Even if specific foreign state-sponsored narratives do not go viral in the Pacific now, trust of authorities, the media and critical thinkers could be dented by this disinformation and, so, it makes it harder to counter disinformation later. The dangers of disinformation do not just lie in the chance foreign state actors may sway public opinion, but in the certainty that they will shape the expanding epistemic environments of Pacific peoples.

Foreign State-Sponsored Disinformation in the Pacific Islands

13 Mar 2025

By Dr Anouk Ride, Tessa Ballard and Dr Graeme Smith

Analysis

internationalaffairs.org.au

Disinformation stories are used by foreign states in an attempt to influence opinions and framing of foreign policy in the Pacific. Learning from recent experiences in the Pacific Islands may help identify shifts in the online environment that will have domestic and international ramifications.

Disinformation has been a prominent topic of global security research since accusations of Russian interference surfaced in the 2016 United States Presidential elections. Studies have been conducted on foreign disinformation campaigns in the United States, Taiwan, Ukraine and the EU. Comparatively, little has been written on state-sponsored disinformation in Pacific Island Countries (PICs).

Our review found only 13 academic articles and research reports on disinformation that study foreign disinformation in the Pacific, which we reviewed to determine what is currently known about foreign state-sponsored disinformation on public opinion. Disinformation can arise from state or non-state sources, and actually pinning a disinformation story to a state can be difficult to near impossible. However, we can surmise that disinformation that repeats and supports foreign state policy positions may arise from that state, particularly when the information seems disconnected from domestic issues.

According to studies we reviewed, China, Russia and Indonesia have been involved in disinformation in the Pacific Islands region. The most active spreader of disinformation was China, which uses disinformation as part of a broader influence campaign to boost its recent engagement with the Pacific. China is accustomed to using disinformation and influence campaigns within its borders, and most notably against Taiwan, which has been described as subject to the most disinformation in the world as well as the having some of the best counter mechanisms.

What is driving disinformation in the Pacific?

States have different motivating factors to disseminate disinformation in the Pacific. In the case of China, it seeks political influence and support on its position about Taiwan. Since 2019, three Pacific Island countries have switched diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to China, but three–Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and Palau–maintain ties with Taiwan. Russia has no direct interest in the Pacific, but has engaged in disinformation campaigns globally to erode the United States’ reputation. 

One notable Chinese disinformation campaign occurred following the 2021 Honiara riots in the Solomon Islands. A series of articles were released by Chinese state-owned media outlet the Global Times falsely accusing the United States and Taiwan of inciting the riots. This narrative was amplified by Alfred Sasako of the popular Solomon Star newspaper and vice president of the Solomon Islands China Friendship Association, who published an article in the Solomon Star that claimed Taiwan had sponsored the violence. 

In 2024, a similar disinformation campaign involved cooperation between Chinese and Russian state-sponsored media, with the Russian news outlet Sputnik announcing that it had found evidence of a US conspiracy to stage an electoral coup against pro-Chinese Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. The article quoted what it claimed was an anonymous source from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). This article was picked up by the Global Times and the Chinese media site published six articles amplifying the false narrative. At around the same time as these publications, an anonymous source claiming to be from the IFES circulated an email claiming that, with US knowledge and funding, insurgent supporters of former Malaita premier Daniel Suidani intended to use petrol and dynamite to destroy critical infrastructure and attack the Solomon Islands government. To date there have been some prosecutions for arson and looting of Asian businesses in Honiara but no evidence of pre-planned organised violence. Other analyses of the riots point to deep dissatisfaction with, and exclusion from, politics and economics, being key drivers, combined with a combustible moment of local protest, rather than foreign interference.

Indonesia’s primary interest in the Pacific is to quell support for calls West Papuan independence and assert its dominion over the territory. Vanuatu has an active Free West Papua Association and its leaders have repeatedly called for West Papuan self-determination at international forums. Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Solomon Islands governments have not actively supported the West Papuan cause in recent times, and more broadly, Pacific states have shown waning interest in self-determination. An investigation in August 2019 found that an Indonesia-based actor had set up multiple Facebook pages masquerading as independent news pages that spread disinformation about Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for the Decolonisation of West Papua to the Pacific Islands States. Indonesia has also been repeatedly linked to bot networks on Facebook and Twitter that “hijack” hashtags such as #FreeWestPapua and #Vanuatu by flooding the hashtags with pro-government comments and infographics. Pro-West Papuan independence activists have reported that their accounts are regularly targeted with verbal abuse and threats from a mixture of authentic and inauthentic accounts on Facebook and Instagram.

Does foreign state-sponsored disinformation work?

Determining the effectiveness of state-sponsored disinformation is challenging, as it rarely operates as a single source tool, and it is difficult to separate the impacts of disinformation from other forms of influence. Nonetheless, analyses to date suggest that foreign state disinformation campaigns in the Pacific have had little immediate impact on the populations they target. The original fake Facebook pages directed at ni-Vanuatu internet users were taken down following the Daily Post ’s report, and a 2022 investigation into China’s disinformation campaign around the Honiara riots found that it failed to shift Solomon Islanders’ sentiments about either China or the West. Our experience to date suggests authorship is important – so disinformation articles authored by Solomon writers known to be “for hire” rather than journalists with reputations for balanced reporting, or writers with names not known to Solomon audiences were flagged by Solomon internet users as likely untrue. The 2024 Sputnik article about election interference was reposted on Facebook by Sogavare’s O.U.R. party, but may have been seen as politically biased rather than factual. Disinformation will need to get more sophisticated in order to “feel real”, a task that may also be harder to do with artificial intelligence in the Pacific, due to diversity of languages and peoples not easily replicated with current tools.

These are short-term tactical failures, however, which should be set against longer term strategic interests. The interests of foreign states such as China and Indonesia in disinformation in the Pacific will continue and even intensify as conflicts unfold. West Papua has become increasingly militarised in recent years and election of former military general Prabowo Subianto, who has been accused of human rights abuses in West Papua and East Timor, is likely to lead to an escalation of tensions. Likewise, China-Taiwan tensions are high, and the Pacific also holds three of the 11 UN member countries globally that still recognise Taiwan, making them a battleground for the “One China” principle. Northern Pacific countries could be more adversely affected by a future conflict over Taiwan and currently China-linked cyber-attacks are common in Palau.

Longer term goals of foreign disinformation are to discredit individuals and institutions that speak critically—in particular, of Taiwan, Chinese influence, and West Papua—and to diminish the emotive or cultural ties people feel to these causes. Psychological studies have suggested that repeated exposure to false information makes people more receptive to disinformation narratives. Even if specific foreign state-sponsored narratives do not go viral in the Pacific now, trust of authorities, the media and critical thinkers could be dented by this disinformation and, so, it makes it harder to counter disinformation later. The dangers of disinformation do not just lie in the chance foreign state actors may sway public opinion, but in the certainty that they will shape the expanding epistemic environments of Pacific peoples.

Dr Anouk Ride is a Fellow at Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at Solomon Islands National University

Tessa Ballard is an honours student at Australian National University.

Dr Graeme Smith is a Senior Fellow at the ANU Department of Pacific Affairs and co-host of The Little Red Podcast.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.

internationalaffairs.org.au

18. Navigating the Gray Zone—Strategies to Address Hybrid Warfare (Council on Foreign Relations forum)

Navigating the Gray Zone—Strategies to Address Hybrid Warfare

Monday, March 10, 2025

https://www.cfr.org/event/navigating-gray-zone-strategies-address-hybrid-warfare

Speakers

James Appathurai

Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid, and Cyber, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

Max Boot

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; @MaxBoot

Linda S. Lourie

Principal, WestExec Advisors; Former Assistant Director for Research and Technology Security, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2021-22); CFR Member

Presider

Christopher Isham

President, CT Group Intelligence USA; CFR Member

Panelists discuss the rising threat of hybrid warfare, exploring the tactics used by hostile states, and effective strategies to counter these covert attacks.

ISHAM: Thank you very much and welcome, everyone. My name is Christopher Isham. I’m president of C|T Group Intelligence USA. And I’ll be presiding over today’s session on “Navigating the Gray Zone—Strategies to Address Hybrid Warfare.”

We have a very strong panel with us today. And we’re—and I’ll introduce them briefly. James Appathurai is NATO’s deputy assistant secretary general for innovation, hybrid, and cyber. In this capacity, he is the secretary general’s primary advisor on hybrid threats. Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author, and foreign policy analyst. He’s the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. Linda Lourie, the principal at WestExec Advisors and a former assistant director for research and technology security at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

So with that, let’s get on with it. Just to preface, other than Ukraine most European countries do not believe that they are at war with Russia, but there is increasing evidence that Russia is at war with them. And what we’ve seen over the past year—for example, we’ve seen assassination plots. We’ve seen a series of packages explode in cargo facilities in the U.K., Germany, and Poland. We’ve seen arson attacks across the continent. We’ve seen undersea fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea severed. We’ve seen rail lines sabotage and information war operations designed to influence elections have been conducted. So, broadly speaking, these kinds of attacks are considered part of Russia’s hybrid war, or gray zone attacks. This is activity that falls just short of open kinetic warfare and below the threshold that would trigger response under Article 5.

So let me begin with James. How serious do you think this threat of hybrid or gray zone warfare is to NATO member states today?

APPATHURAI: So we do think it’s important. So, first of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

We think it’s important. We think it’s quite important. And I’d just maybe frame it for a second, so that viewers can at least see how we see it. I think the first thing to note is that these kinds of destabilization campaigns have been Soviet policy, and now Russian policy. So this is decades long. And this is enshrined in their strategic documents. And most people—you can just go online and have a look at them. It’s not just me saying it. And I think the second point to note is this is all in the concept of Russian warfare. So the way Russians approach warfare is to use all the tools available to the state to achieve a political aim. And that includes military tools and non-military tools in a very flexible, fluid way. And they’ve actually built a headquarters in Moscow where all the instruments of state power are sort of aggregated and all the levers can be pulled at the same time. And you can Google it, because they happily showed it off to the media when they built it a few years ago. So I think the—sort of the starting point is this is campaign and it’s about destabilization.

You very accurately listed a lot of the incidents and trends that we’re seeing. We take it seriously for a couple of reasons. One is, a lot of these attacks pose a risk to the lives of citizens in our countries. For example, the incendiary devices put onto aircraft, which could, of course, kill the people on the aircraft. The aircraft can also fall on somebody or on many people. So that’s one example. Second is to threaten politicians. And we’ve seen that too. So interference in our political systems is something very, very important. And another aim is to undermine support for Ukraine. And that’s why you saw some of the sabotage against railroads and other ways in which logistical support is provided to Ukraine.

Final point I’d make is this can get much worse. You talked about damage to undersea infrastructure and other critical infrastructure. That can take place also using cyberattacks. And I’ll give you an example. There was the hack on the Colonial Pipeline system in the eastern United States, which shut down fuel supplies for, you know, millions of people. Imagine that everywhere, all the time, or all at once, and you start to get an idea of how important an economic effect hybrid attacks can have. And if you look at the Skripal incident, where chemical weapons were used in the United Kingdom to kill two people, that jar of Novichok was then thrown under a park bench. It could have killed a thousand people, plus. And it was just nonchalantly thrown down. And killed a couple of people, in fact. But it could have been much, much worse. So we see the risk appetite of Russia going up. And when I say risk, I mean risk to our citizens and our economy. So we are taking it very seriously.

ISHAM: And have you seen the pace of these kinds of attacks increase as the risk on Russia’s side increases?

APPATHURAI: I mean, in general it goes up and down from month to month. And we follow this very carefully. But the overall trend over the last five years is definitely on the way up. And what is new, or new-ish in the last couple of years, is the more kinetic side, which you outlined. Which is the sabotage, the derailments, the fires, the incendiary devices, the threats to politicians, attacks on their property, and the increasing damage to undersea infrastructure. All of this is increasing intensity—in intensity since Russia’s war on and in Ukraine.

ISHAM: Got it. This kind of warfare may be accelerating, and we’re obviously much more aware of it today, but it’s not a new phenomenon. Max, what do we know about the origins of this kind of warfare?

BOOT: Well, I mean, we call it gray zone or hybrid warfare but, you know, another name for it is simply warfare, I mean, or competition among countries. I mean, you know, going back to the dawn of civilization nations have engaged in propaganda and sabotage, in trying to undermine their adversaries, to buy—to buy them off, to, you know, split their alliances against them, and so forth. So, I mean, this is not a new thing. But it is certainly something that I think is gaining greater recognition in the modern world, especially up until recently there has been kind of an assumption that state-on-state warfare is a thing of the past, because we have not seen that much of it since 1945. And there was—in particular after, you know, Russia sent little green men to occupy Crimea in 2014, I think people tended to focus on this is kind of the new face of warfare, just below the line of actual kinetic warfare.

And, of course, Russia has since gone on to invade Ukraine and to wage a very deadly and very conventional conflict. You know, probably the worst conventional war we’ve seen since the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, and one of the few since—in the post-1945 era. So that’s a reminder that conventional warfare has not gone away, even in the nuclear age. But there is no question that, at the same time that Russia is waging, you know, very conventional warfare on Ukraine, it is also carrying out, as James pointed out, all of these gray zone type of actions in Europe, in particular. But also with a very active propaganda disinformation arm which is messaging around the world, and pretty successfully even in the United States. So this is—this is—you know, I think another way to put it is this is kind of 360 degree warfare. And it’s being waged not just by Russia. It’s also China, Iran, a number of other adversaries. And that’s—we need to—we need to think of warfare in all those dimensions.

ISHAM: Yes. In fact, I wanted to ask Linda a little bit about some of the other perpetrators. Russia is considered the primary perpetrator of these kinds of attacks but, as Max just mentioned, other countries have engaged in in these kinds of tactics. What comes to mind?

LOURIE: That’s a great lead in. And I echo James’ thanks for including me on this panel.

China is obviously watching and learning what Russia is—from Russia, and matching and surpassing their efforts to—for attempts to destabilize the United States. I think first comes to mind, and something that’s really current, is TikTok, which is a Chinese-controlled app that is pushing through their algorithm all kinds of content, to largely young people but broader than that, that serves Chinese interest and serves to destabilize the U.S. and destabilize our youth from foreign policy objectives. They’re also working to surveil American citizens, as well as Chinese American citizens, through their police stations that are operating out of their embassies.

And economic efforts, including investments in critical technology, which we are—you know, we work hard to review those, but it’s—some investments are impossible to review, as well as even short of investments, when you have Chinese—young Chinese interns into offices of venture capital firms reviewing all kinds of technology, they have ability to see what’s going on. And then the next step is data collection tools. We see that from the OPM breach—the Office of Personnel Management—from several years ago. So anybody who worked in the government then has had their information collected by the Chinese.

And I would add to this Wi-Fi and video cameras on subway cars that they’ve sold to a number of major cities and connected cars. And there’s a rule that’s being promulgated on prohibition of Chinese-connected cars in the United States. We don’t currently have Chinese cars, at least not in large numbers, but these are the ways that China is looking to gather information to use in the future to—you know, as a way to weaponize and destabilize this country. So I would argue that this is a part of a hybrid program as well.

ISHAM: Thank you. Yeah, thank you. These kinds of operations fall into several categories. And the first, which I’d like to dig into a bit, is what I would call critical infrastructure attacks. And the most obvious example of those have been the severing of these undersea fiber optic cables in the Baltics, which occurred last November and December. In one of those cases a vessel, which is suspected of dragging its anchor to cut the cable, was detained by Finland. James, what do we know about that ship?

APPATHURAI: So that ship is being investigated. It’s the Eagle S. And it’s being investigated by the Finnish authorities. But actually, I think your point is the larger one also, that what we see is a pattern of damage to this infrastructure. And it’s damage that wasn’t taking place to the same extent a few years ago. And what we know is that our job is to ensure that our citizens can get the heat and the light and the data that passes through this undersea infrastructure—pipelines and data cables. So we’ve done a few things in NATO to try to do more to help protect it.

That includes setting up basically a network with the companies that operate this undersea infrastructure, so that we can exchange data, we can exchange information about threats, we can exercise together. We can talk about how to build better resilience. So that’s already been done. We’ve deployed military assets into the Baltic Sea with instructions to be more robust. And NATO allies that are contributing or defending their own territorial waters are also being more robust. The example you used of Finland was inspiring to other allies to be a little bit more robust in how they respond.

And we’re setting up—

ISHAM: They actually boarded the ship, didn’t they? And I believe they detained a number of the crew members.

APPATHURAI: They did. Well, they abseiled down onto the ship and then took the ship to shore. And you’ll see more robust action from NATO allies. And you’re already seeing it in incidents that took place after that particular incident.

The final thing we’re doing is setting up basically a sensor stack from seabed to space so that we can better see what’s going on in the Baltic Sea, but also use AI tools to narrow down what we need to focus on, from the 3,000 ships that are at sea at any given point to, let’s say, the five or the twenty that we need to watch more carefully. What we want to do is make it very clear to everyone—not just whoever is behind increased damage but also ships’ captains, fleet operators—that it’s going to cost a lot to do damage or even to threaten damage to the undersea infrastructure there and send a clear deterrent message.

ISHAM: So there have been some indications that that ship, the Eagle S, was part of what’s been called Russia’s shadow fleet, which operates to smuggle oil from Russia to various buyers around the world, clandestinely in violation of sanctions. And that they’re using this shadow fleet to also cause damage to undersea infrastructure and cables. How much visibility do we have into this shadow fleet? And do you agree with that assessment, that the fleet is being used for sabotage as well as for evading sanctions on oil supplies?

APPATHURAI: So in terms of visibility, there’s quite a lot. And there has been for quite some time. So I think in terms of knowing which ships are part of the shadow fleet and where they’re going, we already have a pretty strong foundation amongst governments, also other private companies, like major oil companies, also know which ships are in the shadow fleet. And there are steps being taken to substantially enhance that knowledge. As to whether or not things are being done deliberately or not, I think—so I don’t always know. I don’t think everybody knows. And we have to let the investigations run their course. But actually, from our perspective, what matters is the damage that’s being done.

And these ships, these shadow fleet ships, are called shadow fleet precisely because they are, of course, as you say, being used to evade sanctions on Russian oil. But, as a result, they are almost always ships that are old, that are generally unsafe, that are single hulled, that don’t meet international safety standards, that are sometimes operating with legal flags of convenience, sometimes, and increasingly, not with legal flags of convenience. Often they don’t have the insurance that they need. And they’re transiting through relatively shallow waters close to shore.

So there’s all kinds of risk involved with these ships, which is in addition to what risk it might be posing to undersea infrastructure. And that’s very much a part of the reason why NATO allies and other countries are stepping up activity to monitor them and do what’s necessary to address the threats that they face, even in international waters when it comes to environmental issues. And that’s on a solid legal basis. And we’ve checked that very carefully. So there’s all kinds of risk from these ships, sanctions, environmental, and, as well, potential risk from anchor dragging.

ISHAM: Yeah. There’s a proposal, I believe, that Canada has put on the table to be introduced at the G-7 coming up this week that would create a task force on Russia’s shadow fleet. It’s my understanding that the United States has not signed on to this proposal. Does NATO have a position on that particular proposal?

APPATHURAI: We don’t comment on proposals in other international bodies, of course.

ISHAM: But it could be helpful.

APPATHURAI: Well—good try. (Laughter.) We also—I don’t think we’d particularly appreciate if, you know, the G-7 were to comment on draft proposals in the NATO system. (Laughs.) So we’ll leave that to the G-7 and to the countries that are occupying it.

What we care about is security in the Baltic Sea area. We care about protection and security for critical undersea infrastructure. Many allies look to the risks posed by the shadow fleet and have taken decisions, including in NATO, in terms of accepting them, for example, in ports. We have no obligation—our allies have no obligation to accept them docking in their ports because of, aside from anything else, the environmental risks that I just discussed. And, you know, if you’re in Denmark and you see all these ships piling up in the Gulf of Denmark, you’re not that happy about the very, very low safety standards that these ships face—or, cause.

ISHAM: Yeah. So, I mean, just briefly maybe you could address some of the other forms of attacks on critical infrastructure. I believe there have been a number of attacks on medical facilities, hospitals, that sort of thing.

APPATHURAI: Yeah. And I think you’re right to point more broadly. I think the first thing I would mention is actually cyber because people don’t see it, obviously, but actually the cyber threat to critical infrastructure is really high—both from Russia in the form of ransomware, and ransomware that is often a cover for the implantation of malware. And that includes, in particular, into industrial control systems. And from China, through programs which some people might have heard of—Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon. So it’s a steady program of putting malware into critical infrastructure to do two things, espionage and to be able to shut it down if they want to. And I mentioned the Colonial Pipeline hack. That was one. You mentioned hospitals. You’re referring to the U.K., of course, most obviously. But that has happened elsewhere as well. So there’s very substantial cyber risks which are not going away. These campaigns continue.

Then, of course, there are physical threats to critical infrastructure. And we’ve seen some of those play out across Europe. So, you know, we’re very concerned about critical infrastructure. And I think it’s important to note that the Russians in particular, like the Soviets before them, have, as part of their strategy, to go after energy infrastructure. And they have done that and weaponized energy very obviously over the past few years, first by cutting off energy supplies to the West. Second, the cyberattacks that I mentioned. Third, damage to our critical infrastructure through sabotage. And we’ve discussed some elements of that. And then, fourth, full-scale assault. And that’s what the Ukrainians are experiencing every single day. So you get the whole arc of attack, on energy infrastructure in particular, happening right now. And as I say, this has been a long-standing focus of Soviet and then Russian policy and strategy and operations.

ISHAM: Max, another category of this kind of warfare is what I would call information war, which has often been directed at influencing elections in, for example, Moldova and other European countries. What are some other examples of that?

BOOT: Well, this has been a massive Russian disinformation campaign where they’ve spent years building up Kremlin organs like Sputnik, RT, Russia Today, many others, and also establishing links with far-right and far-left parties in Europe and the United States. And you see that really paying off for them with, you know, the AfD, for example, now being the second-largest party in Germany. And they are, aside from being—you know, having extremely offensive views on immigrants, and neo-Nazi proclivities, and so forth, they’re also pretty pro-Russia. They really echo Russian propaganda. You see Russian propaganda being echoed by Orban and his Fidesz Party in Hungary, many others as well.

I mean, quite frankly, you see it here in the U.S. of A. I mean, when—if you go back to that horrendous Oval Office exchange between President Zelensky, President Trump, and Vice President Vance, when Trump and Vance ganged up on Zelensky a lot of what they were saying was just Russian propaganda about how Ukraine is leading us to World War III, how they can’t win. Trump has consistently said that Ukraine started the war, even though it was an unprovoked invasion by Russia. Vance has blamed NATO, which is the excuse that Putin has given for his unprovoked invasion. And, you know, it’s hard to know exactly where these talking points come from, but they are certainly part of the far-right infosphere in the U.S. and in Europe.

And you see very interesting interchange between Russian propaganda organs and far-right websites, and social media, and so forth in the U.S. and Europe. And it’s—at this point, it’s actually hard to know where these disinformation stories start, although they get propagated everywhere. But one good example of that was the this nonsense about Ukraine having bioweapons labs, which was apparently started by an expatriate American and then it, you know, found its way onto the right-wing media sphere, and then was picked up and amplified by the Russian propaganda organs. And then it’s this kind of endless feedback loop where this ridiculous stuff gets spread. And it often, you know, winds up at the highest levels of U.S. or even European politics.

So the Russians have been very effective in spreading their lies. And we are basically, at the moment, I would say, unilaterally disarming. Even before Trump took over Republicans had ended funding for the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, which is meant to counter disinformation from Russia, from ISIS, from China, and other sources. So that was defunct even before Trump came into office. And, of course, since Trump came into office he and Elon Musk have destroyed funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, for example, which supports so many groups that are trying to get out the truth about Putin’s oppression and corruption, and doing the same with other regimes around the world. And, you know, Putin—and the Trump administration has now ended offensive cyber operations against Russia. So I feel like the Russian propaganda blitz is continuing, and now instead of trying to counter it too often U.S. leaders are echoing that Russian propaganda.

ISHAM: I want to hit on one more category before we move to sort of some more general questions. Linda, what can you tell us about how Russia uses—facilitates migration, and it’s actually weaponized migration?

LOURIE: Yeah. So between August and December of 2023, more than 1,300 asylum seekers from the Middle East, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, entered Russia with cheap flights on student or tourist visas. And they were given winter coats and bicycles and driven to the border with Finland. It’s about a thousand-mile border with Finland, and a lot of it is not well guarded. But they give them winter coats and bicycles—and bicycles because you’re not allowed to walk across the border. That’s one rule.

And so they’ve got them biking across the border, with the idea that all these asylum seekers are going to destabilize Finland and, in effect, the EU. And a largely this was retaliation for Finland’s joining NATO in April of 2023, and looking to destabilize their alliance—the NATO alliance, as well as the EU. This was a security threat as well as an economic threat. So they did this before with Belarus, but Belarus was an ally, and with the idea that they’re going to get people into Europe through Belarus. But this was particularly egregious. And Finland retaliated—or, responded by closing all their borders with Russia.

ISHAM: Thank you. I’d like to move on to question of how—from a from a high point of view—how NATO combats this kind of warfare. James, one of its characteristics, it seems to me, is the deniability and the ambiguity that’s built into many of these kinds of attacks. The difficulty in attributing these attacks to certain actors, and particularly tracing them back to perpetrators such as Russia or China. What is NATO doing to strengthen intelligence sharing among member states, among both law enforcement organizations as well as intelligence organizations, to try to get a better—get better visibility into the actors behind these kind of tactics?

APPATHURAI: So a couple of points. And I think it’s a great question, because better visibility is crucial, but I would also put some constraints on the attribution aspect. So I’ll just explain for a second. It’s very important that we don’t allow a sort of very rigid requirement for 100 percent attribution at all times to handcuff us from doing what we need to defend our systems, to also establish some deterrence. These kind of gray zone, destabilization efforts, hybrid, whatever you call it, are predicated on the attempt to be deniable, to hide it, to be ambiguous, to make it difficult to determine exactly who was behind it very quickly. And that’s the attempt. It doesn’t always work. And they’re not often very good at it, but that’s part of the package.

But what’s really important is that we do what’s necessary to defend our societies, regardless of where the threat comes. But we do need to identify that there is a threat and, if possible, attribute, because actor-specific responses are more effective. If you know what they’re going after, for whatever reason, then you can build better resilience and you can respond and deter more effectively. So a real important foundation of that is good tracking. And we haven’t been good at it. We have been, as a group of countries—not treating this as a group of countries. There’s been a lot of Whack-a-Mole happening.

You know, when my son was young and I took him to football, to soccer, you’d see a bunch of six-year-olds all running after the ball. You know, nobody plays their position. You don’t see the whole field. We were a little bit like that. What we are doing now is tracking in a comprehensive way. And this is something we’ve just built in the last couple of years, to be able to look across the alliance at the full scale and the full range of destabilization activities or hybrid attacks, and putting together a tracking mechanism. And the logic of that is threefold.

One is to get a comprehensive view and not play at Whack-a-Mole. Second, is to set a baseline. Because we have been in a bit of a boiling frog situation where it’s going up a little bit all the time, and it’s going up over here, and then it’s going up over there. And if you look back five to ten years, this overall scale is much higher than it used to be. And we cannot accept for ourselves that we just get used to this ever-increasing amount. So that’s the first or second reason, to set a baseline.

Third is to get a pattern, to see patterns. If one train in the Netherlands, say, that carries supplies to the Ukraine derails, well, it might be a derailment. But if we see seven in seven countries, then we know that it’s a pattern. And we know also what the intent is. And we don’t need to catch seven people who have been hired online by the Russians, or whoever, to carry out this attack. We know, and we can build better resilience. We can respond in different ways, including managing escalation and deterrence.

And the third reason is to detect the trends. Meaning, is it going up? Is it going down? And I say that because we want it to go down. It’s one thing to set a baseline, but we don’t want this to be the baseline. So even as we are dealing with increased resilience, deterrence, escalation management, because it’s being pressured up, we also need to have a long-term strategy—our own campaign of counter destabilization—to push it down to where we can live with it, and where, you know, red lines aren’t crossed.

And what always concerns me is that a major attack from wherever in this gray zone would break through and cause, for example, major civilian casualties, major economic damage. And the Skripal example that I used before could easily have been that. Which would then trigger a very violent—I’m sorry, let me rephrase that—a very strong political response or pressure from the opposition, from the media, from the public, that we would have to deal with in times of crisis. So I think it’s really important that we have this better visibility, better attribution wherever possible, but also patterns, trends, and a comprehensive view, and we’re building all of that here.

ISHAM: Now, there have been some suggestions that NATO could strengthen its countermeasures by adopting hybrid war tactics themselves. So in other words, using Russia’s weapons against themselves. So using sabotage, covert operations, that sort of thing. Have you—what do you think about that?

APPATHURAI: I think the first thing to say, and I think it’s really important to say—and I’m not just saying it because, you know, we’re on camera—we will abide by the law. We will abide by national laws. We will abide by international laws. There is no ambiguity about that amongst allies. So that’s the first thing. Which means just because Russia does something, or China does something, or whoever does something illegal against us, or one of the allies, that we’re not automatic—we’re not going to do something illegal in response. Second point to make is an effective response to this threat does not necessarily mean you respond with like for like. Like, a cyberattack against one or more allies does not mean that we should necessarily, or any individual ally should, launch a cyberattack in response.

You can take political judgments to impose costs and express displeasure that are not necessarily like for like. So I’ll give you an example. Major cyberattack can lead—and in fact, does lead—to the expulsion of a substantial number of Russian so-called diplomats, who were carrying out espionage activities inside NATO countries and across, in many cases, Schengen. And so there was a collective decision to engage in this mass decision to PNG, persona non grata, a whole number of Russian diplomats, or so-called diplomats, as a response. This is an effective way to manage this particular challenge. And I think each time there is an incident allies will take a decision nationally or together on how to respond. It won’t necessarily be like for like. And we may take decisions even not in response but as part of the campaign to lower the overall threshold of hybrid attacks against us.

ISHAM: Got it. Good. Well, thank you very much. With that, I think we should take some questions from our members, I’d like to invite members to join the conversation. You will be cued on how to do that. Raise your hand. And, once again, reminder that this meeting is on the record.

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.)

We’ll take our first question from Jane Harman.

OPERATOR: Ms. Harman, please accept the unmute now button.

Q: Are you talking to me? This is Jane Harman.

OPERATOR: Yes, you’re on. Thank you.

Q: OK. Hello, everyone. I thought this was a great panel. Congrats.

My question is, what impact is—

OPERATOR: Apologies. Seems we’re having trouble hearing you, Ms. Harman.

Q: Well—(laughs)—

ISHAM: We got you now. That’s good.

Q: You got it?

ISHAM: Yeah.

Q: What—(audio break)—administration decision on offensive cyber having on all of this? Not tracking offensive cyber in Russia. Did you hear me?

ISHAM: Yeah. I think the question was, what was the impact of the administration’s decision to terminate offensive cyber operations against Russia, is that right, Jane?

Q: Correct. Better stated and correct.

ISHAM: OK. (Laughs.) James, you want to take a whack at that?

APPATHURAI: Well, I guess what I would say is this. You know, there’s all sorts of fast-moving events and decisions that are underway. What I would say is, from a NATO point of view, I would draw your attention to a political article from a couple of days ago in which a senior NATO official, who wasn’t me, is quoted as saying that intelligence cooperation from the United States with allies through NATO has not been interrupted. It hasn’t been modified. So that’s sort of the basis here. Beyond that, I would leave it to other colleagues.

ISHAM: Max, I think—I have a feeling where you would take that question. Maybe you want to suggest another pathway there?

BOOT: Well, I don’t—I mean, I don’t know the exact consequence of cutting off cyber—offensive cyber operations against Russia. And we probably will not know the consequence of that for a little while. And the consequence is probably going to be highly classified, unless it appears on the front page of the New York Times, which is also possible. But, I mean, it does seem to me, as just an outside observer with no access to any of the super-secret information that we’re discussing, that there is a bizarre imbalance in the Trump administration approach here, where Trump is bending over backwards to curry favor with Putin, including by cutting off cyber operations against Russia, but at the same time he has cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which is getting Ukrainians killed.

And that is putting a massive hamper on Ukrainian ability to defend their population or to target the Russians, who continue their unprovoked, illegal, criminal aggression against Ukraine. So, you know, I can’t see any justification whatsoever for this approach. And, you know, I think it’s just basically an encouragement to further Russian aggression, whether in Ukraine, or in Europe, or in the United States, because basically the signal we are sending to Putin is we will not oppose him. And that is a very dangerous signal to send, I think, to somebody who is already an indicted war criminal.

BOOT: OK. Thank you. Next question, please.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Ken Morse.

Q: Thank you for this excellent panel. And, James, thank you for tuning in across the time zones.

It’s a very simple, naive question. What’s the definition of a declaration of war? It seems to me that deliberately dragging an anchor a hundred kilometers, with the obvious knowledge that critical infrastructure will be severed, is pretty close. But I don’t know. And maybe you guys can tell me when is hybrid not hybrid?

ISHAM: When—I guess, when would hybrid activities cross the line and trigger an Article 5 response, for example? Maybe you could address that, James.

APPATHURAI: Sure. So, first of all, it’s a great question. And it’s not a naive question. It’s a sophisticated question. And it’s one that we, you know, think about very hard here. The basic policy position of allies is that a hybrid attack can reach the level of armed attack and therefore trigger Article 5. Or, cumulative hybrid attacks could reach a level where allies wish together to invoke Article 5—because, of course, it’s up to allies to invoke it, not the secretary general, and not NATO. It’s up to allies to do that. And, as you know, we’ve only done it once.

Then comes the next level, which is, OK, what if one ally feels that it has reached that level? And I think it’s really important that we exercise together and discuss together these ideas because one ally’s view might not be that of other allies if we haven’t really exercised it together. So Norway has said publicly that it could consider that an attack on the critical infrastructure it operates can be considered an armed attack against Norway, which then it could bring to the NATO table. And, you know, when you look at how Europe now depends on Norway for 30 percent of its natural gas since we’ve gotten off Russian supplies, that would matter to everybody. And it’s part of the reason why I suspect the Norwegian government wanted to send a very clear message by announcing this publicly.

So, you know, to bring that long answer to an end, it is a political decision every time, first on the part of a nation and then, if they bring it to NATO, on the part of other allies. But our policy position is very clear. And we will continue to—and we’re doing it right now, literally, almost as I speak—we will continue to exercise together hybrid attacks against us so that we have a common understanding of where the thresholds are of what each ally sees as core to their national interest, and where these attacks can reach the level of armed attack.

The final point I’d make, though, is we really should not make the mistake of thinking that, OK, there’s hybrid, and then kinetic starts and hybrid’s done and we’re into war fighting. These kinds of destabilization activities will not just continue during full force-on-force fight, but they will intensify. Cyberattacks, disinformation, political interference, attacks on critical infrastructure, attacks on energy infrastructure, these will all be part of a kinetic fight and they’ll continue at varying levels before and after. That is the reality we’re in.

ISHAM: Thank you. Next question, please

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Meredith Berger.

Q: Thank you so much. Meredith Berger.

And I wanted to go to a piece of U.S. critical infrastructure that was more recently designated in the context of some of the information warfare that several folks were commenting on. And that’s elections. I know that recently the administration has made a decision to review CISA, the FBI task force that looks at influence operations. I was wondering if you all would comment on what that means in the context of this conversation, and how you see that impacting in some of the gray space that we’re talking about. Thank you.

ISHAM: James, you want to address that?

APPATHURAI: I think that’s a question for Americans.

ISHAM: OK. Linda, maybe you have some thoughts on that?

LOURIE: Thanks. I mean, that’s a great question. I think, as Max was talking about, the media influence both in terms of sovereign media outlets, like RT, but also, like, social media, I think there is a great deal of disinformation and misinformation, as well as just flat-out interference that we’ve seen in the past. And by removing our—or, diminishing our ability to spot that, it’s very worrisome, frankly. And it makes it difficult for us to be able to respond in the future and future elections, and to ensure that we have free and fair elections.

ISHAM: And what kinds of countermeasures would you suggest could be strengthened to, basically, prevent these kinds of attacks in the future?

LOURIE: I mean, I think with AI there’s increasing opportunity for malign involvement. Some of the AI tools, like watermarking and identification of—that requirement of identification that AI is being used would be helpful in being able to identify which are actual videos and which are AI-created videos. And then reestablishing measures that can identify malign efforts to destabilize and promote disinformation would be ideal.

ISHAM: OK. Thank you. Next question, please.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Ken Kraetzer.

Oh, good morning. This great panel. Ken Kraetzer with CaMMVetsMedia.

When we were in Washington in December they talked a lot about the SALT Typhoon virus. But military people tell us about the connection between cyber and space. And I’m wondering if damage to a communications satellite would go over the line that you’re describing between hybrid and kinetic.

APPATHURAI: Oh, I guess that one’s for me again, huh?

ISHAM: That’s for you. James, yeah. (Laughter.)

APPATHURAI: So, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about space and our—and, I mean, all allies and NATO’s heavy dependence on space assets. And, you know, we have now taken steps to enhance our resilience in space. And that includes stronger reliance on commercial infrastructure. You know, we’ve always had this sort of exquisite military satellite focus in many NATO countries. And obviously these satellites have incredible capability. But what you see more recently is the proliferation of commercial satellites, low earth orbit synthetic aperture radar satellites, low earth orbit communication satellites. Starlink is an excellent example but there are others. And so we’re working really hard to basically diminish the threat that you just discussed, which is taking out one satellite, which can then, you know, blind you, cripple your ability to communicate or to see.

With these constellations of small satellites, it becomes really, really hard to take them out. Like, maybe with this sort of nuclear weapon that Russia is putting into space, well, then everything goes. But below that I’m actually feeling confident that as we, and NATO allies also nationally, move towards these different constellations, actually the risk of a single attack against a satellite having such an impact on our security that it does raise very fundamental questions about collective defense will diminish. And I think diminish pretty quickly, because of the pace at which these satellite constellations are being put up.

Not just by us, by many, many countries. But, you know, we happen to have in the West a real strength when it comes to launch. And, you know, SpaceX is one of the most obvious, but there are others in the U.S. which are also of good value. So I think actually we’re getting to be, when it comes to space, in a stronger position than the pretty vulnerable position we’ve been in until now, especially when you see the extent to which China, in particular, has developed antisatellite capabilities. Russia has as well. I just mentioned the biggest one. So it’s of concern. I hope and expect that over time it will be of diminishing concern.

ISHAM: Thank you. Next question, please.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from James Gavrilis.

Q: Hi. James Gavrilis. I’m with George Washington University.

Maybe this is not such an interesting question, but I have a lot of graduate students who are interested in this field. And I’m wondering what areas do you see further research could advance either awareness or understanding or policy changes? And I’d like to almost hear from every one of the panelists, if they’ve got a couple ideas on that. Thanks.

ISHAM: OK. Well, shall we start with Max? Any ideas on that?

BOOT: I mean, there’s a lot to do. It’s obviously a burgeoning area. And there’s so many different questions that have been raised, even during this—our discussion today that don’t have great answers, like when do hybrid attacks cross the threshold of becoming acts of war and that could lead to kinetic response? Or, you know, how—you know, what is the threat of information operations? What is the threat of cyber operations? How do you counter these threats?

I mean, to me, it’s a vast research agenda which is only hampered at this point by the fact that I don’t expect there will be a lot of U.S. government funding coming for any of these things because, obviously, U.S. government funding for a lot of worthwhile activities is now being slashed. So it’ll have to be supported elsewhere. Maybe I hope our European partners and allies can step in and continue that collective intellectual engagement with these issues.

ISHAM: Linda.

LOURIE: This is a great question. Really appreciate your asking it.

I think public awareness, public education, and especially with the younger generations, is really critical. They have to learn how to look at media, and with a clear eye, and be able to detect what is disinformation, what is accurate. Being able to be critical—have a critical eye is really an important skill. And so the—with a lot of the things we’ve been talking about, it’s about separating the noise—the signal from the noise, essentially. So I think that’s great, you know, for your students to be thinking about this.

ISHAM: James, any thoughts on that?

APPATHURAI: Well, maybe a couple. What I think would be very useful is basically AI tools. And, I would say, not generative AI but agentic AI tools to basically be able to track open-source information, and then turn it into something useful. So I mentioned the patterns, the trends, they can—these tools can increasingly give warnings to policymakers when they see attacks coming. They can propose remedial steps, for example, in cyber when cyberattacks are coming, as a result of a zero-day vulnerability that’s being exploited by whatever attacker. And that can be, you know, a kid in the basement or it can be a state actor.

But these tools are super effective when programmed correctly, but is just beginning to give the public, to give policymakers an idea of what’s really happening across the breadth of threats and activities, detect the patterns and the trends, but also to propose remedial steps that can be taken, and all very quickly. So there’s an area where, you know, we can hire very big, expensive companies to do it—and to a certain extent, they can do it. But with the pace of change in AI, that would be a very interesting thing I would ask my students to develop. And, you know, spin off a company and go get rich.

ISHAM: (Laughs.) Very interesting. So I think those are all good suggestions. Next question, please.

OPERATOR: We do not have any questions currently in the queue. So back over to you, Mr. Isham.

ISHAM: OK. So maybe we could wind up a little bit on some general questions of where we go from here. One specific question is it seems that many of the attacks that have been attributed to Russia are linked to the war in Ukraine. And one question I have is, if there is some kind of a peace agreement in Ukraine, and given this—you know, it may or may not be temporary. But if there is a—if the violence subsides to some degree, would you anticipate a similar downtick in the pace of hybrid war attacks against countries in Europe? Or do you think that Russia is hellbent on this path, regardless of the campaign in Ukraine, and that these kinds of destabilization efforts and gray zone attacks would continue regardless of what happens in Ukraine? I’d put that to James, but I’d be interested in the other panelists as well.

APPATHURAI: So I’m absolutely convinced that they will continue, for three reasons. One is, they preceded the war in Ukraine. So, point one. Point two is they are—or, actually a few points. They are part of the Russian strategic mentality, and approach, and force structure, and exercise program. So that’s the second reason. Third reason is Russia has ambitions that go well beyond Donetsk and Luhansk. You know, when I was in school I was taught that Russia was a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a puzzle. But, actually, my experience, and now it’s long experience, is that this is not true at all. Russia says exactly what it thinks. It says it repeatedly. And then we’re always surprised when they actually do it.

But, you know, Russia has made no secret of its ambitions to impose itself on its neighbors. That, you know, when President Putin said that the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, that was what they meant. And I was in Munich in 2007 when he gave that very famous speech. And then the final reason is, if you look at Russia it has now closed off its information space. And the Kremlin is convincing the totality of the Russian population that the collective West, as they call us, is Russophobic—not true—trying to dismantle Russia—not true—trying to contain Russia—to a certain extent, true. Meaning, we don’t want them to, you know, impose themselves militarily on their neighbors. That, we don’t like. And holding them back from their ambition to be a great power, meaning to dominate Europe.

And that is going to continue, because we have no way of changing their minds, of communicating the truth to them, of expressing to them what we actually see, because of this information space closure and the internal propaganda inside of Russia. So for all these reasons, I have zero doubt that this is going to be a real problem for us for a very long time. Even after—even as we have to constrain Russia militarily, we’re also going to have to constrain this hybrid threat, which I expect not just to continue but to increase.

ISHAM: Thank you. Max and Linda, do you have anything to add to that?

BOOT: I mean, fully agree. And I think, keep in mind what’s going to—if there is a ceasefire—and I don’t actually see much immediate prospect of a ceasefire in Ukraine because, again, all of Putin’s incentives at this point are just to keep going because the U.S. has cut off Ukraine. But if there is a ceasefire, I would expect a massive uptick in Russian gray zone-type of activity, especially in Ukraine because, as James was alluding to, Putin’s goal is not to take 20 percent of Ukraine. He wants 100 percent.

And so if there is a temporary stop in the fighting, Russia is going to focus not just on rebuilding its military arsenal but also on a massive subversion campaign to overthrow President Zelensky, to install a Russian puppet in Kyiv. Which, remember, this is how we got here, is when the people of Ukraine rose up and overthrew a Russian puppet in 2014, that’s the direct event. It wasn’t the expansion of NATO. It was the fact that Ukrainians were throwing off Russian domination that led to the Russian campaign in eastern Ukraine, the seizure of Crimea, and then eventually, in 2022, the Russian attempt to take all of Ukraine.

So I would expect that those types of subversion activities would radically increase as a result of any agreement that is reached with Putin. In addition to, of course, all the other things that James talked about in Europe and the U.S. I mean, Russia is also, by the way, projecting power in Africa, in the Middle East. They’ve used mercenaries and other means to do that there. So I think all these activities are going to be on the upsurge, even if there is a temporary peace in Ukraine.

ISHAM: Good.

LOURIE: I would agree. Just be to be really quick, I completely agree with everything James and Max said. And would just take that one more step, which I would say this is part of the axis of chaos, or whatever you want to call it. But Russia, China, Iran trying to change the world order, and that this is one tool in their toolbelt to remove the United States and the—and the West from the top of the food chain, to put them up. And so I think it will continue.

ISHAM: Great. Well, thank you very much. That is 12:00. So on penalty of death we’ve got to wind this up. But it’s been a very, very interesting discussion. And thank you, James, Max, and Linda, and all of you who joined today.

APPATHURAI: Thank you very much.

BOOT: Thank you.

LOURIE: Thank you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

19. It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot.

Will this resonate with Americans in "flyover country" who support the President? Or will it further harden their resolve and support for the President?

Every one of these issues might cause many Americans to say either "so what" or "good riddance" or "good for us."

NATO is over.

The West is (temporarily) over.

The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft.

Europe will either revive or become a museum.

A new age of nuclear proliferation.

China will fill the gap.

A global culture war.

A return to national greatness.

David Brooks

It Isn’t Just Trump. America’s Whole Reputation Is Shot.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/opinion/america-trump-europe.html

March 13, 2025

Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

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Many years ago, I asked a friend who had been hired as a senior foreign policy official what he’d learned in government that he didn’t know beforehand. He replied: “I used to think policy-making was 75 percent about relationships. Now I realize it’s 95 percent about relationships.”

It’s very hard to do big things alone. So competent leaders and nations rely on relationships built on shared values, shared history and shared trust. They construct coalitions to take on the big challenges of the age, including the biggest: whether the 21st century is going to be a Chinese century or another American century.

In that contest the Chinese have many advantages, but until recently America had the decisive one — we had more friends around the world. Unfortunately, over the last month and a half, America has smashed a lot of those relationships to smithereens.

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

In Canada and Mexico you now win popularity by treating America as your foe. Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas.

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This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.

So what’s going to happen?

NATO is over. Joe Biden spent four years defending the postwar liberal order. That order grew out of a specific historical experience: Isolationism after World War I led to the horrors of World War II; internationalism after World War II led to 80 years of superpower peace. You tell that narrative to the younger generations and many look at you as if you’re talking about the 14th century. The postwar order was a historic accomplishment, but it was a product of its time, and we are not going back to it. It does no good to try to revive the ghost of Dean Acheson; we have to think of a new global architecture.

The West is (temporarily) over. What we call “the West” is a centuries-long conversation — Socrates searching for truth, Rembrandt embodying compassion, Locke developing enlightenment liberalism, Francis Bacon pioneering the scientific method. This is our heritage. For all of our history America understood itself as the culmination of the great Western project. The idea of the West was reified in all the alliances and exchanges between Europe and North America.

But the category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head. Trump is cutting America off from its spiritual and intellectual roots. He has completed the project that Jesse Jackson started in 1987 when he and a bunch of progressive activists at Stanford chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft. Don’t overthink this. Trump is not playing four-dimensional chess and trying to pry Russia from its alliance with China. American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft. Elon Musk codes as hard; U.S.A.I.D. codes as soft. WWE is hard; universities are soft. Struggles for dominance are hard; alliances are soft.

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Europe will either revive or become a museum. It’s possible Europe will become a low-fertility, low-innovation, slow-growth vacation destination for the world. But Europeans know that this is their moment to cut the security cord with America and revive their own might. Germany is increasing its borrowing capacity so it can build weapons. The former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi jolted the continent by arguing that market fragmentation was killing innovation in tech. Many conservatives are convinced that Europe is too secular and decadent to ever recover. Maybe. But Germany is a serious nation. France has an unsurpassed Civil Service. History has shown that the British people can be trusted when times are hard.

A new age of nuclear proliferation. As America withdraws its security umbrella, nations around the world, from Poland to even Japan, will conclude that they need nuclear weapons. What could go wrong?

China will fill the gap. As America betrays its friends, China will seek to make them. China’s special representative for European affairs to the E.U. recently called the Trump administration’s treatment of Europe “appalling.” He continued: “I believe European friends should reflect on this and compare the Trump administration’s policies with those of the Chinese government. In doing so, they will see that China’s diplomatic approach emphasizes peace, friendship, good will and win-win cooperation.”

This kind of plea will fall on skeptical ears, but the reality is that when they are faced with two rogue superpowers — China and America — nations across Europe, Asia and Africa will have to hedge their bets and play both sides.

A global culture war. For years, the World Values Survey has shown that Western Europe and the blue parts of America are drifting toward a hyper-individualistic, postmodern culture that is farther and farther away from the more traditional communal cultures in other parts of the globe. That was bound eventually to produce political rifts. One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia.

A return to national greatness. History is not over. As the historian Robert Kagan points out, America oscillates between periods of isolationism and interventionism. We also oscillate between individualism and communitarianism, cynicism and idealism, secularism and religiosity, irrational pessimism and irrational optimism. We are now on the extreme edge of the former of all those polarities.

Trumpian incompetence will provoke a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth. When that happens people will be ready to hear the truth that Trump will never understand — that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at home and abroad, that are actually the source of America’s long-term might.

More from Opinion on Trump and the world

Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman

A Great Unraveling Is Underway

March 11, 2025

Opinion | Farah Stockman

Trump’s Foreign Policy May Be Crude, but It’s Realist

March 7, 2025

Opinion | M. Gessen

Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.

Feb. 28, 2025

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David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks

A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2025, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: America Is Surrounded by Enemies … That We Created. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

20. The Cost of Ignoring Geopolitics

Excerpts:

Even though Trump’s policies likely forever changed Europe’s view of the United States, trans-Atlantic ties may not be completely ruined. Rather than trying to develop an independent defense concept linked to the European Union, Europe is better served by maintaining relations with the United States within the NATO framework. However, Europe should aim for a “reversed NATO,” where Europe, not the United States, is the dominating force within the alliance.

Even as it maintains trans-Atlantic relations, Europe should enhance its strategic autonomy to such an extent that it is capable of surviving U.S. abandonment. Europe also needs to be strong enough to avoid alliance entrapment, whereby the United States demands that European nations to do its dirty work in out-of-area missions that run counter to the continent’s interests.

Europe’s challenges go beyond security. Europe’s democratic governance model is now under severe threat—from within as well as from Russian and U.S. interference. Finally, as Mario Draghi’s recent report on EU competitiveness so eloquently pinpointed, the European economy is also in shambles. Indeed, a newly published U.N. Industrial Development Organization report estimated that by 2030, Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse—Germany—will account for only 3 percent of global industrial production (down from 8 percent in 2000), while China will control no less than 45 percent (up from 6 percent in 2000).

In order to retain democracy’s attractiveness for citizens and build a solid defense structure capable of deterring Russia, Europe must swiftly revitalize its economy. If the United States is no longer willing to partner with Europe economically as in other areas, then European leaders must look to bring the United Kingdom back into the EU, develop the continent’s links with Africa, and reconsider its relationship with China.

Only serious, concrete, and fast changes along these lines, rather than yet more summits and speeches, will show that Europe has woken up from its long geopolitical slumber.

The Cost of Ignoring Geopolitics

Like Napoleon and the Ming dynasty, Europe is paying the price for strategic blindness.

By Jo Inge Bekkevold, a senior China fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies.

Foreign Policy · by Jo Inge Bekkevold

Geopolitics
Military
United States
Russia
Europe

March 14, 2025, 12:47 PM

Europe finds itself in the greatest peril since the 1940s. As Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, the Trump administration’s policy shifts mean that Europe suddenly faces the possibility of war with Russia without the United States’ full backing. Washington is now negotiating a possible peace directly with Moscow and Kyiv, without the participation of other Europeans. It also seems willing to reach a deal largely on Russia’s terms.

In addition, the Trump administration demands that any security guarantees to Ukraine be provided by European countries without U.S. backing, and it has signaled uncertainty about its willingness to adhere to NATO’s Article 5 commitments to help defend Europe in case of attack. This is a state of affairs that Europe’s armed forces are ill-prepared to handle.

Europeans could, of course, blame this development entirely on Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump—and many of them do. But at the end of the day, Europeans must acknowledge that they are now paying the price for their own geopolitical ignorance.

History abounds with examples of leaders turning a blind eye to geopolitics, for which their nations eventually paid a heavy price. French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte neglected the challenges of geography when he invaded Russia in 1812, with his army’s devastating losses there contributing to his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo three years later. Nazi Germany committed a similar mistake, setting in motion its own downfall when it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, exposing itself to a two-flank war.

On the level of grand strategy, China’s Ming dynasty committed one of history’s most momentous geopolitical mistakes when it abandoned seafaring in the mid-15th century.

In the 14th and early 15th centuries, China put to sea the most powerful and majestic fleet that the world had ever seen, fully dominating the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. Yet from the 1430s onward, just as European shipbuilding and navigation skills were on the rise, the Chinese emperors reduced their support to shipyards and banned most ocean-going trade. As a result, European navies would dominate Asian waters for the next five centuries.

Europe has failed to learn from these examples—and ignored three distinct geopolitical developments.

First, Europe has largely shut its eyes to Russia’s reemergence as an imperial power, which is the most important and far-reaching geopolitical development directly affecting Europe since the end of the Cold War. Like the Ming emperors who scrapped their navy, the Europeans literally abandoned geopolitics. For almost two decades, they developed a force structure more suited to fight insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan and frighten off pirates in the Gulf of Aden than defending the European homeland. Europe could afford to take its holiday from geopolitics and ignore Putin’s growing assertiveness for one simple reason: the security guarantee extended by the United States.

Second, Europe has failed to acknowledge the geopolitical logic of China’s rise, which will ultimately force the United States to rebalance its military posture toward the Indo-Pacific. In 2011, when the Obama administration first announced a U.S. “pivot to Asia,” only two European countries were fulfilling NATO’s pledge to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. A decade later, in 2021, only four additional European NATO members had managed to reach this threshold.

One important reason for this lack of response was the United States’ apparent suspension of the pivot to Asia when it moved troops to Eastern Europe and warships back into the Atlantic in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. At the time, many people who I talked with in the European strategic community seemed to believe that Washington had permanently pivoted back to Europe. However, they ignored that the U.S. rebalance to Asia is driven by the strongest and most irresistible forces in international relations: the balance of power and a fear of expanding hegemons.

China’s defense spending of $309 billion in 2023 was larger than that of the rest of East Asia plus South Asia combined, meaning that China could easily dominate the region if the United States withdrew its military presence there.

The situation in Europe is very different. The Russian economy is smaller than Italy’s in terms of nominal GDP, and it and lacks key technological and manufacturing capacities; any inability of Europeans to deter and contain Russia is entirely due to European leaders’ past and present unwillingness to do so. This difference in the Asian and European balances of power helps explain Washington’s ongoing flirtation with the Kremlin. A settlement of the Russia-Ukraine war would enable a more comprehensive U.S. military rebalance to Asia.

The third geopolitical development that Europe has ignored at its own peril is the Sino-Russian partnership, its inherent strategic logic, and the value that both countries place on it. China’s economic rise has enabled Russia to diversify its trade relations and reduce its dependency on Europe. This has been particularly important for Russia since 2014, when the West first imposed economic and financial sanctions in response to the annexation of Crimea.

Moreover, despite being the junior partner, Russia knows that China is preoccupied with its rivalry with the United States in the Pacific, which mitigates Moscow’s threat perception of Beijing. Indeed, Russia would not have undertaken a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with an unfriendly China on its Asian flank. For China, good ties with Russia are driven even more strongly by geopolitics and considerations about the balance of power. Having Moscow on its side could give Beijing an edge in its superpower rivalry with Washington.

In sum, Russia’s return to imperialism, the U.S. shift to Asia, and the China-Russia partnership should have provided European leaders with valid reasons to rethink their continent’s security arrangements, but they did not. We are so used to thinking of Europeans as living in their holiday from history that we are less surprised by their ignorance of geopolitics than we should be.

After all, the major European powers used to be masters of strategy. The school of realism in international relations theory, with its strong focus on the balance of power, largely builds on studies of the European great powers. At the height of the British Empire in 1848, then-Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston famously declared in the House of Commons that “[w]e have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Palmerston’s advice would have served European leaders well in recent decades.

Europe’s strategic blindness has various causes, including a leadership class lacking in vision and wisdom. But I would like to stress two other explanations. One important reason is that European nations moved from being masters of strategy to being strategic subordinates of the United States. This has arguably been the case ever since the 1956 Suez crisis, when the United States forced Britain and France to backpedal from their attempt at invading Egypt and controlling the Suez Canal.

While European governments have voiced their dissent on various U.S. policies in the years since, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, they remained second-tier states in an alliance with a superpower. As such, they have been more concerned about being good allies and keeping Washington engaged in Europe than they have been about developing their own strategic capabilities.

Another reason for Europe’s strategic ineptitude is the almost exclusive focus on rules and multilateralism in contemporary European thinking. The paradigm shifts between rules-based liberalism and balance-of-power realism as the dominant force informing state behavior has been a recurrent theme in international relations. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europeans strongly believed that the conditions had finally arrived for German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of eternal peace based on democracy, free trade, and the institutions that would rein in power politics. This post-Cold War optimism was not unique to Europe, but it was more dominant in Europe than in any other corner of the world.

When liberalism became not just the prevalent paradigm but a moral imperative, advocates of geopolitical realism, with their emphasis on the balance of power, were often disregarded as the horsemen of the apocalypse. They became objects of derision, as when German officials laughed at Trump warning them in 2018—as others had warned before—that energy dependence on Russia was a dangerous strategic mistake.

So, where should Europe go from here? In order to avoid the fate of the Ming dynasty, whose mistakes would haunt China for centuries, Europe urgently needs a grand strategy with a coherent view on security, democracy, and economics. Given the continent’s fragmented politics and lack of clear leadership, this is a tall order.

In terms of security, the Ukrainians’ brave war of resistance has weakened Russian military capability to such an extent that defense analysts estimate that Europe probably has a five– to 10-year window to bolster its military capabilities before Russia has fully restored its losses.

Even though Trump’s policies likely forever changed Europe’s view of the United States, trans-Atlantic ties may not be completely ruined. Rather than trying to develop an independent defense concept linked to the European Union, Europe is better served by maintaining relations with the United States within the NATO framework. However, Europe should aim for a “reversed NATO,” where Europe, not the United States, is the dominating force within the alliance.

Even as it maintains trans-Atlantic relations, Europe should enhance its strategic autonomy to such an extent that it is capable of surviving U.S. abandonment. Europe also needs to be strong enough to avoid alliance entrapment, whereby the United States demands that European nations to do its dirty work in out-of-area missions that run counter to the continent’s interests.

Europe’s challenges go beyond security. Europe’s democratic governance model is now under severe threat—from within as well as from Russian and U.S. interference. Finally, as Mario Draghi’s recent report on EU competitiveness so eloquently pinpointed, the European economy is also in shambles. Indeed, a newly published U.N. Industrial Development Organization report estimated that by 2030, Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse—Germany—will account for only 3 percent of global industrial production (down from 8 percent in 2000), while China will control no less than 45 percent (up from 6 percent in 2000).

In order to retain democracy’s attractiveness for citizens and build a solid defense structure capable of deterring Russia, Europe must swiftly revitalize its economy. If the United States is no longer willing to partner with Europe economically as in other areas, then European leaders must look to bring the United Kingdom back into the EU, develop the continent’s links with Africa, and reconsider its relationship with China.

Only serious, concrete, and fast changes along these lines, rather than yet more summits and speeches, will show that Europe has woken up from its long geopolitical slumber.

Foreign Policy · by Jo Inge Bekkevold

21. Death From Above: US Missile Strike Wipes Out ISIS Chief Of Global Ops

There appears to be a video of a strike at the link. But I am not sure if it is the actual strike. If it is, it must have been intended for release. Or was it leaked?

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/abdallah-makki-muslih-al-rifai-isis-abu-khadijah-death-from-above-us-missile-strike-wipes-out-isis-chief-of-global-ops-7927169

Death From Above: US Missile Strike Wipes Out ISIS Chief Of Global Ops

Abu Khadijah was the Chief of Global Operations for the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group and held the position of the group's second-in-command globally.

Edited by:
Samiran Mishra
World News
Mar 15, 2025 13:10 pm IST
Published OnMar 15, 2025 10:10 am IST
Last Updated OnMar 15, 2025 13:10 pm IST
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Approximately 2,500 US troops remain stationed in Iraq to support counterterrorism efforts.

New Delhi:

The United States, in coordination with Iraqi Intelligence and Security Forces, announced the killing of Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rifai, also known as "Abu Khadijah," in a precision airstrike in Iraq's Al Anbar Province. Abu Khadijah was the Chief of Global Operations for the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group and held the position of the group's second-in-command globally. Another ISIS operative was also killed in the strike, which took place on March 13.

According to US military officials, Abu Khadijah oversaw the terror group's logistics, planning, and financial management worldwide.

Following the airstrike, US Central Command (CENTCOM) and Iraqi forces arrived at the site and confirmed the deaths of Abu Khadijah and the other ISIS fighter. According to CENTCOM, both men were found wearing unexploded suicide vests and were armed with multiple weapons. The identity of Abu Khadijah was confirmed through a DNA match using samples collected from an earlier raid in which he had narrowly escaped capture.

"Abu Khadijah was one of the most important ISIS members in the entire global ISIS organisation. We will continue to kill terrorists and dismantle their organizations that threaten our homeland and U.S., allied, and partner personnel in the region and beyond," General Michael Erik Kurilla, commander of US Central Command, said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani hailed the operation, describing Abu Khadijah as "one of the most dangerous terrorists in Iraq and the world." In a post on social media platform X, al-Sudani confirmed that the operation was carried out with support from the US-led coalition.

The US had sanctioned Abu Khadijah in 2023, identifying him as the so-called governor of ISIS-controlled territories in Iraq and Syria. He was also responsible for directing the group's foreign operations. Despite ISIS' territorial defeat in Iraq in 2017, remnants of the group have remained active, launching sporadic attacks against Iraqi security forces.

"Today the fugitive leader of ISIS in Iraq was killed. He was relentlessly hunted down by our intrepid warfighters. His miserable life was terminated, along with another member of ISIS, in coordination with the Iraqi Government and the Kurdish Regional Government," wrote US President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform.

"PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!" he added.

After years of military operations led by Iraqi forces and the US-backed international coalition, ISIS was largely dismantled by 2017 in Iraq and by 2019 in Syria. Yet, the group's fighters remain active, particularly in remote areas of both countries.

Approximately 2,500 US troops remain stationed in Iraq to support counterterrorism efforts and train Iraqi forces.

22. Inside the US War Plans to Invade Canada

I certainly missed this reporting 20 years ago.

But were these simply planning exercises for military planners? I mean we have planned to fight the Krasnovians on the Kansas plains for decades as planning exercises for military students.

But the excerpt below seems to be the real explanation. This was part of the "color plans" of the 1920s. And planners were doing what planners must do: planning for every possible scenario and potential threat. These were planning exercises. I would add that the plans Orange and Black turned out to be very useful planning exercises for the US military in World War II.

I think this is really much ado about nothing.

Excerpts:

At that point, it's only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees! Or, as the official planners wrote, stating their objective in bold capital letters: "ULTIMATELY TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL."

It sounds like a joke but it's not. War Plan Red is real. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was declassified in 1974 and the word "SECRET" crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies. They can photocopy it for 15 cents a page.

War Plan Red was actually designed for a war with England. In the late 1920s, American military strategists developed plans for a war with Japan (code name Orange), Germany (Black), Mexico (Green) and England (Red). The Americans imagined a conflict between the United States (Blue) and England over international trade: "The war aim of RED in a war with BLUE is conceived to be the definite elimination of BLUE as an important economic and commercial rival."

Inside the US War Plans to Invade Canada

A military blueprint to attack Canada has been on the books for almost a century now. Former Washington Post feature writer Peter Carlson recounts how he came across it 20 years ago.

https://www.spytalk.co/p/inside-the-us-war-plans-to-invade?utm

Peter Carlson

Mar 15, 2025

In 1930, the U.S. crafted a top secret plan to invade Canada, as mapped out here. Amid rising tensions today—and as crazy as it sounds—the Trump administration may well be dusting off it’s own version. (Princeton Architectural Press map)

ONE DAY IN 2005, WHEN I WAS A REPORTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I was in the National Archives, researching a story that has long ago escaped my memory. But I remember well what happened next: A PR lady for the Archives introduced me to an ancient gentleman who'd been an archivist there for 50 years.

Being a reporter, I blurted out what seemed like the obvious question: "What's the weirdest document you've seen in your 50 years?"

He did not hesitate even a second before replying, "War Plan Red."

"What's War Plan Red?" I asked.

"It's the American war plan for invading Canada," he said.

Visions of winning the Pulitzer danced in my head, "The US plan for Invading Canada!!

Has anybody ever written about this?"

Yes, he said. When War Plan Red was declassified in the 1970s a few papers ran stories about it.

That ended my Pulitzer fantasies, so I went back to researching that now-forgotten story I was working on. When I returned to the office, I told my editor, Henry Allen, about the ancient archivist who mentioned a document detailing our plans to invade Canada.

"That's fabulous!!" Henry said. He was practically apoplectic with excitement. "Did you get it?"

"Ah, um, no," I mumbled. "Well, It's not a scoop. It's old news. It was released back in the 70s and got some press back then."

"You idiot," Henry said. "Go back and get it."

So I did. I Xeroxed the 90-plus pages of War Plan Red for 15 cents a page, and started reading. It detailed exactly how the USA's Army and Navy could blockade, invade, conquer and colonize our friendly neighbor to the north. Henry and I found it hilarious. I called the mayors of the Canadian cities that the Pentagon planned to attack and most of them seemed to think the whole idea was amusing. I wrote it up as a preposterous comedy and it ran in the Style section under the headline "Raiding the Icebox."

And I didn’t think much about "War Plan Red" until recently, when President Trump repeatedly mentioned his desire to make Canada "the 51st State." Canadians, as you might expect, didn’t take too kindly to the threat. “”Elbows up,” a hockey thing, has become a national war cry.

Anyway, I dug out the story and...well, it's still kinda funny, but maybe not quite so innocently amusing anymore.

But you can decide for yourself. Here it is:

Raiding the Icebox

Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada

Invading Canada won't be like invading Iraq: When we invade Canada, nobody will be able to grumble that we didn't have a plan.

The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It's a 94-page document called "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan -- Red," with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It's a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. It goes like this:

First, we send a joint Army-Navy overseas force to capture the port city of Halifax, cutting the Canadians off from their British allies.

Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark.

Then the U.S. Army invades on three fronts -- marching from Vermont to take Montreal and Quebec, charging out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg, and storming out of the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy seizes the Great Lakes and blockades Canada's Atlantic and Pacific ports.

At that point, it's only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees! Or, as the official planners wrote, stating their objective in bold capital letters: "ULTIMATELY TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL."

It sounds like a joke but it's not. War Plan Red is real. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was declassified in 1974 and the word "SECRET" crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies. They can photocopy it for 15 cents a page.

War Plan Red was actually designed for a war with England. In the late 1920s, American military strategists developed plans for a war with Japan (code name Orange), Germany (Black), Mexico (Green) and England (Red). The Americans imagined a conflict between the United States (Blue) and England over international trade: "The war aim of RED in a war with BLUE is conceived to be the definite elimination of BLUE as an important economic and commercial rival."

In the event of war, the American planners figured that England would use Canada (Crimson) -- then a quasi-pseudo-semi-independent British dominion -- as a launching pad for "a direct invasion of BLUE territory." That invasion might come overland, with British and Canadian troops attacking Buffalo, Detroit and Albany. Or it might come by sea, with amphibious landings on various American beaches -- including Rehoboth and Ocean City, both of which were identified by the planners as "excellent" sites for a Brit beachhead.

The planners anticipated a war "of long duration" because "the RED race" is "more or less phlegmatic" but "noted for its ability to fight to a finish." Also, the Brits could be reinforced by "colored" troops from their colonies: "Some of the colored races however come of good fighting stock, and, under white leadership, can be made into very efficient troops."

The stakes were high: If the British and Canadians won the war, the planners predicted, "CRIMSON will demand that Alaska be awarded to her."

Imagine that! Canada demanding a huge chunk of U.S. territory! Them's fightin' words! And so the American strategists planned to fight England by seizing Canada. (Also Jamaica, Barbados and Bermuda.) And they didn't plan to give them back.

"Blue intentions are to hold in perpetuity all CRIMSON and RED territory gained," Army planners wrote in an appendix to the war plan. "The policy will be to prepare the provinces and territories of CRIMSON and RED to become states and territories of the BLUE union upon the declaration of peace."

Read the rest of Peter Carr’s hilarious story here—> at The Washington Post.

A former reporter for The Washington Post and columnist for American History magazine, Peter Carlson is the author of four books. His latest is Knuckleheads: A Comic Memoir of A Father, A son and a Jamaican Jail.

23. Flynn: Kennedy brought clarity, integrity to foreign policy

A fundamentally different philosophical perspective between then and now:

Excerpts:

To underscore the value of the NATO nations’ “common political purpose,” Kennedy recalled the lessons of the Peloponnesian Wars, when each blinkered Greek city-state was “pressing its own ends to the neglect of the common cause.” The United States, Kennedy assured his Frankfurt audience, would not fall into that trap.

In condemnation of the crude and dangerously shortsighted nature of transactional diplomacy, Kennedy exhorted America’s enemies “to understand that in our relations with them we will not bargain one nation's interest against another's and that the commitment to the cause of freedom is common to us all.”

Kennedy brought clarity and integrity to foreign policy. He was unambiguous about America’s devotion to democratic virtues, and he fortified, through word and deed, the durability and reliability of strategic alliances that strengthened America. Brief as his presidency may have been, he left a record of resolute trans-Atlantic strength that another American visitor to the Berlin Wall, President Ronald Reagan, sought to emulate.

Would that all of Kennedy’s successors emulate the judgment he expressed in Fort Worth on the day of his untimely death, when he declared that “because we are stronger . . . our chances for security, our chances for peace, are better than they have been in the past.”

Flynn: Kennedy brought clarity, integrity to foreign policy

A World War II veteran who bore the wounds of combat duty in the South Pacific, Kennedy could attest to the human and material costs of defending freedom.

https://mitchellrepublic.com/opinion/columns/flynn-kennedy-brought-clarity-integrity-to-foreign-policy?utm

Sean Flynn, professor in the Department of History, Dakota Wesleyan University(Courtesy photo)

Opinion by Sean Flynn, professor in the Department of History, Dakota Wesleyan University

March 14, 2025 at 8:00 AM

Two years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Theodore Sorenson, a proud Nebraskan who served as special counsel to the slain president, published “Kennedy,” an account of the author’s political and personal relationship with the book’s chief subject. A significant portion of Sorenson’s work is devoted to Kennedy’s foreign policy.

Though he may have exaggerated the extent to which President Eisenhower was accountable for the strained U. S.-Soviet relationship inherited by the Kennedy team, Sorenson did not overstate the threat to democracy posed by Russia. The leadership in Moscow was waging, Sorenson observed, “a new Cold War offensive to master the earth — an offensive relying on Western disunity in the face of nuclear blackmail.”

China, meanwhile, was making inroads into Africa and developing a nuclear capability.U. S. foreign aid programs were shamefully underfunded, America’s military forces were poorly equipped to meet the demands of unconventional warfare, and “[t]he United Nations was in a disarray.”

Compounding these trials, Sorenson noted, was a failure of American messaging.“ Other nations were uncertain what we meant when we talked — or whether we meant it when we talked — about the equality of men . . . or about our commitment to defend freedom.”Democracy, it appeared, was “on the defensive.”

Sorenson recounts how Kennedy’s stirring inaugural address challenged the nation to staunch the spread of authoritarianism, steady the confidence of its allies, and clarify its foreign policy principles. The president proclaimed that his generation “was unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.”

A World War II veteran who bore the wounds of combat duty in the South Pacific, Kennedy could attest to the human and material costs of defending freedom. Yet he declared that the wartime generation to which he belonged would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the success of liberty.”

Though his abbreviated presidency would be marked by Communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and by the reckless Russian meddling that triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s persistent international predicament was the Russian threat to the citizens of West Berlin, whose fate, he believed, was linked to ours. Kennedy’s spirited defense of half a German city, comprised of only 2 million souls and lying within the confines of the Soviet bloc, was illustrative of his purpose to “assure the success of liberty.”

On the eve of his historic speech before the Berlin Wall, Kennedy appeared in Frankfurt to deliver what Sorenson called “one of the most carefully reworked speeches of his Presidency.”The U. S. and Europe, Kennedy emphasized, were bound by their common heritage and values, their pledge to a common defense of democracy “indivisible.”

Nevertheless, some critics, Kennedy conceded, doubted America’s commitment to European security per the provisions of the North Atlantic Treaty.They said “that the United States will neither hold to these purposes nor abide by its pledges—that we will revert to a narrow nationalism.”

Kennedy thought otherwise, for “commitments to the common freedom” expressed in the NATO charter were underpinned by “one great fundamental fact—that they are deeply rooted in America's own self-interest.” In a declaration of American foreign policy embraced by every post-World War II president save one, Kennedy reaffirmed that “[a] threat to the freedom of Europe is a threat to the freedom of America.”

To underscore the value of the NATO nations’ “common political purpose,” Kennedy recalled the lessons of the Peloponnesian Wars, when each blinkered Greek city-state was “pressing its own ends to the neglect of the common cause.” The United States, Kennedy assured his Frankfurt audience, would not fall into that trap.

In condemnation of the crude and dangerously shortsighted nature of transactional diplomacy, Kennedy exhorted America’s enemies “to understand that in our relations with them we will not bargain one nation's interest against another's and that the commitment to the cause of freedom is common to us all.”

Kennedy brought clarity and integrity to foreign policy. He was unambiguous about America’s devotion to democratic virtues, and he fortified, through word and deed, the durability and reliability of strategic alliances that strengthened America. Brief as his presidency may have been, he left a record of resolute trans-Atlantic strength that another American visitor to the Berlin Wall, President Ronald Reagan, sought to emulate.

Would that all of Kennedy’s successors emulate the judgment he expressed in Fort Worth on the day of his untimely death, when he declared that “because we are stronger . . . our chances for security, our chances for peace, are better than they have been in the past.”

— Sean J. Flynn, Ph.D., is professor and chair of history at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, SD.

24. OUR WWII STORY: Legion founder helped lead the OSS

Now that I know this I guess I should consider joining the American legion.

OUR WWII STORY: Legion founder helped lead the OSS

https://www.legion.org/information-center/news/library/2021/april/our-wwii-story-legion-founder-helped-lead-the-oss

By Jeff Stoffer

Library & Museum

OUR WWII STORY: Legion founder helped lead the OSS

World War I combat officer G. Edward Buxton was not done with war after military retirement.

Maj. G. Edward “Ned” Buxton Jr. of Rhode Island was the beloved commanding officer of future Medal of Honor recipient Alvin York in the 328th Infantry Regiment, 82nd Division, during World War I. Buxton had famously counseled York, then a private training at Camp Gordon, Ga., about his Christian reluctance to take another life, even in wartime combat. Buxton eventually sent York home for 10 days to sort out his feelings, certain the young man from rural Tennessee would seek non-combatant status as a conscientious objector. York, impressed with Buxton’s compassion and knowledge of the Bible, instead came back willing to fight and kill, if need be.

“It made me happy to know my battalion commander was familiar with the word of God,” York later explained. So respectful of his commanding officer, York later named one of his children George Edward Buxton York.

During the decisive Meuse-Argonne Offensive in late 1918, York led a team under Buxton’s command that eliminated 35 machine-gun nests, killed 25 enemy soldiers and took 135 prisoners, thus making York one of the most decorated U.S. soldiers in history. His story later drew global acclaim in the 1941 hit film “Sergeant York,” starring Gary Cooper.

Following the armistice in Europe, Buxton – soon to be promoted to lieutenant colonel – was one of 20 officers from the American Expeditionary Forces who met in February 1919 to lay out plans for what would become The American Legion. At the Paris Caucus the following month – which York also attended – Buxton was assigned to chair the first national Constitution Committee of the organization. He was also the first commander of his American Legion post in Providence, R.I., participated in the May 1919 St. Louis Caucus, was one of the organization’s first incorporators, helped lead the first National Convention in November 1919 in Minneapolis, and served as an American Legion National Executive Committee member in 1920.

After the war, Lt. Col. Buxton worked as a textile-industry executive and continued his dedication to The American Legion and Boy Scouts, the first youth program supported by the organization. He rose to colonel in the reserves and commanded the 385th Rhode Island Infantry, 76th Division, before he hung up the uniform in 1932.

He did not realize at the time that his wartime service was far from over.

After Col. William Donovan – also an American Legion founder – was appointed in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to lead the agency that would become the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, Donovan recruited Buxton to serve as his second-in-command. As a newspaper war correspondent before U.S. entry into World War I, Buxton had experience getting behind enemy lines to write and send strategically important reports back to the Allies. He was arrested several times during his time in Germany, France and Belgium on suspicion of being a spy, but the charges never stuck.

His life of espionage would come later.

“Col. Buxton, known for his shrewd observation and diplomacy, was the obvious choice by Donovan to be his primary deputy – first assistant director – of the OSS in order to handle procedural and many operational aspects of running this international organization,” Buxton’s grandson, Gonzalo Edward Buxton III, wrote in a 2006 biography. As the OSS grew to more than 13,000 men and women by 1944, the American Legion founder’s expertise in large organizations was vital to the spy agency. But he had a much greater role, as well, one that diversified U.S. intelligence and made him a respected colleague among top leaders of World War II.

“Donovan, Buxton and (Executive Officer Lt. Col. Otto Doering Jr.) believed that the best way into the mind of the enemy was to harness the minds, talents and experiences of every kind of American,” Buxton’s grandson wrote. “That meant hiring women as well as ethnic minorities. So, while many people were gripped with a fear of subversion, and while Japanese-Americans were being put in internment camps, the OSS (and Buxton specifically) were hiring Japanese-Americans from these camps, along with German and Italian-Americans. The OSS personnel office once boasted that its payroll listed every nationality and every occupation. The OSS hired thousands of women to work in many types of jobs. Buxton and the OSS and other war-related positions offered the first real relief from the discrimination then rampant in our society and set the stage for future progress.”

Buxton also reviewed and approved strategic plans and operations from the White House to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, including intelligence that influenced the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. He also distinguished himself as an analyst of the Soviet Union’s postwar military weaknesses. Many of his accomplishments during World War II, however, were classified, his grandson wrote.

Col. Buxton resigned as assistant director of the OSS on June 30, 1945, seven weeks after Germany surrendered to the Allies. Of his friend’s decision, Donovan wrote: “Col. Buxton has tirelessly and ably served the war effort. And now when he finds that he must return to private life, no words of mine can express the vast extent of our debt and indeed, that of our country, to him.”

Buxton returned to business leadership serving as an executive and board chairman for such companies as Fruit of the Loom Mills and Bache and Co. (later Prudential Securities). He spent two years as president of Knight Finance Corp. of Providence and worked to raise funds for his alma mater, Brown University. He also continued to serve in support of The American Legion and Boy Scouts.

When he died at age 68 on March 15, 1949 (American Legion birthday), dignitaries from around the world sent their condolences and later attended a celebration of his life in Providence. Buxton International House on Brown’s campus was named in his honor, and members of the Infantry Lodge (12 surviving former officers of World War I) deeded 30 acres of property near Rehoboth, Mass., to the Boy Scouts of America’s Narragansett Council that would become Camp Buxton. And, among the many tributes appeared one from a Dutch bulb grower – in honor of Buxton’s OSS services during World War II – who named a specially bred variety of daffodil the Edward Buxton.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

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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