Quotes of the Day:
“Guerrilla warfare is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or the accuracy of electronic computers. It can be conducted in any terrain, in any climate, in any weather; in swamps, in mountains, in farmed fields; its basic element is man and man is more complex than any of his machines.”
- Brig Gen S.B. Griffith in the Introduction to Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare, 1961.
“In a national insurrection the center of gravity to be destroyed lies in the person of the chief leader and in public opinion; against these points the blow must be directed.”
- Clausewitz, 1833.The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Land Warfare: An Illustrated World View By Byron Farwell, page 424.
"Now — now, I want to be honest with you: This could be a long and difficult battle. But the American people will be steadfast in our support of the people of Ukraine in the face of Putin’s immoral, unethical attacks on civilian populations. We are united in our abhorrence of Putin’s depraved onslaught, and we’re going to continue to have their back as they fight for their freedom, their democracy, their very survival. And we’re going to give Ukraine the arms to fight and defend themselves through all the difficult days ahead."
- President Joe Biden
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 16 (AKA PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion
3. Remarks by President Biden on the Assistance the United States is Providing to Ukraine
4. Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance for Ukraine
5. Zelenskyy tells US Congress, ‘We need you right now’
6. Outmatched in military might, Ukraine has excelled in the information war
7. Opinion | Why the West must boost military assistance to Ukraine
8. How the West is breaking through Russia’s propaganda wall
9. US must counter Russian misinformation on Ukraine with ‘psyops,’ experts say
10. Invoking America’s Darkest Days, Zelensky Pleads for More U.S. Aid
11. Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says
12. Ukraine War Update - March 17, 2022 | SOF News
13. The DOD Needs a Joint Wargaming Center
14. Japan spots four Russian amphibious transports sailing from Far East
15. Top Marine General Praises Ukrainian Forces as 'Very Well Trained, Very Well Led'
16. Pacific general vows ‘robust’ response to China attack
17. Ukraine’s Lessons for Taiwan
18. A complete guide to why a no-fly zone over Ukraine won't work
19. Better Curricula, Better Strategic Outcomes: Irregular Warfare, Great Power Competition, and Professional Military Education
20. Fall of the Golden Arches Theory: Enriching tyrants doesn’t prevent wars after all
21. Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says
22. A Losing and Desperate Putin Could Be Terrifying
23, Paying for Tomorrow’s Readiness with Today’s
24. Inherently Escalatory: The No-Fly Zone in Ukraine
25. China will define the next phase of the Russia-Ukraine war—and the shifting world order
26. U.S. bars ex-spies from becoming 'mercenaries,' following Reuters series
27. How China is winning the information war in the Pacific
28. We need to stop talking about the grey zone
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 16 (AKA PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 16
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 16, 5:30 pm ET
Russian forces face mounting difficulties replacing combat losses in Ukraine, including the possible death of the commander of the 150th Motor Rifle Division near Mariupol. Russian efforts to deploy forces from Armenia, its proxy states in Georgia, and reserve units in the Eastern Military District will not provide Russian forces around Kyiv with the combat power necessary to complete the encirclement of the city in the near term. Russian forces made limited, unsuccessful attacks northwest of Kyiv and did not conduct offensive operations in northeastern Ukraine, toward Kharkiv, or toward Mykolayiv. Russian forces did make limited territorial gains in Donetsk Oblast and around Mariupol and continued to target civilian infrastructure in the city. Russian forces will likely continue to reduce the Mariupol pocket in the coming days, but Russian forces likely remain unable to conduct simultaneous attacks along multiple axes of advance.
Key Takeaways
- Russia is deploying reserves from Armenia and South Ossetia and cohering new battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from the remnants of units lost early in the invasion. These reinforcements will likely face equal or greater command and logistics difficulties to current frontline Russian units.
- President Zelensky created a new joint military-civilian headquarters responsible for the defense of Kyiv on March 15.
- Russian forces conducted several failed attacks northwest of Kyiv and no offensive operations northeast of Kyiv on March 16.
- Russian forces continue to shell civilian areas of Kharkiv, but will be unlikely to force the city to surrender without encircling it—which Russian forces appear unable to achieve.
- Russian forces continued to reduce the Mariupol pocket on March 16. Russian forces continue to commit war crimes in the city, targeting refugees and civilian infrastructure.
- Ukrainian Forces claimed to have killed the commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army’s 150th Motor Rifle Division near Mariupol on March 15. If confirmed, Miyaev would be the fourth Russian general officer killed in Ukraine; his death would be a major blow to the 150th Motor Rifle Division, Russia’s principal maneuver unit in Donbas.
- Russian warships shelled areas of Odesa Oblast on March 16 but Russian Naval Infantry remain unlikely to conduct an unsupported amphibious landing.
Russia is increasingly pulling forces from its international bases and redeploying damaged units that were rotated out early in the invasion of Ukraine to replace mounting casualties. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are deploying additional Eastern Military District (EMD) reserves to Ukraine as of March 16.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff additionally reported that Russian command “refused” to deploy elements of the 5th Combined Arms Army (CAA) to the Kyiv advance “due to heavy losses in the south.”[2] It is unclear if the Ukrainian General Staff means Ukraine intercepted a request by Russian commanders around Kyiv for reinforcements from the 5th CAA that was denied, or if they are only assessing that Russian casualties in the south are draining reinforcements initially intended for Kyiv. Social media users observed elements of Russia’s 58th Combined Arms Army based in Russia‘s proxy republic in Georgia, South Ossetia, redeploying in likely transit to Ukraine on March 15.[3] Russia has already pulled forces from its base in Armenia and will likely soon redeploy forces from its base in Tajikistan. The Ukrainian General Staff additionally reported that Russia is forming additional battalion tactical groups (BTGs) by consolidating units that suffered losses in the first 10 days of the Russian invasion and graduating cadets from military higher education early to replace officer losses.[4] Russian forces will likely face further difficulties integrating these units into its command and logistics structures.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk Oblast;
- Supporting effort 2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast; and
- Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.
Ukraine established a new military headquarters responsible for the defense of Kyiv on March 15. Ukrainian President Zelensky appointed acting Commander of the Joint Forces Oleksandr Pavlyuk as head of the “Kyiv Regional Military Administration,” a new position, and appointed Eduard Koskalov the new Commander of the Joint Forces.[5] Zelensky announced that Pavlyuk will take over unified control of Ukrainian actions around Kyiv “to further strengthen the defense of the capital” and will be supported by Kyiv‘s civilian regional governor, Oleksiy Kuleba. Zelensky likely established this command structure to place an experienced general in charge of all efforts to defend the Kyiv region. Russian forces again conducted only limited attacks northwest of Kyiv and no attacks northeast of the city on March 16.
Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro
The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled limited Russian attacks toward Vyshhorod, along the western bank of the Dnipro River, on March 16.[6] Kremlin-run media claimed Russian paratroopers crossed the Irpin River at an unspecified location on March 16, but these claims are likely false.[7] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued to regroup and restore combat capabilities and used Orlan-10 drones to reconnoiter Ukrainian positions.[8]
Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis
Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations toward northeastern Kyiv on March 16.[9] The Ukrainian General Staff again reported Russian troops around Chernihiv concentrated on organizing logistical support “without success.”[10] Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attempts to encircle Sumy city from the south on March 15-16.[11]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:
Russian forces did not conduct major offensive operations toward Kharkiv on March 16.[12] Russian forces continued to regroup troops and replenish their stocks of ammunition and fuel, and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russia is actively concentrating reserves in Russia to support the Kharkiv axis.[13] Ukrainian forced repelled continued Russian efforts to surround the city of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, on March 15-16.[14] The Ukrainian Border Guard reported detaining two Russian saboteurs in Kharkiv on March 16; Russian conventional forces remain unsuccessful in their frontal assaults on the city.[15] Russian forces continue to shell civilian areas of Kharkiv, but will be unlikely to force the city to surrender without encircling it—which Russian forces appear unable to achieve.[16] Russian forces are additionally unlikely to successfully bypass Kharkiv from the southeast to advance toward Dnipro and Zaporizhia in the near term.
Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk Oblast:
Ukrainian forces repelled several Russian assaults on Rubizne, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk on March 15-16.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported inflicting heavy casualties on Russian forces. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on March 16 that Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) forces are conducting an offensive on Severodonetsk.[18]
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast:
Russian forces continued assaults on Mariupol from the east and west on March 15-16. The Ukrainian General Staff said that Ukraine’s worst military situation remains Mariupol but that Russian forces are taking heavy casualties and introduced reinforcements from the 810th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade late on March 15.[19]
The Ukrainian Armed Forces additionally claimed to have killed Russian Major General Oleg Mityaev, commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army’s 150th Motor Rifle Division, on March 15. Ukrainian President Zelensky announced that Ukrainian forces had killed a Russian general in a video address on March 15 without naming the deceased; independent Ukrainian sources have reported Mityaev’s death and circulated photos of his alleged body.[20] ISW cannot independently confirm Mityaev’s death. If confirmed, Miyaev would be the fourth Russian general officer killed in Ukraine; his death would be a major blow to the 150th Motor Rifle Division, Russia’s principal maneuver unit in Donbas.
Russian forces continue to commit war crimes and target civilian infrastructure in Mariupol in a likely effort to force the city to capitulate. Russian forces reportedly seized the Mariupol Regional Intensive Care Hospital on March 15 and are holding its patients hostage.[21] Mariupol’s City Council additionally reported Russian aircraft purposely destroyed Mariupol’s Drama Theater on March 16.[22] Hundreds of civilians were sheltering in the building at the time, though the number of casualties is currently unknown.
Russian and proxy forces likely secured further territory north of Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast on March 16. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed DNR forces took control of Mikhaylovka, Stavka, Botmanka, and Vasilevka on March 16.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported at noon local time on March 16 that Russian forces are conducting an offensive toward Velyka Novosilka without stating (as they do for Russian attacks near Kyiv) that Ukrainian forces halted the attacks—likely indicating Russian forces made some territorial gains, though ISW cannot verify the full extent of Russian MoD claims, which have repeatedly been false in previous days.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and west:
Ukrainian forces halted continued Russian attacks northeast of Kherson on March 16, and Russian forces did not conduct any operations toward Mykolayiv and Odesa in the past 24 hours.[24] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces halted Russian advances toward Velyka Kostroma, Mala Kostroma, and Kryvyi Rih as of noon local time on March 16.[25] The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed it seized a large depot of rocket and artillery weapons in Kherson on March 16.[26] The Ukrainian General Staff reported a Ukrainian air strike on an airfield near Kherson destroyed at least seven helicopters.[27] Ukrainian aircraft previously struck this airfield on March 8, and the continued failure of Russian forces to ground the Ukrainian air force is likely slowing Russian operations toward Mykolayiv. Russian forces continued to shell Mykolayiv’s outskirts but did not conduct any ground attacks.[28]
The Ukrainian General Staff stated that unspecified Russian warships shelled the coastal settlements of Lebedivka, Sanzheika, Zatoka, and Bilenke in Odesa Oblast on March 16.[29] Satellite imagery previously depicted 14 Russian warships operating off the coast of Odesa on March 15.[30] Russian Naval Infantry likely retain the capability to conduct an amphibious landing along the Black Sea coast. However, Russia is unlikely to launch an unsupported amphibious operation against Odesa until Russian forces secure a ground line of communication to the city—which they are unlikely to do in the next week.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks.
- The Ukrainian General Staff continued to report that there is a high probability of Russian provocations aimed at involving Belarus in the war in Ukraine, though ISW continues to assess Belarus is unlikely to open a new line of advance into Ukraine.
- Ukrainian counterattacks and operations by Territorial Defense Forces in northeastern Ukraine threaten Russia’s exposed line of communicating, requiring Russia to redeploy forces away from the offensive toward eastern Kyiv.
- Company and battalion-level attacks northwest of Kyiv likely represent the largest scale of offensive operations Russian forces can currently undertake to complete the encirclement of the city.
- Russian troops may drive on Zaporizhya City itself within the next 48-72 hours, likely attempting to block it on both banks of the Dnipro River and set conditions for subsequent operations after Russian forces take Mariupol, which they are currently besieging.
2. Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion
Unconventional warfare includes shared battlespace between the CIA and Special Forces.
We can lament the fact these operations are exposed or we can learn how to operate in the new information environment.
But this illustrates our extreme risk averseness (or maybe this is just good IO, wink and nod):
The Ukraine-based CIA program operated for years, according to former officials. But as the threat of a large-scale Russian invasion became increasingly acute last month, the Biden administration, still feeling the sting of the Afghanistan withdrawal, pulled all CIA personnel out of the country, including war-zone-hardened agency paramilitaries, according to a former intelligence official in close touch with colleagues in U.S. government.
The administration was “terrified of even clandestine folks being on the frontline,” says the former official.
But even if the CIA’s cadre of paramilitary trainers are no longer in Ukraine, the effect of the agency’s training programs — both in the U.S. and on Ukraine’s eastern front — “cannot be overestimated,” said the former senior CIA official. These elite units trained by the agency have created “a strong nucleus” for Ukraine’s larger military forces today, according to this official.
Exclusive: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion
Ukrainian snipers had a problem: Russian forces in eastern Ukraine were trying to blind them.
As the Ukrainians were looking through their scopes in order to find their targets, the Russians had begun pinpointing their location using the glare of the glass, and were shooting high-energy lasers into them, damaging the snipers’ eyesight.
The two sides were squaring off in close proximity. In early 2014, Russia had already invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Shortly thereafter, pro-Russia insurgents in the eastern Donbas region began a grinding secessionist war against Kyiv.
Russian troops soon entered the fray. So, quietly, did the CIA.
As the battle lines hardened in Donbas, a small, select group of veteran CIA paramilitaries made their first secret trips to the frontlines to meet with Ukrainian counterparts there, according to former U.S. officials.
CIA paramilitaries soon concluded that, in Russia and its proxies, the agency was facing an adversary whose capabilities far outmatched the Islamist groups that CIA had been battling in the post-9/11 wars. “We learned a lot real quick,” says a former senior intelligence official — including about the Russians’ laser-blinding techniques. “That s*** wouldn’t happen with the Taliban.”
Since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine last month — which transformed a long-simmering, attritional conflict into an explosive, all-out war — the Ukrainian military has defied predictions of a rapid collapse, holding key cities against the Russian advance and inflicting punishing losses to Russian troops and materiel.
A Russian vehicle was destroyed and a Russian soldier killed by Ukrainian forces near Sytnyaky, Ukraine, on March 3. (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
The Ukrainian military has claimed to have killed three Russian generals, including at least one reportedly eliminated by sniper fire. (Yahoo News could not independently verify whether the Russian commanders were killed by CIA-trained troops.)
At least some of the fierce resistance by Ukrainian forces has its roots in a now shuttered covert CIA training program run from Ukraine’s eastern frontlines, former intelligence officials tell Yahoo News. The initiative was described to Yahoo News by over half a dozen former officials, all of whom requested anonymity to speak freely about sensitive intelligence matters.
The program was run under previously existing authorities for the CIA and did not require a new legal determination for the agency, known as a covert action finding, according to a former national security official.
As part of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former officials.
After Russia’s 2014 incursion, the U.S. military also helped run a long-standing, publicly acknowledged training program for Ukrainian troops in the country’s western region, far from the frontlines. That program also included instruction in how to use Javelin anti-tank missiles and sniper training.
Yahoo News reported in January on the CIA’s secret U.S.-based training initiative for Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. That program, which began in 2015, also included instruction in firearms, camouflage techniques and covert communications. Yahoo News’ prior report also revealed that CIA paramilitaries had traveled to eastern Ukraine to assist forces loyal to Kyiv in their fight against Russia and its separatist allies.
Front row, left to right: Crimean Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov, Chairman of the Crimea State Council Vladimir Konstantinov, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Sevastopol Mayor Alexei Chaly at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
U.S. officials previously denied to Yahoo News that the CIA training programs were ever offensively oriented. “The purpose of the training, and the training that was delivered, was to assist in the collection of intelligence,” said a senior intelligence official.
Until now, however, the details of the CIA’s paramilitary training program on Ukraine’s eastern frontlines have never been revealed. This initiative, say former agency officials, has helped battle-hardened Ukrainian special operations forces for the current Russian assault, which has plunged Europe into its worst conflict in decades. (The CIA declined to comment. The National Security Council referred queries to the CIA. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not return a request for comment.)
Former U.S. intelligence officials believe the program is still bearing fruit. “I think we’re seeing a big impact from snipers. Especially as Russian forces get bogged down from lack of supplies,” said the former senior official. “I think the training really paid off.”
***
When CIA paramilitaries first traveled to eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s initial 2014 incursion, their brief was twofold. First, they were ordered to determine how the agency could best help train Ukrainian special operations personnel fight the Russian military forces, and their separatist allies, waging a grinding war against Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region.
But the second part of the mission was to test the mettle of the Ukrainians themselves, according to former officials. The agency needed to determine the “backbone” of the Ukrainians, said a former senior CIA official. The question was, “Are they going to get rolled, or are going to stand up and fight?” recalled the former official.
The Ukrainians, the CIA paramilitaries reported back to their superiors, were indeed ready for battle.
The CIA operatives taught their Ukrainian counterparts the best skills for irregular warfare, said the former senior intelligence official. “We tried to really focus on operational planning, then really hard military skills like long-range marksmanship — not just the capacity to do it, but to know how to do it on a battlefield, to really deplete the leadership on the other side,” said the former senior intelligence official.
Ukrainian servicemen take part in military exercises near Lviv with U.S. and other NATO soldiers, Sept. 24, 2021. (Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty Images)
Because of the sensitivities of the mission, the agency chose to send experienced, mature operatives, recalled former officials. The thinking was, “one miscalculation, one overzealous paramilitary guy, and we’ve got ourselves a problem,” said the former official. “Everything we did in Ukraine had a chance to be misinterpreted, and escalate the tensions.” Accompanying the more strategic-minded, veteran paramilitaries sent by the agency were tactical specialists, like snipers, who also worked for the CIA Special Activities Center.
But after over a decade focused on the war on terror, the high-tech battlefield environment was a shock to the CIA. Russian soldiers and their proxies were using drones, cell towers and other equipment to triangulate the phones and electronic devices of the Ukrainians and CIA paramilitaries on the frontlines — and then rapidly targeting them with that information, according to former officials.
Ukrainian soldiers “were using mobile phones in a trench,” recalled a former intelligence official. “People were getting blown to bits.”
It was “almost like SkyNet in a ‘Terminator’ movie — that’s what the eastern edge of Ukraine started looking like,” says the former senior CIA official, referring to the malevolent, self-aware, weaponized artificial intelligence system in the Arnold Schwarzenegger films. The Russians’ operations on the frontlines would evolve rapidly in response to the Ukrainians’ and the CIA’s own there, according to former officials.
CIA paramilitaries needed to make quick adjustments, recalled former officials. Agency officials were forced to develop new modes of secure communications systems so paramilitaries could “communicate and then move before you get the direction finding from the Russians” and “they start[ed] rocketing the crap out of you,” recalled the former senior official.
The CIA had to solve the tradecraft challenges that arose from working in eastern Ukraine. The environment was unique, where “Moscow rules” — that is, the need for extreme operational care, because of the Russians’ counterintelligence capabilities — converged with an active war zone.
Civilians participate in a beginners combat and survival training course run by instructors from the Ukraine Territorial Defense units in Kyiv. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
“We were caught with our pants down,” says the former senior CIA official. But the agency soon developed new tools to ensure that agency paramilitaries could transmit information to each other securely on the frontlines, as well as to Washington, without tipping off the Russians. Agency paramilitaries also shared some of these techniques with their Ukrainian counterparts.
The last thing the CIA wanted was a direct confrontation with the Russians that could explode into a wider conflict. Though the program grew over time, it was kept very small on purpose, with the number of CIA paramilitaries initially sent to eastern Ukraine in the low single digits. This was in order to minimize the agency’s exposure, and to protect the Ukrainians from arousing the Russians’ ire, according to former officials.
And the rules of the agency’s engagement on the Ukrainian frontlines was clear: Advise and train, but do not take part in combat yourself, recalled former officials.
The agency impressed upon the CIA paramilitaries traveling to the front that “the Ukrainians have very effective special operations,” recalled the former senior intelligence official. The directive was, “Your job is to make them more effective.”
CIA officials believed that “just sending six guys to be six snipers is not really going to be something that’s going to affect the battle space,” recalled this official. “Our job is to have an exponential impact; it’s not to get our badge for shooting a Russian or something.”
Still, shortly after Donald Trump took office in 2017, National Security Council officials were concerned that, though the CIA paramilitaries in Ukraine were prohibited from engaging in combat, the parameters of their mission, which had begun under the Obama administration, were ambiguous. “We worried that the authorities might be too far-ranging,” said a former national security official.
One big question was, “How far can you go with existing covert action authorities?” recalled the former official. “If, God forbid, they’ve shot some Russians, is that a problem? Do you need special authorities for that?” White House officials also worried about what might happen if CIA operatives were captured by pro-Russian forces on what was supposed to be a secret mission, recalled the former official.
The discussion about the agency’s program was part of a broader review at the Trump White House of U.S. support for Kyiv — and what Moscow’s red lines might be, recalled the former official. “There was a school of thought that the Russians spoke the good old language of proxy war,” and that the CIA’s covert (as well as the military’s acknowledged) training programs and the U.S.'s overt supplying of weapons to Ukraine were therefore within historically acceptable bounds, the former official said.
Firefighters spray water on a destroyed shoe factory following an airstrike in Dnipro on March 11, 2022. (Emre Caylak/AFP via Getty Images)
CIA leadership and White House officials both understood — but still fretted over — the risks. “I don’t know how we didn’t get anybody injured, to be honest,” says the former senior intelligence official. But the covert nature of the mission ensured deniability. U.S. officials “wouldn’t want to say, We just had a CIA officer killed by a Russian” in Ukraine, recalled the former official. “That would put the president or the White House in a very bad position.”
The Ukraine-based CIA program operated for years, according to former officials. But as the threat of a large-scale Russian invasion became increasingly acute last month, the Biden administration, still feeling the sting of the Afghanistan withdrawal, pulled all CIA personnel out of the country, including war-zone-hardened agency paramilitaries, according to a former intelligence official in close touch with colleagues in U.S. government.
The administration was “terrified of even clandestine folks being on the frontline,” says the former official.
But even if the CIA’s cadre of paramilitary trainers are no longer in Ukraine, the effect of the agency’s training programs — both in the U.S. and on Ukraine’s eastern front — “cannot be overestimated,” said the former senior CIA official. These elite units trained by the agency have created “a strong nucleus” for Ukraine’s larger military forces today, according to this official.
In addition to the hard skills these operatives are bringing to the fight with Russian troops, some of the benefits are more intangible, according to former officials. The CIA-trained special operations units set an example by “getting some small wins” and by “providing some success stories” for the larger Ukrainian military, says the former senior official.
Courage can be contagious, notes the former official. So then, empowered by their comrades’ victories, “you get people that are charging to the sounds of the gunfire.”
_____
What happened this week in Ukraine? Check out this explainer from Yahoo Immersive to find out.
3. Remarks by President Biden on the Assistance the United States is Providing to Ukraine
Excerpts:
The United States and our Allies and partners are fully committed to surging weapons of assistance to the Ukrainians. And more will be coming as we source additional stocks of equipment that are — that we’re ready to transfer.
Now — now, I want to be honest with you: This could be a long and difficult battle. But the American people will be steadfast in our support of the people of Ukraine in the face of Putin’s immoral, unethical attacks on civilian populations. We are united in our abhorrence of Putin’s depraved onslaught, and we’re going to continue to have their back as they fight for their freedom, their democracy, their very survival. And we’re going to give Ukraine the arms to fight and defend themselves through all the difficult days ahead.
We’re going to continue to mobilize humanitarian relief to support people within Ukraine and those who have been forced to flee Ukraine.
Remarks by President Biden on the Assistance the United States is Providing to Ukraine
MARCH 16, 2022
•
South Court Auditorium
Eisenhower Executive Office Building
1:01 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking President Zelenskyy for his passionate message this morning. I listened to it in the private residence, and he was convincing. And — significant speech.
He speaks for a people who have shown remarkable courage and strength in the face of brutal aggression — courage and strength that has inspired not only Ukrainians but the entire world.
Putin is inflicting appalling — appalling devastation and horror on Ukraine — bombing apartment buildings, maternity wards, hospitals.
I mean, it’s — it’s God awful. I was speaking about this with the — our — our Commander, behind me here — General Milley. I mean, it just is amazing.
Yesterday, we saw reports that Russian forces were holding hundreds of doctors and patients hostage in the largest hospital in Mariupol. These are atrocities. They’re an outrage to the world. And the world is united in our support for Ukraine and our determination to make Putin pay a very heavy price.
America is leading this effort, together with our Allies and partners, providing enormous levels of security and humanitarian assistance that we’re adding to today and we’re going to continue to do more in the days and weeks ahead.
We are crippling Putin’s economy with punishing sanctions that’s going to only grow more painful over time with the entire NATO and EU behind us, and many other countries.
What’s at stake here are the principles that the United States and the united nations across the world stand for. It’s about freedom. It’s about the right of people to determine their own future. It’s about making sure Ukraine never — will never be a victory for Putin, no matter what advances he makes on the battlefield.
The American people are answering President Zelenskyy’s call for more help, more weapons for Ukraine to defend itself, more tools to fight Russian aggression. And that’s what we’re doing.
In fact, we started our assistance to Ukraine before this war began, as they started to do exercises along the Ukrainian border — the Russians — starting in March of last year.
We took the threat of Putin invading very seriously, and we acted on it. We sent Ukraine more security assistance last year — $650 million in weapons, including anti-air and anti-armor equipment before the invasion — more than we had ever provided before. So when the invasion began, they already had in their hands the kinds of weapons they needed to counter Russian advances.
And once the war started, we immediately rushed $350 million in additional aid to further address their needs: hundreds of anti-air systems, thousands of anti-tank weapons, transport helicopters, armed patrol boats, and other high-mobility vehicles, radar systems that help track incoming artillery and unmanned drones, secure communications equipment and tactical gear, satellite imagery and — and analysis capacity. And it’s clearly helped Ukraine inflict dramatic losses on Russian forces.
On Saturday, my administration authorized another $200 million to keep a steady flow of weapons and ammunition moving to Ukraine. Now I’m once again using my presidential authority to activate — to activate additional security assistance to continue to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s assault — an additional $800 million in assistance. That brings the total of new U.S. security assistance to Ukraine to $1 billion just this week. These are the lar- — these are direct transfers of equipment from our Department of Defense to the Ukrainian military to help them as they fight against this invasion.
And I thank the Congress for appropriating these funds.
This new package on its own is going to provide unprecedented assistance to Ukraine. It includes 800 anti-aircraft systems to make sure the Ukrainian military can continue to — can continue to stop the planes and helicopters that have been attacking their people and to defend their Ukrainian airspace.
And at the request of President Zelenskyy, we have identified and are helping Ukraine acquire additional longer-range anti-aircraft systems and the munitions for those systems.
Our new assistance package also includes 9,000 anti-armor systems. These are portable, high — high-accurate — high accurately — high-accuracy shoulder-mounted missiles that the Ukrainian forces have been using with great effect to destroy invading tanks and armored vehicles.
It’ll include 7,000 small arms — machine guns, shotguns, grenade launchers — to equip the Ukrainians, including the brave women and men who are defending their cities as civilians, and they’re on the countryside as well. And we’re — and we — and as well as the ammunition, artillery, and mortar rounds to go with small arms — 20 million rounds in total. Twenty million rounds. And this will include drones, which — which demonstrates our commitment to sending our most cutting-edge systems to Ukraine for its defense.
And we’re not doing this alone. Our Allies and partners have stepped up to provide significant shipments of security assistance and will continue to help facilitate these deliveries as well.
The United States and our Allies and partners are fully committed to surging weapons of assistance to the Ukrainians. And more will be coming as we source additional stocks of equipment that are — that we’re ready to transfer.
Now — now, I want to be honest with you: This could be a long and difficult battle. But the American people will be steadfast in our support of the people of Ukraine in the face of Putin’s immoral, unethical attacks on civilian populations. We are united in our abhorrence of Putin’s depraved onslaught, and we’re going to continue to have their back as they fight for their freedom, their democracy, their very survival. And we’re going to give Ukraine the arms to fight and defend themselves through all the difficult days ahead.
We’re going to continue to mobilize humanitarian relief to support people within Ukraine and those who have been forced to flee Ukraine.
In just the past few weeks, we’ve provided $300 million in humanitarian assistance to the people in Ukraine and in neighboring countries. Tens of thousands of tons of food, water, medicine, and other basic supplies to support the people in need.
Our experts on the ground in Poland and Moldova and other neighboring countries are there to make real-time assessments of the rapidly evolving crisis and get urgently needed humanitarian supplies to the people in need when they need it.
And we will support Ukraine’s economy with direct financial assistance as well.
And together with our Allies and partners, we will keep up the pressure on Putin’s crumbling economy, isolating him on the global stage. That’s our goal: make Putin pay the price, weaken his position while strengthening the hand of the Ukrainians on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
Together with our Allies and partners, we’re going to stay the course. And we’ll do everything we can to push for and end this tragic, unnecessary war. This is a struggle that pits the appetites of an autocrat against humankind’s desire to be free.
And let there be no doubt, no uncertainty, no question: America stands with the forces of freedom. We always have and we always will.
I want to thank you all. And God bless you. And now I’m going to walk over and sign this legisla- — sign this bill to allow the drawdown of those materials.
And may God protect the young Ukrainians who are out there defending their country.
What I’m signing here is the Delegation of Authority Under Section 506(a)(1) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Translated into plain English: a total of $800 million in defense articles.
(The Delegation of Authority is signed.)
Q Mr. President, what will it take for you to send the Polish MiGs that President Zelenskyy is asking for?
THE PRESIDENT: I’m not going to comment on that right now. I’m not going to comment on anything other than what I told you (inaudible).
Thank you.
1:10 P.M. EDT
4. Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance for Ukraine
This list of equipment below looks like it could be right out of a modern catalog support system list to support resistance forces. (Remember marge bundle codes - If you know, you know - I know every old SF guy knows!)
Here is a link to the appendix in FM 31-20 Special Force Operational Techniques (1965) that covers the Catalog Support System for supplying a guerrilla force. Of course today we need a lot more modern equipment.
Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance for Ukraine
MARCH 16, 2022
•
President Biden today announced an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, bringing the total U.S. security assistance committed to Ukraine to $1 billion in just the past week, and a total of $2 billion since the start of the Biden Administration. The assistance will take the form of direct transfers of equipment from the Department of Defense to the Ukrainian military to help them defend their country against Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion.
The new $800 million assistance package includes:
- 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
- 2,000 Javelin, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, and 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems;
- 100 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
- 100 grenade launchers, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, and 400 shotguns;
- Over 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenade launcher and mortar rounds;
- 25,000 sets of body armor; and
- 25,000 helmets.
In addition to the weapons listed above, previous United States assistance committed to Ukraine includes:
- Over 600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
- Approximately 2,600 Javelin anti-armor systems;
- Five Mi-17 helicopters;
- Three patrol boats;
- Four counter-artillery and counter-unmanned aerial system tracking radars;
- Four counter-mortar radar systems;
- 200 grenade launchers and ammunition;
- 200 shotguns and 200 machine guns;
- Nearly 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition and over 1 million grenade, mortar, and artillery rounds;
- 70 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs) and other vehicles;
- Secure communications, electronic warfare detection systems, body armor, helmets, and other tactical gear;
- Military medical equipment to support treatment and combat evacuation;
- Explosive ordnance disposal and demining equipment; and
- Satellite imagery and analysis capability.
In addition to the U.S.-produced short-range air defense systems the Ukrainians have been using to great effect, the United States has also identified and is helping the Ukrainians acquire additional, longer-range systems on which Ukraine’s forces are already trained, as well as additional munitions for those systems.
The United States continues to expedite the authorization and facilitation of additional assistance to Ukraine from our Allies. At least 30 countries have provided security assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began. In 2022, the Department of State authorized third-party transfers of defensive equipment from more than 14 countries, a number that continues to grow as Allies and Partners increase support to Ukraine.
###
5. Zelenskyy tells US Congress, ‘We need you right now’
Zelenskyy is the 21st century master communicator.
Zelenskyy tells US Congress, ‘We need you right now’
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cited Pearl Harbor and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on Wednesday as he appealed to the U.S. Congress to do more to help Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but acknowledged the no-fly zone he has sought to “close the sky” over his country may not happen.
Livestreamed into the Capitol complex, Zelenskyy said the U.S. must sanction Russian lawmakers and block imports, and he showed a packed auditorium of lawmakers an emotional video of the destruction and devastation his country has suffered in the war.
“We need you right now,” Zelenskyy said, adding, “I call on you to do more.”
In urging a steeper economic hit to the Russians, he said: “Peace is more important than income.”
Lawmakers gave him a standing ovation, before and after his short remarks, which Zelenskyy began in Ukrainian through an interpreter but then switched to English in a heartfelt appeal to help end the bloodshed.
“I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths,” he told them.
Nearing the three-week mark in an ever-escalating war, Zelenskyy is using the world’s leading legislative bodies as a stage to implore allied leaders to stop the Russian airstrikes that are devastating his country. It has also put Zelenskyy at odds with President Joe Biden, whose administration has stopped short of providing a no-fly zone or the transfer of military jets from neighboring Poland as the U.S. seeks to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia.
RELATED
The war in Ukraine may signal a historic shift in American thinking about defense of the continent.
Instead, Biden will deliver his own address following Zelenskyy’s speech, in which he is expected to announce an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, according to a White House official. That would bring the total announced in the last week alone to $1 billion. It includes money for anti-armor and air-defense weapons, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Appearing in his now-trademark army green T-shirt as he appeals to world leaders, Zelenskyy has emerged as a heroic figure at the center of what many view as the biggest security threat to Europe since World War II. Almost 3 million refugees have fled Ukraine, the fastest exodus in modern times.
The Ukrainian president is no stranger to Congress, having played a central role in Donald Trump’s first impeachment. As president, Trump was accused of withholding security aid to Ukraine as he pressured Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on political rival Biden. Zelensky spoke on the giant screen to many of the same Republican lawmakers who declined to impeach or convict Trump, but are among the bipartisan groundswell in Congress now clamoring for military aid to Ukraine.
Firefighters extinguish an apartment house after a Russian rocket attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Pavel Dorogoy)
He thanked the American people saying Ukraine is “grateful” for the outpouring of support, and Biden in particular, even as he urged Biden to use his office to do more.
“You are the leader of the nation. I wish you be the leader of the world,” he sad “Being the leader of the world means being the leader of peace.”
Invoking Shakespeare’s hero last week, Zelenskyy asked the British House of Commons whether Ukraine is “to be or not to be.” On Tuesday, he appealed to “Dear Justin” as he addressed the Canadian Parliament and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Zelenskyy called on European Union leaders at the start of the war to do the politically unthinkable and fast-track Ukraine’s membership — and he has continued to push for more help to save his young democracy than world leaders have so far pledged to do.
Biden has insisted there will be no U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine and has resisted Zelenskyy’s relentless pleas for warplanes as too risky, potentially escalating into a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
“Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III,” Biden has said.
U.S. defense officials say they have been puzzled by Zelenskyy’s demand for more warplanes. They say Ukraine isn’t often flying the planes it has now, while making good use of other weapons the West is providing, including Stinger missiles for shooting down helicopters and other aircraft.
The Biden administration is looking to send Ukraine “more of what’s been working well,” according to an official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces members train to use an NLAW anti-tank weapon on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Already the Biden administration has sent Ukraine more than 600 Stinger missiles, 2,600 Javelin anti-armor systems, unmanned aerial system tracking radars; grenade launchers, 200 shotguns, 200 machine guns and nearly 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition, along with helicopters, patrol boats, satellite imagery and body armor, helmets, and other tactical gear, the official said.
Even though Zelenskyy and Biden speak almost daily by phone, the Ukrainian president has found a potentially more receptive audience in Congress.
This won’t be the first time he has appealed directly to members of the House and Senate, who have remained remarkably unified in their support of Ukraine. Nearly two weeks ago, Zelenskyy delivered a desperate plea to some 300 lawmakers and staff on a private call that if they could not enforce a no-fly zone, at least send more planes.
Congress has already approved $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, and the newly announced security aid will come from that allotment, which is part of a broader bill that Biden signed into law Tuesday. But lawmakers expect more aid will be needed.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Zelenskyy asked for help in rebuilding his country when they spoke last week. It was in that call that Zelenskyy asked to address the U.S. Congress, something the Democratic leader readily agreed to.
“The Congress, our country and the world are in awe of the people of Ukraine,” said Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement Monday announcing the address.
Zelenskyy’s next stop could be Spain. The speaker of Spain’s Congress of Deputies has invited the Ukrainian president to address Spanish lawmakers via videolink.
In a letter to Zelenskyy, Speaker Meritxell Batet wrote that the address “will be a magnificent opportunity for the chamber, all Spanish people and the thousands of Ukrainians living in Spain to listen to your message and express our firmest support.”
Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Ellen Knickmeyer and Chris Megerian and Raf Casert in Brussels, Jill Lawless in London, Aritz Parra in Madrid and videojournalist Rick Gentilo contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cited Pearl Harbor and the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on Wednesday as he appealed to the U.S. Congress to do more to help Ukraine’s fight against Russia, but acknowledged the no-fly zone he has sought to “close the sky” over his country may not happen.
Livestreamed into the Capitol complex, Zelenskyy said the U.S. must sanction Russian lawmakers and block imports, and he showed a packed auditorium of lawmakers an emotional video of the destruction and devastation his country has suffered in the war.
“We need you right now,” Zelenskyy said, adding, “I call on you to do more.”
In urging a steeper economic hit to the Russians, he said: “Peace is more important than income.”
Lawmakers gave him a standing ovation, before and after his short remarks, which Zelenskyy began in Ukrainian through an interpreter but then switched to English in a heartfelt appeal to help end the bloodshed.
“I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths,” he told them.
Nearing the three-week mark in an ever-escalating war, Zelenskyy is using the world’s leading legislative bodies as a stage to implore allied leaders to stop the Russian airstrikes that are devastating his country. It has also put Zelenskyy at odds with President Joe Biden, whose administration has stopped short of providing a no-fly zone or the transfer of military jets from neighboring Poland as the U.S. seeks to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia.
RELATED
The war in Ukraine may signal a historic shift in American thinking about defense of the continent.
Instead, Biden will deliver his own address following Zelenskyy’s speech, in which he is expected to announce an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, according to a White House official. That would bring the total announced in the last week alone to $1 billion. It includes money for anti-armor and air-defense weapons, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Appearing in his now-trademark army green T-shirt as he appeals to world leaders, Zelenskyy has emerged as a heroic figure at the center of what many view as the biggest security threat to Europe since World War II. Almost 3 million refugees have fled Ukraine, the fastest exodus in modern times.
The Ukrainian president is no stranger to Congress, having played a central role in Donald Trump’s first impeachment. As president, Trump was accused of withholding security aid to Ukraine as he pressured Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on political rival Biden. Zelensky spoke on the giant screen to many of the same Republican lawmakers who declined to impeach or convict Trump, but are among the bipartisan groundswell in Congress now clamoring for military aid to Ukraine.
Firefighters extinguish an apartment house after a Russian rocket attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Pavel Dorogoy)
He thanked the American people saying Ukraine is “grateful” for the outpouring of support, and Biden in particular, even as he urged Biden to use his office to do more.
“You are the leader of the nation. I wish you be the leader of the world,” he sad “Being the leader of the world means being the leader of peace.”
Invoking Shakespeare’s hero last week, Zelenskyy asked the British House of Commons whether Ukraine is “to be or not to be.” On Tuesday, he appealed to “Dear Justin” as he addressed the Canadian Parliament and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Zelenskyy called on European Union leaders at the start of the war to do the politically unthinkable and fast-track Ukraine’s membership — and he has continued to push for more help to save his young democracy than world leaders have so far pledged to do.
Biden has insisted there will be no U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine and has resisted Zelenskyy’s relentless pleas for warplanes as too risky, potentially escalating into a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
“Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III,” Biden has said.
U.S. defense officials say they have been puzzled by Zelenskyy’s demand for more warplanes. They say Ukraine isn’t often flying the planes it has now, while making good use of other weapons the West is providing, including Stinger missiles for shooting down helicopters and other aircraft.
The Biden administration is looking to send Ukraine “more of what’s been working well,” according to an official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces members train to use an NLAW anti-tank weapon on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Already the Biden administration has sent Ukraine more than 600 Stinger missiles, 2,600 Javelin anti-armor systems, unmanned aerial system tracking radars; grenade launchers, 200 shotguns, 200 machine guns and nearly 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition, along with helicopters, patrol boats, satellite imagery and body armor, helmets, and other tactical gear, the official said.
Even though Zelenskyy and Biden speak almost daily by phone, the Ukrainian president has found a potentially more receptive audience in Congress.
This won’t be the first time he has appealed directly to members of the House and Senate, who have remained remarkably unified in their support of Ukraine. Nearly two weeks ago, Zelenskyy delivered a desperate plea to some 300 lawmakers and staff on a private call that if they could not enforce a no-fly zone, at least send more planes.
Congress has already approved $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, and the newly announced security aid will come from that allotment, which is part of a broader bill that Biden signed into law Tuesday. But lawmakers expect more aid will be needed.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Zelenskyy asked for help in rebuilding his country when they spoke last week. It was in that call that Zelenskyy asked to address the U.S. Congress, something the Democratic leader readily agreed to.
“The Congress, our country and the world are in awe of the people of Ukraine,” said Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement Monday announcing the address.
Zelenskyy’s next stop could be Spain. The speaker of Spain’s Congress of Deputies has invited the Ukrainian president to address Spanish lawmakers via videolink.
In a letter to Zelenskyy, Speaker Meritxell Batet wrote that the address “will be a magnificent opportunity for the chamber, all Spanish people and the thousands of Ukrainians living in Spain to listen to your message and express our firmest support.”
Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Ellen Knickmeyer and Chris Megerian and Raf Casert in Brussels, Jill Lawless in London, Aritz Parra in Madrid and videojournalist Rick Gentilo contributed to this report.
6. Outmatched in military might, Ukraine has excelled in the information war
We can learn a lot from Ukraine.
Outmatched in military might, Ukraine has excelled in the information war
When President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking to U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, aired a video documenting the human toll of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, the images were so graphic they prompted an apology from a cable news anchor for having failed to warn viewers about what they were going to see.
The video, which showed corpses being dumped in mass graves and bandaged children staring out from hospital beds, brought home the toll of the conflict in a stark, visceral way, leveraging support from Congress and intensifying pressure on the Biden administration as Zelensky appeals for additional military aid in his country’s struggle.
The Ukrainian leader’s plea to Congress — in which he appeared unshaven and grave-faced, in his trademark military tee — is the latest example of how the one-time TV star has overseen an extraordinarily effective communications campaign that has proven crucial in marshaling global support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
By playing up Russian brutality and military stumbles, deftly using social media, and appealing to foreign leaders’ emotions while challenging their policies, Zelensky has steered an information offensive that has yielded greater Western arms donations and wider backing for unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia.
Sean McFate, author of “The New Rules of War” and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said the Ukrainian communications strategy — or stratcom, in military parlance — highlighted a shift taking place in modern conflicts, from a focus on munitions dropped to one centered in large part on messaging, media and persuasion.
“Russia may be winning the shooting war,” he said. “But Ukraine is winning the information war. That is the key to getting allies’ support and sympathy.”
The effort also reveals how Ukraine now rivals — and, in the West, has far outpaced — Russia in a field in which Moscow has been seen as a global leader. Unlike in the past, when Russia used information and disinformation operations to sway global events including the 2016 U.S. presidential election, experts say Moscow’s effort is directed internally as President Vladimir Putin scrambles to shore up domestic support.
The standing ovation Zelensky received from American lawmakers on Wednesday — like those he has received elsewhere — caps the 44-year-old’s transformation from comic actor to wartime leader.
After his 2019 election, Zelensky — who rose to fame as a bumbling but straight-talking fictional president on a popular Ukrainian TV show — installed associates from his TV production company into the country’s top jobs. Policymakers from Ukraine’s allies warned privately that it was a bad idea, but the in-house media expertise appears to have paid off.
Long before the Russian invasion, Zelensky embraced a communications strategy unusual in its disregard for standard diplomatic parlance, often generating discomfort among Ukraine’s backers in the West, as he did when he repeatedly challenged the Biden administration’s policy of not sanctioning the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was built to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany.
“He had the guts to defy Western leaders who were only giving him half a loaf and saying, ‘Look, given the threat I’m under, I should get a full loaf,’ ” said John Herbst, who served as ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and now heads the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
Now, those tactics have been elevated to a larger stage. In plain-spoken late-night speeches from his office, in sweatshirt-clad selfie videos filmed outside the presidential administration building in Kyiv, and in more formal videoconferences to leaders around the world, Zelensky has galvanized a strong global response to the invasion. He has 5.4 million Twitter followers.
He has tailored his appeals to different audiences, echoing the wartime words of Winston Churchill in a speech to the British Parliament; referencing Canadian cities in an address to lawmakers in Ottawa; and citing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech in Wednesday’s remarks to Congress.
“Zelensky has the circumstances where his unique abilities as a communicator can really flower,” Herbst said.
People who were in the room when Zelensky addressed a late-night summit of European Union leaders last month, a day after Russia began its invasion, credited his powerful intervention as inspiring them to impose significantly stronger sanctions than were initially considered.
His declaration that Ukrainian mothers were watching their children die on behalf of European values left some leaders in tears, the officials said. After Zelensky’s remarks, the leaders approved teaming up with the United States to freeze the Kremlin’s foreign reserves, a sledgehammer to the Russian economy.
While his regular video addresses are aimed at bolstering Ukrainian morale as people endure punishing Russian attacks, they are also directed at ordinary Russians he hopes might see his remarks on some of the few modes left to communicate to them, such as the Telegram messaging app. He speaks in passionate and angry Russian, telling Russian soldiers that if they surrender, they’ll be treated well but that if they keep up the fight, they’ll be tried as war criminals. He switches fluidly between Ukrainian and Russian. Speaking to Congress, he turned from Ukrainian to English to deliver the most urgent part of his appeal.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, calls Kyiv’s messaging strategy “visually evocative, highly dramatic,” helping people all over the globe identify with what’s unfolding in Ukraine.
The government’s efforts have been complemented by a grass-roots effort from within Ukraine and beyond, generating pro-Kyiv content and memes that have flooded English-language feeds. There’s the St. Javelin, an image of a female saint holding a Javelin antitank missile. There’s the postage stamp with an image of a Ukrainian soldier defiantly displaying his middle finger to a Russian battleship.
The stamp commemorates an incident early in the conflict, in which Ukrainian border guards on an island in the Black Sea were reported to have resisted Russian invaders. In a viral audio recording, a Russian voice warns the guards they will be attacked if they don’t surrender. “Russian warship,” a Ukrainian is heard responding: “Go f--- yourself.”
Zelensky cited the story, saying that 13 guards had “died heroically,” promising to recognize each with the title “Hero of Ukraine.” A day later, the country’s State Border Guard Service reported on its Facebook page that the guards may have survived, after Russian media reported that they were taken as prisoners. While what actually occurred on the island may not match the early accounts, it became a rallying cry.
Ukrainian officials have also aired videos of captured Russian soldiers begging for forgiveness for Moscow’s assault.
“They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops,” a senior NATO official said. “I hope Western countries take their lead from them.”
Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.
One State Department official said that Ukraine’s approach amounted to “basic wartime communication.”
“You’re going to emphasize everything that’s positive for you — talk up your enemy’s losses, downplay your own,” the official said. “What’s the old cliche — truth is the first casualty in war? States basically say what is most advantageous to them in wartime.”
Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who served as the commander of U.S. Army Europe, said that as successful as Kyiv had been in shaping the Western narrative, it remained unable to persuade NATO leaders to embrace a no-fly zone or supply fighter jets. Still, “it’s been a million times better than the tired old fairy tales that continue to come out of the Kremlin,” he said.
As Russia’s far more powerful military employs new tactics and massive firepower in its push to take Ukrainian cities, a closer look at the battlefield situation suggests a more worrying situation for Ukraine, one in which Kyiv’s success in the information sphere could outpace its battlefield performance.
“The Ukrainians have taught a master class in information warfare,” the State Department official said. “My only fear is that the power of the narrative could lead some to assume that things are going better than they are, which could hurt the Ukrainians in the end.”
“This isn’t just about memes,” the official added. “What’s happening on the ground is what matters most in the end.”
Shane Harris in Washington and Paul Sonne in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
7. Opinion | Why the West must boost military assistance to Ukraine
Conclusion:
Biden rightly has rejected calls for implementing a no-fly zone, a euphemism for a declaration of war against Russia. But short of that, Biden and his partners in the free world must do everything they can to create conditions for ending this horrific war. In all three scenarios, Ukrainians eventually win. Our task in the West — those of us standing on the sidelines, watching Ukrainians bravely fight invading Russian armed forces alone — is to do all that we can to hasten the end of the war, and thus save Ukrainian (and Russian) lives. More weapons and more sanctions do just that.
Opinion | Why the West must boost military assistance to Ukraine
The Washington Post · by Michael McFaulContributing columnist Today at 2:56 p.m. EDT · March 16, 2022
Ukrainians will ultimately defeat Vladimir Putin’s army. Ukraine will be sovereign and free once again. Only two questions are unanswered: How long will it take? And how many Ukrainians will have to die before Putin’s soldiers finally leave?
The goal for the West in general, and the United States in particular, must be to hasten the defeat of Putin’s army. Three scenarios for liberating Ukraine from Russian attack and occupation should shape the appropriate Western strategies for helping end this horrible war as fast as possible.
Of course, the best outcome for Ukraine and the rest of the world is a total Russian defeat. In this scenario, Russian armed forces fail to capture Ukraine’s major cities, including, most importantly, Kyiv, while rapid economic meltdown inside Russia compels retreat. This outcome is the most desirable but also the least likely.
The second-best outcome is stalemate on the battlefield, which produces ripe conditions for a settlement. Both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will find it hard to accept this end game. Putin would have to acknowledge that he waged a senseless war, killing thousands of Russian soldiers and thousands of innocent Ukrainians (ethnic Russians and Ukrainians alike), only to achieve what he de facto already had — control over Crimea and parts of the Donbas region as well as Ukrainian neutrality. That, after all, was the status quo on Feb. 23, the day before Putin launched his invasion. In this scenario, what was tacitly and ambiguously accepted would be codified de jure in a peace settlement. Zelensky also would have to agree to conditions, including perhaps neutrality, that would be hard to accept.
The worst outcome would be a Russian occupation of major Ukrainian cities followed by a prolonged guerrilla war. With snipers, suicide and car bombs, and acts of nonviolent civic resistance, Ukrainians would continue to resist Putin’s occupation until Russian soldiers go home. I have no doubt that Ukrainians will one day liberate their country again. In contrast with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Eastern Europe after World War II, Putin does not have a sufficiently large army, willing collaborators, or a compelling idea to maintain Ukrainian occupation for long. The duration and human cost of this scenario, however, could be horrific, not unlike the carnage in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.
All three scenarios make clear that more Western military assistance, especially weapons that can shoot down Russian airplanes and rockets or destroy artillery, is immediately needed for ending the war. Zelensky, in his address to Congress Wednesday, has powerfully reminded us of this fundamental point. More fighter jets, more surface-to-air missiles systems and more counter-fire weapons against long-range artillery are needed immediately. In parallel, the West must ratchet up economic sanctions against Russia every single week until one of these three endgames is reached.
Obviously, new weapons would help achieve Scenario One, however unlikely. But military stalemate is necessary for achieving Scenario Two, and that can happen only if Ukrainian soldiers fight Russian forces to a standstill. Despite unexpected Ukrainian battlefield victories, stalemate has not yet been achieved. Right now, Putin has no incentive to negotiate if his armed forces, most of which are still intact, continue to make advances and close in on Ukraine’s major cities. He is still hoping to win.
But that worst-case, very low-probability scenario cannot be invoked as an excuse against new military supplies from NATO countries. If the risk of Russia’s escalation can be assessed to be below the nuclear threshold, then Putin’s threats of new actions in response to the transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets or S-300 surface-to-air missile systems are cheap talk. The transfer of planes or air defense systems will not trigger World War III. Given how poorly the Russian army has performed against Ukraine’s relatively small army, would Putin really escalate and attack the most mighty alliance in the world, anchored by the strongest military power in the world, the United States? Putin may be angry and unhinged, but he’s not suicidal. Threats to NATO front-line states become serious only if Putin wins in Ukraine.
On the diplomatic front, Biden and U.S. allies and partners should convey to Putin that they are ready to gradually lift sanctions in return for a complete Russian military withdrawal. All interlocutors with Putin should make this crystal clear. If Putin and Zelensky signal a credible commitment to negotiate, NATO leaders should work with Xi, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, or U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to help mediate these peace talks.
Biden rightly has rejected calls for implementing a no-fly zone, a euphemism for a declaration of war against Russia. But short of that, Biden and his partners in the free world must do everything they can to create conditions for ending this horrific war. In all three scenarios, Ukrainians eventually win. Our task in the West — those of us standing on the sidelines, watching Ukrainians bravely fight invading Russian armed forces alone — is to do all that we can to hasten the end of the war, and thus save Ukrainian (and Russian) lives. More weapons and more sanctions do just that.
The Washington Post · by Michael McFaulContributing columnist Today at 2:56 p.m. EDT · March 16, 2022
8. How the West is breaking through Russia’s propaganda wall
We are doing many good things. We are learning lessons. One of the lessons we do need to learn is that information preparation of the battlefield prior to conflicts occurring is of paramount importance. Going from a cold start is hard. We must think through the effects we can achieve with information and influence and what effects can be supported by the effective use of information. And we must properly resource the organizations that have the capability to move the message.
How the West is breaking through Russia’s propaganda wall
An international resistance of computer programmers and volunteer “information warriors” is racing to pierce Kremlin propaganda and expose ordinary Russians to the uncensored truth of a brutal war.
They’ve built tools that allow anyone to surprise Russian citizens with text messages detailing the war’s civilian death toll. They’ve published antiwar videos and news sites built to evade Russian government bans. They’ve even cobbled together databases with the personal details of Russian military personnel — all in the hopes of fomenting rebellion across the new Iron Curtain.
Since the days of the Cold War, when U.S.-government-funded stations such as Radio Free Europe broadcast anti-communist messaging across the airwaves of Soviet states, the West has tried, often futilely, to pierce the propaganda bubble that surrounds and isolates the Russian populace.
But the Internet has sent those information-war efforts into overdrive, allowing everyday people to pitch in on imaginative efforts designed to reach strangers thousands of miles away.
But some of the initiatives also could backfire due to their reliance on the personal data of Russians, many of whom are disconnected from the war effort and face grave risks for public protest. They could also prove ineffective due to the force and speed with which the Kremlin has worked to sever millions of Russians from the open Internet.
The Russian government, decrying Western censorship, has blocked or restricted access to the social networks Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; the websites of publicly funded broadcasters such as the United Kingdom’s BBC, Germany’s Deutsche Welle and the United States’ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America; and independent news sites appealing to Russian audiences.
A new “fake news” law signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened 15 years in prison for journalists who contradict state propaganda, including by calling the war a war, leading The Washington Post and other news organizations to pause reporting inside the country. Popular independent TV and radio outlets in Russia have been shut down or banned.
But the Internet has helped reveal how porous such traditional blockades can be — and how quickly political messages can spread. After a Russian state TV producer named Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto a government news broadcast with a “No War” sign, the moment went viral almost immediately on the Russian Internet, and her Facebook page exploded with thousands of celebratory comments, some of which were in Russian.
In a video message posted to Telegram before her arrest — which has since been widely copied and shared — she said, “I am ashamed that I’ve allowed the lies to be said on the TV screens … that I let the Russian people be zombified.” Meduza, an independent Russian-language news site recently banned by Russia, reported on Tuesday that employees at Ovsyannikova’s state-run network routinely watch Western news to understand the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recorded videos appealing directly to citizens of the country invading his own, saying in Russian, “As long as your country has not completely closed itself off from the whole world, turning into a very large North Korea, you must fight.”
Social media companies and media outlets in the West have also started helping Russians circumvent that censorship by using the special software Tor, which routes Internet traffic through a scattered network of servers, effectively neutralizing the website blockade.
“Our mission is to maintain a dialogue with the people of Russia,” Peter Limbourg, a director at Deutsche Welle, wrote in one reader guide. “A dialogue sometimes also includes unpleasant truths.”
VPN — or virtual private network — apps, which allow Russians to access otherwise-banned sites, have been downloaded millions of times in recent weeks on the Apple and Google app stores, market research data shows.
And internal data from Tor, which began as a U.S. government project but now operates as a nonprofit, shows that use of the system inside Russia has soared, with thousands more computers connecting to its network since the invasion began.
The U.S. government has also sought to protect the continued presence of companies such as Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company used by much of the Internet to keep their websites online. The company has faced calls to drop sites that echo Kremlin propaganda, but it has resisted due to concerns that could lead to its other clients — including independent media reaching Russians — falling offline, too.
The State Department has supported them in that balancing act, with a spokesperson telling The Washington Post, “It is critical to maintain the flow of information to the people of Russia to the fullest extent possible.”
The New York Times and The Post have launched channels on Telegram, the uncensored group-chat service popular in Russia, and made some war coverage free to access in Russia and Ukraine.
The BBC, which also uses Telegram, says traffic to its Russian-language digital platforms has exploded, including breaking a record of nearly 17 million people in the first week of the war. But the British news giant has also turned to one of media’s earliest marvels, shortwave radio, to reach Russian listeners, saying this month it would start broadcasting on new frequencies that “can be received clearly in Kyiv and parts of Russia.”
Four hours of daily news reports are now broadcast in the early evening and just before midnight Ukraine time on the frequencies of 15735 kHz and 5875 kHz, the BBC said. In one of the BBC World Service’s first shortwave broadcasts, in 1932, King George V said it would connect those throughout the British Empire “so cut off by the snow, the desert or the sea that only voices out of the air can reach them.” Its last shortwave broadcast before the Ukraine war was in 2008.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is not transmitting over shortwave. But the owners of a shortwave station in Okeechobee, Fla., whose radio antennas tower over a cow pasture, told reporters that they have started beaming Voice of America broadcasts over the airwaves to Russia. (An online fundraiser for the operation has raised more than $12,000.)
Thomas Kent, a former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, wrote in an essay last week that Western strategists should consider more imaginative options for fomenting internal dissent in Russia, including organizing campaigns to email audio files, holding closed discussions on small social networks and smuggling flash drives.
“Kremlin leaders cannot eternally ignore public discontent, even if they are willing for now to brutalize anyone who dares protest in the streets,” Kent wrote. “The Western world must demonstrate it respects Russia’s population, even if the regime doesn’t. That means showing commitment to the principle that Russians deserve to be informed.”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC say they’ve seen audiences for their Russian-language offerings grow dramatically since Russia’s invasion and crackdown on independent media.
The RFE/RL website saw its number of unique visitors from Russia spike by 86 percent in the first two weeks of the war; on YouTube, many of its latest videos have surpassed 1 million views. People are also evading Russian censors by sending the stories over Telegram and email newsletters, said Jamie Fly, president and chief executive of RFE/RL.
“Certainly it is becoming more difficult if you are Russian sitting inside Russia to get independent news and information, but people are still looking to that content, whether they’re using VPNs or mirror sites,” Fly said. “As we saw throughout the Cold War, in a variety of countries, people always find a way no matter what the jamming tactics are.”
Beyond the official efforts, teams of computer programmers have also begun striking out to stir up Russian rage. One group, squad303, named for an air squadron that tore through Nazi warplanes during World War II, has built a website that shows a randomly selected Russian citizen’s email address, phone or WhatsApp number — as well as a pre-written message a visitor can send to strike up a conversation from their own accounts.
“Hello, my Russian friend,” one text says, roughly translated. “We don’t know each other. I live abroad. I know that Russia invaded Ukraine and many soldiers and civilians died there. How do you live in Russia? How is it going?”
One of the group’s programmers in Poland — using the name of Jan Zumbach, one of the squadron’s ace fighter pilots — said he now works alongside more than 100 volunteers from Estonia, France, Germany, the United States and other countries, broken into teams devoted to software development, cyberdefense, social media and a “help desk” to get new messengers onboard.
Millions of messages, some of which have showed photos of the war or tallies of civilian deaths, have been sent in less than two weeks to the Russian numbers, according to the programmer, who said their database includes tens of millions of phone numbers and email addresses taken from hacked Russian databases. The team has raced to expand its infrastructure, growing from one server earlier this month to 16 servers today. Other mass-distribution operations are currently in the works, he said.
The project is all-consuming, he said, and he’s getting about three hours of sleep a night. But he said he remembers how important outside information from Radio Free Europe was to his parents during the 1980s, when they took part in the Solidarity labor movement that shook the Soviet Union. He hopes his work today will have a similar impact.
“We do not expect instant rewards or instant replies. It’s a process,” he said. “Every single text message sent to a person in Russia is a tiny bridge between two people.”
Dey Correa, a volunteer messenger in Panama, said she has sent hundreds of messages to Russians with help from the site, including 50 while she was at home breastfeeding her infant son.
She shared screenshots with The Washington Post showing dozens of messages and conversations, including one in which a respondent said Russians were shocked by the war but afraid to protest due to police crackdowns.
Correa doesn’t know if it will have any impact, and she has worried about retaliation. But she said she felt motivated to do something when she saw photos of a devastated maternity ward in Mariupol, Ukraine.
“When I saw the hospital, it became personal,” she said. “I think how horrible the nights are for those mothers — the cold. Not all of them have the opportunity to hold their babies, like I do.”
Another group has created a search engine, called Rusleaks, that aggregates more than a dozen databases purported to feature the personal information of Russian military personnel, including tens of thousands of people’s names, addresses, phone numbers and passport details.
The data have not been fully verified and some of the records have been released by the Ukrainian government, raising the risks of false information.
But one of the group’s members, a software developer formerly in Kyiv, said the data could be used to alert the Russian public to what their government is doing or help investigate war crimes.
“I don’t know how soon it will happen. I don’t know that it will happen at all. But I am doing what I’ve been training for,” he said. “We are fighting on too many frontiers now. And this is clearly one of them. … Whatever it takes to make our voice louder.”
Paul Sonne contributed to this report.
9. US must counter Russian misinformation on Ukraine with ‘psyops,’ experts say
For Fox News: Here is a pro tip: "psyops" is PSYOP.
US must counter Russian misinformation on Ukraine with ‘psyops,’ experts say
Psychological operations are tactics geared toward shaping how people perceive thing
Former CIA director addresses whether China will get dragged into the Ukraine war and also discusses the North Korea threat on 'America Reports.'
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The U.S. has supported Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders by supplying the country with weapons and slapping harsh sanctions against Russia.
But despite U.S. support, the conflict has only descended into further chaos. Russia continues to shell major cities, the civilian death toll is rising, and millions of people have fled their homes, creating the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
Captured Russian air force officers whose jets were shot down by Ukrainian forces speak to reporters at a news conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2022. (Associated Press)
Geopolitics experts who spoke with Fox News said the U.S. should be devoting more resources to bolstering psychological warfare, an approach that would not send American troops into harm’s way.
Shaping perceptions
Psychological operations, or "psyops," broadly refer to tactics geared toward shaping how people perceive events and information. The U.S. perfected the craft against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but has lagged behind in recent decades, preferring instead to concentrate on hard power.
Russia, meanwhile, has been perfecting the craft of peddling disinformation against Americans to deepen racial and political divisions, all while distracting Washington and emboldening U.S. adversaries.
People in Hong Kong stand by TV screens broadcasting the news that Russian troops have launched an attack on Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022. (Associated Press)
Pysops could be a "potential mitigating factor" in the conflict, says Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer who grew up in the Soviet Union.
"We need to raise awareness within the Russian population about what’s going on," she said, "because right now, the Russians and the Americans are limiting the information flows into Russia – the Russians because they’re afraid of Western propaganda, and the U.S. because we want to punish Russia."
The net sum of these actions, she argued, has been an Iron Curtain dropped on Russia in the information domain, a situation that ultimately does not serve U.S. interests because Russians need to be favorably predisposed to Western views rather than Russian views.
Those "Western views," Koffler said, include telling the truth about how Russian President Vladimir Putin is "killing brethren Slavic people" in Ukraine and how the Russians should not be standing for this.
Firefighters are seen at the site after airstrikes hit civil settlements as Russian attacks continue on Ukraine in Dnipro, Ukraine, March 11, 2022. (Getty Images)
Kremlin's crackdown
The Kremlin has cracked down on social media and independent outlets in Russia, effectively reshaping the narrative of its invasion of Ukraine by calling it a "special military operation" rather than a war.
Russia’s playbook harkens back to the Soviet-era tactic of "reflexive control," whereby information is conveyed to an opponent -- causing it to react in a way that favors the initiator of the action.
The U.S. could send Russian people more information about virtual proxy networks (VPNs) to help them bypass government censorship, says Ivana Stradner, an adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has studied psyops.
The U.S. and its Western allies ought to work with disillusioned Russians who have left the country to help promote a different narrative to Russians back home, Stradner told Fox News. This not does have to entail "the typical democracy promotion" that has been tried by the U.S. in other parts of the world, she clarified.
Tackling corruption in Russia, for example, would resonate with more people – especially younger generations – because corruption impacts every facet of daily life, Stradner argued.
"We have to start from where we are and right now. And right now the number one thing is to offer Russians alternative views of the war and talk about corruption in the country," Stradner said. "Corruption certainly affects every single young Russian over there."
"The number one thing is to offer Russians alternative views of the war and talk about corruption in the country."
— Ivana Stradner, adviser, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
The Kremlin’s information warfare will not stop with the end of the war in Ukraine, Stradner warned. She and called for social media platforms to be more proactive in fighting disinformation.
Continue polarizing US?
"I would really not exclude also the possibility of Russia to continue polarizing American society," she said. "So we might actually see new protests or different unrest prior to the 2022 elections."
Firefighters work to clear the rubble and extinguish a fire after a Russian rocket exploded in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 14, 2022. (Getty Images)
Koffler, meanwhile, said psyop tactics must be deployed diligently against Russia, lest the Kremlin overact.
She evoked the time the Soviets mistakenly shot down a South Korean airliner in 1983 at a time when the U.S. was running major psyop campaigns against the Kremlin.
"The other side of (psyops) is that you can unintentionally cause your adversary to overreact. So, it’s the kind of thing that you have to be super accurate. And that requires a deep understanding of your adversary," she said.
"I hope that President Biden knows right now that Ukraine is not Putin’s first or last step," Koffler said. "And so right now is the time to wake up and put all of our instruments together and synchronize them."
10. Invoking America’s Darkest Days, Zelensky Pleads for More U.S. Aid
I know I am beating the dead horse but again Zelenesky is giving us a master class in strategic communications.
Invoking America’s Darkest Days, Zelensky Pleads for More U.S. Aid
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called for a no-fly zone and more weapons to combat Russia’s assault and implored President Biden to be “the leader of peace.”
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President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address was a remarkably direct appeal from a wartime leader under siege.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
March 16, 2022Updated 7:33 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine invoked the memory of America’s darkest days on Wednesday as he pleaded for more military aid to combat Russia’s “inhumane destruction” of his country, directly challenging President Biden and members of Congress to help by showing a wrenching video of the carnage in Ukraine’s cities.
Appearing before Congress by video link from Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky likened Russia’s three-week onslaught in Ukraine to Japan’s World War II air assault on Pearl Harbor, when “your sky was black from the planes attacking you,” and to Sept. 11, when “innocent people were attacked from the air.” Dressed in an olive green T-shirt and seated next to a Ukrainian flag, he urged the United States and its allies to fulfill a moral duty by imposing a no-fly zone over his country to prevent Russian attacks from the air.
“I call on you to do more,” Mr. Zelensky said, describing the conflict raging in Ukraine as an assault on the world’s civilized nations. Speaking directly to Mr. Biden, he added: “I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”
The appeal and the explicit video of people wounded and killed by Russian attacks left some lawmakers in tears and brought members in both parties to their feet in lengthy standing ovations for the wartime leader. In his own remarks a few hours later, Mr. Biden praised Mr. Zelensky for demonstrating “remarkable courage and strength in the face of brutal aggression” and announced that the United States would soon deliver $800 million worth of antiaircraft and anti-armor missiles, grenades, rifles, body armor and more.
Mr. Zelensky’s appeals in recent weeks, capped by his emotional speech on Wednesday, have helped spur bipartisan action from Mr. Biden and members of Congress, including a nearly $14 billion aid package that includes help for refugees, economic assistance and billions of dollars in military aid. Mr. Biden signed that legislation on Tuesday.
But while Mr. Zelensky has steadily increased the pressure by tapping into a public sense of anger and grief about the consequences of Russia’s invasion, he has failed to persuade Mr. Biden and most lawmakers to support his most pressing demands for help — access to fighter jets and efforts to close off the skies above his country.
Mr. Biden and his top military aides have rejected requests to help Ukraine acquire aging Russian-made MIG fighters from Poland. American officials said the Pentagon had assessed that they would do little good in Ukraine’s fight against Russia — and might be used by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as an excuse to widen the fighting to neighboring countries in Europe.
Mr. Zelensky’s speech did little to immediately shake the resolve of the United States and its allies to avoid direct military confrontation with Russia, which leaders of NATO countries believe could lead to a catastrophic global war with devastating consequences.
In Brussels, NATO officials again categorically rejected the idea of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, saying it would require the kind of military conflict with Russia that they are seeking to avoid. In Washington, Mr. Biden made no mention of a no-fly zone even as he pledged to send more military aid.
“The American people are answering President Zelensky’s call for more help, more weapons for Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said. He also vowed to help Ukraine acquire long-distance antiaircraft systems and munitions that could help defend the country’s cities against Russian fighters and bombers.
“Putin is inflicting appalling, appalling devastation and horror on Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said. “Bombing apartment buildings, maternity wards, hospitals. I mean, it’s just God-awful.”
Asked a question as he departed an event later in the day, Mr. Biden said of Mr. Putin: “I think he is a war criminal.” It was the first time the administration had specifically accused the Russian president of war crimes over the invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Biden delivered their speeches against the backdrop of more grim developments in Ukraine, including shelling in Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv on Wednesday.
Ahead of Mr. Biden’s eight-minute speech, Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, warned his Russian counterpart on Wednesday against “any possible Russian decision to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine,” the White House said in a statement.
The warning to Nikolai P. Patrushev, Mr. Putin’s main national security adviser, reflected escalating concerns in Washington that the Russians, stymied in their hopes of a quick takeover of the country, could resort to using weapons of mass destruction.
In his address to Congress, Mr. Zelensky appealed to both lawmakers’ emotions and their belief in the United States as the leader of the free world. He thanked lawmakers for their support but sternly suggested that the United States had yet to fulfill the nation’s purported moral duty to help defend democracies terrorized by violent authoritarians — including democracies that are outside its alliances.
He borrowed a phrase from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — “I have a dream” — as he urged the United States to help him fight Russia’s aircraft, saying “I have a need” to protect the sky from Russian attacks.
“I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths,” Mr. Zelensky said, speaking in English during the end of his speech.
Mr. Zelensky delivered his address through a translator to a packed movie-theater-style auditorium in the Capitol complex, calling it “the darkest time for our country” as he asked lawmakers to watch images of Ukraine before and after the Russian invasion. Such explicit scenes of wreckage have rarely, if ever, been shown to lawmakers in an address delivered by a foreign dignitary, and the effect was immediately palpable.
Sitting rapt in their seats during the address, many members of Congress could be seen wiping away tears from their faces as they watched scenes of a Ukraine in shambles. Mr. Zelensky’s defiance in the face of the unrelenting Russian assault has inspired lawmakers in both parties, who have been eager to send him aid.
Oksana Markarova, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, attended Mr. Zelensky’s address, which was delivered through a translator to a packed movie-theater-style auditorium on Capitol Hill.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
Many lawmakers have pressed Mr. Biden to do more to help Ukraine and punish Russia, often on a quicker timeline than the administration has desired. In his remarks, Mr. Zelensky appeared to play up that dynamic, as he simultaneously praised Mr. Biden’s help but said it had fallen short.
“A few minutes ago, President Zelensky reminded us that the United States is indeed the leader of the free world,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said in a speech from the Senate floor. “So it’s time we acted like it.”
Congress last week approved the nearly $14 billion aid package for Ukraine, more than doubling the Biden administration’s original price tag in an unusually swift and bipartisan display. But faced with Mr. Zelensky’s emotional descriptions of a terrorized nation, lawmakers on Wednesday emerged from his presentation showing no qualms about sending him even more aid, in what is likely to become a messy debate that splinters along party lines.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to Know
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While members of Congress generally agree that the United States should send more weaponry to Ukraine, deep disagreements remain over what exactly would be appropriate to provide.
Some of Mr. Zelensky’s requests, such as the imposition of a no-fly zone, have been ruled out by the Biden administration and NATO allies. Others are being more seriously considered by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, including providing Ukraine with advanced antimissile systems and drones.
And several lawmakers in both parties continue to call for the United States to help transfer MIG fighter jets to Ukraine, despite questions about whether the country’s air force could even fly the planes and whether Russia would view the transfer as an escalatory move.
“They need more Javelins, they need more ammo, they need more Stingers, they need more surface-to-air missiles, they need more airplanes, they need more of everything,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, referring to Javelin antitank missiles and Stinger antiaircraft missiles.
“Zelensky has the courage of his convictions,” Mr. Sasse added. “The question he asked the Congress and the United States government is: Will we have the courage of ours? We’re a superpower. We should act like it.”
With many in Congress calling for the White House to get behind the transfer of the MIG fighters to Ukraine from Poland, the White House pushed back again.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that because the planes would take off from NATO air bases, those bases could become targets for Russian retaliation, potentially drawing NATO forces into the war. On Wednesday, she built on that argument, saying that because the jets were capable of making it to Russia to conduct an attack, they could be considered offensive weapons.
The Biden administration insists that the long-range antiaircraft systems being transferred to Ukraine are entirely defensive in nature. But it is not clear that the Russians would regard them as such, since both the antiaircraft systems and the MIG fighters could take down Russian planes.
In private, some administration officials concede that the distinction is a narrow one and that it is not clear that the Russians would consider antiaircraft batteries as defensive.
Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said Mr. Zelensky made “an incredibly compelling case that Putin will only stop when we stop him.” But he added a note of restraint, giving voice to a calculation that top administration officials have privately weighed.
“It really is just a fundamental question of how much risk are we willing to take,” Mr. Coons said.
The public and often partisan debate over which weapons to send to Ukraine has clearly annoyed some Biden allies. Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said the public discussion was reaching the point of absurdity.
“For us to be telegraphing to Russia every single day our divisions over what kind of defensive support Ukraine should get, and telegraphing to them exactly what weapon systems we’re transferring, I don’t know is helpful,” Mr. Murphy said. “This is a strange way to prosecute a war.”
Despite the divisions among lawmakers, Mr. Biden sought to make clear that the United States was united in its support of Ukraine.
“Let there be no doubt, no uncertainty, no question,” he said. “America stands with the forces of freedom. We always have, we always will.”
Jonathan Weisman, Emily Cochrane and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
11. Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says
The Chinese: no holds barred.
Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says
Prosecutors unseal complaints accusing Chinese government agents of targeting dissidents in U.S., including father of U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu
By Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe in Washington and James Fanelli
in New York
Updated March 16, 2022 10:41 pm ET
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe in Washington and James Fanelli in New York
A man working as an agent of the Chinese government also plotted to appear at another dissident’s house pretending to represent an international sports committee in a bid to get his passport and that of a family member, prosecutors said. The dissident isn’t named but was confirmed by a person familiar with the investigation as Arthur Liu, the father of American figure-skating Olympian Alysa Liu, who has said he fled China after organizing student protests in 1989.
Altogether, prosecutors presented three cases in Brooklyn charging five people, three of whom are in custody and two of whom are at large.
While U.S. authorities have long accused the Chinese government of using illegal tactics to threaten political rivals and dissidents world-wide, law-enforcement officials said Wednesday the efforts had grown more brazen in recent years, reaching even into the U.S. political process.
“Authoritarian states around the world feel emboldened to reach beyond their borders to intimidate or exact reprisals against individuals who dare to speak out against oppression and corruption,” Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security, said at a press briefing on the cases.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Qiming Lin, the alleged Ministry of State Security agent who targeted the candidate, told the investigator: “Whatever price is fine. As long as you can do it.” According to a transcript of their conversation that prosecutors included in charging documents, Mr. Lin, who is in China, said: “We don’t want him to be elected,” adding, “we will have a lot more—more of this [work] in the future…Including right now [a] New York State legislator.”
The candidate, who is running for a New York seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, isn’t named in the complaint but matches the description of Yan Xiong, a student leader in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989 who later fled China, served in the U.S. military and became a citizen.
Mr. Lin suggested a variety of ways the investigator could end the would-be congressman’s candidacy, including by manufacturing derogatory information about him or arranging for him to be in a car accident, prosecutors said. “Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right?” Mr. Lin said, according to prosecutors. In another conversation, the agent allegedly said: “You go find a girl for him, see if he would take the bait.”
The private investigator, who wasn’t identified, reported the efforts to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the charging document.
Mr. Xiong, a Democrat, is among several candidates vying to succeed Rep. Lee Zeldin in Long Island’s First Congressional District. Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, isn’t seeking re-election and is running in New York’s gubernatorial primary later this year.
Mr. Xiong said in an interview Wednesday that he was surprised by Mr. Lin’s arrest. He said he just returned from a trip abroad and only learned of the allegations by reading the news. The allegations are ugly, Mr. Xiong said, but he wasn’t intimidated and vowed to continue his congressional campaign.
“It reminded me to be more cautious and be more brave,” he said.
Representatives for Alysa and Arthur Liu also didn’t respond to a request for comment. The complaint alleges that the surveillance and harassment campaign against Mr. Liu included looking to pay a reporter to let an agent tag along on an interview and ask his own questions, put a GPS tracker on his car, and get his Social Security number.
The complaint said investigators had also secured an international sports committee ID card bearing the name of an actual representative and an image of one of the agents. The plan to get Mr. Liu’s passport and that of a family member, the complaint said, was discussed in November 2021 and involved going to the Lius’ house with the identification card under the guise of checking if they were prepared to travel.
The 16-year-old Alysa Liu competed at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, finishing seventh in the women’s competition.
The three men accused of targeting Mr. Liu are two New Yorkers, Fan Liu and Matthew Ziburis, as well as a Chinese national they allegedly worked for, Qiang “Jason” Sun. The three allegedly engaged in other operations against several dissidents, including trying to bribe an Internal Revenue Service employee for access to one of their tax returns. They are also accused of stalking and surveilling an artist who made a sculpture depicting Chinese President Xi Jinping as a coronavirus molecule.
In a third case, a former Chinese dissident living in Queens, Shujun Wang, was accused of using his status within the Chinese community to report to the Ministry of State Security on people the Chinese government considers threatening, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, advocates for Taiwanese independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists—both in the U.S. and abroad. At least one high-profile Hong Kong democracy activist on whom the defendant reported was subsequently arrested by Chinese officials, prosecutors said.
“The Chinese Communist Party is not the only entity engaged in these practices, but their level of aggressiveness is unique,” said FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Alan Kohler Jr., who added that the actions often targeted Chinese Americans.
Fan Liu and Messrs. Wang and Ziburis appeared in a federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon. During his appearance, Mr. Liu denied the allegations through a Chinese interpreter. A judge set his release at $1 million bond.
The judge set Mr. Wang’s release at $300,000 bond. Mr. Ziburis’s bond was set at $500,000. The three defendants had their travel restricted, and a judge ordered Messrs. Liu and Wang to not enter the Chinese consulate in New York or other Chinese government facilities in the U.S.
Lawyers for all three defendants didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Justice Department last month ended a Trump-era initiative to counter national-security threats from China after it led to a series of failed prosecutions of academics that sowed broad distrust in the higher-education community. At the time, Justice Department officials had said they planned to continue pursuing other cases involving allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Chinese government, including those that targeted Chinese dissidents living in the U.S.
—Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe in Washington and James Fanelli in New York
12. Ukraine War Update - March 17, 2022 | SOF News
Ukraine War Update - March 17, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, and NATO.
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Russian Campaign Update. The Russian advanced is stalled. Much of its current offensive activity consists of shelling with airstrikes (standoff), missiles, and short-range rockets. The Iskander missile (pictured above) has been used quite frequently. According to news reports and social media the Russians appear to be hitting a number of civilian targets with these area weapons. The cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol are facing dire circumstances with shortages of food, fuel, water, and electricity and constant shelling of residential areas by the Russians. It is still pressing the attack against coastal city of Mariupol. As of March 16 the Russians have fired over 900 missiles from Russia and within Ukraine. Western Ukraine has not been targeted over the past few days.
Civilian Facilities Targeted by Russians. Many hospitals and medical clinics have been attacked according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Russia has stated that the attacks are ‘false flag’ operations by Ukrainian forces. Many observers note that a favorite Russian tactic is to demoralize the civilian population and cause a flow of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) to disrupt their opponents operations and to ‘cleanse’ the occupied areas of potential future insurgents. There are reports that many deaths and hundreds of injuries were suffered by Ukrainians seeking safety in a theater that was clearly marked as sheltering civilians. Read “Hundreds feared trapped in Ukraine theater hit by airstrike”, AP News, March 17, 2022.
Fight for the Skies. The Ukrainians may not get a no-fly zone or Polish MiG-29s; but they will continue to receive thousands of MANPADs. In addition, efforts are underway to provide more sophisticated air defense weapons that will reach altitudes that MANPADs cannot reach. There are reports that Slovakia may provide Ukraine with some of its S-300 air defense systems. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is going to be visiting Slovakia in the next several days and this will likely be a topic during the meetings. Slovakia will likely press the U.S. for some replacement systems if they go ahead with the S-300 transfer to Ukraine. There could be one or two U.S-manned Patriot missile batteries heading that way in the future.
Maritime Activities. An amphibious landing force on several ships is still positioned in the Black Sea off the coast of Odessa to land a substantial element of Russian naval infantry. The Russian blockade of Ukrainian shipping continues. Thus far, the only amphibious landing of naval infantry that has taken place in the war occurred on the coast of the Sea of Azov in support of the Mariupol siege. There has no yet been a landing on the coast of the Black Sea. In the Black Sea there are likely six amphibious landing ships each with the capability to land about 300 troops and 12 main battle tanks. The seizure of the Baltic Leader, a Russian merchant ship, in the English Channel on February 25, 2022 has raised some legal questions about high seas freedoms.
Kyiv. The capital city of Ukraine is considered the primary objective of the Russians. The Capture of Kyiv would allow Russia to put in place its puppet government. Apparently the Russians had been preparing for a ‘victory parade’ in Kyiv. A secret stash of Russian military dress uniforms were found near Kyiv – providing an indication that the Russians had anticipated a quick military victory. (Politico). The Russians have made limited but unsuccessful attacks in the region northwest of Kyiv. For the last 24 hours the region east of Kyiv has been quiet, with the Russian forces still about 30 kilometers away. The Ukrainians are still in control of the town of Brovary, east of Kyiv. The U.S. Department of Defense said on Wednesday (Mar 16) that the Russians have not made any significant advances toward the city.
Kharkiv. The second largest city of Ukraine is Kharkiv located in the northeast of the country. The city has still not been encircled, but it is suffering intense shelling from aircraft, missiles, and rockets. The Ukrainians have mounted several counterattacks over the past few weeks to keep the Russians off balance.
Mariupol. Located on the Sea of Azov, the coastal city of Mariupol is under siege by the Russians. This city is situated along the coastal road network that would provide Russia with a land bridge between Russia and the Crimea. The city is still being defended by Ukrainian forces. The Russians have been using long-range fires to strike military and civilian targets in the city.
Mykolayiv and then Odessa. Located on the west bank of the Dnieper River close to the coast of the Black Sea, Mykolayiv is a strategic objective for the Russians that is on the road to Odessa located further west along the coast of the Black Sea. Russian warships have been shelling towns near Odessa as naval activity has been increasing in the northern Black Sea.
Refugees. As of March 16, over 3,000,000 refugees have left Ukraine according to data provided by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). This includes about 1.5 million children. A March 16, 2022 report (PDF, 9 pages) by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) provides details on the humanitarian impact of the Ukraine War.
Zelensky Address to Congress. On Wednesday (Mar 16) the Ukrainian president addressed the United States Congress with an emotional appeal for a no-fly zone, more sanctions, fighter jets, and more shipments of military weapons and supplies. On Tuesday (Mar 15) the U.S. Senate passed a resolution condemning the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin, members of the Russian Security Council, the Russian Armed Forces, and Russian military commanders for committing atrocities against the Ukrainian people.
More U.S. Military Aid. On Wednesday (Mar 16) President Biden delivered remarks on the assistance that the United States is providing to Ukraine in a televised event (DVIDS, 9 mins). He announced more military aid ($800 million) to be shipped to Ukraine in the coming weeks. The equipment includes 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 9,000 anti-armor systems (Javelin, AT-4, etc.), 100 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems (Switchblades used by SOF), 7,000 small arms, and munitions for artillery and mortars.
NATO Conference. President Biden will travel to Europe to meet with European heads of state and senior officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The event will take place in Brussels. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will be present as well.
Ruling by International Court of Justice. On Wednesday (Mar 16) the curt issued a ruling in Ukraine’s case against the Russian Federation under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ruling ordered Russia to immediately suspend the military operation in Ukraine. (DoS press release 16 March 2022).
Legality of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. Much of the information operations (IO) battle concerns the opinions former by the international community of the justification and legality of the Russian invasion. A recent report by the Congressional Research Service examines the Russian reasons for its invasion of Ukraine and subsequent actions during the conflict in the context of international law. The Law of War and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, CRS, March 16, 2022, PDF, 5 pages.
Germany’s Big Defense Shift. The recent invasion of Ukraine has prompted the German government to reverse decades of German pacifism and pivot toward building a stronger military and defense industry. It will begin to institute reforms to bring its defense spending in lien with the 2 per cent NATO requirement. Putin has managed, with his aggression in Ukraine, to take Germany off the sidelines and have it once again assume its traditional status as central Europe’s dominant military power. “Germany’s Defence Pivot”, Defence Connect, March 17, 2022.
Cyberspace and the Military. The dynamics of cyberspace and conflict are driving fundamental shifts that the military and society will have to surmount. There are some unique challenges to the cyber civil-military relationship – a couple include the constant quest for intelligence by military leaders and perhaps a tendency to see cyber as a weapon that does not cause human suffering . . . and therefore the threshold for employment is lower. Jason Healey, president of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, explores these issues and more in “Soldiers, Statesmen and Cyber Crises: Cyberspace and Civil-Military Relations”, Lawfare, March 16, 2022.
Ukrainian Version of the Ballad of the Green Berets. Members of the U.S. Special Forces community will recognize this tune. “One Hundred Warriors”.
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, defense, or the current conflict in Ukraine then we are interested.
Maps and Other Resources
UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one
Maps of Ukraine
Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.
UNHCR Operational Data Portal – Ukraine Refugee Situation
Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.
Janes Equipment Profile – Ukraine Conflict. An 81-page PDF provides information on the military equipment of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces. Covers naval, air, electronic warfare, C4ISR, communications, night vision, radar, and armored fighting vehicles, Ukraine Conflict Equipment Profile, February 28, 2022.
Arms Transfers to Ukraine. Forum on the Arms Trade.
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13. The DOD Needs a Joint Wargaming Center
Who will take the lead for irregular warfare wargaming or making sure irregular warfare is included in DOD wargames?
The DOD Needs a Joint Wargaming Center
The recent explosion of wargames obscures several flaws in the current system.
BY LT. COL. GABE S. ARRINGTON
NATIONAL DEFENSE FELLOW, CNAS
MARCH 16, 2022 09:00 AM ET
Reinvigorate our wargaming efforts, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work told Pentagon and military leaders in 2015. Services, research institutions, and industry have since responded with an explosion of wargames. But these largely uncoordinated efforts have left knowledge gaps, reflected various biases, and insufficiently addressed mid- and long-term scenarios. To fix these problems and ensure unity of effort, the DOD should create a Joint Wargaming Center.
In his memo, Work prescribed three lines of effort. The first, led by the services and combatant commands, looks up to five years ahead and focuses on current concepts. The Joint Staff leads a mid-term effort, studying new capabilities and operational concepts five to 15 years out; while the Office of Net Assessment leads a long-term effort focused on technology trends and competition.
The near-term line has proven to be the easiest for the DOD to execute, mainly through service entities such as the Air Force Wargaming Institute and the Naval War College, which focus on educational and service-specific wargames. The services continue to invest in wargaming capability and modeling and simulation that complement their specific missions, such as the Wargaming and Advanced Research Simulation Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and the Marine Corps Wargaming and Analysis Center in Quantico, Virginia.
But as the Pentagon responded to the new wargaming guidance, so too did industry and the research institutions associated with national security. This response, while well-intentioned, means that mid- to long-term wargame efforts are not being led as intended by the Joint Staff and Office of Net Assessment. Instead, much of the wargaming design, execution, and report writing is contracted outside the Department of Defense.
One consequence is that too many wargames are built on data that is outdated, insufficient, generalized, or inaccurate. Mid- and long-term ones that involve policy and strategy development are too often conducted at an unclassified level. Considering the role of sensitive intelligence and classified information in senior leaders’ decision-making, this practice should now be considered obsolete.
As well, the utility of wargames increasingly depends on current and accurate technical data, systems information, and emerging technology, but there is no process for ensuring that new data reaches every wargaming and modeling and simulation organization across the Defense Department.
Finally, wargames hosted by industry and research organizations, many of which receive funding from industry and foreign entities, may be subject to pressures that distort the games and the lessons that are drawn from them.
There are other problems as well. The proliferation of wargaming means key participants across government agencies must choose from an overwhelming list of invitations, creating a lack in unity of effort. Wargames often lack the diversity that would come through inviting (and compensating) experts in wargame design, international relations theory, the humanities, and exquisite technologies. Adjudication techniques are often stuck in the industrial age; rolling dice cannot usefully determine outcomes in complicated fields such as international relations theory, operational concepts of employment, and technical information related to current and emerging technologies.
All this leads to many wargames producing reports based on bad data and influenced by institutional and personal bias. The creation of a Joint Wargaming Center would address these challenges. And it would give the Joint Staff and Office of Net Assessment the ability to design, execute, and adjudicate wargames with the appropriate participants while minimizing and identifying bias. Ultimately, it would enable senior leaders to receive more accurate recommendations from wargames.
Recommendations
The new center should subsume the various Joint Staff directorates involved in wargaming and report to the Joint Chiefs’ Vice Chairman. The Vice Chairman’s office will prioritize the center’s wargaming efforts by looking at future challenges and opportunities that align with decisions made by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council. Its oversight will also help ensure that any bias allowed into the wargame can be accurately described to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense.
The center should have a specialized division that reports to the Director of the Office of Net Assessment, which will help the office with the manning and funding it needs to take on the mission of leading long-term wargaming.
Operationally, the center should help move away from wargames hosted by industry and research organizations, in the spirit of National Security Presidential Memorandum 33, which aimed “to strengthen protections of United States Government-supported Research and Development (R&D) against foreign government interference and exploitation.”
Integrating diverse expert opinions from industry and research experts will be critical to the new center’s credibility. This is best accomplished by inclusion of a wide range of experts in events such as the Air Force’s Annual Trilateral workshop in France, which this year involves technology integration. This will ensure that strategic challenges and opportunities are more thoroughly explored through various viewpoints.
Finally, the DOD should stand up a wargaming data-fusion center capable of agile software development and processing. It will collect data from across the U.S. government and use it to update every wargaming center in the DOD and as well as intelligence agencies. This center will also create better ways to adjudicate wargames, including by using emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. This supports Deputy Defense Secretary Katheen Hicks’ vision for Data Advantage by tracking data and recommendations for continued use in multiple iterations of wargames.
Lt. Col. Gabe S. Arrington is a National Defense Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., and Seminar XXI Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An Air Force officer, he previously served as the Executive Officer to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
14. Japan spots four Russian amphibious transports sailing from Far East
Hmmm..maybe there will be a conflict over the Kuril Islands.
Japan spots four Russian amphibious transports sailing from Far East
TOKYO, March 17 (Reuters) - Japan's military said on Thursday that it had spotted four large Russian amphibious warfare ships sailing close to its islands as they traveled west, possibly towards Europe.
Pictures of the amphibious transports, typically used for landing expeditionary forces ashore, published by Japan's defence ministry showed what appeared to be military trucks loaded onto the deck of one of the vessels.
We don't know where they are heading, but their heading suggest it is possible," a Japanese defence ministry spokesman said. Asked if they could be bound for Ukraine, he said "it is possible".
A Japanese Self Defense Force maritime patrol first detected the Russian vessels, which can carry dozens of tanks other military vehicles and hundreds of troops, on Tuesday and monitored them as they passed West from the Pacific Ocean to the Sea of Japan through the narrow Tsuruga Strait separating Japan's main Honshu island from Hokkaido island on Wednesday.
It is unusual for Russian ships to pass through the strait so close to Japanese territory, the military spokesman said.
Armed with anti-tank weapons supplied by the United States and other countries Ukrainian fighters have taken a heavy toll on Russian armour and fuel trucks, meaning Moscow, which describes its attack as a "special operation," may need to reinforce its forces with new equipment.
NATO allies, which have already supplied 20,000 anti-tank and other weapons to Ukraine, on Wednesday said they would keep helping the country resist the Russian attack.
Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
15. Top Marine General Praises Ukrainian Forces as 'Very Well Trained, Very Well Led'
Top Marine General Praises Ukrainian Forces as 'Very Well Trained, Very Well Led'
The Marine Corps' top officer had high praise for Ukrainian forces Wednesday as he discussed the invasion of the country by Russia.
"I would begin first of all with Ukraine, and how well their forces are doing," Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said while speaking to Washington Post reporter David Ignatius on a webcast.
"I think they're proving to be very disciplined, very well trained, very well led, and now very inspired," Berger added. Specifically, the Marine leader noted that the country is winning "the information competition."
"Fighting continues around major cities, major bombing, but no appreciable gains by Russia in recent days," a senior defense official told reporters Wednesday.
Berger noted that the Russian forces have not been effective at "fighting combined arms" -- using infantry and armor units to complement each other. Though the Marine general noted that it's not clear why Russian forces have not been implementing these tactics, he floated the possibility that it's driven by how well the Ukrainians are denying the invading force any reconnaissance opportunities.
"If you're a Russian tactical commander right now, on the ground, I'm not sure they have a good picture of what's in front of them," he said.
Berger also noted that Ukrainian forces have successfully made resupplying Russian troops very challenging by having units take "individual initiative" to get at Russia's "backside, at [their] logistics trains."
"That really causes Russian tactical leaders more problems because the resupply that they were planning now has to fight its way to get to you from Russia," he said.
Exacerbating Russia's supply woes could also be an inflexible command structure "where junior leaders are not allowed, not permitted to make those kind of calls" that permit forces to change tactics on the fly, Berger explained.
When asked why the Russians hadn't assaulted Ukraine from the Black Sea, the leader of the military branch that specializes in amphibious assaults noted that "no other operation that I know of is more complicated, more complex, takes more preparation, practice, rehearsal than an amphibious operation."
"Which is why not all forces can do them," Berger was quick to add.
He suggested that "Ukrainian forces had time to set a defense along the coastline that caused them, the Russian forces, to be concerned and delay" -- a sentiment echoed by others at the Pentagon.
One senior defense official told reporters last week that the one amphibious landing conducted by Russian forces occurred where it "was not going to be contested because they don't have a lot of amphibious experience, and there was no great air support for that amphibious landing."
"It's hard stuff for us, and I think what we're seeing over the last couple of weeks is just how much harder it is for the Russian military," that official added.
Berger noted that "during a conflict, it's difficult to draw all of the deeper lessons learned," but added that the war will continue to be studied by both U.S. and foreign militaries.
"We should assume that [Chinese navy] leaders are studying what's happening in Ukraine," he said.
"I think it should definitely give them pause about any degree of confidence an assault, an invasion of another country ... especially if it's across a body of water, is not going to be easy and it's not going to be quick."
16. Pacific general vows ‘robust’ response to China attack
Pacific general vows ‘robust’ response to China attack
NEWS AND ANALYSIS:
China needs to learn the lessons being taught to the Russian military in Ukraine and the dangers Beijing’s military forces will face from any attack on Taiwan or another regional nation, the commander of the Pacific Air Forces said this week.
Air Force Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach, who heads the air element of the Indo-Pacific Command, warned Beijing will suffer an even more forceful response if the People’s Liberation Army conducts an unprovoked attack on the island state similar to Russia’s strike against Ukraine. He contended that China’s communist government is operating “outside the rule of law and the rules-based international order” in conducting aerial and other incursions against neighboring states.
The first lesson China needs to learn, he said this week, is the power of international unity in punishing Russia and assisting Ukraine with weapons in response to the invasion.
“I’m hoping that China will recognize that and realize that,” Gen. Wilsbach said in remarks Monday to the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “Something very similar — maybe even more robust — would happen if [China] were to conduct some kind of unprovoked attack on one of their neighbors.”
And as in Ukraine, China’s military should now realize that military operations against Taiwan would be difficult to conduct and probably would not go according to Beijing’s plans for a decisive victory.
“What China would have to do … with the terrain that they have to contend with around where their neighbors are at is something else they should consider — that is, that it’s very difficult to conduct an invasion and to achieve the military objectives and perhaps they might not be ready to do what they would want to do,” Gen. Wilsbach said.
Russia is paying an “immense cost” in blood and treasure with large-scale loss of life, the general added. “I’m hoping China will pay attention to that as well,” he said.
The general argued that Beijing is engaged in nefarious activities that include predatory lending as part of the Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, and the takeover or attempted takeover of areas in the South China Sea and East China Sea.
The four-star general said U.S. military officials in the Pacific are closely watching China, amid concerns Beijing may seek to seize strategic opportunities as the world is focused on Ukraine. Intelligence assets are also closely monitoring China, along with North Korea, for signs of impending military action.
North Korea in recent weeks stepped up provocative missile tests, and China this week sent nine more military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense zone as part of an ongoing military intimidation campaign.
Gen. Wilsbach said China also should realize the Russian military attack strengthened the NATO alliance and that aggression against Taiwan will have a similar impact for the nations of Asia.
He rejected Chinese complaints that Washington is seeking to build a Pacific-like NATO alliance. “We’re actually not doing that,” he said. But he added that “some kind of unprovoked attack inside the Pacific region certainly would provide some kind of solidarity for the nations of the Pacific to come together and oppose” the aggression.
Invading Taiwan likely would lead to either an actual Pacific NATO or a more informal set of regional alliances. “Either one of those I’m hopeful the Chinese will pay attention to,” the general said.
The PLA also is working with the Russian military in Asia, including a small number of integrated bomber patrols. Chinese and Russian forces, however, do not appear to be interoperable militarily, Gen. Wilsbach said.
During the flights, China has regarded itself as the leader of the two militaries while the Russians consider their forces to be in the lead. “I’m pretty happy with that tension, and I think that will be a problem for them as they go into the future,” Gen. Wilsbach said.
By contrast, U.S. Pacific air forces regularly conduct integrated operations together with the militaries of South Korea, Japan, Australia and many other regional states. Those flight operations show the warplanes can and would operate together in a conflict increasing their deterrent impact on China.
Pacific Air Forces (PAC-AF) have not changed the way they seek to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan, an approach based on high levels of military readiness to respond to aggression in the region, Gen. Wilsbach said.
“One of the things that I hope China pays attention to for PAC-AF is our readiness,” Gen. Wilsbach said.
In the Pacific, the Air Force is applying a new doctrine called “agile combat employment,” described as both proactive and reactive military activities against threats using increased durability and survivability during combat.
The new doctrine is “just one example of presenting dilemmas in the event that we do have a conflict with [the Chinese] that they haven’t thought through the solutions to or come up with solutions to be able to counter what we can do,” Gen. Wilsbach said.
The doctrine is now guiding all forces in the Pacific, including the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Army.
The Chinese Communist Party-affiliated Global Times dismissed the general’s remarks, noting “the only lesson we learn is that the U.S. is a paper tiger.”
“The nonsense of U.S. military officials will only ramp up the risks they may encounter,” the outlet stated in an editorial published Wednesday. “It is hoped Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach will learn the lessons; otherwise, Washington will be more embarrassed when China takes actions to solve its internal Taiwan question.”
The Air Force has a stash of MiG-29 jet fighters that Ukrainian allies say would be a perfect fit for a country besieged by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s relentless killing machine. However, Air Force officials told Capitol Hill this week that the 21 Cold War MiG-29 fighters will remain stateside.
“Yes, we have MiG-29s in inventory. At this time, we have no plans to transfer planes to the Ukrainian Air Force,” the service said in an email to House military staffers shared with Inside the Ring.
President Biden already nixed a plan by Poland to send some of its Soviet-era MiGs to Ukraine over fears the jet transfers would provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has vowed to use nuclear weapons if the Ukraine conflict escalates. The Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and other cities are now under constant bombardment by Russian planes, artillery and tanks.
Mr. Biden and NATO also refused to set up and enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, for fear it would lead to direct combat encounters with Russian forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday repeated calls in a virtual address to Congress for Western powers to set up the no-fly zone and send fighter aircraft that can be used to defend Ukraine. Republican lawmakers have pressed the Biden administration to send Polish MiGs to Ukraine. Poland, a key NATO ally, agreed to send the MiGs if they could buy new U.S. strike aircraft as replacements.
The American-owned MiGs were obtained by the Air Force in the late 1990s. At the time, the Clinton administration feared the jets would end up in the hands of a terrorist state like Iran. As a result, the 21 MiG-29s were secretly purchased from Moldova — a state that borders Ukraine — and moved aboard C-17 transports to Dayton, Ohio, according to 1997 press reports.
The Air Force used the MiGs for training, playing the role of aggressor enemy aircraft, until the jets were worn out.
“None are flying or able to fly,” the Air Force said. “They require a lot of refurbishment to restore to flight-capable status.”
But one Hill defense aide told the Ring that Ukraine’s survival requires U.S. aerial help and that there are aircraft depots that could refurbish the planes within a year. The source said rebuilding the MiGs would be the perfect job for The Boneyard aircraft storage site at Davis-Monthan Air AFB, Tucson, Arizona, and its 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group.
“The refurbishment of these MIG-29 aircraft for the Ukrainian air force is great work for our arsenal of democracy,” the source said. “There is no shortage of depots that could do the work.”
A Navy aircraft carrier strike group has conducted high-profile flight operations in the Yellow Sea in response to stepped up North Korean ballistic missile testing.
The Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in a statement that the United States “strongly condemns” missile tests that included two intercontinental-range missile launches Feb. 27 and March 5.
“As a demonstration of our resolve and commitment to our regional allies, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command conducted a carrier-based air demonstration in the Yellow Sea,” the Navy said.
“This demonstration was carried out in international airspace by fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft from the USS Abraham Lincoln, along with regionally-based U.S. Air Force aircraft, and is in addition to previously announced increases in [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] collection in the Yellow Sea and enhanced regional ballistic missile defense posture on the Korean peninsula.”
The ICBMs launched by Pyongyang were “a brazen violation” of several U.N. Security Council resolutions and pose a threat to regional states and the world, the statement said.
“We have made clear our growing concern over the significant increase in [North Korea’s] missile testing, and we will continue to take all necessary measures to ensure the security of the United States and our allies,” the statement said.
The Yellow Sea is bordered by the Korean Peninsula on the east and China on the west, including Qingdao, a major Chinese naval port.
Chinese state media reported Tuesday that PLA naval exercises were held simultaneously in the Yellow Sea and East China and South China Seas.
The naval maneuvers were carried out in response to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s call for allies in Asia to strengthen credible deterrence against China, the Communist Party-affiliated Global Times reported.
• Staff columnist Rowan Scarborough contributed to this report.
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17. Ukraine’s Lessons for Taiwan
We should also specifically discuss a resistance operating concept with Taiwanese characteristics and unconventional deterrence. (Local or territorial defense is discussed in the article).
Conclusion:
Chinese leaders are learning from the conflict in Ukraine, not just by observing Russia’s actions, but also the West’s response. The United States, Taiwan, and other like-minded partners should be learning too. By doing so, they can help ensure that Beijing comes away from the current crisis with a greater appreciation of the risks that attacking Taiwan would entail.
Ukraine’s Lessons for Taiwan - War on the Rocks
Today, Ukraine is the site of a violent struggle between an embattled democracy and a repressive, irredentist, authoritarian regime bent on subduing it. Tomorrow, Taiwan could be the site of a similar clash. Oriana Skylar Mastro is likely correct in arguing that Russia’s assault on Ukraine does not presage a Chinese attack on Taiwan. But applying lessons from the current crisis could nonetheless be critical for defending Taiwan in the future.
While the Ukraine invasion is still in its early days, it has already demonstrated how the United States and its allies can prevent a Chinese invasion from becoming the world’s next big crisis. Rather than treat a Chinese victory as inevitable, Washington should begin preparing in peacetime to ensure a rapid, coordinated military and economic response to any potential attack. Policymakers in allied states around the region should also prepare for a dramatic refugee crisis, exacerbated by Taiwan’s geography. To strengthen these efforts, America and its allies can target intelligence collection to better assess Beijing’s intentions while also trying to anticipate the unexpected ways an invasion could reshape the political landscape from Canberra to Tokyo.
No Surprises
Months prior to its invasion, satellite imagery showed that Russia was building up its forces on Ukraine’s border. While many had hoped that Putin would avoid conflict, the West should have seen his buildup as a sign of intent to invade. If China chooses to invade Taiwan, it will likely have to prepare on a scale that will be impossible to conceal. In addition to massing missiles, the Chinese military would likely need to assemble an amphibious armada, aircraft, paratroopers and infantry, and logistical support capabilities that could be incredibly challenging to hide. But these preparations could either signal the start of a very large exercise or an assault. As a result, maintaining a close watch on military movements will be critical. Distinguishing between efforts geared toward an exercise versus an invasion will be difficult. There are arguably certain logistical preparations that China would conduct for an invasion but not a large-scale exercise, such as amassing greater amounts of food, fuel, and ammunition and assembling a large number of field hospitals. Similarly, it may be the case that for an invasion, some units that rarely participate in East China Sea exercises would be called up and moved east. This suggests that active and real-time intelligence could be the critical factor in alerting the world to an invasion.
The more allies monitor Chinese movements during future exercises, the better they will be able to judge what could potentially be invasion preparations. Taiwan should continue to devote its satellites and other advanced intelligence collection capabilities to this effort while the United States and other like-minded countries should foster robust intelligence links with Taiwan toward this end. By doing so, they can ensure that critical information collected by foreign sources is shared widely to prevent any surprise attacks and to assist with targeting cues in wartime. By the time it becomes apparent that an “exercise” is a ruse for an invasion, it will be difficult to assemble a credible deterrent in the region. Thus, it would benefit the United States and its allies to maintain a robust force posture, including logistical and sustainment support, to make clear that China will not be able to achieve its goals by force, or will at least incur enormous costs in doing so.
Prepare for a Struggle
It is still too early to draw definitive conclusions, but it has been striking how well the Ukrainians have defended themselves. Facing a quantitively larger and better equipped Russian military, Ukrainian forces have proven stubbornly resistant despite assessments that they would be unable to stop Russia’s rapid movement. This underestimation of the Ukrainians’ capability and will to fight had disastrous consequences for Russia. The same hubris could bedevil a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. As in Ukraine, national identity could play a factor. An overwhelming number of people in Taiwan see themselves as Taiwanese, distinct from mainland China, which can serve as a powerful motivation to fight. Training these people into some sort of territorial defense force could help make them lethal. Tactically, in advancing from Taiwan’s western shore to Taipei, an invasion force could encounter numerous insurgents ready to set ambushes and take out vehicles with the types of anti-tank weapons being used in Ukraine. Rather than engage the People’s Liberation Army force-on-force, Taiwan would be better positioned to pursue an asymmetric guerilla war in which civilians and military forces fight from urban areas, where they could hide and restock supplies. Similarly, the same forces could use guerrilla tactics to defend key choke points like bridges or valleys while leveraging mountains or rivers as obstacles. The more effectively teams of citizens and soldiers work together, the more of a challenge the Chinese forces will face. In Ukraine, Russia is already facing these challenges, including resupply issues. The longer Ukrainians hold out, the more challenges Russia will face. The same would be true for China, made worse by the fact that any resupplies would have to be brought from the mainland across the Taiwan Strait.
Just as defenders should not be underestimated, aggressors should not be overestimated. Russia has a large military but proved unable to force Kyiv’s quick capitulation. There is still a lot the West does not know about Putin’s operational plan and it is unclear which of his generals’ assumptions regarding force readiness and training proved false. Ukraine showed that even a prepared invasion, telegraphed in advance, can go off-track quickly. China’s military, like, Russia’s, is sometimes viewed as a 10-foot giant. But if Russian forces, with recent operational experience in Chechnya and Syria, can struggle, why should we be confident the People’s Liberation Army will be successful in what would be its first military operation since its border war with Vietnam in 1979? China may choose a more aggressive and lethal approach from the outset in order ensure victory at any cost, but there is still nothing inevitable about a Chinese conquest of Taiwan.
Launching a successful large-scale amphibious invasion across a maritime strait would require a lot of things to go right, and thus involves a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong. Whether it be rough waters across 100 miles of strait, a botched amphibious landing, stretched supply lines, or battlefield mistakes, the People’s Liberation Army has opportunities for tactical failures that could result in operational catastrophes. The more that other countries help Taiwan, the more opportunities there will be for such catastrophes. And the more these allies prepare and coordinate their force postures and capabilities in peacetime, the more effective their help will be.
Taiwan could best prepare for this operation by ensuring the right kind of defense strategy and capabilities. According to Drew Thompson, this means “systems that are short-range and defensive, able to survive an initial bombardment from a larger adversary, and suitable for deployment close to home in defense of the island should it come under blockade or attack.” Knowing that an invasion would come largely by sea, a premium could be placed on sea mines and anti-ship cruise missiles. Similarly, in addition to successfully injecting paratroopers into Taiwan, air superiority could be critical for any Chinese amphibious invasion to succeed. This would put a premium on anti-air capabilities. Finally, for everything, passive-defense measures and lots and lots of munitions may be needed. As Michael Hunzeker wrote in War on the Rocks last year, Taiwan and the United States should be focusing on stockpiling large numbers of small and cheap asymmetric capabilities, things like coastal defense cruise missiles, short-range mobile air defenses, naval mines, and drones.
Allied countries have been explicit that they would not defend Ukraine given that it is not a NATO member. Instead, European countries have been forthcoming with military assistance meant to bolster Ukraine’s defense, with the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and even Germany, among others, providing Ukraine with a variety of weapons. Many European countries may choose to do the same thing if Taiwan is attacked: they do not even formally recognize it, and it is geographically far away. These facts could lead to a situation in which allied states, including some of the European nations that had started to make forays into the Indo-Pacific operationally — such as France, the United Kingdom, or Germany — may be less inclined to provide operational support to Taiwan in a crisis. Were they to still provide military assistance to Taiwan, such as anti-air missiles, this may be exponentially more difficult because of the distance and the fact that Taiwan is an island. Difficulties will only increase if China establishes air superiority and a maritime quarantine of Taiwan, enabling Chinese forces to intercept or prevent such aid from arriving. As a result, this assistance would be more effective before a war starts. Taiwan should be encouraged to stockpile — or procure — critical capabilities in peacetime.
A Quick and Coordinated Economic Response
Despite some initial disagreements over things like military aid or exclusion from SWIFT, the United States helped to rapidly coordinate an international coalition to punish Russia diplomatically, economically, and financially. It also led the way on providing military assistance to Ukraine. A similarly quick and unified effort would be necessary if Taiwan were attacked. While it is possible the United States, along with Japan and Australia, would intervene to defend Taiwan either directly or indirectly, it is likely that other countries would find it difficult to do so. Yet these countries could still be part of a coordinated international response to punish Beijing.
As the Ukraine crisis demonstrates, war is conducted on two battlefields: one between militaries and one among nations, banks, companies, and individuals. While Russia appears to be increasing its military advantage over Ukraine, Western allies are destroying Russia through financial sanctions and other types of economic penalties. Because of China’s global trade and overseas investments, targeted, coordinated sanctions could drastically hurt the Chinese Communist Party, which is heavily involved in the economy. Of course, China’s larger economy and greater integration with the world economy means that such steps might have a larger impact on some allied economies than the sanctions on Russia have had. In other words, the consequences for the global economy could be massive — far worse than what we have seen with Russia.
That said, Western countries should be prepared to take many of the same steps they have taken against Russia. These could include cutting off Chinese banks from SWIFT, sanctions on Chinese goods, and secondary sanctions on countries willing to trade with China. In addition, Western countries could ban Chinese planes from their airspace and ships from their ports, forcing Chinese citizens to remain locked in China. For a globally integrated economy like China’s, this kind of isolation would dry up international trade and possibly collapse the renminbi, leading to significant economic contraction. The damage done by government sanctions could be further compounded by corporate actions. If global corporations discarded their joint ventures in Chinese companies, ended their business relationships with China, or withheld Western products, the air would be sucked out of the Chinese economy. While none of this is likely to cause China to cease an attack on Taiwan, the pain brought to bear on the government could undermine its legitimacy and authority. As with military aid, Taiwan’s allies and partners should coordinate their economic response in advance to ensure they can act as quickly and effectively as possible.
A Greater Humanitarian Challenge
As of 2020, Ukraine’s population was approximately 44 million people. The website for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says that almost three million refugees have left Ukraine for neighboring countries such Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and Slovakia. Millions more are stranded inside the country. There are already growing concerns that the situation is leading to a humanitarian crisis. But Ukraine is surrounded by land, enabling those refugees who can manage it to escape by train, car, or foot. This is not the case for Taiwan. As of January, the population of Taiwan was approximately 23 million people. Should conflict occur, where will these people go? The Philippines and Japan are too far by boat. According to the Ministry of the Interior National Immigration Agency, as of September 2021 there were also approximately 765,000 foreigners on the island. Noncombatant evacuation operations would pose an extra challenge, as there are no good options for getting any of these people off Taiwan during a conflict. And in addition to the large number of people who would want out, there is also the difficulty of getting supplies in. If all Taiwan becomes an active war zone, delivering humanitarian assistance will be more dangerous as well.
Understanding the possible massive scale of a humanitarian crisis, the United States and Taiwan should focus on stockpiling critical resources and relief items. As the most capable ally that is closest to Taiwan, Japan would play a particularly important role. The United States, Japan, and Taiwan should begin discussions in peacetime about how Japan can best receive civilian refugees during a conflict. This would include identifying likely Japanese air- and seaports that could handle large influxes of people and pre-positioning critical supplies there.
There Will Be Unintended Consequences
While trying to prevent surprises, policymakers should recognize that there will still be unintended consequences. Russia’s war has led to dizzying changes that even a month ago seemed impossible. Belarus amended its constitution to allow it to host nuclear weapons. Finland and Sweden have signaled their interest in joining NATO. And Germany has taken unprecedented steps to increase its defense spending and arm Ukraine.
In response to a Chinese onslaught against Taiwan, regional countries might make similar changes. For example, a Chinese attack could coalesce U.S. partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific. This could create a quasi-alliance between Japan and Australia and also push several states like the Philippines, Thailand, or Vietnam — which have been trying to balance between Washington and Beijing — closer to the United States. Even South Korea may decide that the price of trying to play nice with China is no longer advantageous.
As with Germany, a conflict could force Japan to rethink aspects of its strategic approach to the world. Already, the Ukraine crisis has caused Tokyo to take unprecedented steps to brace for the fallout of Russia’s actions. A Taiwan conflict could lead Tokyo to accept its first combat role since WWII and possibly to make rapid changes in its defense policies. Political leaders might prove willing to host U.S. ground-based intermediate-range ballistic missiles or a U.S. Army Multi-Domain Task Force. Given recent chatter among some in Japan’s political elite on the need for a nuclear-sharing arrangement with the United States, there is always a possibility that a war with China could push Japan into a position where it feels a nuclear deterrent is necessary.
Chinese leaders are learning from the conflict in Ukraine, not just by observing Russia’s actions, but also the West’s response. The United States, Taiwan, and other like-minded partners should be learning too. By doing so, they can help ensure that Beijing comes away from the current crisis with a greater appreciation of the risks that attacking Taiwan would entail.
Jeffrey W. Hornung is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
18. A complete guide to why a no-fly zone over Ukraine won't work
A complete guide to why a no-fly zone over Ukraine won't work
This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy once again pressed US lawmakers to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, intended to limit the Russian military’s ability to continue their invasion of his nation. This is far from the first time a no-fly zone has been proposed, but despite the tragic circumstances the Ukrainian people now find themselves in, fighting a superior force for the fate of their nation, Western leaders from the United States and the majority of NATO have been unanimous in dismissing the idea as untenable.
A no-fly zone is simply the prohibition of all or certain aircraft from operating within a defined airspace, and while that might seem like a great idea in theory, its the execution that makes it tricky.
How to assess the value of a no-fly zone over Ukraine
B-1B Lancers from the 28th Bomb Wing, Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, integrated with Ukrainian Su-27 Flankers and MiG-29 Fulcrums (U.S. Air Force photo)
In order to realistically determine if a no-fly zone over Ukraine is a good option, you have to be able to look at the situation through an objective lens—and that’s no easy feat while innocent people are being killed by Russian air and missile strikes each day. Establishing a no-fly zone alone does nothing, however. It can only change matters over Ukraine if enforced, and that very likely means combat.
This isn’t just a challenge for those of us working to develop our own positions on the topic in a complex media environment—it’s also a big challenge for policymakers and diplomats tasked with simultaneously maintaining global stability and supporting Ukraine during the largest conflict on European soil since the end of World War II.
Fortunately, the arithmetic isn’t complicated. Assessing the value of a no-fly zone really comes down to a simple risk versus reward proposition. We have to weigh the risks of sending NATO aircraft into Ukrainian airspace to engage Russian helicopters and jets against the potential benefits doing so could provide the Ukrainian people. If, after the math is complete, the risk side of the equation is bigger than the reward side, the concept isn’t a good one.
It’s essential to not fall victim to the “either/or” fallacy, often referred to as the “false dilemma” when doing these sorts of thought exercises. The options aren’t a no-fly zone over Ukraine or nothing. They’re rather, a no-fly zone over Ukraine or a whole slew of other options, some of which may even be more effective.
The nuclear elephant in the room
Russian President Vladimir Putin (Kremlin)
“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside – if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022
Arguing against a no-fly zone in Ukraine may seem insensitive or even self-serving, and to some extent, it may really be. But self-serving pragmatism has, for the past 73 years, been the very basis of modern global stability. The advent of nuclear weapons, and more importantly, the Soviet Union’s development of comparable atomic bombs in 1949, forced a dramatic shift in the way global powers engage in direct competition for good reason. Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, is predicated on the willingness of nuclear powers to leverage their weapons to lay waste to their opponents, as well as their opponent’s willingness to respond in kind.
And in many ways, this looming threat of total annihilation has been one of—if not the—most effective means of deterring global war in this modern era, ranked just above an increasingly intertwined global economy and well ahead of still-valuable global peace-keeping initiatives like the United Nations.
Ukraine is a large geographical region, slightly smaller than the state of Texas. Policing airspace that large would require a huge number of aircraft and countless opportunities for individual engagements if Russia chose to press into Ukrainian airspace anyway. If there were the case, we’re now talking about American fighters squaring off against Russian pilots in combat—while not unheard of, every exchange would bring our nations significantly closer to open war and potentially even a nuclear one.
MiG-29s in a mock dogfight during training (WikiMedia Commons)
But here in the United States, where our modern concept of war is largely based on the Global War on Terror, nuclear annihilation is no longer a pressing anxiety, and as such, many have come to dismiss Putin’s nuclear threats as nothing more than theater. After all, the embattled Russian president knows that launching a nuclear attack on the West would undoubtedly result in Russia’s ruin.
But the argument that America should call Putin’s nuclear bluff is based entirely on the good intentions of a ruthless dictator who feels increasingly backed into a corner economically, militarily, and diplomatically. While it seems unlikely that Putin would resort to nuclear strikes, pressing him to do so would literally mean betting our children’s survival on Putin’s calm, rational decision-making prowess.
This isn’t to say that nuclear war would be an inevitable outcome of establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Rather, it’s highlighting the biggest risk right off the bat. The potential nuclear annihilation of human civilization may sound like hyperbole, but this is one case where our sensationalized concept of nuclear war is, despite pop-culture fictions, accurate enough to give us a real sense of the stakes.
Previous no-fly zones haven’t worked out as well as you think
U.S. Air Force F-15s and F-16s over Iraq (U.S. Air Force photo)
As outlined in an excellent piece by Richard K. Betts for Foreign Affairs, our modern concept of no-fly zones is based entirely on sets of circumstances that were nothing like those currently faced over Ukraine.
NATO-enforced no-fly zones (NFZs) were a fairly common facet of warfare during the 1990s and 2000s, seeing use in the early ’90s over Iraq, in the mid-’90s over Bosnia, and in 2011 and later over Libya. As Betts points out, these were nations with limited airpower capabilities that could do very little to stand up to NATO’s massive airpower apparatus. Despite that, in every instance of NATO or U.S. enforced no-fly zones, enforcing them involved kinetic exchanges, or shooting at each other.
In another excellent piece of analysis from retired Navy aviator, attorney, and Associate Professor of Law at Syracuse University Mark Nevitt, published by Just Security, he outlines the circumstances and outcomes of previous efforts to establish and enforce no-fly zones dating back to 1991 (the same listed above). Despite having overwhelming air superiority, NATO aircraft still faced engagement from surface-to-air missiles and even other aircraft, and the complexity of operating massive no-fly zone operations increases other risks, like the potential for friendly fire incidents.
- Iraq: Operation Southern Watch & Northern Watch (1991-2003)
- No-fly zones enacted after the defeat of Iraqi forces
- 2 U.S. Army Blackhawks were shot down in 1994 by friendly fire after being mis-identified
- NATO aircraft were repeatedly fired upon from the ground and “force was employed repeatedly” to maintain the integrity of the NFZ
- Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992,1995)
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U.S. Air Force F-16s were forced to engage and shoot down four Serbian fixed-wing tactical aircraft that were engaging ground forces
- Libya (2011)
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Requested directly by the Libyan National Transitional Council
- NATO forces bombed Libyan government facilties while enforcing the NFZ, killing at least 72 civilians
Unlike the limited air capabilities offered by these nations, Russia has the second-largest Air Force in the world (though it’s important to note, they are a far second). Trying to enforce a no-fly zone over an area the size of Ukraine against such a large force is something that’s literally never been done, and if contested, could result in the rapid escalation of this conflict.
“There are no examples of something called a ‘no-fly zone’ being imposed on a major power outside the context of battles for air superiority in regular warfare,” Betts explains.
A no-fly zone over Ukraine would require airstikes inside Russia and potentially even Belarus
Russian S-400 Triumf air defense system (WikiMedia Commons)
Even those taking a pragmatic view of trying to establish and enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine tend to limit their imagined operation to NATO fighters patrolling airspace to deter or shoot down Russian sorties. That’s part of it, but there’s much more to controlling the airspace of a nation the size of Ukraine than simply pouring fighters into the sky.
Russian air defense systems are widely believed to be among the best in the world, despite their limited success in controlling Ukraine’s airspace to date. Russia’s S-400 Triumf, for example, is often touted as potentially capable of identifying and targeting stealth aircraft, though just how successful it would be against incredibly difficult-to-target platforms like the F-35 remains the subject of a great deal of debate.
However, even if NATO limited its use of fighters within Ukraine to stealth platforms (which wouldn’t be feasible considering the amount of territory to cover and the number of available F-35 and F-22 airframes), NATO’s air presence would not be limited to fighters. Air operations over Ukraine would require massive amounts of fuel flowing into and out of Ukrainian airspace via tankers. Aircraft like the KC-135 Stratotanker would be easy targets for systems like the S-400.
An E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft finishes refueling from a KC-135R Stratotanker aircraft (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Mark R. W. Orders-Woempner)
Other essential support aircraft like the E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS) would likewise be easy prey for advanced Russian air defenses. In order to mitigate the threat posed to these aircraft as well as fourth-generation fighters, Russian ground-based air defenses both inside Ukraine and beyond would have to be eliminated at the onset of establishing a no-fly zone. That would require airstrikes against Russian troops and equipment in Ukraine, Russia, and potentially even Belarus if they permitted Russian equipment to operate from their soil, which is fairly likely.
In other words, there is very little chance a no-fly zone could be safely enacted without NATO firing on Russian targets first.
The aforementioned S-400 Triumpf has an operational range of right around 250 miles, which means Russian systems could engage NATO aircraft from well inside Russian territory. These systems would have to be engaged directly, likely using anti-radiation missiles like the AGM-88 HARM that cannot currently be deployed by stealthy jets like the F-35, and would instead have to be carried into Russia aboard modified F-16s or F/A-18 Super Hornets. There are, of course, other methods of targeting air defense systems that don’t rely on radar-hunting missiles, like deploying special operations troops into Russia to identify and target these systems for subsequent airstrikes, but needless to say, sending Delta or Green Berets into Russia would be a significant escalation toward open war.
As we’ve seen in previous situations where no-fly zones were enacted, low-flying NATO aircraft over Ukraine would still face being targetted by systems like Russia’s man-portable 9K38 Igla surface-to-air missiles. That means NATO pilots would be faced with having to decide whether or not to engage Russian ground forces often, dramatically increasing the chances of open conflict once more.
But even if Russia backed down and removed its air defense systems from Ukraine and nearby territory, this war would rage on.
Even if everything went right, a no-fly zone would have a limited effect
Russian rocket artillery during live-fire exercises (Kremlin)
A no-fly zone, if enacted and enforced, would prevent Russian aircraft from operating freely over Ukraine, but that wouldn’t mean an end to attacks from the air or a significant enough reduction in Russia’s military capabilities to give Ukraine a sizeable advantage.
Thus far in the conflict, Russian airpower has failed to dominate Ukrainian airspace and many experts contend airstrikes have consistently been less effective than Russian artillery, rocket barrages and mortar fire. A no-fly zone would do nothing to limit the use of or effectiveness of these weapons. It’s important to remember that even with a sky full of NATO aircraft, Russia would still have some 180,000 troops operating within Ukraine.
Russia’s inability to dominate Ukrainian airspace has allowed Ukraine’s forces to leverage drones for reconnaissance and airstrikes. When enforcing a no-fly zone in Ukraine, NATO would have to decide whether or not it would permit Ukraine to continue to operate aircraft freely, and if so, that too would appear less like enforcing a no-fly zone and more like simply joining the conflict and waging war against Russia.
Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB2 drones have proven successful against Russian equipment (Ministry of Defense of Ukraine)
The limited benefit of a well-enforced no-fly zone took yet another blow this past weekend as Russian heavy-payload strategic bombers launched cruise missiles at targets inside Ukraine from deep within Russian airspace. Weapons like Russia’s air-launched Kh-555 cruise missile have ranges in excess of 2,000 miles. So for NATO to prevent these attacks they would have to either send fighters deep into Russian territory to shoot these bombers down, or deploy crewed air-defense systems inside Ukraine that are capable of intercepting cruise missiles. That would mean putting U.S. troops on the ground inside Ukraine, which again, is a big step toward open war.
And while Russia’s supply of these particularly long-range weapons may be limited, Russia has many weapons with sufficient reach to be fired from inside Russian airspace and still engage Ukrainian targets. In fact, according to the Pentagon, Russian aircraft are flying nearly 200 sorties a day to launch munitions, but most never actually leave Russian airspace.
Ukraine needs help, but a no-fly zone isn’t it
(Image courtesy of Taras Gren, MoD of Ukraine)
Ukraine faces what could be considered overwhelming odds in its fight for freedom, but thus far, the Ukrainian forces have mounted an astonishing defense. In a very real way, Russia’s strained supply lines, dire economic circumstances, lack of international or domestic support, and Ukraine’s own rugged terrain may all be conspiring toward forcing Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
In fact, on Wednesday, Putin may have signaled a willingness to pursue a means to withdraw from Ukraine while still declaring victory domestically. He said Russia would be willing to discuss Ukraine adopting a “neutral status” that would alleviate his claimed concerns about Russian border security. This is a long way off from peace, but it may be the first step toward a negotiated end to hostilities.
But even if it isn’t, many defense experts like retired Marine Corps colonel Andrew Milburn have highlighted the West’s ability to help Ukraine win this fight without ratcheting up the likelihood of global thermonuclear war. In a great piece for Task & Purpose, Milburn lays out how to enable Ukraine’s victory without firing a shot in anger, and to be honest, it looks a lot like what NATO nations are working toward doing.
The plan calls for enabling, supplying, and training Ukrainian forces even if the nation were to fall to Russian invaders, which is clear involvement in the conflict, but is decidedly non-kinetic. Let me clear, that’s a troubling strategy, as it allows for the possibility of a Russian victory and prolonged insurgency—but as we stated at the onset of this now rather long-winded exploration of the concept of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, the arithmetic remains simple.
The potential for expanding this conflict beyond the confines of Ukraine, for escalating this war into something that could engulf a much larger swath of the European continent or even result in nuclear war is just too high to risk sending hundreds of NATO aircraft into this fight, especially with the understanding that all this risk would not lead to an end to this conflict.
A no-fly zone over Ukraine may prevent a relatively small number of airstrikes from taking place inside Ukraine’s airspace, but that’s simply not enough to justify rolling the dice when one potential outcome is the end of all life as we know it.
Ukraine is relying on foreign support in this fight and let there be no doubt, the international community should be, and appears to be, providing it. But a no-fly zone over Ukraine is simply too big a risk with too little potential reward.
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19. Better Curricula, Better Strategic Outcomes: Irregular Warfare, Great Power Competition, and Professional Military Education
I will normally criticize any article about irregular warfare that does not address unconventional warfare, political warfare, psychological operations, support to indgenous forces and populations as this one does not. However, it does mention influence some 29 times which is a good thing. Importantly, without using any of the keywords I stress it does describe the activities and missions. Can you describe unconventional warfare without using the term unconventional warfare? (rhetorical question but my answer is yes you can and must because if you use the term you lose a lot of readers who have antibodies against UW and resistance, - the ideal is to get people to accept and embrace UW without knowing they are accepting it, etc)
My petty criticism aside, I could not agree more that we need better PME that helps us with irregular warfare. Professor Gregg has provided some very important analysis and recommendations. And she makes some very important points in that a lot of the education we need for IW is not solely focused on IW. We need a lot more education but all of does not have to be IW specific education. That said, my educational experiences at CGSC, SAMS, and the National War College provided me with an excellent foundation for all things related to IW. BUt I think that is only because I chose to look at the history, military theory, geography, operational art, and strategy from an IW (and UW and political warfare) perspective. There is a lot of IW relevant education embedded in PME if you know where to look or look at the subjects and lessons and readings with an open IW mind.
I am curious how the Congressional legislation SEC. 1299L will help this. It calls for DOD to establish a Functional Center for Irregular Warfare Security Studies. What is the status of the center? What is DOD doing to establish and resource the center? To me that is a bellwether for how serious DOD is about synthesizing irregular warfare into DOD concepts, operations, and strategy.
Better Curricula, Better Strategic Outcomes: Irregular Warfare, Great Power Competition, and Professional Military Education - Modern War Institute
This article is part of the contribution made by the US Army War College to the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
On April 29, 2021, cyber hackers broke into the networks of the US Colonial Pipeline system through a compromised VPN account and installed ransomware, effectively shutting down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States a week later. In the following days, US citizens up and down the Eastern Seaboard waited in hours-long lines, fearing that gasoline supplies would run out. Panic buying actually resulted in some states nearly running out of fuel before executives paid the ransom, ending the crisis. A postmortem investigation of the incident tied the attack to individuals from the “ransomware as a service” group Darkside, who reportedly resided in Russia and had ties to the Russian government, intelligence services, or the military.
This attack, which was perpetrated by a near-peer adversary but with a degree of plausible deniability, directly targeted the American public with the goal of achieving a strategic effect. It demonstrates that the United States and its allies are in an age of strategic competition with a range of actors, including near-peer adversaries, rogue states that do not conform to international laws and norms, as well as nonstate actors who seek to challenge the status quo. These strategic competitors leverage a wide variety of means below the threshold of armed conflict, including cyber activities, to provoke the United States and offset its conventional military capabilities.
As we seek to rebuild our own lethality in traditional warfare, our adversaries will become more likely to emphasize irregular approaches in their competitive strategies to negate our advantages and exploit our disadvantages. Their intent will be to achieve their objectives without resorting to direct armed conflict against the United States, or to buy time until they are better postured to challenge us directly.
Our adversaries, in other words, understand the need to use IW to offset US conventional capabilities and compete at the strategic level. Greater US lethality and conventional overmatch will not counter their asymmetric approach—in fact, it is likely to only increase our adversaries’ use of irregular approaches, a point that is echoed in a 2019 CSIS report on the gray zone, in which the authors argue that “the United States is being confronted with the liabilities of its strength.” Given our competitors’ use of IW to shape the security environment in their favor, teaching IW in professional military education (PME) will help prepare the militaries of the United States and its allies for long-term engagement in strategic competition.
IW and Strategic Competition
Considerable confusion exists among academics, policymakers and military practitioners over what IW is, especially at the strategic level. The principal goal of IW is to create and leverage influence over key populations to achieve strategic effects in the security environment. Actors use a range of instruments that, when properly employed, build influence in target populations and shape their behavior. In IW, a country’s military is just one tool it can use to build influence. State and nonstate actors have other instruments, including economic tools, narratives and other forms of information, and bargaining and negotiations, to name a few. Likewise, kinetic activity—the use of force—is just one option the military can use to influence relevant populations. Militaries can also influence populations by providing aid and assistance, through defense cooperation agreements, and by working by, with, and through other militaries in exercises and other activities. Put another way, IW is about employing a mix of resources and activities designed to influence relevant populations for a strategic effect.
The current draft of Joint Publication 1, Volume 1, Joint Warfighting echoes the goal of IW as influence. It defines IW as “a struggle among state or nonstate actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy [of a government or occupying power].” The draft further describes that “IW includes a political struggle for legitimacy and influence through means other than military domination over an adversary or enemy,” and “IW may be between nations, state and nonstate actors, or nonstate actors with no state involvement.”
Conventional Overmatch vs. Irregular Activities
While the United States continues to refocus heavily on conventional overmatch with its near-peer competitors, state and nonstate actors are currently using a range of activities to influence relevant populations and undermine our conventional military capabilities, including information operations, cyber warfare, proxy battles, the use of private military companies (PMCs) and economic incentives and coercion.
Russia and China, for example, have prioritized the human domain—including what humans think, how they act, and what they create—to effectively use information as a weapon to influence key populations and offset conventional capabilities in contested areas. A recent Modern War Institute article argues “…that the human domain is increasingly attracting adversary attention and gaining importance within the context of great power competition—especially for Russia and China over the last decade, which have recognized that the United States does not have an information or human domain grand strategy and has struggled to adapt to this domain.” The authors conclude that “we ignore the human domain and information warfare at our own peril.”
Several countries also have made use of proxy forces, PMCs, and individuals to indirectly target key populations and provide persistent deniability of their involvement in various conflicts. Iran, for example, has used Kata’ib Hizballah to target US forces in Iraq while maintaining a degree of deniability. Iran has also used the Lebanese group Hizballah to exert influence among critical Shia populations in the Middle East and beyond. The Russian PMC Wagner Group has appeared in conflicts ranging from Ukraine to Syria to Mali, providing a range of services, all while legally maintaining independence from the Russian government. Chinese PMCs in Africa have provided security to China’s infrastructure programs as part of its Belt and Road initiative, allowing the Chinese government to maintain its stated policy of noninterference in these countries. And both state and nonstate actors have used individuals to perpetrate cyberattacks on the United States and its allies, including on infrastructure and other targets that directly affect and influence their citizens. The 2021 ransomware attack on the US Colonial Pipeline, mentioned above, is one such example.
The use of economic incentives and development have even become a critical tool of IW. China’s Belt and Road initiative aims to use infrastructure development, loans, information technologies, and other economic incentives to build “a community of common destiny with mankind.” Patrick Cronin argues that the United States and its allies need to “asymmetrically” compete with China to offset this influence, meaning that military posturing in the US Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility alone will not counter China’s strategic influence. He argues, “But even more than new military investments, the United States needs to revitalize its ability to shape the regional order using diplomatic and economic instruments of power.”
Finally, threats posed to regional stability and international security by nonstate actors are still a key concern to the United States and its allies. A 2016 document released by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Operating Environment 2035, identifies “violent ideological competition” as a key concern in the current and future security environment, which it defines as “irreconcilable ideas communicated and promoted by identity networks through violence.” As the unclassified 2021 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community asserts, nonstate actors like ISIS and al-Qaeda have not gone away and continue to exert a disrupting influence in North Africa and the Sahel, South Asia, Syria and Iraq, and Southeast Asia, as have newly emerging antigovernment movements in North America, Europe, and beyond. The United States and its allies and partners will continue to confront these ideologically motivated groups and need to identify strategies that undermine their influence with vulnerable populations.
Teaching IW for Strategic Competition
Our competitors use a range of instruments and activities to influence key populations and shape the strategic environment, which requires us to adopt new ways of thinking to effectively counter these challenges to global security. Teaching IW principles, concepts, and activities in PME will help prepare the militaries of the United States and its allies to better address the complexity of the current security environment and prepare for long-term influence operations in strategic competition.
First and foremost, PME at all levels needs to instill an IW mindset to prepare officers for strategic competition, specifically how to influence relevant populations and actors with an array of tools and through a range of activities. Critically, the US military has more tools of influence than the threat and use of force. The military can also be used to build relationships with key populations, including other militaries, and be an example of US intentions and goodwill. PME should focus more on a range of influence activities that the military can perform, and its critical role as an instrument of what Joseph Nye calls “soft power,” or a nation’s ability to attract or persuade. Put another way, the military is not solely “hard power,” and the other instruments of statecraft “soft,” because one uses force and the others do not; the way these instruments are employed is what makes them hard or soft. The US military’s job is not to just “kill people and break things,” as some have argued, but to shape the security environment in the United States’ favor and to defend the homeland. The US military needs to understand how it can employ soft power that influences and persuades in the strategic environment as well as the conditions under which the military’s use of hard power is needed.
Second, alongside a focus on the role of influence in strategic competition, PME needs to have a much greater emphasis on the other instruments of statecraft and a whole-of-government approach. PME at all levels should spend more time teaching officers about the other instruments of power, their employment in strategic competition, and the military’s subordination as an instrument of statecraft at the strategic level. At the senior level, PME classrooms should include more individuals who wield these other instruments of national power. Among the US military’s senior PME institutions, the US National War College has the best ratio with 59 percent of the student body from the US military and 41 percent made up of nonmilitary US government personnel and international fellows. More is needed. All PME institutions should work to include more curricula on the other instruments of national power as well as students who understand and use these instruments as strategic influence.
Third, PME needs to teach the why and how to of relationship building for the US military. Today’s complex and interconnected global security environment requires allies and partners; the US government and the US military cannot go it alone and expect to have lasting influence on relevant populations and to shape the security environment in its favor. The US military needs to better understand how to work “by, with, and through” its allies and partners, to borrow a special operations forces tagline. Allies and partners are not subordinates; they are equals that bring their own set of expertise and priorities to the relationship. PME needs to teach the fundamentals of relationship building and maintenance, including better listening skills, negotiation, compromise, leadership sharing, humility, and an understanding of allies’ and partners’ needs and priorities.
Fourth, PME needs to teach complex problem management as opposed to problem solving. There are no easy fixes in strategic competition and language that seeks out a decisive battle or culminating point will continue to result in failures at the strategic level. Our near-peer competitors are unlikely to go away anytime soon, nor are rogue states and even the nonstate actors we are fighting. PME needs to teach how to manage complexity with no clear end point on the horizon. As importantly, PME needs to teach officers how to measure effectiveness in a world where building and maintaining influence is paramount. Measuring influence is considerably more difficult than assessing highly measurable effects like bombing targets or other kinetic activity.
Within complex problem management, PME needs to teach a more nuanced understanding of victory. Enduring competition has few decisive victories. The US military’s infatuation with the large-scale military operations of World War II and Operation Desert Storm that resulted in a decisive defeat of the adversary followed by a ticker-tape parade is not the world we live in today. PME needs to better prepare officers for thinking about how to shape the security environment in the United States’ favor and pursue incremental gains over time, as opposed to the binary categories of victory and defeat. IW is well acquainted with this problem, where nonstate actors and extreme ideologies are rarely defeated but rather need to be managed.
Fifth, PME also needs to seek out new and better metaphors to describe the type of engagements we are in. We are not in a duel, to use Clausewitz’s metaphor, nor are we in a football game where each side is clearly defined and visible, the rules are agreed to, the space is specified, and teams are given a finite amount of time in which to play and win (or lose) the game.
Sixth, PME needs to devote considerably more time to studying our strategic competitors, including their histories, their narratives, and their use of IW to shape the security environment. PME needs to do a better job building “strategic empathy,” which Zachary Shore defines as “the skill of stepping out of our own heads and into the minds of others.” The possibility of misperception in the current security landscape is rife, as is mirror imaging and assumptions based on our own preferences. It is critically important to try and see the world from our competitors’ perspective by studying what they are doing and saying.
Finally, PME needs to better study and learn from our failures, not just our victories. The chaotic end to the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan came as a shock to many within the government and military. It is important to admit that what happened in Afghanistan was, at least in part, a failure of military strategy. PME needs to study specifically what went wrong in Afghanistan. Furthermore, PME needs to investigate case studies that better reflect the complex security environment we now live in. Studying the Franco-Prussian war, World War II, or Operation Desert Storm is unlikely to help our officers understand the world in which we live. The Cold War—including the many simultaneous fronts on which that war was fought, the use of all the instruments of national power, IW approaches, conventional wars, and nuclear deterrence, and enduring debates over how the Cold War ended—is a valuable case study for today. Studying the Great Game of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where European powers used a range of irregular activities to vie for influence in Central and South Asia, would also be useful. Currently, neither the Cold War nor the Great Game is studied in any systematic fashion at the US Army War College.
Within all of this, PME needs to teach IW by moving beyond its principal focus on “historical mindedness”—using history as a means of preparing officers for the complex security environment they face—and hiring highly qualified faculty from a range of academic disciplines including economics, political science, mathematical modeling, human geography, and psychology. Expanding beyond military history to a range of academic fields provides necessary tools for studying our strategic competitors and their use of IW to shape the security environment in their favor.
Heather S. Gregg is professor of military strategy at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. She is the author of Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska 2018), Religious Terrorism (Cambridge 2020), and The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (University of Nebraska 2014).
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Scott Finger, US Army War College (adapted by MWI)
20. Fall of the Golden Arches Theory: Enriching tyrants doesn’t prevent wars after all
I always thought the Golden Arches theory was a parody of Norman Angel's thesis. But these two paragraphs are brilliant. In the first it provides the logic of the theory(s) which appears to make complete sense and which seemingly any rational person would accept. Then the second perfectly refutes the theory.
Excerpts:
Returning to the Golden Arches Theory: It was not entirely original. In 1910, Norman Angell, a journalist, member of the British Parliament and 1933 winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, published “The Great Illusion,” a highly popular book making the case that in an economically interdependent world, wars will become counterproductive, rendering militarism obsolete.
Among the flaws in this theory: Strongmen may be Material Girls when it comes to their personal finances but not when it comes to those of their subjects. Mr. Putin, who became a multibillionaire through means not much different from those employed by John Gotti, does not regard putting a chicken in every pot — or a Big Mac on every table — as a worthy goal.
Fall of the Golden Arches Theory: Enriching tyrants doesn’t prevent wars after all
OPINION:
McDonald’s is closing its restaurants in Russia, which means no more Happy Meals in Gorky Park. But there’s also a McNugget of geostrategic significance in this development.
Toward the end of the 20th century, Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, observed: “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.”
He considered that a revelation, the basis for his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” Boiled down: Economic integration and globalization pave the path to peace.
He may have been correct in asserting that “when a country reaches a certain level of economic development” most of its people “don’t like to fight wars.” What he failed to appreciate is that if those countries are unfree, undemocratic and ruled by tyrants, most of its people don’t matter.
Russian President Vladimir Putin could have said to Ukrainians: “We’re one people! Let’s reunite! Think of all we can achieve together!” Instead, starting on Feb. 24, he has been raping Ukraine.
“Like it or not, it’s your duty, my beauty,” he recently — and crudely — instructed Ukrainians. Their duty being to submit to him. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acidly responded: “We are not his.”
Of course, Ukrainians have been rebuffing Mr. Putin’s advances for years. I was an election observer in Ukraine for the International Republican Institute in 2019. Despite Russian meddling, the pro-Russian party received just 13.5% of the ballots.
Many Russians are disgusted and outraged by Mr. Putin’s slaughter of their neighbors. They can and do protest. He can and does arrest or kill them. The same is true of the despotic rulers of China and Iran with whom Mr. Putin is aligned.
Returning to the Golden Arches Theory: It was not entirely original. In 1910, Norman Angell, a journalist, member of the British Parliament and 1933 winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, published “The Great Illusion,” a highly popular book making the case that in an economically interdependent world, wars will become counterproductive, rendering militarism obsolete.
Among the flaws in this theory: Strongmen may be Material Girls when it comes to their personal finances but not when it comes to those of their subjects. Mr. Putin, who became a multibillionaire through means not much different from those employed by John Gotti, does not regard putting a chicken in every pot — or a Big Mac on every table — as a worthy goal.
The same can be said for Tehran’s obscenely rich theocrats. They follow the line of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who said that the Islamic Revolution “is not about the price of watermelons.”
Not understanding that, former President Barack Obama cut a dollars-for-promises deal with them. Not understanding that, President Biden continues to attempt to conclude a weaker version of that deal, ignoring Iranian death threats against Americans and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps missiles exploding near the American consulate in Kurdistan.
As for China’s Communist rulers, there was a time when it did appear that they were prioritizing national economic advancement and therefore might be willing to become good stakeholders in a global economic system benefitting all participants. It was on that basis that, in 2000, former President Bill Clinton pushed Congress to approve the U.S.-China trade agreement and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization.
But the experiment failed — spectacularly. Beijing has for years been stealing American intellectual property, building its nuclear and conventional forces for offensive purposes and subverting international institutions, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Human Rights Council among them.
Millions of American workers have lost their jobs as too many American corporations have found it convenient to take advantage of Beijing’s forced laborers, including in Xinjiang where, according to the U.S. government, a Turkic Muslim people faces genocide.
We don’t know whether Mr. Putin, using siege and scorched-earth tactics, will succeed in subjugating Ukrainians, depriving them of the right to cast ballots to decide who leads them, and preventing them from choosing their foreign affiliations.
What is certain is that the imperialist war he is waging will leave Ukrainians impoverished. Russians will suffer, too. That should not suggest there isn’t a constituency for Mr. Putin’s grander goals which, as Georgetown University’s Angela Stent noted, include “reversing the consequences of the Soviet collapse, splitting the transatlantic alliance, and renegotiating the geographic settlement that ended the Cold War.”
The West’s first order of business — for reasons both moral and strategic — is to do all we can to help Ukrainians exercise their right to self-defense. But it’s not too soon to start thinking about the mistakes we have made, the lessons we should learn, and the policies we need to change. Three examples:
Europeans need to break their addiction to Russian energy, and Americans can and should be an energy superpower. That will require a cease-fire in the war on oil and gas, especially if the alternative is begging thugs such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to take our money in exchange for their fossil fuels.
The U.S. and its allies need to upgrade military capabilities. “Peace through strength” requires convincing adversaries they’d be fools to provoke us. But achieving deterrence — as opposed to talking about it — is neither easy nor cheap.
We need to secure strategic supply chains, pursue freer trade with friends and begin to disentangle economically from regimes that are hostile to us, our values and our interests.
McDonald’s and other corporations entered Russia knowing Mr. Putin was a tyrant. They thought their presence there would be salutary. They were wrong. Shouldn’t this recognition have implications for our relations with the tyrannical regimes that rule China and Iran?
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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21. Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says
The Chinese: no holds barred.
Chinese Agent Proposed Violent Means to End Dissident’s Congress Run, DOJ Says
Prosecutors unseal complaints accusing Chinese government agents of targeting dissidents in U.S., including father of U.S. figure skater Alysa Liu
By Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe in Washington and James Fanelli
in New York
Updated March 16, 2022 10:41 pm ET
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe in Washington and James Fanelli in New York
A man working as an agent of the Chinese government also plotted to appear at another dissident’s house pretending to represent an international sports committee in a bid to get his passport and that of a family member, prosecutors said. The dissident isn’t named but was confirmed by a person familiar with the investigation as Arthur Liu, the father of American figure-skating Olympian Alysa Liu, who has said he fled China after organizing student protests in 1989.
Altogether, prosecutors presented three cases in Brooklyn charging five people, three of whom are in custody and two of whom are at large.
While U.S. authorities have long accused the Chinese government of using illegal tactics to threaten political rivals and dissidents world-wide, law-enforcement officials said Wednesday the efforts had grown more brazen in recent years, reaching even into the U.S. political process.
“Authoritarian states around the world feel emboldened to reach beyond their borders to intimidate or exact reprisals against individuals who dare to speak out against oppression and corruption,” Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security, said at a press briefing on the cases.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Qiming Lin, the alleged Ministry of State Security agent who targeted the candidate, told the investigator: “Whatever price is fine. As long as you can do it.” According to a transcript of their conversation that prosecutors included in charging documents, Mr. Lin, who is in China, said: “We don’t want him to be elected,” adding, “we will have a lot more—more of this [work] in the future…Including right now [a] New York State legislator.”
The candidate, who is running for a New York seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, isn’t named in the complaint but matches the description of Yan Xiong, a student leader in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989 who later fled China, served in the U.S. military and became a citizen.
Mr. Lin suggested a variety of ways the investigator could end the would-be congressman’s candidacy, including by manufacturing derogatory information about him or arranging for him to be in a car accident, prosecutors said. “Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right?” Mr. Lin said, according to prosecutors. In another conversation, the agent allegedly said: “You go find a girl for him, see if he would take the bait.”
The private investigator, who wasn’t identified, reported the efforts to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the charging document.
Mr. Xiong, a Democrat, is among several candidates vying to succeed Rep. Lee Zeldin in Long Island’s First Congressional District. Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, isn’t seeking re-election and is running in New York’s gubernatorial primary later this year.
Mr. Xiong said in an interview Wednesday that he was surprised by Mr. Lin’s arrest. He said he just returned from a trip abroad and only learned of the allegations by reading the news. The allegations are ugly, Mr. Xiong said, but he wasn’t intimidated and vowed to continue his congressional campaign.
“It reminded me to be more cautious and be more brave,” he said.
Representatives for Alysa and Arthur Liu also didn’t respond to a request for comment. The complaint alleges that the surveillance and harassment campaign against Mr. Liu included looking to pay a reporter to let an agent tag along on an interview and ask his own questions, put a GPS tracker on his car, and get his Social Security number.
The complaint said investigators had also secured an international sports committee ID card bearing the name of an actual representative and an image of one of the agents. The plan to get Mr. Liu’s passport and that of a family member, the complaint said, was discussed in November 2021 and involved going to the Lius’ house with the identification card under the guise of checking if they were prepared to travel.
The 16-year-old Alysa Liu competed at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, finishing seventh in the women’s competition.
The three men accused of targeting Mr. Liu are two New Yorkers, Fan Liu and Matthew Ziburis, as well as a Chinese national they allegedly worked for, Qiang “Jason” Sun. The three allegedly engaged in other operations against several dissidents, including trying to bribe an Internal Revenue Service employee for access to one of their tax returns. They are also accused of stalking and surveilling an artist who made a sculpture depicting Chinese President Xi Jinping as a coronavirus molecule.
In a third case, a former Chinese dissident living in Queens, Shujun Wang, was accused of using his status within the Chinese community to report to the Ministry of State Security on people the Chinese government considers threatening, including Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, advocates for Taiwanese independence, and Uyghur and Tibetan activists—both in the U.S. and abroad. At least one high-profile Hong Kong democracy activist on whom the defendant reported was subsequently arrested by Chinese officials, prosecutors said.
“The Chinese Communist Party is not the only entity engaged in these practices, but their level of aggressiveness is unique,” said FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Alan Kohler Jr., who added that the actions often targeted Chinese Americans.
Fan Liu and Messrs. Wang and Ziburis appeared in a federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon. During his appearance, Mr. Liu denied the allegations through a Chinese interpreter. A judge set his release at $1 million bond.
The judge set Mr. Wang’s release at $300,000 bond. Mr. Ziburis’s bond was set at $500,000. The three defendants had their travel restricted, and a judge ordered Messrs. Liu and Wang to not enter the Chinese consulate in New York or other Chinese government facilities in the U.S.
Lawyers for all three defendants didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Justice Department last month ended a Trump-era initiative to counter national-security threats from China after it led to a series of failed prosecutions of academics that sowed broad distrust in the higher-education community. At the time, Justice Department officials had said they planned to continue pursuing other cases involving allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Chinese government, including those that targeted Chinese dissidents living in the U.S.
—Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Aruna Viswanatha and Kate O’Keeffe in Washington and James Fanelli in New York
22. A Losing and Desperate Putin Could Be Terrifying
Key points. I concur taking the use of US military force off the table is not a good strategy. We msu always reserve the right to use force to protect our interest as well as protect allies. Taking the use of force off the table undermines our diplomatic efforts and may lead to the larger conflict we are trying to avoid.
Excerpts;
To be perfectly clear: No sane person wants a U.S. war with Russia. Any clash between the world’s two greatest nuclear powers would carry unprecedented risks. Yet the danger that the Ukraine war may not follow America’s desired script has two implications for U.S. policy.
First, the Biden administration must consider whether there are forms of Russian escalation within Ukraine that might trigger a Western military response. This isn’t a crazy question: If Putin successfully used tactical nuclear escalation in Ukraine to escape conventional defeat, he would send a truly terrible message to would-be aggressors and would-be proliferators around the world. So the U.S. government should be considering whether, and how, it might respond if Putin takes the conflict to an extreme.
Second, Biden should stop signaling that there are no circumstances in which Washington would intervene militarily. If the U.S. makes Putin think that he can act with impunity inside Ukraine, it may encourage the Russian dictator to run just the risks that would push America into a more agonizing debate about whether to get involved.
Biden is correct that a conflict with Moscow would be horrible. But not the least of the paradoxes of this war is that taking U.S. intervention off the table entirely may tempt just the sort of Russian escalation that the president is, quite rightly, hoping to avoid.
A Losing and Desperate Putin Could Be Terrifying
Fighting for his life, the Russian leader could turn to nuclear or chemical weapons, attacks on NATO members or atrocities against Ukrainian civilians.
March 17, 2022, 2:30 AM EDT
The war in Ukraine is getting more dangerous, in part because it is going better than Ukraine’s supporters could have imagined. President Joe Biden has sought to reconcile two conflicting objectives: avoiding U.S. military intervention while also helping Ukraine and making Moscow pay a high price for aggression.
Yet as Russian President Vladimir Putin grows more desperate, that balance will become harder to strike. Potentially, the worse Russia does, the greater risks the U.S. and its European allies may face.
Putin — and most observers — expected that Russian forces would quickly break Ukrainian resistance. Yet a combination of Russian incompetence and inspired Ukrainian defense has produced a rough stalemate. Moscow holds swaths of Ukrainian territory; its early gains in the south were impressive. There is a danger that it could cut off Ukrainian forces in the east, encircle and besiege Kyiv, or seize Mariupol and Odesa on the southern coast. Russia still has preponderant combat power.
But Western money and arms are enhancing Ukrainian endurance, while Ukrainian forces ambush Russian units and attack their vulnerable supply lines. Moscow’s losses are mounting and Putin now confronts the possibility that the war may destroy his army before it destroys Ukraine.
That would be a remarkable outcome — and one that could, ironically, create sharper dilemmas for the U.S.
Biden’s approach to Ukraine has been straightforward: He has punished Russia while scrupulously refusing to get involved in the fighting. Washington and its allies have hit Moscow with far-reaching, hard-biting sanctions; they have given Ukraine antitank rockets, ammunition and other means of bleeding the invaders.
On Wednesday, Biden said the U.S. will send an additional $800 million in military aid, including cutting-edge explosive drones, and will help the Ukrainians acquire more lethal air-defense systems.
Yet Biden has ruled out a no-fly zone over Ukraine (a step most defense experts believe would be ineffectual, because it would not affect the Russian ground forces and artillery doing most of the damage), let alone more significant forms of direct U.S. military intervention. He halted the transfer of Polish jets to Kyiv for fear of provoking Moscow.
“We will defend every inch of NATO territory,” he tweeted, but “we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” because that would be “World War III.” Biden’s instincts are reasonable, but there are major perils ahead that could force a rethink of U.S. policy.
As Putin worries what stalemate or defeat might mean for his political survival, he could resort to dramatic, brutal tactics in hopes of breaking Ukraine’s will. Russian doctrine emphasizes an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy of limited nuclear strikes to avoid conventional military defeat. Yet even short of that, Putin has some scary options.
Russia could employ chemical weapons in Ukraine, or it could escalate the conventional bombardment of major cities with appalling humanitarian consequences. The latter is already happening in cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, while chemical attacks are reportedly under consideration in Moscow.
Russia could also intensify attacks near the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s borders with western Ukraine or threaten nearby NATO countries militarily to sever the lifeline keeping Ukraine alive. Putin previewed this tactic when he used cruise missiles to pummel a base near the Polish border formerly used by U.S. troops — and now used by foreign fighters flocking to aid Ukraine.
Any of these options could appeal to a dictator looking to win a fight that, as U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has said, he “cannot afford to lose.” And any of them could provoke louder calls for intervention in the West.
The U.S. could conceivably have to reconsider its position even short of deliberate Russian escalation. Suppose a stalemated war drags on for months or years, producing terrible bloodshed within Ukraine and instability and insecurity beyond it. Suppose scared, frustrated Russian forces respond to dogged resistance by murdering civilians.
In the 1990s, Western democracies ultimately intervened in the former Yugoslavia to end a conflict that was having similar consequences. Today, writes recently retired Australian general Mick Ryan, “there may be a requirement for a military intervention” in Ukraine, “if the west doesn’t want a forever war on the doorstep of Europe.”
To be perfectly clear: No sane person wants a U.S. war with Russia. Any clash between the world’s two greatest nuclear powers would carry unprecedented risks. Yet the danger that the Ukraine war may not follow America’s desired script has two implications for U.S. policy.
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First, the Biden administration must consider whether there are forms of Russian escalation within Ukraine that might trigger a Western military response. This isn’t a crazy question: If Putin successfully used tactical nuclear escalation in Ukraine to escape conventional defeat, he would send a truly terrible message to would-be aggressors and would-be proliferators around the world. So the U.S. government should be considering whether, and how, it might respond if Putin takes the conflict to an extreme.
Second, Biden should stop signaling that there are no circumstances in which Washington would intervene militarily. If the U.S. makes Putin think that he can act with impunity inside Ukraine, it may encourage the Russian dictator to run just the risks that would push America into a more agonizing debate about whether to get involved.
Biden is correct that a conflict with Moscow would be horrible. But not the least of the paradoxes of this war is that taking U.S. intervention off the table entirely may tempt just the sort of Russian escalation that the president is, quite rightly, hoping to avoid.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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23. Paying for Tomorrow’s Readiness with Today’s
Training is perishable. If you do not sustain training you cannot sustain readiness. ANd paying for future readiness today is like a world class athlete having to come back from a catastrophic injury. Some do and some do it well (e.g., Tiger woods) while most are never the same again). But as noted there are tradeoffs. And that is the real key. How to make the right tradeoffs.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, there is a trade-off between having a sufficiently modern force for the future and having maximum availability of units today. The Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model creates a scaffolding to balance and make decisions about where risk is acceptable. The U.S. Army can no longer proceed with its current force generation model; otherwise, in a decade it will find itself woefully behind its peers in technology. Taking risks now when the global threat is better understood, rather than in a nebulous future, is essential. In today’s fiscally constrained environment without the ability to build more units to cover for modernizing ones, today’s readiness is the non-monetary cost to creating critical readiness for tomorrow.
Paying for Tomorrow’s Readiness with Today’s
“The surest way to prevent war is to be prepared to win one. Doing so requires a competitive approach to force development and a consistent, multiyear investment to restore warfighting readiness and field a lethal force.”[1]
In his book, Making the Unipolar Moment, Hal Brands describes the unique strategic environment that emerged after the Cold War with the United States as the sole and uncontested superpower.[2] The world Brands describes is not the one the United States Department of Defense operates in today. The urgency of the quote above from the 2018 National Defense Strategy, that we must restore readiness rather than maintain it, is underscored throughout that document in its discussion of that fast pace at which the Nation’s peers are catching up to it.
The U.S. Army must determine not only how and when to modernize, but also how to mitigate the cost of modernization.
It is imperative that the Department of Defense figure out how to remain competitive by achieving the maximum readiness that allows it to compete or to transition to conflict. This is certainly a challenge for the Department of Defense as a whole, but each service also faces its own unique challenges. As the ground force provider with constant missions, the United States Army has, post-WWII, attempted to maintain readiness while it modernized simultaneously and in-stride. However, the force the U.S. Army wants to field in the future is transformational and therefore requires a more deliberate approach. The U.S. Army must determine not only how and when to modernize, but also how to mitigate the cost of modernization.
The U.S. Army is an ever-changing organization that must adapt to changes in society and politics, global threats from both official state and non-state actors, evolutions in warfare, and technological advancement.
The cost of readiness need not be measured only in dollars, with a fixed budget creating a zero-sum game; it is more interesting to understand the trade-off between readiness today and readiness tomorrow. The U.S. Army is an ever-changing organization that must adapt to changes in society and politics, global threats from both official state and non-state actors, evolutions in warfare, and technological advancement. Facing any one of these changes potentially requires transforming how the Army sees itself and how it fights. However, what happens when all of these occur at once? This is the operational environment the U.S. Army currently faces. With the war in Afghanistan behind it, the Army must look forward to how it anticipates what it needs to fight in the future. It also must conduct a modernization effort that is decades overdue. Attempting to balance this transformation without incurring risk to its current demands, the U.S. Army has implemented a new force generation model: the Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model.
Motivation for Transformation
Since the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Army has found itself engaged in and fully committed to a protracted fight against numerous threats from both state actors and non-state-sponsored terrorist organizations. During this war, the level of demand on the Army varied, but at its peak, the Army was utilizing legacy processes and procedures to build and maintain readiness. The Army adopted the Army Force Generation model to generate readiness to deploy more predictably for the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan.[3] The Army developed this model to facilitate the readiness needed for either short-term, high-tempo or long-term, low-intensity operations.[4] However, as the war on terrorism continued with multiple surges of forces, that force generation model proved insufficient to meet demand. In 2017, the U.S. Army once again changed how it generates the force to the Sustainable Readiness Model.[5] Shifting its focus from primarily the war on terrorism to acknowledging the multitude of other near-peer and global threats, the U.S. Army needed to have more units ready to fight at any given time than the Army Force Generation model provided. Sustainable Readiness intentionally pushed units to maintain as much readiness as possible at all times to continue in an enduring, high-tempo fight, but also to be prepared to engage in large-scale combat operations. This is no longer the operational environment the U.S. Army faces. Rather, after scaling back from the conflicts of the last 20 years, Army leaders have determined that to remain globally competitive and relevant, the “American way of war must evolve and adapt,” and the Army must prepare to fight and win in multi-domain operations in a large-scale conflict.[6]
Because of its focus over the last 20 years on the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has not emphasized significant modernization of any of its major systems.
UH-60 Blackhawk. (Matt O’Dell/Unsplash)
The motivation to change the force generation model extends beyond how the Army generates readiness within units based on training plans. Because of its focus over the last 20 years on the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has not emphasized significant modernization of any of its major systems. This is not to say that it has not sought or created new technology to improve how it fights. Rather, it has been decades since the U.S. Army fielded a new major weapon system. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that the U.S. Army fielded the Big Five: the Abrams fighting vehicle, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Apache attack helicopter, the Blackhawk utility helicopter, and the Patriot air defense missile system.[7] While those systems have seen incremental upgrades, the U.S. Army has not conducted a modernization that fundamentally changes the tactics and how the Army fights. It is also interesting to note that as described in the study authored by Conrad Crane and published by the United States Army War College, the fielding of the Big Five should not serve as the optimized example of how to modernize. Rather, the authors propose that modernization must be a deliberately planned and synchronized effort that is not a mere update of technology, but is also a holistic update to doctrine and how the U.S. Army fights.[8]
Cost of Transformation
…the cost of a more modern and presumably more capable force in the future is a decrease of forces available to meet today’s demands.
While the monetary cost of modernizing to this level is monumental, it is far more interesting to consider the cost to readiness of fielding the planned systems. Historically, and to the chagrin of many commanders, the Army’s procurement community has planned, scheduled, and dictated the fielding of new equipment. In light of the magnitude of the current modernization effort, this method would hamstring the U.S. Army. When considering readiness, a unit that is receiving a new system cannot be considered mission capable for several months, at best, since it must first divest its old equipment then receive and train on the new equipment. Thus, the cost of a more modern and presumably more capable force in the future is a decrease of forces available to meet today’s demands. The magnitude of the risk to meeting today’s mission is exacerbated or mitigated depending on the speed at which the Army can accomplish modernization. If it is critical for the Army to modernize as fast as possible, then it must reduce the mission capability of more units almost immediately. Alternatively, if the Army perceives that it has more time before it needs to have reached a sufficient level of modernization, then it decreases the risk to today’s mission.
Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model
It is this need to modernize at a magnitude unparalleled for 50 years with no foreseeable relief from the global demands of competition, which necessitates a new force generation model. To be feasible, the new model needs to meet the demands of today while allowing the U.S. Army to be able to flex, or surge, in the event of a large-scale conflict. It also has to provide the time and space for the force to modernize as it transitions to a multi-domain capable force. Finally, it needs to create stability, predictability, and the ability to synchronize the entire force including the Reserve Components.
Re-ARMM (U.S. Army)
The Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model does all this. The model establishes a life cycle for each unit, thereby creating predictability for all units, Soldiers, families, the industrial base, the procurement community, and the Department of Defense. This life cycle consists of three or more phases depending on the type of unit and the demand. Regardless of the particular structure of the life cycle, it still contains a modernization phase. Given that the life cycle is repeated over time, the Army knows the modernization phases of all units for the foreseeable future and thus can drive the procurement timeline rather than have units react to the fielding of modernized equipment. Most importantly, this life cycle model clearly establishes which units are ready and when they are ready. U.S. Army senior leaders now know through the Future Years Defense Program how much of their unit inventory is available and can make risk decisions if that inventory is perceived to be insufficient.
The U.S. Army can no longer proceed with its current force generation model; otherwise, in a decade it will find itself woefully behind its peers in technology.
This model certainly contains risk. To establish the necessary predictability to truly benefit the procurement community, the model trades flexibility. If delivery of equipment is delayed or takes longer than anticipated, the unit life cycle is disturbed and that disrupts the schedules of its sister units on the same mission line. This model also assumes a constant set of demands which, if altered, will require a revision of the mission line allocation. Given these risks and an understanding of the mitigation measures, the Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model better provides the force generation structure to transform the U.S. Army than its predecessors.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there is a trade-off between having a sufficiently modern force for the future and having maximum availability of units today. The Regionally Aligned Readiness and Modernization Model creates a scaffolding to balance and make decisions about where risk is acceptable. The U.S. Army can no longer proceed with its current force generation model; otherwise, in a decade it will find itself woefully behind its peers in technology. Taking risks now when the global threat is better understood, rather than in a nebulous future, is essential. In today’s fiscally constrained environment without the ability to build more units to cover for modernizing ones, today’s readiness is the non-monetary cost to creating critical readiness for tomorrow.
Christine Krueger is an officer in the United States Army. Her academic interests include operations research, systems engineering, and system dynamics. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Notes:
[1] James Mattis, “National Defense Strategy Unclassified,” Office of the Secretary of Defense,
[2] Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.
[4] Army Regulation 525-29: Force Generation- Sustainable Readiness, November 1, 2019.
[6] TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1: The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, 6 December 2018.
[8] Ibid.
24. Inherently Escalatory: The No-Fly Zone in Ukraine
I am reading a lot of no fly zone articles from a number of prominent airmen and air power experts. We should defer to their expertise.
Inherently Escalatory: The No-Fly Zone in Ukraine - Modern War Institute
As the world sees the impact of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and particularly the wanton slaughter of civilians by Russian forces, European and American audiences are searching for a way to put additional pressure on Russia to end the war. Sanctions, despite their undeniable effect on the Russian economy, are insufficiently instantaneous and emotionally unsatisfying. And so like the title monsters in a bad zombie movie, the no-fly zone has become the idea that will not die. In this fantasy story, the no-fly zone has become a method of mitigating the effects on civilians while supporters of the idea cling to the pretense that it “might” not escalate or, in one particularly inexplicable falsehood, that “a no-fly zone would not make NATO a direct combatant.” Views like these are a dangerous fantasy, and serve only to obscure the three central facts about a no-fly zone option in Ukraine: a no-fly zone is inherently escalatory, it will have little effect in protecting Ukrainian civilians from attack, and it is likely to be ineffective militarily. Instead, the no-fly zone is about the worst way for NATO to enter the war on Ukraine’s side, delivering a risky and poorly matched airpower option in place of an appropriate use of airpower to smash adversary combat capabilities.
As Mike Benitez and I laid out two weeks ago, a no-fly zone operation is a use of airpower in which the US or NATO would inform the Russians that they will no longer be allowed to employ airpower over a specified geographic area. There is no bluff—a no-fly zone will and must be enforced, and that includes lethal force employed against Russian aircraft without warning. It also includes the necessary suppression of air defenses that could fire on NATO aircraft in the zone, even if those air defenses are outside Ukraine (which most of them are). No-fly zones are not peacekeeping operations. They are combat operations against a defined adversary and they are inherently escalatory—in this case they would signal a transition from a proxy war where NATO is only supplying weapons to the defending side to a war where NATO air assets are killing Russian soldiers and aviators. While much of the press tends to shy away from the bald reality that somehow airpower operations are a less damaging form of warfare, combat operations are all about killing people and destroying things, and airpower applications are no exception. I have personally been responsible for the deaths of Iraqi air defense officers in Iraq (one account can be read and watched here) under the auspices of Operation Northern Watch. It is completely fallacious to assert that a no-fly zone will not lead to an expanded conflict; by definition the establishment of a no-fly zone deliberately and unambiguously expands the conflict. There are no nuances—calls for a “humanitarian” no-fly zone are merely obscuring the reality by changing the name. All former no-fly zones were established for humanitarian reasons and they all involved the use of lethal force without warning.
Adding to the pile of reasons not to consider a no-fly zone is that it would clearly be ineffective at preventing civilian deaths. The Russian employment of airpower has not been the primary attack method against civilian targets, although the Russians’ reliance on imprecise air attacks using nonprecision munitions against civilian targets has certainly caused civilian casualties. The primary method of destruction employed by the Russians is artillery, long a staple of Russian military action and about the only part of the Russian army that is working well. Russian mechanized columns and supply lines are being hammered by Ukrainian forces using small-unit tactics and advanced weapons, leaving artillery as the primary source of Russian lethal fires. Indeed, this is typical Russian doctrine—in the Russian Ground Forces, artillery is the supported branch, meaning that the armor and infantry are there to support the artillery, not the other way around (as with most of NATO). If one can imagine a magic condition under which the Russians do not fly combat missions over Ukraine, civilian casualties would continue largely unabated because those deaths and injuries are not caused by airpower and cannot be interdicted by counterair methods. The Russians rely heavily on tube and rocket artillery, including long-range rocket artillery fired from Russian soil.
With that in mind, it should become clear that a no-fly zone would be ineffective in achieving the goal for which it was invented—protecting civilians from threat of attack. In Iraq and Bosnia, the adversary had no other practical method of attacking civilian targets at range—in Ukraine the Russians clearly do. It would also be a clear case of airpower malpractice, akin to the protective reaction raids in Vietnam, where fighter escorts attacked individual air defense batteries, but only after they had been fired upon. As it is, on the second day of the war, a Russian S-400 bagged a Ukrainian Su-27 flying over Kiev—a shot taken from neighboring Belarus at a range of around 150 nautical miles. Essentially, the enforcement of a no-fly zone would place NATO aviators in a position where they were surrounded by air defenses that can reach out and touch them from the north and south, completely independently of any fighters the Russians might throw into the fight. That threat condition can lead to one of only two things: attacks on those air defense batteries or unnecessary loss of NATO aircraft and aviators who lacked the ability or authority to target assets that put them under threat.
One of the points that might get missed in the advocacy of a no-fly zone is the implications for the air bases involved. If combat missions against Russian assets are flown from NATO air bases, those air bases are immediately subject to Russian attack, and Russian operational doctrine makes it clear that long-range aviation and rocket forces will target those bases, along with their supply lines, ammunition and fuel stores, and command-and-control nodes. Ironically, Russian attacks on these targets would be completely in keeping with international law, as bases from which combat operations are launched are subject to legitimate attack.
While I don’t in any way advocate this step, the most appropriate and effective use of airpower against Russian assets in and around Ukraine would be to use the full range of NATO airpower in a deliberately constructed air campaign intended to destroy Russian forces’ combat capabilities, impair their logistics, attrit their forces in the field, and shatter their ability to deliver long-range fired on demand. That would be equally escalatory in that it would bring NATO into a war against Russia, but in a form where the military effects would be immediate, noticeable, and potentially decisive against a slow-moving force at the end of tenuous supply lines. In other words, if NATO elected to escalate, it should escalate smartly. Legally, there is no difference between the different flavors of combat operation and if NATO airpower is applied against Russia, the alliance should choose the option with the greatest chance of success.
At the end of the day, there is no credible way to assert that the no-fly zone is an option that is only potentially escalatory or that it would be effective in protecting Ukrainian civilians from attacks. As I pointed out during a recent episode of the Modern War Institute podcast, the establishment of a no-fly zone has only two possible outcomes. Either NATO fires the first shot at a Russian target in an expanded European war, or the Russians fire the first shot at a NATO target in an expanded European war. All other expectations are unrealistic, created by a misunderstanding of the available airpower options.
Col. Mike “Starbaby” Pietrucha (US Air Force, retired) was an instructor electronic warfare officer in the F-4G Wild Weasel and the F-15E Strike Eagle, amassing 156 combat missions and taking part in 2.5 SAM kills over ten combat deployments. He flew in Operations Provide Comfort, Southern Watch, and Northern Watch, and in no-fly zone operations in Bosnia after Operation Deliberate Force.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles at Łask Air Base, Poland, February 28, 2022 (credit: Tech. Sgt. Jacob Albers, US Air Force)
25. China will define the next phase of the Russia-Ukraine war—and the shifting world order
An interesting thesis.
Excerpts:
China’s support for Russia hardly squares with the cornerstones of Xi’s leadership: the use of state capitalism as a gravitational field to attract others into China’s orbit, respect for national sovereignty, and peaceful emergence into world leadership.
For the moment, the West is winning the information war; it should not lose sight of this. But Europe must pay close attention (as should the rest of the world) to China’s oscillations, compromises, manipulations, and back-room alliances. It is proving to be an unreliable interlocutor. For this reason, the European Union “third way” mentality—with Germany at the helm—to maintain equal distance from the United States and China is not feasible.
The world is becoming more uncertain. Negotiating with Beijing will be necessary. Europe should do so with eyes wide open, with the full use of its toolkit. To do so, it must overcome internal cliques and divisions, prioritize NATO, and move beyond the formats of the past. Now, more than ever, it is essential for Europe to fully bring in the Baltics, Poland, NATO’s southern flank, and, to paraphrase former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, coordinate with its American friend. In today’s world, as in the one to come, there is no place for Europe to be equidistant between the United States and China.
China will define the next phase of the Russia-Ukraine war—and the shifting world order
By Ana Palacio
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” said Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—better known as Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin—during his exile prior to the 1917 Revolution. Today though, the quote describes what Europeans and others in the world are experiencing. The abruptness of the change the world is witnessing—which happened, quite literally, overnight—in conjunction with the violence in Ukraine relayed by the media, generates deep uneasiness and fear. How will this affect the rest of the world?
Beyond this question, we Europeans in particular must ask ourselves why the bombing of Mariupol has been so shocking, when we watched—unperturbed—the atrocities Russian President Vladimir Putin committed in the Chechen capital Grozny in 1999-2000 and in Aleppo, Syria, in 2016.
We look to history for an answer: There are events that act as catalysts for situations in suspension. They mark a before and an after, crystallizing the evolution. The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to belong to that terrible category. We are entering times of collective unrest: Globalization, as we understand it, has ended, and international relations are already disconnected from what has come to be considered established practice. And all signs indicate that multilateralism will undergo a profound transformation.
Although it was Putin who triggered this shift, it is China whose protagonism will be defining. That protagonism was on full display when US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi on Monday.
Without drawing attention away from Ukraine, it is of utmost importance to consider Chinese President Xi Jinping’s strategies, specifically with regard to three areas of interest: the contortion of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in relation to its Westphalian foreign policy; the interplay between China’s actions and its vision of an alternative international order; and the alterations to the great economic-political designs of Xi (with his aspirations of lifelong service, like his Russian friend).
Western intelligence maintains that Beijing had, at the very least, inklings of Putin’s machinations of war—a fact which makes China’s mixed messaging even more striking and denotes a turning point in its position on non-interference in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations.
This shift in thinking was made explicit in the joint statement from February 4, the culmination of a Putin-Xi bilateral meeting. It is worth mentioning that the version published on the Kremlin’s website is more than five thousand words long, unlike the Chinese foreign ministry’s “summary” (four times shorter), which tiptoes around—or avoids entirely—certain hot-button topics (NATO, for one). The timeline is also important: The statement was released twenty days before the beginning of the attack on Ukraine which, in turn, started just after the conclusion of the Beijing Olympics. A moment chosen, according to US sources—who, in this matter, have proven exemplary—to appease the Chinese president.
Putin and Xi’s friendship with “no limits” was recorded by the aforementioned document and has since been echoed (and replayed on loop) by government spokespeople. One wonders what led Xi to opt for this level of a commitment to Putin: How much was Xi influenced by the consensus regarding Russian military superiority that was expected to be reflected in a speedy and efficient takeover of Ukraine? How much weight did Xi give to the supposition that the operation would not have a significant impact on his economy (along with the very Chinese principle of seeing opportunities in every crisis—such as the ability to buy large stakes in Russian oil and gas companies that the Chinese government is reportedly evaluating)? How absorbed was Xi by the notion that a decadent Europe—the whole West—would get caught up in grandiose declarations and do little more?
China, in its support for Russia and its historical defense of national sovereignty, is on a tightrope. And, caught in an impossible balancing act, it is trying to play several hands at the same time. Beijing abstained from voting for the United Nations General Assembly resolution against the Russian invasion (as it did in the UN Security Council’s similar proposal, struck down by a Russian veto). But last Monday, China offered to mediate “when needed”—as if the need were not already excruciating. In parallel, China has committed almost $800,000 in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, lamenting civilian casualties and imploring “restraint,” as well as refusing to provide replacement aircraft parts to Moscow (for now). All this while underlining its alliance with Russia as “one of the most crucial bilateral relations in the world.”
Xi’s contradictions stem from his defense of the Kremlin’s “reasonable security concerns”—to this day, he has avoided designating Russian actions in Ukraine as an “invasion.” On March 7, Foreign Minister Wang Yi again underlined China’s commitment to its “ever-lasting friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation” with Russia, which is founded on the “clear logic of history.” In this string of cartwheels and pirouettes, Wang continues on to say that China believes it must “respect and protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.”
Of special importance in the Russian version of the aforementioned joint pronouncement (not the “synthesis” produced by the CCP) is the condemnation of NATO enlargement. China, until now, had avoided taking sides. In this context, we are already seeing ramifications of the war in Ukraine: It has breathed new life—renewed the raison d’être—of NATO, generated unprecedented European unanimity, and strengthened both the transatlantic link and the image of gravitas that the United States left behind in Afghanistan. Ramifications which, paradoxically, run counter to Xi’s foreign-policy interests.
There is agreement regarding the nature of the China-Russia relationship, considering their tumultuous shared historical heritage: It has been dubbed a marriage of convenience, something temporary. The truth is that, even beyond past tensions, the two make an unlikely duo. China, an economic giant with bullish growth projections, has been striving to wield the soft power it has worked so hard to build (with little to no return on investment). Russia, the epitome of revanchism, is a declining spoiler state seeking to regain former greatness by brandishing its nuclear-armed military capabilities.
Moreover, Beijing has benefited from the global order cemented after World War II, specifically from the economic, military, and geopolitical stability the order provided. China learned to adeptly navigate Cold War dynamics and, since the United States’ Nixon administration, international institutions—over time, Beijing’s end goal became remaking the system in its image. Moscow, on the other hand, has rooted its actions firmly in historical victimization, claiming damages for the alleged contempt inflicted by the liberal system, which it seeks to undermine.
Added to this is the unexpected, powerful response of the international community to the invasion of Ukraine in terms of attitude, reprisals, and sanctions. The dominos have started to fall toward China: A week ago, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced China’s lowest annual growth target (5.5 percent) since 1991. The potential for an internal crisis stemming from faltering economic development—the sole clause in Xi’s “social contract” with his citizens—is of concern to the president. It should not be forgotten that China’s trade with Russia, a lifeline for Putin, represents less than a fifth of its trade with Europe.
The growing toxicity of the China-Russia relationship is incontrovertible. It weighs down the public image that Xi, unlike Putin, has carefully sculpted, recognizing its correlation to soft power. In cozying up to Russia, Beijing shares the stage with countries like North Korea, Syria, and Belarus, which makes it difficult to sell itself as an alternative hegemonic leader.
In the end, Xi’s geopolitical juggling has profound implications for his number one priority: the future of Taiwan. China cannot help but notice the translatability of Ukrainian courage to Taiwan.
China’s support for Russia hardly squares with the cornerstones of Xi’s leadership: the use of state capitalism as a gravitational field to attract others into China’s orbit, respect for national sovereignty, and peaceful emergence into world leadership.
For the moment, the West is winning the information war; it should not lose sight of this. But Europe must pay close attention (as should the rest of the world) to China’s oscillations, compromises, manipulations, and back-room alliances. It is proving to be an unreliable interlocutor. For this reason, the European Union “third way” mentality—with Germany at the helm—to maintain equal distance from the United States and China is not feasible.
The world is becoming more uncertain. Negotiating with Beijing will be necessary. Europe should do so with eyes wide open, with the full use of its toolkit. To do so, it must overcome internal cliques and divisions, prioritize NATO, and move beyond the formats of the past. Now, more than ever, it is essential for Europe to fully bring in the Baltics, Poland, NATO’s southern flank, and, to paraphrase former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, coordinate with its American friend. In today’s world, as in the one to come, there is no place for Europe to be equidistant between the United States and China.
A version of this article originally appeared in El Mundo. It has been translated from Spanish by the staff of Palacio y Asociados and is reprinted here with the author’s and publisher’s permission.
Ana Palacio is a former minister of foreign affairs of Spain and former senior vice president and general counsel of the World Bank Group. She is also a visiting professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors.
26. U.S. bars ex-spies from becoming 'mercenaries,' following Reuters series
U.S. bars ex-spies from becoming 'mercenaries,' following Reuters series
WASHINGTON, March 16 (Reuters) - A new law bans the United States' former spies from hiring themselves out to foreign governments right after they stop working for Washington.
The legislation, signed into law by President Joseph Biden on Tuesday as part of a $1.5 trillion spending bill, prohibits U.S. intelligence officials with knowledge of spycraft and national security secrets from selling their services to other countries for 30 months after retiring.
Democratic U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro introduced the legislation to address issues raised in a 2019 Reuters investigation, a congressional aide told Reuters. In a yearlong series, Reuters showed that former National Security Agency hackers helped the United Arab Emirates spy on journalists, dissidents and other Americans.
“We don't want our best trained intel officers going straight into the hands of foreign governments for the sake of money," Castro said. "This discourages intelligence mercenaries and protects our national interest."
The UAE spying operation, called Project Raven, hacked into Facebook and Google accounts and thousands of Apple iPhones, targeting activists that human rights groups say were later arrested and tortured.
While U.S. law has always prohibited intelligence officials from revealing specific national security secrets, previously no rule restricted retired intelligence officers from the Central Intelligence Agency or the NSA from selling their services to foreign governments after retiring.
On top of the 30-month ban, the new law will require former intelligence officials to report any foreign government work to the U.S. intelligence community and Congress for five years after they leave service.
The law applies to the CIA, the NSA and the more than dozen other American intelligence agencies.
Rhea Siers, a former senior official at the NSA, said the law addresses a critical gap in current law that has allowed American officials to commit grave ethical breaches for personal profit.
“Even after government employment, intelligence officers have a responsibility to uphold the public trust,” she said. “Personally, I was appalled by what was revealed about Project Raven, especially the involvement in conducting surveillance of U.S. citizens.”
The law defined work for foreign governments broadly. For example, the prohibition includes work for state-backed companies that are controlled by or receive substantial investments from foreign governments.
Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel for the NSA, said that while he is generally supportive of the restrictions, he believes this definition is too broad and could end up preventing security experts from taking up important roles in the private sector.
“My concern is that it could inadvertently have an effect of making it a little harder for people even to work for companies that we would be perfectly delighted for them to work for,” Gerstell said.
Over the last decade, governments around the world have created investment funds that buy stakes in private companies, which could be included in the restriction depending on how the law is interpreted as it comes into force in the next six months.
The law allows former spies to apply for an exemption if they can show the foreign work is critical to U.S. national security. Washington has at times encouraged U.S. intelligence contractors to work with allied nations when it was seen as helping America's spying efforts, experts say.
Gerstell said he hoped the law wouldn’t hinder these kind of legitimate intelligence contracting arrangements. “We rely on our allies. There is nothing evil about working for a foreign government,” he said. “Sometimes it helps us."
Reporting by Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing; Editing by Kieran Murray and Jonathan Oatis
27. How China is winning the information war in the Pacific
We must practice a superior form of political warfare.
How China is winning the information war in the Pacific | The Strategist
As China seeks greater influence in the South Pacific, its manipulation of local news outlets is having a serious impact on media independence.
Most Pacific media organisations are struggling financially, many journalists have lost their jobs and China is offering a way for them to survive—at the cost of media freedom.
It’s not just the ‘no strings attached’ financial aid and ‘look and learn’ tours of China for journalists; it’s about sharing an autocratic media model.
Prominent journalists and media executives say Pacific leaders are copying Chinese media tactics and stopping them from doing their jobs.
China is one of the worst countries in the world for media freedom. It ranks 177 on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. Now it’s trying to influence media around the world, especially in countries which have signed up to its Belt and Road Initiative. That includes 10 Pacific island nations. Four remain with Taiwan.
China has spent an estimated US$6.6 billion over 13 years strengthening its global media presence. It took over Radio Australia’s shortwave transmitter frequencies in the Pacific when the ABC shut down its shortwave service in 2017.
China’s national television service is about to start broadcasting by satellite into Vanuatu.
In a 2020 report, the International Federation of Journalists warned that foreign journalists were wooed by exchange programs, opportunities to study in China, tours and financial aid for their media outlets. Beijing also provides free content in foreign newspapers and ambassadors write opinion pieces for local media.
The federation’s report found that journalists frequently think their media is strong enough to withstand this influence, but a global survey suggests that’s not the reality and China is reshaping the media round the world.
These attempts at ‘sharp power’ go beyond simply telling China’s story, according to Sarah Cook, research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House. Their sharper edge often undermines democratic norms, erodes national sovereignty, weakens the financial sustainability of independent media, and violates local laws.
Journalists say this is an ideological and political struggle, with China determined to combat what it sees as decades of unchallenged Western media imperialism.
There’s mounting evidence from the Pacific of the impact of Beijing’s worldwide campaign, particularly in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
The situation for journalists in Solomon Islands has rapidly changed since the country swapped diplomatic allegiance from Taipei to Beijing in 2019. Media freedom has deteriorated and journalists say leaders are now taking their cues from China.
Media outlets are vulnerable to offers of financial help. Many journalists have lost jobs and others haven’t been paid for months. It’s estimated there are just 16 full-time journalists left in Honiara.
There’s been little advertising since the November 2021 riots, a situation exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. The only income for one privately owned media outlet is from the small street sales of its newspapers.
Earlier this month, the Solomon Islands government held its first news conference for 2022 after months of pressure to talk to journalists. The government denied there were restrictions on media freedom.
As the media struggles to survive, China’s ambassador is offering support, such as more trips to China (after the pandemic) and donations including two vehicles to the Solomon Star and maintenance of the newspaper’s printing presses. In the experience of other media, these offers are often followed with pressure to adhere to editorial positions congruent with those of the Chinese embassy.
While some journalists are resisting the pressure and holding a strong line, others are being targeted by China with rewards for ‘friends’.
Chinese embassies throughout the South Pacific are active on social media. In Solomon Islands, the embassy’s Facebook site includes posts about its aid assistance for Covid-19, joint press releases with the Solomons government and stories from official Chinese news outlets.
There are numerous examples of the growing impact on media freedom.
A freelance journalist has relocated to Australia after her investigations into the relationship between Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and a Chinese businessman resulted in harassment from police. She said police told her an order for her arrest came directly from the prime minister.
She was advised by Australia’s high commissioner to move to Australia for her safety.
Veteran journalist Dorothy Wickham was among a group of Solomon Islands journalists who accepted an invitation for a ‘look and learn’ tour of China soon after the Sogavare government swapped allegiance to China in 2019.
She said the trip left her concerned about how Solomon Islands would deal with its new diplomatic partner.
‘By the time our tour concluded in Shanghai, I was personally convinced that our political leaders are not ready or able to deal effectively with China. Solomon Islands’ regulatory and accountability mechanisms are too weak. We have already shown some spirit with our attorney general rejecting a hasty deal to lease the island of Tulagi, the capital of one of our provinces, to a Chinese company, but I fear how fragile and weak my country is against any large developed nation let alone China.’ she wrote in an article for The Guardian.
One senior media executive that said if his own government, Australia, and New Zealand didn’t assist, he would look to China. ‘There is too much talk about the role of media in democracy,’ he said. He thought the Chinese ambassador understood that his organisation had its own editorial policy. Soon after that, though, he was asked to publish a press release word for word.
Another media executive said he only had to ring the Chinese embassy and help arrived. He said China was rapidly moving into his country’s media space with no expense spared.
High-profile Vanuatu journalist Dan McGarry says he has no doubt that some Pacific governments are following China’s lead and adopting its contempt for critical speech and dissent.
In 2019, McGarry left Vanuatu to attend a forum in Australia, but his visa was revoked and he was banned from re-entering Vanuatu. He told the ABC’s Media Watch program at the time that he had no doubt it was because of a story he wrote about the secret deportation of six Chinese from Vanuatu.
The six were arrested and detained without charge on the premises of a Chinese company with numerous large government contracts before being escorted out of Vanuatu by Chinese and Vanuatu police. McGarry said he was summoned by the prime minister, who told him he was disappointed with his negative reporting.
McGarry said he had no evidence that China tried to influence the Vanuatu government over his residence, but he’d seen a tendency in Pacific leaders to emulate behaviour they saw elsewhere.
Now back in Vanuatu, he said the decision to refuse his work permit was still under judicial review and he’s seeking financial compensation.
In 2018, Papua New Guinea journalist Scott Waide was suspended by EMTV under pressure from Prime Minister Peter O’Neill for a story he wrote about a diplomatic Chinese tantrum and a scandal over the purchase of Maserati cars for the APEC meeting in Port Moresby.
Waide told the ABC that Pacific governments were taking lessons from China in dealing with their critics using media clampdowns and intimidation. That didn’t necessarily involve direct instructions from Beijing, ‘but people watch, people learn’.
A dispute over media freedom has escalated with the sacking of the head of news and 24 journalists at EMTV in PNG. They were initially suspended but later terminated for supporting their editor over interference from a government minister about a story involving an Australian man charged with drug trafficking. On 9 March, the EMTV news manager was sacked for insubordination. The network has since hired a new team of recent graduates with little experience—just months before the scheduled elections in June.
These examples give a sharper edge to concerns about China’s growing influence in the South Pacific and the lack of an Australian media voice there. The ABC’s presence has been described as a whisper. There’s only one Australian journalist based in the region, the ABC’s Natalie Whiting in PNG. Meanwhile, Xinhua has a correspondent based in Fiji and China has recently been recruiting Pacific journalists for its global TV network.
The situation worries Australia’s national broadcaster. ABC managing director David Anderson told a Senate hearing in February 2022 of growing Chinese influence in the Pacific. ‘The single biggest piece of information that comes back to us from the public broadcasters is concern over the pressure the Chinese government put on them to carry content,’ he said.
In November 2019, the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum at Griffith University expressed concern about growing threats to media freedom. It called on Pacific governments to fund public broadcasters properly to ensure they have sufficient equipment and staff to enable their services to reach all citizens and to adequately play their watchdog role.
Australian journalist, media development consultant and trainer Jemima Garrett says media executives are at risk of being captured by China.
She has no doubt that China’s growing influence is a major story, but with so few Australian journalists based in the region, even significant developments in the China story are going unreported.
Author’s note: Some of the Pacific journalists in this story have asked not to be named or identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
28. We need to stop talking about the grey zone
Excerpts:
Reconciling this longer-term strategic objective with immediate and operational tactical needs will undoubtedly create difficult choices. But these are not illuminated by the grey zone concept. That’s because it doesn’t distinguish between the tools of modern statecraft and offers no strategic compass in choosing between them.
This lack of strategy is evident in many of the arguments for Western adoption of grey zone tactics. More extreme examples include a simplistic call for covert action aimed at regime change in Russia. But a lengthy study of options for offensive political warfare similarly puts tactics ahead of strategy by making the question of whether regime change should be pursued a secondary consideration. A proposed US-Australian “strategy to deter China’s grey-zone coercion” argues for the adoption of many “unorthodox capabilities” and at least asserts that this can be done in “legal, moral, and ethical ways”. But it doesn’t explain how.
We need to stop talking about the grey zone
The concept of a grey zone in international affairs has gained popularity as analysts have tried to understand how states compete for strategic advantage in a more complex and interdependent world. But war in the Ukraine has underscored how the concept now obscures more than it clarifies. The “grey zone” blurs the differences between tools of modern statecraft and doesn’t provide any guidance as to how they should be used.
The new black
Talk about the grey zone began not long after Vladimir Putin started sending unmarked forces – “little green men” – into eastern Ukraine in 2014. The grey zone is the murky area in between the black-and-white categories of war and peace posited by the rules-based international order. It encompasses fuzzy domains where international rules are unclear, such as in cyber or outer space.
Western governments have adopted the theory. Australia’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update reported on increasing “grey zone activities” in the Indo-Pacific which “involve military and non-military forms of assertiveness and coercion aimed at achieving strategic goals without provoking conflict”, warning of a range of threats including militarisation, cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and economic coercion.
The invasion featured no little green men, massive cyberattacks or sophisticated disinformation campaigns.
The grey zone offers a conceptual umbrella linking Putin’s little green men with Chinese island-building in the South China Sea. In both cases the revisionist power incrementally changed facts on the ground (or in the water) without crossing the line that could prompt a military response. The grey zone is attractive, according to the theory, because war has become so costly and unpredictable.
Role reversal in Ukraine
Putin’s old-fashioned invasion of Ukraine seemed to directly refute this theory. Russia didn’t exploit the grey zone. The invasion featured no little green men, massive cyberattacks or sophisticated disinformation campaigns and it has been incremental only insofar as Russian’s advance has been slowed by poor logistics and Ukrainian resistance.
But Russia’s seemingly disastrous war may yet be the exception that proves the rule. If, as already seems likely, the costs of the invasion exceed any benefits, states will have another reason to avoid military conflict and pursue their goals through other means.
Not just revisionist states. Ukraine’s backers are the ones trying to stay below the threshold of co-belligerence while they bolster its resistance with weapons, intelligence and cyber support and, above all, sweeping economic sanctions.
Pisky village, Donetsk region, Ukraine, seen in 2017, a victim of fighting long before Russia’s invasion in February this year (OSCE/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Of course, there is no moral equivalence between Russia’s assault on Ukraine and the West’s effort to help defend it. The West’s careful use of legally permitted measures short of war can’t be compared with Russia’s, or China’s, exploitation of the murky grey zone.
Or can it? Australia defines economic coercion as a grey zone activity. The unprecedented sanctions on Russia – most notably the freezing its externally held foreign currency reserves – have broken taboos. We don’t know the extent of covert action undertaken by the United States, which was clearly forewarned by intelligence. But National Security Agency head General Paul Nakasone referred recently to “some of the work that others have been able to do to prevent” Russian cyber attacks. As the conflict intensifies, countries supporting Ukraine may have to consider adopting “grey zone tactics”.
Shrink the grey zone
They will have a have a much longer menu of options draw from than they did when, at the start of the Cold War, famed US diplomat George Kennan argued for democracies to use of all measures short of war. Globalisation and technological development have created new forms of weaponised interdependence. But Kennan’s observation that democracies should be more restrained than totalitarian states still holds true.
For countries that want a more rules-based international order, the strategic objective should be to strengthen that order and thereby shrink the grey zone. That’s not an abstract goal. Clear legal distinctions are necessary to maintain the security of weapons transfers en route to Ukraine and prevent the war spilling over into neighbouring states. An offensive cyber operation that, for example, destroyed a Russian military capability could prove counterproductive if it sparked escalation or undermined broader efforts to promote cyber norms.
More immediately, the West needs a clearer strategy for economic coercion.
Reconciling this longer-term strategic objective with immediate and operational tactical needs will undoubtedly create difficult choices. But these are not illuminated by the grey zone concept. That’s because it doesn’t distinguish between the tools of modern statecraft and offers no strategic compass in choosing between them.
This lack of strategy is evident in many of the arguments for Western adoption of grey zone tactics. More extreme examples include a simplistic call for covert action aimed at regime change in Russia. But a lengthy study of options for offensive political warfare similarly puts tactics ahead of strategy by making the question of whether regime change should be pursued a secondary consideration. A proposed US-Australian “strategy to deter China’s grey-zone coercion” argues for the adoption of many “unorthodox capabilities” and at least asserts that this can be done in “legal, moral, and ethical ways”. But it doesn’t explain how.
More immediately, the West needs a clearer strategy for economic coercion. Economic tools will be an essential part of compelling Russian concessions. But a 2019 study of Washington’s growing use of “weaponised interdependence” found that most of its practitioners knew surprisingly little about what they were doing: “the key actors concerned have yet to start thinking systematically about how others are going to respond to their own actions, working out the plausible chains of consequences.” Or, as academic and columnist Dan Drezner put it more recently:
the sanctioners need to have a theory of the case. Otherwise, all this behaviour is just an exercise in maximizing the economic pain of ordinary Russians … One thing it could achieve is a Russian populace that embraces the demented imperial ambitions that Putin embodies. Another is to capsize a tottering global economy.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
