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– B. F. Skinner

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– George Santayana

1. It's Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There

2. The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis

3. What Another Six Years of Putin May Bring for Russia and the World

4. A Small Ex-Soviet Satellite State Goes Hunting for Arms for Ukraine

5. Consultants Are Paid to Fix Businesses. Why Can’t They Fix Their Own?

6. As Gaza war rages, U.S. military footprint expands across Middle East

7. House Launches Broad Probe into China’s Infiltration of U.S.

8. Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say

9. Russia alleges Indonesian mercenaries are fighting for Ukrainian military

10. Sweden’s New Model Army

11. Geopolitics, influence and crime in the Pacific islands

12. The TikTok Ban Is Truly An Issue Of National Security

13. Australia Wanted to Catch Chinese Spies. Is This Really Whom It Had in Mind?

14. US Air Force special ops forces are turning big cargo planes into bombers with a new weapon

15. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 16, 2024

16. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, March 16, 2024

17. Iraq’s Dangerous Mix: 2,500 U.S. Troops, Iran-backed Militias and Battle for Influence

18. Drones Reduce US Military Capabilities

19. Students without sunlight: the underground schoolkids of Kharkiv

20. Will Political Hatred Spill Into the Streets?

1. It's Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There

A sobering Sunday morning read.

Excerpts:

No one disputes that history should inform policy. The question is which history matters most.

For many commentators, the answer is not the second world war but the first. “Unless there is some basis for some cooperative action,” Henry Kissinger warned the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in 2020, “The world will slide into a catastrophe comparable to World War I.”

...

US abstention created a cascading commitment problem: The fact that Britain and France couldn’t count on American support made them reluctant to face down Hitler in 1938, when they might have won had war been the result. As World War II and the Cold War subsequently showed, only the consistent application of America’s power could create an environment in which humanity reached new levels of flourishing because the worst forms of aggression were constrained.

That lesson stuck for decades after Pearl Harbor but is being unlearned today. The ethos of the pre-World War II isolationists — America First — has made a comeback. Support for assistance to Ukraine is slipping. If Donald Trump wins the presidency in 2024, the hollowing out of NATO and other US alliances is all too conceivable. It is important to understand what this might mean.

A key difference between Munich in 1938 and Ukraine in 2022 was American leadership. Absent US assistance, Kyiv surely would have been defeated, whether sooner or later, and a divided Europe might have chosen to appease rather than oppose an advancing Russia. Likewise, an Asia abandoned by the US would be at China’s mercy. Countries in the Middle East would struggle to counter Iran and its proxies, to say nothing of the menagerie of terrorist groups that still menace the region, without the diplomatic and military support Washington provides.

At best, the consequence of US retrenchment would be greater international disorder. At worst, it would be the liberation of aggressive impulses that consigned the world to terror 85 years ago. America can have the comfort of retrenchment, or it can have the global stability, prosperity and democratic supremacy it created in the aftermath of history’s worst war. It probably can’t have both at the same time.

Opinion

Hal Brands, Columnist

It's Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There

America Firsters seem unaware of just how quickly and completely the international order can collapse.

March 17, 2024 at 12:00 AM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2024-03-17/it-s-looking-like-world-war-ii-out-there-with-russia-china-iran?sref=hhjZtX76

Our world resembles the 1930s more than we might think. Now, as then, the balance of power is shifting ominously. Violent autocracies are seeking expansive empires. Ties between authoritarian states are growing stronger; regional conflicts are becoming interwoven. Democracies are threatened from without and within. The US is, once again, tempted by a doctrine that pursues unilateralism and retrenchment, in the guise of “America First.”

To be sure, the parallels are inexact. The present international system is stronger than the one that crumbled in the 1930s, thanks to the stability American power and US alliances still provide. None of the travails of recent decades — not the global financial crisis, not Covid — has wrought privation and radicalism equivalent to that caused by the Great Depression. For these and other reasons, a catastrophic collapse of global order may seem inconceivable. But to many who lived through the 1930s, it seemed inconceivable that the accumulating pressures of that decade would explode into the peerless horrors that followed.

The greatest danger to any international order is the assumption that its achievements are permanent and its enemies will always be held at bay. Defending the liberal order the US created after World War II thus requires learning the lessons of an earlier, darker era in which such complacency exacted an awful cost.

No one disputes that history should inform policy. The question is which history matters most.

For many commentators, the answer is not the second world war but the first. “Unless there is some basis for some cooperative action,” Henry Kissinger warned the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in 2020, “The world will slide into a catastrophe comparable to World War I.”

True, like today’s US-China rivalry, World War I resulted from tensions between a liberal hegemon, the UK, and an illiberal Eurasian challenger, Imperial Germany. In this instance, the thinking goes, blunders and miscalculations caused a devastating conflict no one truly wanted. The present-day imperative, then, is to reduce tensions, avoid arms races, and limit the chances humanity might “sleepwalk” into catastrophe. It’s a superficially appealing analogy, but not a very useful one.

World War I was no accidental war. Its root cause was the conduct of a Germany whose power and ambition had polarized Europe, and which ran enormous risks in the summer of 1914 despite knowing a continental conflict might result. British efforts to reduce tensions during that crisis made war more likely, by giving Berlin false hope London might sit out the fight. The history of World War I just isn’t what advocates of the analogy think it is. And today, parallels to the period before the second world war seem more pronounced.

There are haunting symbolic similarities: A neo-totalitarian China using concentration camps for industrial-scale oppression; a neo-fascist Russia waging a quasi-genocidal war of conquest; Iranian-backed terrorists making Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Most fundamentally, the core strategic problem of our moment is ripped from the 1930s, not the 1910s. World War I was caused by tensions within a single region, Europe. But today, like before World War II, the prevailing system is being challenged on multiple fronts, by multiple actors, who are coming together in an awkward, destabilizing embrace.

The expansion of these revisionists is, so far, modest compared to the malefactors of the 1930s and 1940s. Their atrocities aren’t yet close to those of Adolf Hitler’s “New Order” or Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But perhaps that’s because today’s revisionists have had to operate in an environment long dominated by US power. How ugly might things get if aggressive autocracies were less constrained? The best reason to mine the lessons of the pre-World War II era is to ensure we never find out.

The first lesson is that international order can collapse with devastating thoroughness and speed. In retrospect, we know what happened in the 1930s. Breakdowns of regional order produced a crisis of global security. Regimes rooted in violent ideologies pursued some of history’s most brazen, horrific land-grabs. But even though most democratic leaders knew an ill wind was blowing, few predicted how ferocious the gale would become.

Into the mid-1930s, some European leaders hoped Italy’s Benito Mussolini might check Adolf Hitler. After the Munich crisis of 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed he had secured “peace for our time” by allowing Germany to annex a large part of Czechoslovakia. On the eve of Hitler’s rampage through Western Europe in 1940, almost no one realized how totally the European balance of power was about to break. That same year — as Japan waged a brutal war in China — US diplomats still hoped “moderates” in Tokyo might change that country’s course.

Some experts underestimated the totalizing ambitions of the fascist powers; others misjudged the military strength of the opposing sides. The larger intellectual failing was simply an inability to imagine how catastrophically the world could buckle when assaulted by determined aggressors — and how steep the resulting descent could be.

Perhaps no such calamity is possible in our era — perhaps the progress and prosperity the world has achieved since 1945 are irreversible. Yet warning signs are starting to accumulate.

China’s Military Budget

Beijing’s defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been rising since 2020

Source: China’s Ministry of Finance via Bloomberg

Note: 2024 is a projection.

Russia’s conduct in Ukraine since 2014 has demonstrated how what starts as a limited incursion into a disputed territory can become an effort to erase an entire nation. Recent events in the Middle East remind us of how even an economically feeble revisionist, Iran, can cultivate proxies capable of throwing the region into chaos. In East Asia, China is conducting what one US admiral calls “the largest military buildup in history since World War II.” These states make no secret of their desire to rearrange the regions around them and upend a world long structured by American power. They still have some distance to go: The fact that the front lines of the US-China competition are in the Taiwan Strait, not the Central Pacific, and that the contest between Russia and the West is occurring in Ukraine, not Central Europe, testifies to the achievements of the present order. But to assume this system is immune to the strains being exerted upon it is to risk being surprised, once again, by how quickly things fall apart.

The authoritarian powers make awkward partners. Iran, Russia and China aren’t formal allies. Historically, they have been rivals more often than friends. Even today, a China that ultimately dominates Eurasia might menace Russia and Iran more severely than it menaces America. But this isn’t much reason for reassurance, because a second lesson is that even an ambivalent alliance of totalitarian states can set the world aflame.

The Axis powers — Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy —never trusted one another. As historian Williamson Murray wrote, they were united mainly by their desire “to steal as much of the world as possible.” Had they succeeded, the towering ambitions and toxic racism that motivated these countries surely would have condemned them, eventually, to a fratricidal falling-out. Even so, one of history’s most dysfunctional partnerships created deeply destabilizing effects.

These powers backed each other at vital moments: Mussolini aided Hitler in crises over Austria and Sudeten Czechoslovakia in 1938. Success by one opened doors for others: Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 encouraged Hitler to send his military back into the Rhineland in 1936, just as Germany’s blitzkrieg through Western Europe in 1940 emboldened Japan to press into Southeast Asia. The combined effect of these assaults was to fatally rupture the status quo, by confronting its defenders with more challenges than they could beat back.

Costs of Superpower

China and Russia have been closing the gap on US defense spending

Source: SIPRI

Note: In Constant 2022 USD.

Today’s revisionists don’t share much beyond illiberal rule and resentment of American might. That’s enough to produce cooperation with pernicious results.

Russia has accelerated China’s military ascendance by selling it advanced aircraft, missiles and air defenses — and now through shadowy technological partnerships meant to hasten development of sensitive capabilities. Iran and North Korea have bolstered Russia’s attack on Ukraine by selling it drones, artillery and missiles. China has provided Putin with microchips and outlets for Russian trade. Meanwhile, the autocratic peace these powers have established at Eurasia’s core allows them to probe, more assertively, into surrounding regions. Putin can throw his army against Ukraine because he doesn’t have to worry about hostility from China.

Military Muscle

Russia's defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been surpassing the US’s for a decade

Source: SIPRI

Don’t underestimate where these alignments could lead. If Russia sells China its most sensitive submarine-quieting technology, it could upend the undersea balance in the Western Pacific. If Moscow postures its forces menacingly in Europe during a Sino-American showdown in Asia, Washington would be whipsawed by crises on separate fronts. Today’s autocratic axis doesn’t need to be a formal alliance if the goal is simply to overload the international system by fostering more, and more serious, challenges than America can handle at once.

The goal of US policy should be to prevent major war, particularly the sort of global war that erupted in the 1930s — and that could occur again if Europe, the Middle East and Asia were all consumed by conflict at once. Yet the best way of deterring war is preparing to wage it effectively, and the demands of any great-power conflict could be severe.

Fighting in Ukraine has devoured vast quantities of lives, money and materiel. A war between America and China would consume munitions, ships and aircraft at rates more astonishing still. US officials should heed a third lesson: Use other countries’ wars to get ready for one’s own.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America was hardly prepared for conflict. The only reason it wasn’t further behind the curve was that it had actually begun to rearm in 1938-39, and then more seriously in 1940. Defense spending rose dramatically in peacetime, from well under 2% of GDP in 1938 to more than 5% of GDP by 1941.

As war loomed, there were anguished debates about whether to send US weapons to an existentially embattled Great Britain, through the Lend-Lease program, or keep them for America itself. But in reality, Lend-Lease was a positive-sum undertaking. By stimulating additional military production before Pearl Harbor, it expanded the capacity of the US defense industrial base, which would ultimately carry the free world to victory.

President Joe Biden has said that America must be the “arsenal of democracy” for Israel and Ukraine. But America’s defense industrial base is now faulty and fragile, which is why the US is struggling to produce the artillery and other weapons Ukraine needs to fend off Russia — let alone the long-range missiles, ships, and submarines it would need in a great-power war of its own.

Aid to Ukraine is sometimes said to exacerbate this problem by depleting US stockpiles and diverting aid from Taiwan. It is true that rocket motors and artillery shells used for one thing cannot be used for another. But the answer, for a country with worldwide commitments, is to use what wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have revealed about a deteriorating global order — and a feeble defense industrial base — to impel the larger rearmament program that can ease those tradeoffs by expanding America’s overall production capacity. The arsenal of democracy is in danger of being outstripped by the arsenal of autocracy. The US must find, in wars that are already occurring, the urgency needed to prepare for what may come.

This may seem like a heavy burden: It requires Washington and its allies to start treating the present moment as a prewar period. Motivation might come from a fourth lesson: It is cheaper to sustain a favorable order than rebuild one that has been shattered.

The cost of failing to stop the fascist powers early was ghastly. It could be measured in the 60 million lives lost in World War II, or in the herculean feats of power projection required to liberate Hitler’s Europe and a Japanese-dominated Pacific. It could be measured in the vicious crimes the Axis powers perpetrated in areas they conquered — and in the moral compromises the Allies made to set the balance aright, whether the devil’s bargain with Moscow or the incineration of German and Japanese cities.

The reward Washington and its allies reaped, for winning World War II and then the Cold War, was a system historically favorable to the democracies. The price of preserving that system only looks steep until one calculates the price of letting it slip away.

Aid to Ukraine—equivalent to about 5% of the US defense budget—may seem expensive. But would it be cheaper to see Ukraine defeated, and then face a vengeful, mobilized Russia to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s east? In Asia, the investments in military capabilities and coalition-building needed to sustain the status quo are sizable. But would it be easier to curb China once it has taken Taiwan and cast its imposing shadow across the Western Pacific? In the Middle East, keeping crucial sea lanes open is challenging. Allowing hostile forces to close them would surely take a higher toll, in economic losses and deepening strategic decay.

Americans presently find the vexations of upholding global order endless. A look backward suggests the alternative could be much worse.

Finally, preserving global order is a collective endeavor—but it won’t happen without the US. Washington wasn’t a major player in Europe and East Asia as the forces of revisionism gained momentum before World War II, and that was exactly the trouble.

US abstention created a cascading commitment problem: The fact that Britain and France couldn’t count on American support made them reluctant to face down Hitler in 1938, when they might have won had war been the result. As World War II and the Cold War subsequently showed, only the consistent application of America’s power could create an environment in which humanity reached new levels of flourishing because the worst forms of aggression were constrained.

That lesson stuck for decades after Pearl Harbor but is being unlearned today. The ethos of the pre-World War II isolationists — America First — has made a comeback. Support for assistance to Ukraine is slipping. If Donald Trump wins the presidency in 2024, the hollowing out of NATO and other US alliances is all too conceivable. It is important to understand what this might mean.

A key difference between Munich in 1938 and Ukraine in 2022 was American leadership. Absent US assistance, Kyiv surely would have been defeated, whether sooner or later, and a divided Europe might have chosen to appease rather than oppose an advancing Russia. Likewise, an Asia abandoned by the US would be at China’s mercy. Countries in the Middle East would struggle to counter Iran and its proxies, to say nothing of the menagerie of terrorist groups that still menace the region, without the diplomatic and military support Washington provides.

At best, the consequence of US retrenchment would be greater international disorder. At worst, it would be the liberation of aggressive impulses that consigned the world to terror 85 years ago. America can have the comfort of retrenchment, or it can have the global stability, prosperity and democratic supremacy it created in the aftermath of history’s worst war. It probably can’t have both at the same time.

More From Hal Brands at Bloomberg Opinion:

Russia’s Ukraine Resurgence Shows It’s Often Down But Never Out
The US Can’t — and Shouldn’t — Escape the Middle East
Ukraine’s Desperate Hour: Victory (of a Sort) Is Still Possible

Want more Bloomberg Opinion? Terminal readers head to OPIN <GO>. Or you can subscribe to our daily newsletter.

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

To contact the author of this story:

Hal Brands at hbrands1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

2. The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis

Author bio: Alfred W. McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power." His new book is "To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change."

Excerpts:

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

...

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

...

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

...

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

...

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

The American Empire in (Ultimate?) Crisis

tomdispatch.com · by Andy Kroll · March 12, 2024

The Decline and Fall of It All?

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Buy the Book

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

Featured image: Faded Glory by Bob White is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

tomdispatch.com · by Andy Kroll · March 12, 2024

3. What Another Six Years of Putin May Bring for Russia and the World

I suppose even if Russia had term limits it would not stop Putin.

What Another Six Years of Putin May Bring for Russia and the World

Vladimir Putin’s fifth term in office will likely be dominated by the war in Ukraine and making sure Russians support it

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/what-another-six-years-of-putin-may-bring-for-russia-and-the-world-d044d47b?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Ann M. Simmons

Updated March 17, 2024 8:23 am ET

Voting in the Russian presidential election concludes on Sunday. PHOTO: YURI SMITYUK/ZUMA PRESS

What’s next for Vladimir Putin?

After 24 years in the Kremlin, the Russian leader is on the cusp of securing another six years as president as this weekend’s presidential election winds up Sunday. The vote itself is largely a formality, putting him on the path to matching Stalin as Russia’s longest-serving leader. His government pulled out all the stops to secure the win. It jailed critics, muzzled the press and introduced new laws to stamp out anything that could be considered criticism of his war in Ukraine. Putin’s most effective opponent, Alexei Navalny, was gone, found dead in an Arctic prison camp last month where he was serving out sentences totaling 30 years in circumstances that haven’t been fully explained.

What matters more is the extent of his victory. Putin, now 71 years old, doesn’t just want to win. Analysts who follow the country’s politics say he needs to win big if he wants a free hand in reviving what he says are Russia’s conservative Orthodox traditions and, ultimately, prevailing in Ukraine and in his broader confrontation with the West.

“This would legitimize Putin’s legacy and his war of aggression, relegating the remaining opposition to an even more marginalized role, and allowing Putin to implement, unchecked, his vision for the next six years,” the European Parliament Think Tank, which provides analysis and research on policy issues relating to the European Union, said in a briefing paper this month.

The last presidential election in 2018 put turnout at 67.5%, with close to 77% of the vote going to Putin, according to government data. The Kremlin has made clear it wants even higher numbers this time around to provide the Russian leader a free hand in pursuing his objectives, following the “tradition of post-election carte blanche for Putin,” as Boris Vishnevsky, deputy head of the opposition party Yabloko, put it in comments posted on his Telegram channel.

The Kremlin wants the election tally for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who voted online Friday, to be higher than in his 2018 victory. PHOTO: MIKHAIL METZEL/ZUMA PRESS

Putin has already signaled some of his plans in speeches and interviews. Chief among them is his insistence on carrying on the war in Ukraine as the U.S.’s support for Kyiv shows signs of wavering.

“I think this is what the election was about—that this is a national war, that he’s the leader of the nation in this existential struggle to maintain Russia’s role in the world, to maintain Russia’s territorial integrity,” said Angela Stent, author of the book “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest” and a senior adviser at the Washington, D.C. -based United States Institute of Peace. “Everything that he has signaled is that he’s going to continue the war.”

Observers predict the Russian leader could soon launch another wave of arrests and detentions at home, new laws to stifle dissent and increased taxes on the rich. Analysts said there could also be a new wave of mobilizations to reinforce Russia’s growing advantage on the battlefield in Ukraine.

“What we have seen recently is an increase in activity of Russian intelligence and security services, which are extremely aggressive,” a reflection of the regime’s pre-election paranoia, Andrei Soldatov, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for European Policy Analysis told a media briefing on Thursday. “Because it is political stability which is at stake, everything is justifiable, including the killing of political opponents [and] attacks abroad,” he said.

Soldatov predicted the clampdown on criticism evident in the run-up to the election will continue once the vote is done, following a familiar pattern in Russia. “They use the election as an excuse, and then they just make these methods and activities part of their playbook. My biggest concern is that they’re going to be using this for months and months to come,” he said.

Russians Vote in Presidential Election Expected to Return Putin to Power

A Small Ex-Soviet Satellite State Goes Hunting for Arms for Ukraine

As the U.S. dithers on aid, the Czech Republic is turning to Cold War contacts to supply the ammunition Ukraine needs most

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/a-small-ex-soviet-satellite-state-goes-hunting-for-arms-for-ukraine-35255577?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By Bojan PancevskiFollow

Updated March 17, 2024 12:02 am ET

PRAGUE—Ukraine is about to receive large shipments of the ammunition it needs most. It won’t come from the U.S., or any other pillar of NATO.

Rather, the deal was clinched by a landlocked country of 10 million people sandwiched between Germany and Poland and known more for its picturesque capital and famed beer than its military prowess.

The Czech Republic, a former Soviet satellite state with little sympathy for Russia’s efforts to restore its lost empire, is one of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters. By activating relations dating back to the Cold War, it has sourced around 800,000 artillery shells from a diverse coalition of suppliers spanning the globe and identified another 700,000 that could be secured with extra funds.

The shells include 300,000 Soviet-standard shells and around 500,000 Western-made rounds, to be delivered in batches by the end of the year. More shells will be available as funding comes in, the Czech government said. Altogether, Czech officials say around 3 billion euros, equivalent to $3.3 billion, would secure around 1.5 million shells—a fraction of the $60 billion aid package for Ukraine now stranded in the U.S. congress.

The shipments, which Czech officials say could start reaching Ukraine within weeks, come as shortages of ammunition and troops are forcing Ukraine’s battered army to pull back in places faced with a Russian onslaught.

The Ukrainian forces are so depleted that they now only fire around two shells for every 10 Russia fires at them, according to Western intelligence estimates.

The Ukrainians aren’t running out of courage, but “they are running out of ammunition,” said Jens Stoltenberg, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO’s failure to provide Ukraine with enough ammunition stems from a lack of political will, alliance chief Jens Stoltenberg said. PHOTO: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Russia, by contrast, having ramped up domestic manufacturing and tapped allies such as North Korea, Iran, and Belarus for supplies, is now both outgunning Ukraine on the battlefield and outproducing NATO.

Some military analysts say Ukraine needs up to 200,000 shells of various calibers each month to push back against the renewed onslaught. The supplies organized by the Czech Republic could help Ukraine’s defenders hold back Russia’s advance while the West slowly ramps up its own weapons production.

“The Czech initiative will help Ukraine stabilize the front and regain the upper hand,” said Nico Lange, former chief of the executive staff at the German defense ministry.

Czech officials behind the discreet procurement plan said their effort started shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago and largely circumvented the ponderous bureaucracies of NATO and the European Union.

Unlike the U.S., France or Germany, which mainly focused on ramping up domestic production to supply Ukraine, Czech officials said their initiative focused on sourcing existing materiel. Czech officials began quietly crisscrossing the globe, clinching sales deals and negotiating export licenses from scores of manufacturing nations.

The Czech officials said the country’s past as a former Soviet satellite was an unexpected boon. It gifted the country both a substantial armaments industry with global customers and good relations with many nations in the Global South with large stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons and the capacity to produce more.

The officials are coy about where the shells are coming from but say suppliers include some allies of Russia. By contrast, similar entreaties by the U.S. and Western Europeans to potential suppliers in Africa, Asia and Latin America have been rebuffed, according to Western officials.

NATO and EU officials have publicly backed the Czech initiative in recent days. Germany has so far pledged over €500 million, which is by far the largest commitment of all participants, Czech officials said.

The Czech Republic’s approach was to act as a middleman, said Tomas Kopecny, the Czech special envoy for Ukraine who helped negotiate the deal. Prague approached nations it knew to have either manufacturing capacity or compatible ammunition in storage and connected them with a Western country that would place an order and pay for the shipment.

Part of a mobile howitzer at an arms factory in the Czech Republic. PHOTO: PIROSCHKA VAN DE WOUW/REUTERS

Tomas Kopecny, the Czech special envoy for Ukraine, helped negotiate the shells deal. PHOTO: PAVEL VRAGA

The Czech Republic would then organize the logistics, with shipments going either through its own borders or through third countries, blurring any direct link between the country of origin and Ukraine so as not to expose the supplier to Moscow’s ire.

“Confidentiality is key here: We talk and will talk to anyone, no matter what their allegiance or political stance is—with a very few exceptions, such as North Korea,” said Tomas Pojar, the Czech government’s national security adviser.

Prague’s efforts exposed a discrepancy between some governments’ friendly attitude to Russia in public and their openness to doing business with Ukraine’s allies in private, said Jan Jires, deputy minister of defense.

“If you come with a pile of money they are interested, and Czechia is seen as neutral compared with the U.S., which is often polarizing,” said Jakub Janda, head of the European Values Center for Security Policy, a Prague-based think tank, using an alternate English-language name for the country.

So far, the Czech Republic has secured funding for the first tranche of around 300,000 shells. Among the donors are Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark. The U.S. isn’t part of the buyers’ club at this stage.

Israel and Ukraine Both Need 155mm Artillery Shells. Can the U.S. Meet Demand?

Consultants Are Paid to Fix Businesses. Why Can’t They Fix Their Own?

Slower promotions, partner layoffs and fewer office snacks as big firms grapple with a slowdown. Recruits wait months to start, ‘Here I am…doing Uber Eats.’

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/consultants-are-paid-to-fix-businesses-why-cant-they-fix-their-own-1ed9bb04?st=wcihfo3gh9h46l0&utm

By Lindsay Ellis

Follow and Chip Cutter

Updated March 16, 2024 12:06 am ET

At Boston Consulting Group, junior staffers have been peppering more senior consultants with a now-familiar query: Do you have work for me?

The answer has often been no.

Big and established consulting firms such as McKinsey, BCG and Deloitte, which are paid to predict the future for the world’s biggest corporations, have gotten their own destiny wrong. The fallout is messy.

Some new recruits are struggling to find work. Firms are losing contracts as one-time clients slash budgets for strategic reviews amid broad cost-cutting efforts. Some employees are working long hours for the assignments they do have, while others are twiddling their thumbs. A number of firms are cutting staff by imposing large-scale layoffs or by quietly showing staff the door, citing performance reasons.

The troubles are arising after the industry boomed with new business—and hired staff to match—during the Covid-19 pandemic when companies sought expertise on how to handle the global slowdown, the work-from-home paradigm and supply-chain delays. When relative normalcy returned, companies looked hard at their costs and many have been in contraction mode ever since.

Interviews with more than 60 current and former consultants and partners from Bain, EY, McKinsey, and beyond reveal a new frugal environment where everything from office snacks to

Uber rides are under scrutiny and travel for client meetings has scaled back. Consulting executives say the problems are temporary. A number of firms say they are already seeing an uptick in business, and some add that they would not categorize the past 18 months as a massive downturn for the industry.

“2024 is already a strong year, and I am confident in the momentum of the market,” said Sharon Marcil, North America head for BCG, adding that the firm’s operations in the region saw “very strong” double-digit growth in recent months.

Yet companies from

Adidas to Citigroup have said they are ratcheting back on consultants. In the U.S., the consulting market is expected to grow by 6% in 2024, down from double-digit growth in the pandemic, according to Source Global Research estimates. That group found that 86% of U.S. clients said they plan to cut spending on consulting this year.One of the first things Bjørn Gulden did when he returned to Adidas as chief executive in 2023 was to ax the sports giant’s consultants, blaming their strategies for hobbling the company. Consultants’ reports typically run dozens of pages filled with charts and models. Gulden told The Wall Street Journal, “I don’t even see them.”

McKinsey asked partners last year to defer some of their pay to weather the downturn in client interest, though by year’s end business was good enough that they got their full pay. The company also cut 1,400 largely back-office employees last year, and slowed down the pace of promotions and trimmed some in-person training and retreats.

McKinsey has put thousands of staffers on notice with unsatisfactory performance ratings. PHOTO: CHRIS JUNG/NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES

McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels narrowly survived an effort to unseat him, laying bare the dissatisfaction with how one of the world’s most lucrative partnerships is operating. Some partners felt frustrated over the firm’s restructuring last year and how McKinsey responded to slowing growth; others complained about a changing firm culture and a top-down leadership style.

In an almost unheard-of move, EY recently laid off more than 100 U.S. consulting partners amid broader cuts. The partner layoffs ricocheted across the industry, as firms rarely eliminate a cohort that can bring in new business. Making partner at a large firm once meant a career for life, with potentially millions in earnings each year.

“The country club isn’t safe any more,” said Kevin McCarty, chairman and CEO of Chicago-based consulting firm West Monroe.

Business dried up

Private-equity work—a big wellspring of consulting contracts for top firms—has dried up, due to a drop in dealmaking amid high interest rates. Management consultants often advise on due diligence for mergers and acquisitions and then get contracts to integrate one firm with another. The overall M&A market, globally, dropped 15% last year to a total value of $3.2 trillion, according to a Bain analysis.

Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup and a former McKinsey partner. Citi has scaled back spending on consultants. PHOTO: VALERIE PLESCH/BLOOMBERG

Citi hired outside consultants in recent years to help it overhaul its operations. The bank embarked on an ambitious plan under CEO Jane Fraser, a former McKinsey partner, to reshape the company, selling off some international consumer businesses, cutting thousands of jobs, growing its wealth-management division and improving its technology.

In January, Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason said the company had shifted its spending, moving “from consulting expenses to technology and compensation as we have gotten deeper into the execution” of a transformation. Fraser remains under pressure from investors to boost profits.

Block’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, Amrita Ahuja, said this fall that the company had identified a number of areas where it expected to cut corporate overhead costs, including on consultants and contractors. Block is the parent company of payments-platform Square.

Some of the spending companies once allocated for consulting has shifted to spending on tech, in particular artificial intelligence. Consulting firms themselves are also spending on AI. Some say it will be a savior as a tool to improve their own processes as well as an area of expertise to grow and sell services against. McKinsey reported record revenue of approximately $16 billion last year thanks, in part, to a new wave of work relating to generative AI.

McKinsey senior partner Sven Smit, a veteran who joined the firm in the early ‘90s and co-wrote books such as, “The Granularity of Growth,” on improving company performance, said the industry is cyclical. Smit has emphasized to colleagues that life isn’t a straight line; just a few years ago, the company had a backlog of demand. Executives are also facing tougher conundrums than ever, he said, and need the expert advice a consultant can offer to navigate changing consumer behavior and geopolitical unrest. “I have not seen more complexity—and more big issues on the minds of CEOs—ever,” he said.

There is demand for how to use generative AI to boost productivity and restructure workforces, he said. Internationally, many companies are still calling, Smit said, especially from China where some companies are having to conduct layoffs for the first time.

“Demand for our services is actually accelerating, not declining,” said Liz Hilton Segel, a senior partner and McKinsey’s chief client officer.

Clients have demanded that consultancies charge less. Some are trying to save by hiring experienced freelancers who work solo, often specializing in a single industry, said Pat Petitti, CEO of Catalant, a freelance marketplace for consultants. Not only is it cheaper than engaging a big-name firm, he said, but clients don’t have to spend as much time bringing teams of consultants in their 20s up to speed.

Consulting firms are trying to keep clients engaged by staffing projects with fewer, cheaper staff. They can lean on lower-ranked staff or employees in places like India who cost less for clients than a midlevel consultant would.

Job insecurity

Working at a big consulting firm has long been a ticket to a highflying corporate career. McKinsey internally has referred to itself as “the #1 ‘CEO Factory,’” with hundreds of its former employees leading large organizations. Soon-to-be graduates spend hours practicing for interviews where they analyze business strategy, and some keep suits nearby in case there is a chance to network. On the job, they take pride in working long hours and navigating the up-or-out culture. They meet clients from government to finance to tech, calling the field an “M.B.A. part two”—the chance to meet executives and see how business really works, one Sunday-to-Thursday trip at a time.

Now, job cuts are on the table at several consulting companies and some firms have already made significant reductions. Many, however, hung on to staff as long as they could, expecting that new business would rebound quicker than it has. Consulting firms are closely held partnerships so they have less incentives than public companies to cut staff quickly.

West Monroe laid off 10% of staff, or about 200 people, last summer after executives realized their assumption was incorrect that the downturn would last six or nine months before clients came back. Instead, it dragged on longer, though, the CEO, McCarty, said demand is starting to return.

“You have to do something,” and make tough decisions, said McCarty, who started the firm in 2002 with colleagues from Arthur Andersen, the accounting and consulting giant felled by the Enron scandal. “You can’t just hang on to too many people.”

One reason firms have cut staff is that corporate employers—including client companies’ executive teams—have slowed white-collar hiring and continue to announce plans to trim jobs. That means consultants hoping to leave the field have struggled to do so voluntarily, and so firms must lean on cuts to thin the ranks.

Bain encouraged some consultants to take sabbaticals at roughly 25% of their salary to lighten the payroll load. Some young management consultants without projects describe spending their time napping or binge-watching Netflix.

At BCG, multiple team leaders said they felt pressure to score junior staffers more harshly in performance ratings. Worse scores allow more consultants to be quietly jettisoned for performance reasons, they said, without the bad publicity that comes with official layoffs.

Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and other consultancies see artificial intelligence as a tool for their work and as an area of expertise to offer clients. PHOTO: BING GUAN/BLOOMBERG

In slower times, “there’s less opportunity for them to show their stuff,” said Alicia Pittman, BCG’s people chair.

That can breed anxiety, but there are still ways to grow, like work on business development, she added. “The standard itself on what we expect actually doesn’t change very much,” she said.

Doing layoffs is an about-face from consultants’ strategies during the pandemic when McKinsey and others put hiring on overdrive to avoid falling behind, paying ever higher salaries, with median base salaries for recent graduates of some top M.B.A. programs climbing to $175,000 by 2022. Salaries broadly this year flatlined, according to Management Consulted, a website that tracks industry pay and trends.

McKinsey has grown to 40,000 worldwide, up from 30,000 in 2021. In McKinsey-speak, consultants still worry about getting “CTL’d,” or counseled to leave, if they don’t get assigned to a project or if their performance is lacking. McKinsey recently put about 3,000 staffers on notice with unsatisfactory performance ratings, according to people familiar with the matter.

One Deloitte consultant was assigned to a project last year that would normally require four consultants, but to save money was staffed with two. Some days she worked from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. At the project’s peak, she took Adderall daily to stay motivated, and when she washed her hair, clumps of it fell out.

Deloitte cut about 1,200 staffers last spring. PHOTO: J. DAVID AKE/GETTY IMAGES

When Deloitte cut about 1,200 staffers last spring and then kept cutting, text chains with colleagues would light up, comparing notes about who was safe and who was out.

When her project ended, she was laid off, too.

Deloitte said it has invested in workers’ learning and development, including programs to help consultants navigate their careers.

“From a client perspective, they have every right to look at the firms and say. ‘How well are you managing yourself?’ That’s something the firms have to contend with,” said Michael Mische, a former principal at KPMG who now teaches classes on consulting at the University of Southern California.

Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting

Firms stay in recruiting mode regardless. Last fall, as another Deloitte consultant was flying to a college campus to woo students to his firm, he received an email inviting him to a talent update meeting. Translation: He was out of a job.

He went to the campus and pitched the students on a great career they could have at the firm, knowing that by Monday he would be unemployed.

Plenty of people still want a spot in the industry. In a note at the end of last year, McKinsey’s Sternfels told employees and alumni that the firm continues to receive a flurry of applications.

“I’m reminded each time I speak with our Talent Attraction colleagues that so many would love to be in our shoes—more than one million people apply to work here each year,” Sternfels wrote in the memo, which was viewed by the Journal.

To secure top talent from college campuses, Rod Adams, who leads recruiting for the U.S. and Mexico for PricewaterhouseCoopers, said firms start recruiting would-be consultants as college sophomores. Doing so means the firm has to speculate about future client demand, he said. The firm onboarded 575 new grad hires in January, after delaying many of their start dates from summer 2023 because of the downturn in business.

Other 2023 graduates won’t start until this summer, and some had their start dates delayed to as late as October 2024, said Patrick Holton, executive director of Hofstra University’s business school career center.

Deloitte has paid some with delayed start dates $2,000 a month to wait around, and KPMG offered a payment of $10,000 to stop recruits from taking other jobs. The retention stipends don’t compare to their consulting pay, which can top $110,000 for those with undergraduate degrees and $190,000 for M.B.A.s, according to Management Consulted. Consultancies are stringing along new grads with the hope that they’ll tire of waiting and find other work, Holton said.

What’s more, many newly minted M.B.A.s from top-ranked universities like Harvard Business School and Yale’s School of Management received signing bonuses of about $30,000 with their job offers. Backing out now from a consulting job could require repaying those bonuses, several recruits to Big Four firms said.

“The golden handcuffs are now tighter,” said one new consultant who started at PwC in October, several months after earning an M.B.A. As he waited, he patched together odd jobs to make ends meet, including delivering takeout and tutoring high-school students. “Here I am,” he thought, “graduating from this top M.B.A. program—and doing UberEats.”

Mark Maurer and Walden Siew contributed to this article.

Write to Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com and Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com

Appeared in the March 16, 2024, print edition as 'Consultants Are Paid to Fix Businesses. Why Can’t They Fix Their Own?'.

6. As Gaza war rages, U.S. military footprint expands across Middle East

Excerpts:

Some Israelis see the U.S. military activities around the conflict as a byproduct of Biden’s frustration with Israel’s failure to ease the humanitarian crisis. They fear that they are one step closer to Washington putting restrictions on military assistance to Israel.

“It’s a slap in the face of Netanyahu personally,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and a political science professor at Columbia University.

“It’s the senior ally going around the junior ally to do what it wants,” he said. “If [Netanyahu] doesn’t change course soon, the damage could be severe.”

As Gaza war rages, U.S. military footprint expands across Middle East

The Washington Post · by Steve Hendrix · March 17, 2024

OVER THE GAZA STRIP — Lt. Col. Jeremy Anderson tilted up the nose of his U.S. Air Force C-130 and tipped 16 pallets of emergency food aid out of the cargo bay and into the sky above northern Gaza.

Thousands of miles away, off the coast of Yemen, U.S. fighter jets and attack helicopters roared off the flight deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, often just minutes apart, to combat Houthi fighters attacking ships in and around the Red Sea.

In both places, U.S. service members said their missions were unexpected, changing as the White House has moved rapidly to contain wider fallout from the Israel-Gaza war. But now, along with a U.S. Army crew on its way to Gaza to build a floating pier, they are firmly part of the U.S. military’s expanding footprint in the Middle East. It’s a region President Biden had hoped to de-emphasize — and one where American involvement has often been devastating and costly.

“This was definitely not something I anticipated,” Anderson said Tuesday after returning to the Jordanian airfield from which he has been flying the drops. “Little did we know post-Oct. 7 we would be here aiding people during a true crisis.”

Out on the Red Sea, where Houthi fighters from Yemen have attacked ships to protest Israel’s war, Rear Adm. Marc Miguez said his carrier strike group, led by the Eisenhower, was originally scheduled to transit the Middle East, host foreign dignitaries and stage military exercises.

Before the war, “we were going to do a port call in Bahrain, we were going to host a king, we had a lot of things scheduled,” said Miguez, the strike group’s commander. Instead, his forces are intercepting Houthi drone and ballistic missile attacks in one of the world’s most strategic waterways, and striking the group further inland in Yemen.

“We’re going to be here as long as needed,” he said.

The war in Gaza and worsening humanitarian crisis there have taught Biden a lesson many presidents have learned before: It’s not so easy to quit the Middle East.

After the wind-down of the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration had wanted to pivot and direct its foreign policy power toward countering Russian aggression and Chinese expansionism. But the morning of Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people in Israel, changed all that.

Now, the Pentagon finds itself increasingly involved in the region’s most intractable conflict, a widening role that reflects both Biden’s staunch support for Israel and his mounting frustration with how it has prosecuted the subsequent war.

More than 31,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and with Israel rebuffing the administration’s calls to get more aid to the enclave, there are few signs the U.S. military missions will wrap up soon.

Earlier this month, the Army dispatched vessels, including the SP4 James A. Loux, the Monterrey, Matamoros and Wilson Wharf from Virginia to the Mediterranean, as part of an effort to deliver up to 2 million meals a day to Gaza by sea.

U.S. officials say the personnel will help establish a floating pier and causeway that can facilitate aid shipments into Gaza without putting forces on the ground.

“‘Hotel California’ should be the official song of the Biden administration,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former U.S. diplomat focused on the Middle East. “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.”

The Pentagon began rushing military assets to the region almost immediately after Oct. 7, initially to deter Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, from opening a new front against Israel, but also to avert a wider war.

It took the unusual step of positioning two aircraft carriers, including the Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford, in the Middle East. It also deployed ships from the Bataan amphibious ready group off Israel and announced it would send a squadron of F-16 fighter jets and additional air defense systems to the region.

The moves represent an uptick in U.S. military activity in the area, but they remain for now a far cry from the vastly larger footprint the Pentagon oversaw at the height of its post-9/11 insurgent wars, when more than 160,000 troops were deployed to Iraq and some 100,000 to Afghanistan.

Today, in addition to its larger, long-standing bases in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, the United States has some 4,000 troops in Jordan, 2,500 in Iraq and 900 in Syria. And the operations remain relatively modest, with no significant increase to the military’s pre-Oct. 7 presence on land.

The White House is adamant that the Pentagon’s work around the war’s edges will not evolve into a combat role. But there’s no denying the danger for personnel aboard American planes and warships in a theater as volatile as the Middle East.

In Iraq and Syria, the Gaza conflict rekindled a long-simmering campaign by Iranian proxy groups to inflict damage on U.S. forces. The groups have launched more than 170 attacks on those forces since Oct. 7. On Jan. 28, a drone assault killed three U.S. service members at Tower 22, a small support base in Jordan.

In response, the Pentagon launched a large-scale attack and killed a key militia leader in Baghdad, restoring some deterrence and an uneasy calm.

In the Red Sea and around the Arabian Peninsula, however, the United States and other nations have struggled to fully halt the Houthi attacks, despite two months of strikes on the group’s missile sites and infrastructure.

Since October, the Yemeni militants have attacked commercial and naval vessels more than 60 times, diverting global maritime traffic, driving up costs and sinking one cargo ship, the Rubymar. They have also clashed directly with U.S. forces, including firing on Navy helicopters answering a distress call from a commercial ship.

Last week, Miguez and other commanders aboard the Eisenhower said Houthi “activity” has decreased in recent weeks. The group is operating less freely, they said, and the attacks are less brazen.

Still, Miguez described the pace of operations as “a persistent drumbeat.”

Even the aid drops carry risk, according to Anderson, citing the crowded airspace over Gaza as the United States, Egypt, Jordan, Belgium and the Netherlands all deliver supplies out of the same airfield.

“Sometimes there are nine, 10 planes in a very confined space,” Anderson said. “The Israeli [military air traffic] controllers are very good.”

The Israeli military said it was cooperating with the aid flights, deconflicting with its own fighter-jet and helicopter traffic over Gaza. The Israeli military agency responsible for coordinating aid inside of Gaza, COGAT, said it was “involved” in inspecting the bundles before they were dropped but would not say where the inspections took place.

In Israel, reaction to the U.S. military’s new role in Gaza has been mixed.

Some Israeli officials say privately they welcome the U.S. initiative, as they look for alternatives to aid handled by UNWRA, the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency that Israel accuses of complicity with Hamas. Hard-liners contend that most assistance to Gaza is hijacked by the militant group, allowing it to keep fighting.

The American planes have been delivering the supplies literally over the heads of protesters trying to block aid trucks from entering the territory. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been silent on the drops.

An Israeli source familiar with discussions in the prime minister’s office said Netanyahu is treading carefully in order not to anger his conservative base or provoke right-wing ministers.

“He knows that any aid coming into Gaza is problematic for public opinion, the public he needs,” the person said.

Some Israelis see the U.S. military activities around the conflict as a byproduct of Biden’s frustration with Israel’s failure to ease the humanitarian crisis. They fear that they are one step closer to Washington putting restrictions on military assistance to Israel.

“It’s a slap in the face of Netanyahu personally,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and a political science professor at Columbia University.

“It’s the senior ally going around the junior ally to do what it wants,” he said. “If [Netanyahu] doesn’t change course soon, the damage could be severe.”

George reported from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ryan reported from Washington.

The Washington Post · by Steve Hendrix · March 17, 2024

7. House Launches Broad Probe into China’s Infiltration of U.S.

Excerpts:

Many other threats to the U.S. posed by the CCP abound, such as a massive influx of Chinese nationals of military age being apprehended at the southern border, balloon surveillance, the discovery of CCP “police stations” in U.S. cities, and the discovery of a suspicious biolab with ties to China in California. In a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Comer also voiced concern over the CCP engaging in “chemical warfare seeking to poison America with fentanyl, and how the Drug Enforcement Agency is responding.” Reports indicate that “nearly all the precursor chemicals that are needed to make fentanyl come from China.”

In a press release announcing the House investigation, Comer concluded, “Actions taken by the Committee today are just the beginning and I look forward to full cooperation from agencies as we work to thwart China’s efforts to influence and infiltrate the United States of America.”

House Launches Broad Probe into China’s Infiltration of U.S.

washingtonstand.com · by Dan Hart · March 16, 2024

On Thursday, the House Oversight Committee announced the launch of a wide-ranging investigation into the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to infiltrate “every sector and community” in the U.S.

The probe, which has the stated objective to “thwart the CCP’s political and economic warfare campaign,” is being initiated with letters sent to nine different federal agencies requesting reports on what the agencies are doing to counter the communist regime’s efforts, along with how the agencies are coordinating their efforts with each other.

“Without firing a single bullet, the Chinese Communist Party is waging war against the U.S. by targeting, influencing, and infiltrating every economic sector and community in America,” Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) stated. “The lives and security of all Americans are affected. The Oversight Committee has a responsibility to ensure the federal government is taking every action necessary to protect Americans from the CCP’s ongoing political warfare.”

The sectors that the investigation will focus on include education, agriculture, critical infrastructure, research, energy, business, space, and technology. Examples of the CCP’s incursion into these sectors have been making headlines for decades. Here are some recent examples in each sector.

Education: Almost 150 U.S. K-12 schools have been linked to “Confucius Classrooms” which attempt to spread communist propaganda. In higher education, “Confucius Institutes” (which have now been rebranded but have the same communist goal) have popped up in dozens of American universities. In addition, the regime has given over $426 million to U.S. universities since 2011, which experts say has led to increasing influence behind closed doors.

Agriculture: Chinese companies have purchased hundreds of thousands of acres of American farmland, some of which are near U.S. military installations.

Infrastructure: The Chinese government is attempting to “covertly plant offensive malware inside U.S. critical infrastructure networks,” which is currently at “a scale greater than we’d seen before,” according to a report from FBI Director Christopher Wray in February.

Research and Technology: The CCP’s efforts to steal American scientific research and technology are well documented. Comer wrote to the National Science Foundation noting that the regime’s efforts to steal and influence research “takes a holistic approach and includes covert and legal means” and that it is attempting to weaponize “U.S.-backed research and technology for uses that are contrary to U.S. national security and competitiveness.”

Energy: In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Comer writes that the CCP has “successfully pressured U.S. environmental players and industries into adopting initiatives that plainly benefit China at great costs to American businesses and consumers.”

Business: China’s influence over corporate America was illustrated quite clearly recently when a room full of U.S. corporate executives gave Chinese President Xi Jinping multiple standing ovations in his visit to the U.S. last November. Comer also noted the CCP’s efforts to launder money through America’s real estate and casino industries. “These activities allow the CCP to engage in corporate espionage, feed the fentanyl crisis in the U.S., influence our nation’s schools and culture, and otherwise advance destructive goals on American soil,” he wrote in a letter to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Space: As previously reported, the regime is currently pursuing “a ‘space coercion’ strategy that includes the use of both ground-based missiles ‘capable of hitting satellites orbiting at all altitudes,’ as well as orbital missiles — including nuclear warheads.” Comer argued in a letter to NASA that China’s space program should be “properly understood for what it is: an arm of its military, the People’s Liberation Army.”

Many other threats to the U.S. posed by the CCP abound, such as a massive influx of Chinese nationals of military age being apprehended at the southern border, balloon surveillance, the discovery of CCP “police stations” in U.S. cities, and the discovery of a suspicious biolab with ties to China in California. In a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Comer also voiced concern over the CCP engaging in “chemical warfare seeking to poison America with fentanyl, and how the Drug Enforcement Agency is responding.” Reports indicate that “nearly all the precursor chemicals that are needed to make fentanyl come from China.”

In a press release announcing the House investigation, Comer concluded, “Actions taken by the Committee today are just the beginning and I look forward to full cooperation from agencies as we work to thwart China’s efforts to influence and infiltrate the United States of America.”

“At Heartbeat International, we stand firm in our commitment to advocating for the well-being and dignity of every individual, and we call on influencers to do the same.”

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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washingtonstand.com · by Dan Hart · March 16, 2024

8. Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say

Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/musks-spacex-is-building-spy-satellite-network-us-intelligence-agency-sources-2024-03-16/?utm

By Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor

March 16, 202411:22 AM EDTUpdated a day ago

SpaceX headquarters is shown in Hawthorne, California, U.S. September 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

WASHINGTON, March 16 (Reuters) - SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's space company and national security agencies.

The network is being built by SpaceX's Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.

The plans show the extent of SpaceX's involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces.

If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.

The contract signals growing trust by the intelligence establishment of a company whose owner has clashed with the Biden administration and sparked controversy, opens new tab over the use of Starlink satellite connectivity in the Ukraine war, the sources said.

The Wall Street Journal reported, opens new tab in February the existence of a $1.8 billion classified Starshield contract with an unknown intelligence agency without detailing the purposes of the program.

Reuters reporting discloses for the first time that the SpaceX contract is for a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits, and that the spy agency that Musk's company is working with is the NRO.

Reuters was unable to determine when the new network of satellites would come online and could not establish what other companies are part of the program with their own contracts.

SpaceX, the world's largest satellite operator, did not respond to several requests for comment about the contract, its role in it and details on satellite launches. The Pentagon referred a request for comment to the NRO and SpaceX.

In a statement the NRO acknowledged its mission to develop a sophisticated satellite system and its partnerships with other government agencies, companies, research institutions and nations, but declined to comment on Reuters' findings about the extent of SpaceX’s involvement in the effort.

"The National Reconnaissance Office is developing the most capable, diverse, and resilient space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system the world has ever seen," a spokesperson said.

The satellites can track targets on the ground and share that data with U.S. intelligence and military officials, the sources said. In principle, that would enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe, aiding intelligence and military operations, they added.

Roughly a dozen prototypes have been launched since 2020, among other satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, three of the sources said.

A U.S. government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged. Two sources confirmed those to be prototypes for the Starshield network.

All the sources asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the U.S. government program.

The Pentagon is already a big SpaceX customer, using its Falcon 9 rockets to launch military payloads into space. Starshield's first prototype satellite, launched in 2020, was part of a separate, roughly $200 million contract that helped position SpaceX for the subsequent $1.8 billion award, one of the sources said.

The planned Starshield network is separate from Starlink, SpaceX's growing commercial broadband constellation that has about 5,500 satellites in space to provide near-global internet to consumers, companies and government agencies.

The classified constellation of spy satellites represents one of the U.S. government’s most sought-after capabilities in space because it is designed to offer the most persistent, pervasive and rapid coverage of activities on Earth.

"No one can hide," one of the sources said of the system’s potential capability, when describing the network's reach.

Musk, also the founder and CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab and owner of social media company X, has driven innovation in space but has caused frustration among some officials in the Biden administration because of his past control of Starlink in Ukraine, where Kyiv’s military uses it for secure communications in the conflict with Russia. That authority over Starlink in a war zone by Musk, and not the U.S. military, created tension between him and the US government.

A series of Reuters’ stories has detailed how Musk's manufacturing operations, including at SpaceX, have harmed consumers and workers.

The Starshield network is part of intensifying competition between the U.S. and its rivals to become the dominant military power in space, in part by expanding spy satellite systems away from bulky, expensive spacecraft at higher orbits. Instead a vast, low-orbiting network can provide quicker and near-constant imaging of the Earth.

China also plans to start building its own satellite constellations, and the Pentagon has warned of space weapon threats from Russia, which could be capable of disabling entire satellite networks.

Starshield aims to be more resilient to attacks from sophisticated space powers.

The network is also intended to greatly expand the U.S. government's remote-sensing capabilities and will consist of large satellites with imaging sensors, as well as a greater number of relay satellites that pass the imaging data and other communications across the network using inter-satellite lasers, two of the sources said.

The NRO includes personnel from the U.S. Space Force and CIA and provides classified satellite imagery for the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies.

The spy satellites will house sensors provided by another company, three of the sources said.

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor; Editing by Chris Sanders and Alistair Bell

9. Russia alleges Indonesian mercenaries are fighting for Ukrainian military

Russia alleges Indonesian mercenaries are fighting for Ukrainian military

Tria Dianti and Arie Firdaus, and Ahmad Mustakim Zulkifli

2024.03.15

Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur

benarnews.org

Moscow has alleged that 10 Indonesians were fighting alongside the Ukrainian military as “mercenaries” against Russia since it invaded the former Soviet republic in February 2022, according to the Russian Embassy in Jakarta on Friday.

Meanwhile, neighboring Malaysia said this week it had no information that any of its citizens had enlisted to fight on Russia’s side, as a branch of Ukraine’s military had claimed on its website in January.

Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lalu Muhammad Iqbal said that Russia’s information needed to be verified,, telling reporters: “Please ask Russia about the data they have.”

On Thursday, the Russian Defense Ministry released numbers it claimed were a breakdown of “foreign mercenaries” and fatalities among them by country.

According to Russia, more than 13,000 foreigners had joined the conflict in Ukraine to support Kyiv, with confirmed fatalities numbering approximately 6,000.

The allegations were relayed to the Indonesian public by the Russian Embassy in Jakarta on Friday via the instant messaging app Telegram.

In a table attached to the embassy’s statement, Indonesia was listed with 10 fighters, four of whom were marked dead.

‘Provide clear evidence’

The Ukrainian ambassador to Indonesia, Vasyl Hamianin, rejected Russia’s claims that his country hired foreign fighters.

“Is there any evidence and facts? If not, then everyone knows that the Russians are professional liars and provocateurs,” Hamianin told BenarNews.

Russia should provide details, said Teuku Rezasyah, from Padjadjaran University in Bandung.

“They have to provide clear evidence such as their identity, or at least photos, so that our government can identify them,” Rezasyah, an international relations lecturer, told BenarNews.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) meets with Indonesian President Joko Widodo at the Kremlin in Moscow, June 30, 2022. [Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AFP]

In June 2022, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo visited Ukraine and Russia as part of his self-declared peace mission to end hostilities between the two neighbors, which are among the world’s top breadbaskets.

Back then, Indonesia held the rotational presidency of the G20 with Jokowi serving as chairman of the grouping of the world’s 20 largest economies.

During his trip he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, where he stayed for a day, then popped over to Moscow for a discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Jokowi had said his trip was also aimed at averting a food crisis. Since the invasion, Russia has blocked all of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and cut off access to almost all of the nation’s exports, especially of grain, sparking fears of a global food crisis.

Anti-war activists in Malaysia hold placards calling for an end to hostilities after Russia invaded Ukraine, in Kuala Lumpur, Feb. 28, 2022. [Hasnoor Hussain/Reuters]

Indonesia’s neighbor, Malaysia, had to deal with precisely the opposite allegation – that is, Ukraine’s claim that Malaysians had signed up to fight on Russia’s side.

When asked about it in Parliament, Malaysian Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail issued a written statement, which he also published on the legislature’s website.

“The Malaysian police did not receive any information on the allegation that Malaysians were recruited as mercenaries to fight along with the Russian military in the Donetsk Region in Eastern Ukraine,” Saifuddin said.

The specific reference to the Ukrainian region was in response to the allegation made by the National Resistance Center of Ukraine, a branch of the country’s military, on its website.

“Mercenaries from Malaysia, accompanied by a translator, as well as former ‘Wagner’ members have been spotted in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk region” said a post on Jan. 24 on the website.

“The fighters are currently at the training ground,” it said.

Malaysia’s top cop, Razarudin Husain, said that in addition to the usual checks to determine whether anyone was abroad and where, police went the extra mile to investigate the Ukrainian claims, local media reported.

Razarudin said that further checks were conducted by the police department’s intelligence division with its counterparts in Europe but they turned up nothing either.

“There was no information that our people were hired as mercenaries in any countries as reported,” said Razarudin.

The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission, in its two-year assessment of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said that it had resulted in more than 10,000 civilian deaths and nearly 20,000 injuries since Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago.

Actual figures were likely higher, noted the U.N. report, which was released in February.

“Millions across the country have lost their homes, been forced to flee, or endured other hardship due to lack of access to basic services as a result of the war. The hostilities have damaged and destroyed hundreds of medical and educational institutions …” the report said.

“Entire cities have been destroyed.”

benarnews.org

10. Sweden’s New Model Army

This article is focused on Europe's military manpower challenges.

But it makes me wonder, given our politics and the nature of the younger generations, imagine how a national service requirement would go over in the US. What if a future administration tried to implement a national service requirement? Would there be an epidemic outbreak of "bone spurs?" (note sarcasm)

Sweden’s New Model Army

NATO’s newest member has a military conscription system that other countries can learn from.

MARCH 15, 2024, 3:30 PM

By Gil Barndollar, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities.

Foreign Policy · by Gil Barndollar

Sweden officially joined NATO last week as the alliance’s 32nd member and the United States’ newest treaty ally. Analysts and commentators have been quick to highlight Sweden’s robust arms industry and the geographic benefits of an allied Sweden. With its control of 109-mile-long Gotland Island at the center of the Baltic Sea, Sweden will help turn the Baltic into a “NATO lake,” protecting the vulnerable trio of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But Sweden’s greatest potential contribution to the alliance is curiously unsung. The selective conscription system that Sweden reauthorized in 2017 offers a critical example to the many European NATO militaries facing an existential threat at home: the struggle to find soldiers for their shrinking forces.

Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine, which prompted Sweden and neighboring Finland to seek NATO membership, has reminded Western nations that in a major war, few things matter more than mass. Total casualties in the war are perhaps 500,000, with vehicle losses and munitions expenditures to match. Unfortunately, the Atlantic alliance abandoned mass in the 1990s, when the threat from Moscow was presumed dead and buried. European states took more than a peace dividend—they effectively disarmed, slashing their forces to the bone and ending the compulsory military service that had been the bedrock of many NATO militaries. Warning signs, including an extremely limited ability by European allies to contribute to the campaign in Kosovo in 1999, were ignored.

By the mid-2000s, the German Bundeswehr was half its Cold War size, while the British Army was only able to provide a single brigade in Afghanistan. Germany and Britain were and are considered NATO heavyweights. The condition of smaller NATO armies was even more parlous.

The situation only worsened in the following two decades. The Bundeswehr is now down to barely 180,000 men and women while the British Army is the smallest it has been since the Napoleonic Wars. French forces, despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s bluster, are unable “to do anything on a large scale for any length of time,” according to a prominent analyst. The end of their campaign in Mali testifies to the limitations of French land power. A 2017 Rand Corporation study found that Britain, France, and Germany would each take several weeks to generate a single armored brigade each for combat in the Baltics, “with little spare capacity for any other contingencies.”

Sweden’s military has taken a 500-year path to joining NATO, from the Vikings through Napoleon and neutrality. So what’s another few months?

There are a few large NATO forces remaining, but they are not front-line states. Turkey and Greece maintain large conscript forces, but the ability or willingness of either to fight Russia is questionable. The United States boasts about 1 million active military personnel, but the potential return of former U.S. President Donald Trump has put Washington’s willingness to go to war for its allies in doubt—and the United States is grappling with its own recruiting crisis and shrinking army.

Though NATO is now rearming in terms of weapons, manpower remains the proverbial long pole in the tent. Aging populations, expansive social welfare states, and the limited appeal of professional military service leave European states struggling to man even small armies. Despite the manifest Russian threat, the European recruiting problem is only deepening. The Bundeswehr finished 2023 with 1,500 fewer troops than the previous year, despite loud commitments to rearming. The British Army has missed its recruiting targets for 14 years straight. Fiscal 2022 saw a staggering 30 percent drop in new recruits. Le Monde noted an “evaporation” of French military personnel in 2023, with a 6 percent increase in net outflows.

Even high youth unemployment in many southern European countries does not appear to move the needle. Despite a jobless rate north of 20 percent for 15- to 24-year-olds, Italy struggles to meet an annual military recruiting goal of just 8,000 enlistees. In 2020, the average Italian soldier was 38 years old—at least a decade past the optimal age for a combat soldier.

There is scant prospect of any significant improvement in European military recruiting. Almost all European countries are getting older, and many face rapidly shrinking populations. Worsening physical and mental health among the young, dramatically increased by the coronavirus pandemic, shrinks the eligible recruiting pool even further. Rising hostility to mass immigration makes talk of enlisting droves of foreigners a nonstarter, while a worsening fiscal trajectory, accelerated by both COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war, means that substantial increases to poor military pay are also infeasible. The war in Ukraine, with its millions of refugees throughout Europe and daily images of death and destruction, has yielded no lines outside recruitment offices.

European NATO members face a structural problem that seems to afflict all 21st-century volunteer militaries, including that of the United States: a widening gulf between military and society, especially for young people who have scant acquaintance with the small, cantonized forces that defend them. Professional militaries are becoming family affairs, with multigenerational service increasingly common, just as it was in small, preindustrial armies. This becomes a vicious cycle. Those with no preexisting ties to the military view it as alien territory and are unlikely to seriously consider service. Militaries then fish where the fish are, spending their limited recruiting resources where they will have the highest return: on demographic groups and regions already predisposed toward military service. The bulk of the population thus becomes even more divorced from their military. Small wonder that even with historically tiny annual recruiting targets, professional European militaries struggle to find sufficient young people willing to serve.

Sweden chose another path, one that offers valuable lessons for other NATO members. In 2018, the Swedes restored their conscription system, which had been suspended since 2010. Like Germany and France, Sweden had fielded a very large and capable army during the Cold War, with the ability to mobilize as many as 850,000 men and women. Neutral since 1812, Sweden saw a strong military as crucial to maintaining its independence.

A historic photo of soldiers in gasmasks.

The crew of a ship on the lookout to ensure Swedish neutrality during World War II in 1939. Keystone Archive/Getty Images

After the Cold War, Sweden took its peace dividend, too. Territorial defense, the Swedish Army’s raison d’etre while the Soviet Union was alive, became an afterthought. Swedish politicians and citizens increasingly viewed their military as a provider of peacekeepers and supporter of other expeditionary, multilateral operations—in essence, a luxury good for a state that didn’t need to worry about its own security. All conscription was suspended (though not legally abolished) in 2010, and the Swedish military shrank to fewer than 20,000 total soldiers.

The 2014 occupation of Crimea woke Sweden up—but so did basic math. In Sweden’s wealthy, highly individualistic society, voluntary military service held scant appeal. An experiment with part-time professional soldiers was a failure. The military shrank rapidly: By 2013, only 579 recruits completed the full 11 months of initial entry training. On Jan. 1, 2018, Sweden pulled the plug on its failed policy and restored mandatory military service.

Unlike the Cold War system, however, Swedish conscription is now both selective and gender neutral. A hundred thousand 18-year-olds are screened for service annually, but only about 5 percent of this cohort serves. Sweden aims to double this number by 2030. Roughly 10 percent of those serving do so unwillingly, with jail the alternative.

Young recruits are pictured during an inspection at the regiment in Enkoping, Sweden on March 2, 2017.

Young recruits are pictured during an inspection at the regiment in Enkoping, Sweden, on March 2, 2017. Fredrink Sandberg/AFP via Getty Images

Selective conscription, stiffened and led by a small professional force, potentially offers armies the best of both worlds. Since the military needs only a small fraction of every cohort, it can afford to be very picky—standards are higher in Sweden’s post-2018 force than they were before 2010. As in any society, this exclusivity functions as a signaling device: Educational and corporate leaders know that successful conscript service marks a young Swede as being in the top of his or her peer group—doubly so for the small portion of conscripts selected for additional training and longer service as junior officers.

As in any competent conscription system, Swedish national service has two major advantages beyond the basic manning of the military: talent acquisition and expansion of reserves. On the front end, Sweden can screen all young people in the nation, select the most promising for military service, and then attempt to induce the best to stay on for a military career. On the back end, each cohort of conscripts, most of whom will complete their service in nine months, becomes another brigade’s worth of soldiers in the military reserves. Though reservists require regular call-ups to maintain readiness and proficiency, even a poorly managed reserve has military utility in a crisis. The Russian Armed Forces proved this 18 months ago, when it mobilized 300,000 men who had not trained or fought since their initial military service years before. Russia’s partial mobilization was hasty and bloody, but it was still critical to stabilizing Russia’s lines during Ukraine’s Kharkiv counteroffensive.

Sweden was fortunate in that it was restoring a conscription system that had been dormant for less than a decade. When the system was restored, all serving field grade officers and generals had served as conscripts themselves. But the restored selective conscription system included major changes: Women were fully integrated (they now make up about 15 percent of conscripts), and Sweden established a long-service professional noncommissioned officer corps, something that had been absent in the Cold War mass army.

The success of Sweden’s selective conscription system has created a virtuous cycle. In an inversion of the paradigm afflicting most NATO countries, service begets service. Sweden’s Home Guard, a voluntary reserve for territorial defense, has seen recruitment quadruple in early 2024 compared to the same time a year earlier. Once an aging and socially irrelevant force, the Home Guard is suddenly popular with young Swedes, who have seen restored conscription and Sweden’s new seriousness about national defense as evidence that military service is an honorable and necessary component of citizenship.

Other volunteer auxiliary defense organizations, like the all-women Lotta Corps, have gained proportionately even more new members than the Home Guard. In January, Sweden also restored compulsory civic service, committing municipal rescue workers and critical infrastructure personnel to enhance the country’s official national strategy of societal “total defense.” As Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson bluntly told his country: “Citizenship is not [just] a travel document.”

Swedish soldiers during a military exercise on the island of Gotland, Sweden on Sept. 19, 2017.

Swedish soldiers during a military exercise on the island of Gotland, Sweden, on Sept. 19, 2017. Anders Wiklund/AFP via Getty Images

In the face of renewed Russian aggression, what NATO needs most urgently is mass, in both active and reserve forces. Some analysts have called for rejuvenating Europe’s reserves within the context of all-professional militaries. But this fails to solve the recruiting problem. In fact, many countries have reserve recruiting problems that are even more severe than those for the active force. Why volunteer to put up with the disruption, dislocation, and danger of military life for only limited pay and benefits?

There is also the cost issue. European efforts at rearmament are caught between a rock and a hard place—between static budgets and the enormous costs of being ready for modern war. For Europeans forgetful of their continent’s less-than-peaceful history, the scale is mindboggling: Russia has lost the equivalent of 15 Bundeswehrs’ worth of equipment in Ukraine and is still fighting. Purchasing sufficient weapons and munitions will devour European military budgets before any meaningful increase in manpower can be considered. Germany’s vaunted Zeitenwende, to take one example, is off to an excruciatingly slow start.

Most Western countries will struggle to afford meaningful military mass without the enormous budgetary advantage that conscription confers. Expanding personnel in a professional military comes with a huge price tag in compensation, benefits, and recruiting outlays, and many European militaries struggle to attract sufficient recruits due to comparatively poor pay. And as many NATO members struggle to reach the alliance’s defense spending floor of 2 percent of GDP, conscription offers both cheap capacity and a way to demonstrate commitment that goes beyond budgets. Swedish conscripts earn the equivalent of about $450 a month—a fifth of what a U.S. Army private first class is paid.

European leaders are beginning to grasp that their professional military model is failing. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has publicly described the end of German conscription in 2011 as a “mistake.” The head of the British Army, Gen. Patrick Sanders, has described young Britons as a “prewar generation” who may be called to national service. Both men have pointed to Sweden as a potential model.

For NATO’s 29 other European members, Sweden’s selective conscription example is potentially transformative. Finland, Sweden’s neighbor and alliance predecessor, draws even more attention for its system of universal male service, but Sweden’s system offers a more useful model for countries struggling with military manpower and national commitment but unwilling to take the drastic step toward universal mandatory service. In its renewed Home Guard and civilian defense organizations, Sweden also shows the downstream benefits of restoring an ethos and expectation of citizen service.

Even if Russia is ultimately stopped in Ukraine and its threat to Europe reduced for now, a less stable future with potentially less support from the United States is going to demand more robust and resilient territorial defense from European states. Once they’re done celebrating NATO’s newest member, the alliance’s leaders should take a close look at what they can learn from Sweden’s restored system of national service.

Foreign Policy · by Gil Barndollar

11. Geopolitics, influence and crime in the Pacific islands

Excerpts:

Fighting this transnational organised crime is critical to strengthening institutions in Pacific island countries and helping them build long-term sustainable prosperity.

Outside countries should consider lateral approaches to crime fighting in the Pacific that may provide a framework for action that is more palatable to island-country governments than more sensitive, purely law-enforcement-driven strategies.

Crime can be both a cause and an enabler of fragility and underdevelopment. With that in mind, the fight against crime and corruption could be framed as necessary primarily to address those two issues. They deeply impact Pacific populations, so it would be crucial to engage with affected communities along the way.

In the absence of such an approach, and with geopolitical and diplomatic considerations taking precedence, criminals will continue to exploit the limited attention that is paid to crime fighting and will profit as a result.

Geopolitics, influence and crime in the Pacific islands | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Virginia Comolli · March 14, 2024

Getting caught up in geopolitical competition may seem uncomfortable enough for Pacific island countries. What’s making things worse is that outside powers’ struggle to influence them is weakening their resistance to organised crime emanating from China.

And that comes on top of criminal activity that’s moved into Pacific islands from elsewhere, including Australia, Mexico, Malaysia and New Zealand.

This situation must change if peace and stability are to be maintained and development goals achieved across the region.

The good news is that, Papua New Guinea excluded, Pacific island countries have some of the lowest levels of criminality in the world. The bad news is that the data suggests the effect of organised crime is increasing across all three Pacific-island subregions—Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.

The picture is worst in Melanesia and Polynesia, where resilience to crime has declined. In many cases, Pacific Island countries are insufficiently prepared to withstand growing criminal threats, exposing vulnerable populations to new risks.

As China has gained influence in these countries, its criminals and criminal organisations have moved in alongside honest Chinese investors. Some of those criminals, while attending to their own business, are also doing the bidding of the Chinese government.

If the criminal activity involves suborning local authorities—and it often will—then so much the better for Beijing, which will enjoy the officials’ new-found reliance on Chinese friends that it can influence.

Democracies competing with China for influence, such as the US, Japan and Australia, are unwilling to lose the favour of those same officials. So, they refrain from pressuring them into tackling organised crime and corruption head on. The result is more crime and weaker policing.

But more factors are at play here. Growing air travel and internet penetration have helped turn the islands into more accessible destinations and better-integrated points along global supply chains of licit and illicit commodities.

When one starts mapping who is behind major organised criminality, the protagonists are almost always foreigners. The islands do have home-grown gangs but, when there is a lot of money to be made, there is usually the involvement of a Chinese triad, a Mexican cartel, a law-defying Malaysian logging company, or some similar criminal organisation.

Groups that have entered the islands, such as Australia’s Rebels and New Zealand’s Head Hunters, both outlaw motorcycle gangs, or the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, are overtly criminal. Yet, some hybrid criminal actors are making their presence felt even more in some of the islands, and they are arguably even more pernicious and complex to eradicate. They tend to be foreign individuals who operate in both the licit and illicit economies, have become associated with local business elites, and enjoy political connections both at home and in the Pacific.

As their operations have become bolder, as seen in Palau and Papua New Guinea, there are substantiated concerns that the perpetrators may be, or could become, tools of foreign political influence and interference.

The poster boy of this cadre of actors is Wan Kuok Koi, aka Broken Tooth, a convicted Chinese gangster turned valued patriotic entrepreneur. Despite being sanctioned by the US, Wan has leveraged commercial deals linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and established cultural associations that have enabled him to co-opt local elites. He has also exploited links with the Chinese business diaspora to identify entry points for his criminal activities (such as establishing online scam centres) and has used extensive political connections to ensure impunity in his operations.

Although they have a lower profile than Wan, many other foreign business actors are active across the region. They often gain high political access, preferential treatment and impunity through the diplomatic relations between their countries of origin (not just China) and the Pacific countries in which they operate. A further risk is that criminal revenues could also be channeled into electoral campaigns, undermining local democratic processes.

These entrepreneurs have exploited favourable tax regimes, limited monitoring and enforcement capabilities and corrupted political connections. They often operate in extractive industries, real estate and financial services.

As bribes pass from hand to hand, and as outside countries weigh their political considerations, Pacific citizens lose out. Some are vulnerable to labour and sexual exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous (and criminal) foreign businesses. Others see their lands, forests and waters degraded, or they are exposed to the introduction of new narcotics for which health services are unprepared.

Fighting this transnational organised crime is critical to strengthening institutions in Pacific island countries and helping them build long-term sustainable prosperity.

Outside countries should consider lateral approaches to crime fighting in the Pacific that may provide a framework for action that is more palatable to island-country governments than more sensitive, purely law-enforcement-driven strategies.

Crime can be both a cause and an enabler of fragility and underdevelopment. With that in mind, the fight against crime and corruption could be framed as necessary primarily to address those two issues. They deeply impact Pacific populations, so it would be crucial to engage with affected communities along the way.

In the absence of such an approach, and with geopolitical and diplomatic considerations taking precedence, criminals will continue to exploit the limited attention that is paid to crime fighting and will profit as a result.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Virginia Comolli · March 14, 2024

12. The TikTok Ban Is Truly An Issue Of National Security

The TikTok Ban Is Truly An Issue Of National Security

by Peter Suciu Forbes4 min

March 15, 2024

View Original

As Beijing already bans most U.S. social media platforms, the most obvious question to ask is why ...

As Beijing already bans most U.S. social media platforms, the most obvious question to ask is why should Washington allow a Chinese-owned app to be available in the United States? The answer, according to most experts, is that it probably shouldn't—but this is more than just a case of turnabout being fair play, or a tit-for-tat response.

TikTok could be seen as a valid national security threat, warned lawmakers this week. The issues go far deeper than just the user data that China could access.

"TikTok, owned by ByteDance, presents significant cybersecurity concerns for the United States, primarily due to the potential exploitation of its vast user base and the Chinese company's access to user data. The scale of TikTok's user engagement, combined with China's track record of aggressive cyber activities, raises the specter of sophisticated cyber threats targeting American users, including surveillance, data breaches, and manipulation of online discourse," warned Lisa Plaggemier, executive director of The National Cybersecurity Alliance.

Specific Rational

Experts have pointed to specific reasons for banning TikTok, which also apply to other foreign-owned apps.

"Emphatically, the United States should not allow any foreign-owned, created, or operated social media apps within the United States, especially TikTok," explained Dr. Craig Douglas Albert, professor of political science & graduate director of the Master of Arts in Intelligence and Security Studies program at Augusta University.

"The first is that TikTok is 100% owned by the Chinese Communist Party, which is the strategic adversary of the United States, and is deemed by most security scholars as the most likely threat for a great power war with the U.S. by 2050," said Albert.

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This could be seen as concerning for security reasons involving the remaining three reasons for banning TikTok—including that TikTok collects all user data possible from the app.

"This includes not just what users do within the app, but all other apps connected through the user's phone," Albert continued. "Thus, TikTok, and hence the CCP, has access to all personal information for all users. This includes keystrokes—which can help them determine passwords and other sensitive information users type-in—websites visited, location of user, contact's information, everything possible from all apps."

That can allow China to create a full user portfolio for all of its users.

"Essentially, they know everything about its users, from what your children look like, to what time they are dropped off at school, to what you like to eat, where you like to eat, clothes you buy, activities you enjoy, and, your emotional-psychological state of being," Albert noted. "Now imagine the US gets into a conflict with China, and they have this data on 180 million Americans. The comparative advantage this would provide the CCP to use against American citizens is unmatchable."

As it currently stands, the U.S. may have no counter-operation to prevent the CCP from using this information for identity theft to enact precision-targeted assaults. Additionally, that vast trove of data could be potentially sold and used for equally nefarious purposes.

The Spread Of Misinformation

What has further worried lawmakers is how TikTok—and really all social media platforms—could be utilized to spread misinformation and disinformation. In the case of TikTok, such campaigns could be directed from Beijing, and used to undermine our upcoming elections.

"TikTok, like all social media sites, is based upon algorithms that can target its users for propaganda, mis/dis and malinformation," Albert continued. "They can intentionally and purposely push specific types of propaganda against any person, thus they can attempt to push a user to vote differently, or push extremist videos at users likely to have an emotional reaction and resort to violence as a result of neurocognitive hacking. The end game of propaganda is to change a user's thought processes and/or decision-making without the user being aware that this has occurred. Thus, the CCP has a direct line into users' minds."

A ban on TikTok could potentially disrupt the dissemination of false or misleading information to its vast user base, potentially mitigating any harmful effects of viral misinformation campaigns.

"TikTok's popularity among both adults and children amplifies the potential impact of these cyber threats, as sensitive personal information could be compromised, and disinformation campaigns could spread rapidly," said Plaggemier. "The platform's interactive nature and extensive reach make it an attractive target for malicious actors seeking to undermine national security or advance foreign interests."

Social Engineering Campaign

Perhaps one of the least talked about concerns is how TikTok could be ripe for social engineering campaigns that could deliver malware to a user's network.

"If a user clicks a link on one's work email, generated from cyber-intelligence gathered from the CCP from a TikTok user, the CCP can then infiltrate the user's workplace networks and spread from there," suggested Albert. "Now think if this user is in the tech, healthcare, or military industries, the effects of this type of cyber-enabled influence operation could be catastrophic."

All social media sites and apps have many of the same flaws and capabilities just mentioned.

"The question is whether TikTok is any more harmful than say Truth Social or X," pondered technology industry analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. "Rather than cherry picking one service, lawmakers should be crafting a remedy that would apply to all services."

Of course, it could be argued that Truth Social, Facebook and X—among others—are not owned by a great power adversary to the United States.

"For these many reasons, it is clear that TikTok should be banned in the U.S., and so too should any other foreign apps owned by strategic adversaries," said Albert. "The dangers posed by these scenarios are the greatest threat to US security and democracy to date."

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13. Australia Wanted to Catch Chinese Spies. Is This Really Whom It Had in Mind?

Excerpts:

When Australia’s broad-stroke foreign interference laws were passed nearly six years ago amid rising concerns about covert Chinese government meddling in Western democracies, they were heralded as trailblazing by the United States and other countries. Blockbuster prosecutions revealing sophisticated tactics seemed to be just around the corner.

But the first case, Mr. Duong’s, came to trial only in November, and it was, by all accounts, a low-stakes affair. It involved throwing the weight of the Australian government against a suburban tombstone maker over diverging interpretations of two words (“us Chinese”), and a $25,000 donation to a community hospital that — prosecutors said — would at some point have become the basis for a pro-China pitch to a local member of Parliament.

In December, a jury found Mr. Duong, 68, guilty of preparing for or planning an act of foreign interference. Late last month, a judge sentenced him to two years and nine months in prison. He is expected to serve a year behind bars.

Australia Wanted to Catch Chinese Spies. Is This Really Whom It Had in Mind?

The first case tried under Australia’s foreign interference laws has raised tough questions about the breadth of the regulations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/16/world/australia/foreign-interference-laws-sunny-duong.html

Di Sanh Duong at his warehouse in December in Melbourne, Australia.Credit...Abigail Varney for The New York Times

By Yan Zhuang

Reporting from Melbourne, Australia

March 16, 2024

Want the latest stories related to Australia and China? Sign up for the newsletter Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send them to your inbox.

The police officers asked the man what he meant when he said that involving an Australian government minister in a charity event could benefit “us Chinese.” Was he talking about mainland China and the Chinese Communist Party, or the local Australian Chinese community? Depending on the answer, he faced up to 10 years in prison.

“You are understanding the Chinese is China. We always say, ‘I’m Chinese,’ that not mean, ‘I’m mainland China,’” said the man, Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, who was brought in for questioning.

The officer pressed on, according to a tape played for a jury. Was Mr. Duong effectively building a relationship with the minister, “who you thought would be the future prime minister, to support the views of the Chinese?” Another officer asked, “Mainland China?”

When Australia’s broad-stroke foreign interference laws were passed nearly six years ago amid rising concerns about covert Chinese government meddling in Western democracies, they were heralded as trailblazing by the United States and other countries. Blockbuster prosecutions revealing sophisticated tactics seemed to be just around the corner.

But the first case, Mr. Duong’s, came to trial only in November, and it was, by all accounts, a low-stakes affair. It involved throwing the weight of the Australian government against a suburban tombstone maker over diverging interpretations of two words (“us Chinese”), and a $25,000 donation to a community hospital that — prosecutors said — would at some point have become the basis for a pro-China pitch to a local member of Parliament.

In December, a jury found Mr. Duong, 68, guilty of preparing for or planning an act of foreign interference. Late last month, a judge sentenced him to two years and nine months in prison. He is expected to serve a year behind bars.

Image

Mr. Duong leaving the County Court of Victoria in Melbourne last year. He did not testify at the trial and his lawyers did not call any witnesses.Credit...Joel Carrett/EPA, via Shutterstock

While the case received far less attention from Australian media than the passage of the interference laws, it has become a cautionary tale for the country’s large diaspora communities — nearly a third of its population was born overseas. In theory, the new laws were an effort to defend democracy against foreign influence. In practice, they have raised tough questions about when such intentions might drift into xenophobia or wasteful effort.

Mr. Duong did not testify at the trial and his lawyers did not call any witnesses. But in his only in-depth interview since his arrest, with The New York Times, he said that his patriotism toward China never conflicted with his loyalty to Australia and its interests. He saw himself as a scapegoat of geopolitical tensions, saying his prosecution was intended to send a message: “Don’t walk too close to China.”

For some experts, Mr. Duong’s case, which started amid a diplomatic deep freeze between China and Australia and concluded as relations thawed, raised concerns that he had been effectively found guilty by association. To others, his interactions with Chinese officials were undeniable proof that he was working for Beijing.

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Mr. Duong had a tendency to talk himself up. He bragged about the mundane, like his travels, and boasted of the ties he had built with officials in both Australia and China.

Born and raised in Vietnam, he fled in 1979, one of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese who left the country. After cobbling together a middle-class life in Australia, he often sought to portray himself as a man on the rise. He ran unsuccessfully as a candidate in the conservative Liberal Party in a state election in 1996. He worked his way up through the ranks of local Chinese community groups, eventually becoming the No. 2 of the Global Federation of Chinese Organizations from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, an umbrella organization with chapters around the world, as well as the president of its Oceania branch.

Image

Mr. Duong in 2021 at a charity event in Springvale, a suburb of Melbourne. He worked his way up to become a Chinese-Australian community leader.Credit...Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

The groups, he said, allowed him to connect with officials in China, and to mingle with local Australian politicians and officials at the Chinese consulate in Melbourne, which did not respond to a request for comment on the case.

More than a year before his arrest, in another interview, Mr. Duong said that he often said to other Chinese-Australian community leaders, “If they talk about spies, they should put me, Di Sanh Duong, in the category of spies.”

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He spoke about his ties to China, including his overseas adviser positions for four provincial Chinese bodies. So, he said, “Does that make me China’s lackey?”

Unbeknown to Mr. Duong, he was already being investigated by the Australian authorities. They regarded some groups he was involved in as organizations linked to China’s foreign influence operation. They wanted to know why he often traveled to China, made comments that echoed Beijing’s policies, and boasted about his friendship with a Chinese intelligence officer. His interactions with Chinese officials in Australia, including when he sent photos of Falun Gong protesters to a consulate official, also came under scrutiny.

In 2020, Mr. Duong was charged under the foreign interference law, which criminalized any deceptive or covert behavior that is intended to influence Australian politics or policy on behalf of a foreign government.

Mr. Duong’s community group had raised about $25,000 and was donating the money to a Melbourne hospital to help treat Covid patients, at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was high in Australia. Mr. Duong had invited Alan Tudge, the immigration minister at the time, to be present when he handed over the money.

Image

The Royal Melbourne Hospital in 2022. Mr. Duong’s community group raised money for the hospital to help treat Covid patients, at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was high in Australia.Credit...Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

During the trial, which ran for three weeks last year and was partly closed to the public, prosecutors did not dispute that Mr. Duong had good intentions. But they argued — in light of his connections to Beijing and what prosecutors said was his association with China’s foreign influence operation — his ultimate motive was nefarious. He was, a prosecutor said, thinking about how he could, in the future, influence Mr. Tudge to the benefit of “us Chinese.”

Mr. Tudge’s offices said that a background check it ordered on Mr. Duong did not raise any alarms. But prosecutors argued that Mr. Duong hid his connections to Chinese officials, even though his business card listed his provincial adviser positions.

Before donating the money, prosecutors said that Mr. Duong had been in regular contact with Chinese officials. He had been trying to enlist their help to source surgical masks from China, which he wanted to give to the hospital. These interactions, according to the lead prosecutor, Patrick Doyle, meant Mr. Duong had “a secret connection to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Not that those connections did any good: Mr. Duong never managed to get the masks from China.

As evidence of Mr. Duong’s intentions toward Mr. Tudge, prosecutors presented a years-old letter he wrote to a state-level Liberal Party official containing policy suggestions that the judge later described as “vague, impracticable and unlikely to be taken seriously.” His main thrust was that Australia should consider China as its primary strategic partner, not the United States. Prosecutors argued it was the kind of approach he might try again.

Image

Mr. Duong invited Alan Tudge, the Australian immigration minister at the time, for the donation to the hospital. Prosecutors argued that his motive was to influence Mr. Tudge to the benefit of “us Chinese.”Credit...Rohan Thomson/Getty Images

This was all proof, the Australian government argued, that Mr. Duong had been co-opted by a section of China’s influence-peddling operation known as the United Front Work Department.

“The way the United Front system works — and Mr. Duong’s role reflects this — is that it’s a lot more subtle,” Mr. Doyle said. “It’s a lot more nuanced than you’re either a spy or not a spy.”

The case, he said, was not in the realm of “spy novels, of James Bond films.”

The United Front system, Mr. Doyle told the jury, targets all ethnically Chinese people living overseas, not only to sway their beliefs, but also to turn them into agents to influence others. For the latter, specific types of overseas Chinese are prioritized: those who “have a strong allegiance to China as the motherland,” and those with influence and power.

Mr. Duong had both, especially the former, Mr. Doyle said. The United Front system ensured that Mr. Duong had “become exactly the sort of patriot” capable of and willing to act in ways, even without explicit instructions, that helped the Chinese government achieve its goals, he said.

Mr. Duong’s lawyer, Peter Chadwick, argued that his client simply liked to exaggerate his connections to rich and powerful people. Relationships with Chinese government officials were a necessity for someone who did business in China, like Mr. Duong, he argued. This “doesn’t mean that a person or an organization are forever co-opted to do what the Chinese government says,” he said.

Image

Mr. Duong at his office with commemorative plaques and certificates he was given for his involvement in community groups. He saw himself and his community as a bridge between Australia and China.Credit...Abigail Varney for The New York Times

Mr. Duong seemed to draw more scrutiny because of his Chinese heritage, Mr. Chadwick said. He added, “I can’t help but wonder whether we’d be here if Mr. Duong was a person of Italian descent who repeatedly traveled back to the Italian motherland.”

Mr. Chadwick was reprimanded by the judge for “hinting that there’s a racial motivation.”

During the trial, Mr. Duong said in the interview that he believed that it was in both China’s and Australia’s best interests to be strategic partners. For someone who saw himself and his community as a bridge between the two countries, there was no such thing as being “too close” to China.

“We hope China and Australia’s relationship is always good,” he said.

Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news. More about Yan Zhuang

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2024, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: How Australia Linked a Covid-Era Hospital Gift to Chinese Spies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

14. US Air Force special ops forces are turning big cargo planes into bombers with a new weapon

Excerpts:

While Rapid Dragon has achieved a number of milestones since its launch, turning a fleet of transport aircraft into makeshift bombers also comes with its share of logistical hurdles, like working in "very distributed, austere kind of environments."

There are still a number of questions with palletized munitions and how best to use them. "How do we actually think our way through [where] we're going to keep these weapons, how are they going to be configured, do we really want them out in the middle of a field somewhere next to a straight stretch of road?" Slife said.

"We're kind of working our way through the logistics implications of these kind of concepts for how we operate," he added.

US Air Force special ops forces are turning big cargo planes into bombers with a new weapon

Business Insider · by Lauren Frias

Military & Defense

Lauren Frias

2024-03-11T21:31:01Z

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US Special Operations Task Group-Central and Air Forces Central Airmen loading JASSM cradles and other cargo into the special operations aircraft.US Army Photo

US Air Force transport aircraft are going to be carrying more than just troops, equipment, and supplies.
The US Air Force is equipping its big airlift platforms to carry payloads similar to its bombers.
Photos show airmen during a loading training with Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile cradles.

The US Air Force is continuing its mission to transform its existing fleet of workhorse transport planes into bombers.

Recent photos show airmen with Special Operations Task Group Central and Air Forces Central on- and off-loading missile cradles in a training exercise involving an MC-130J and C-17s.

Rapid Dragon

A C-17 drops palletized munitions (simulated JASSMs) during Advanced Battle Management Onramp #2 testing.US Air Force

The rehearsal procedures are part of a larger USAF initiative known as Rapid Dragon, in which the Air Mobility Command (AMC) is exploring the "feasibility and operational advantages of airdropping long-range palletized effects from existing airlift platforms."

Since early 2020, AMC has conducted a series of tests dropping pallets of real and mock cruise missiles from cargo planes like the C-17 and MC-130J.

In September 2023, Air Mobility Command launched a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range cruise missile from a C-17 Globemaster III during an exercise in the Indo-Pacific.

At the Air and Space Forces conference last year, Gen. Mike Minihan, who leads Air Mobility Command, said the airdrop "absolutely serviced a target and was extremely, extremely successful."

Palletized munitions

US Special Operations Task Group-Central and Air Forces Central Airmen prepare missile cradles to be loaded onto transport aircraft in a procedure rehearsal.US Army Photo

The experiment looks to expand the offensive capabilities of its airlifters by giving them the ability to carry and release payloads that might include long-range cruise missiles, much like a traditional bomber can.

But the initiative is broader than just ordnance and is looking at having the planes carry things like sensors and jammers.

"When I talk about Rapid Dragon and when I talk about palletized effects, it's much broader than just the kinetic side of the business," Minihan said, referring to weapons that directly engage targets, as opposed to combat tools like electronic warfare.

"Imagine not only can we service a target, but we could deploy a decoy, we could put out a jamming sensor, we could put out a sensor that could find a radio and provide search-and-rescue. All those things, I think, are on the table," Minihan told reporters at last year's conference.

Workhorse transport planes fighting as bombers

The rehearsals allow the airmen to rapidly employ a litany of effects via airdrop from airlift platforms, such as the MC-130J Commando II.US Army Photo

Traditionally, the Air Force's workhorse transport planes, like the C-17 Globemaster III and MC-130J Commando II, have aided in the strategic and rapid delivery of fuel and supplies via airdrop. The big aircraft can also carry personnel.

These two types of planes were selected for the initiative because turning them into bombers required fewer modifications and training.

"The beauty of that capability is it doesn't require any aircraft modifications," Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, then-deputy chief of staff of US Air Force Special Operations Command, told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association conference, which Business Insider attended at the time.

"It doesn't require any special aircrew training. It really just takes advantage of the characteristics of that platform."

The MC-130J can climb 28,000 feet with a 42,000 payload and has a range of 3,000 miles. Slife said the cargo plane can carry as many long-range weapons as a B-52.

"An MC-130J is the perfect aircraft for this capability because we can land and operate from 3,000-foot highways and austere landing zones whereas a bomber cannot," Lt. Col. Valerie Knight, 352nd Wing mission commander, said in a release in November 2022.

The C-17 has a payload capacity of nearly 171,000 pounds, designed to transport armored vehicles, trucks, and trailers, as well as airdrop more than 100 paratroopers and their accompanying equipment. This plane, given its size, can carry three times as many long-range precision munitions as a B-52 bomber, according to Slife.

'Moving away from the antiquated view that AMC just brings stuff'

Palletized effects have the potential to assist in multiple scenarios on the spectrum of conflict, ranging from contested resupply to kinetic effects.US Army Photo

At the AFA Air, Space, & Cyber Conference in September 2023, Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, head of Air Force Special Operations Command, said the goal of Rapid Dragon is the "multiplication" of what bombers already do by adding airlift platforms to the mix.

"What else can we put in the back of the aircraft?" Bauernfeind said. "There's other kinetic effects, non-kinetic effects, jammers, that if it can fit in the back and can be air-launched," he added, then it could be used to deliver "decisive effects."

Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, formerly the head of Air Mobility Command, said in 2021 that Air Force tankers and cargo planes need to do more than transport supplies and fuel — and Rapid Dragon is working to prove that they can.

"Look at the competition that we're in right now," Van Ovost said at an event for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in March 2021.

"Why wouldn't we change the calculus by doing different things, moving away from the antiquated view that AMC just brings stuff ... and [stays] outside the threat ring to be a maneuver force to support inside the threat ring, because that's really where we're going."

Logistical challenges

US Special Operations Task Group-Central and Air Forces Central Airmen conduct orientations and static on-load/off-load familiarization rehearsals.US Army Photo

While Rapid Dragon has achieved a number of milestones since its launch, turning a fleet of transport aircraft into makeshift bombers also comes with its share of logistical hurdles, like working in "very distributed, austere kind of environments."

There are still a number of questions with palletized munitions and how best to use them. "How do we actually think our way through [where] we're going to keep these weapons, how are they going to be configured, do we really want them out in the middle of a field somewhere next to a straight stretch of road?" Slife said.

"We're kind of working our way through the logistics implications of these kind of concepts for how we operate," he added.

US Air Force

Business Insider · by Lauren Frias

15. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 16, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-16-2024

Key Takeaways:

The Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) reportedly conducted a series of successful drone strikes against three Russian oil refineries in Samara Oblast on March 16.
All-Russian pro-Ukrainian volunteers continue limited cross-border raids into Belgorod and Kursk oblasts.
Russian authorities appointed Boris Kovalchuk, the son of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reported “personal banker” Yuri Kovalchuk, to a position within the Russian Presidential Administration.
Russian authorities threatened Russian election disruptors and some Russian citizens’ continued attempts to disrupt voting in the Russian presidential election on March 16.
Group of Seven (G7) countries issued a joint statement on March 15 warning Iran against transferring ballistic missiles or related technology to Russia.
Russian forces made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.
A Russian insider source claimed on March 16 that Rosgvardia Director Viktor Zolotov revoked a reported agreement allowing former Wagner Group units to operate independently within Rosgvardia.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 16, 2024

Mar 16, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 16, 2024

Angelica Evans, Christina Harward, Grace Mappes, Riley Bailey, and George Barros

March 16, 2024, 5:20pm ET

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

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 1:30 pm ET on March 16. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the March 17 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

The Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) reportedly conducted a series of successful drone strikes against three Russian oil refineries in Samara Oblast on March 16. Sources in Ukrainian special services told Ukrainian outlet RBK-Ukraine that the SBU struck the Novokuibyshevsky, Kuibyshevsky, and Syzran Rosneft oil refineries in Samara Oblast.[1] RBK-Ukraine reported that the three refineries process an estimated 25 million tons of oil per year, or 10 percent of Russia’s annual oil refinement output.[2] Geolocated footage published on March 16 shows a fire at the Syzran oil refinery following the drone strikes, and Samara Oblast Governor Dmytro Azarov stated that there was also a fire at the refinery in Novokuibyshevsky.[3] Russian outlet Kommersant reported on March 13 that Russian authorities recently strengthened anti-drone protection at the Novokuibyshevsky, Kuibyshevsky, and Syzran oil refineries following previous Ukrainian drone strikes targeting Russian oil infrastructure and reported on March 14 that Russian oil and gas and industrial enterprises are currently the main purchasers of anti-drone systems in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.[4] Kommersant also reported that Rosneft has not restarted operations at the Tuapse oil refinery following the January 25 Ukrainian drone strike against the facility, indicating that the January 25 strike likely significantly damaged the facility.[5] Russian milbloggers deliberated whether the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) or Rosgvardia are to blame for not protecting Russian oil refineries and criticized general Russian bureaucracy for delaying the deployment of anti-drone countermeasures and air defense systems to defend Russian critical infrastructure operators against Ukrainian drone strikes.[6] One Russian milblogger asked why Russia has not been able to implement even an “elementary decision,” such as copying Ukraine’s mobile fire groups, to defend against drone strikes.[7]

All-Russian pro-Ukrainian volunteers continue limited cross-border raids into Belgorod and Kursk oblasts. The all-Russian pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) stated on March 16 that it is continuing a “limited military operation” in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts and denied previous Russian claims about the RDK, Freedom of Russia Legion (LSR), and Siberian Battalion suffering heavy losses in raids in recent days.[8] The RDK posted footage of alleged Russian prisoners of war (POW) that it recently captured and called on Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov to meet in order to negotiate the exchange of 25 Russian POWs.[9] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled the cross border raids near Popivka, Sumy Oblast, and in the direction of Spodaryushino and Kozinka in Belgorod Oblast.[10]

Russian authorities appointed Boris Kovalchuk, the son of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reported “personal banker” Yuri Kovalchuk, to a position within the Russian Presidential Administration. Russian news outlet RBK, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported on March 15 that Russian authorities appointed Boris Kovalchuk the deputy head of the Presidential Control Directorate, a department of the Russian Presidential Administration that monitors how Russian federal and regional authorities implement Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orders and directives.[11] Russian outlet Kommersant reported on March 6 that Kovalchuk left Russian energy company Inter RAO, which he headed for 15 years, and that Russian authorities initially gave Kovalchuk four positions to choose from – head of Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom, head of Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft, Deputy Prime Minister for the Fuel and Energy Complex, or governor of St. Petersburg.[12] Bloomberg also reported on March 12 that Russian authorities were considering appointing Kovalchuk as Russian Minister of Energy.[13] The Kovalchuks are also longtime friends of Russian Presidential Administration Deputy Head Sergei Kiriyenko, who has gained increased influence with Putin since the start of the full-scale invasion.[14] Boris’ Kovalchuk’s new position within the Russian presidential administration suggests that both the Kovalchuk family and even Kiriyenko’s wider faction are gaining increased influence within the Kremlin and with Putin himself.

Russian authorities threatened Russian election disruptors and some Russian citizens’ continued attempts to disrupt voting in the Russian presidential election on March 16. Russian opposition outlet Sever Realii reported on March 16 that Russian authorities have opened at least 15 criminal cases across Russia for attempts to disrupt the election and sent at least two people to pre-trial detention centers.[15] Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) Chairperson Ella Pamfilova stated that “simple-minded people” tried to disrupt the voting process by committing arson or damaging ballot boxes at 29 polling stations in 20 Russian federal subjects.[16] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitri Medvedev claimed that Russian citizens who attempt to disrupt the election are “scoundrels” and “traitors” who can face criminal charges for obstructing the exercise of electoral rights.[17] Medvedev threatened that attempts at election disruption are a form of “direct” assistance to Ukraine and the perpetrators could face charges of high treason. Russian State Duma deputy Yana Lantratova told Russian state news outlet RIA Novosti on March 16 that Duma deputies are preparing a bill that would increase the sentencing severity for Russians who attempt to disrupt elections and are allegedly acting on instructions from a foreign state opposing Russia during wartime.[18] The bill reportedly imposes stricter sentences of five to eight years in prison for disrupting elections. Lantratova stated that Duma deputies are preparing the bill as quickly as possible so Russian lawmakers have time to adopt it before the 2026 Russian legislative elections. Isolated public protests against the Russian presidential election and Russian President Vladimir Putin are highly unlikely to impact the course or outcome of the choreographed Russian presidential election, but Kremlin officials may be quickly responding to these incidents out of concerns that continued disruptions will tarnish the Kremlin’s effort to portray the election as Russia unifying around Putin.

Group of Seven (G7) countries issued a joint statement on March 15 warning Iran against transferring ballistic missiles or related technology to Russia.[19] The G7 stated that it is prepared to respond swiftly and in a coordinated manner should Iran provide Russia with ballistic missiles or related technology, including new and “significant measures” against Iran.[20] The G7 statement did not specify what those measures may be, but a senior US official reportedly told journalists that one option under consideration is an effective ban on Iran Air flights to Europe.[21] Reuters reported in late February 2024 that Iranian sources stated that Iran had begun ballistic missile transfers to Russia and that Russia has already received 400 Iranian short-range ballistic missiles.[22] Western media reported on March 15 that the senior US official stated that the United States and its allies have not confirmed that Iran has transferred the missiles to Russia, however.[23] Russia and Iran have been reportedly negotiating transfers of the Iranian short-range ballistic missiles in recent months as Russia continues to increasingly rely on Iran for key components and weapons for its war effort in Ukraine.[24]

Key Takeaways:

The Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) reportedly conducted a series of successful drone strikes against three Russian oil refineries in Samara Oblast on March 16.
All-Russian pro-Ukrainian volunteers continue limited cross-border raids into Belgorod and Kursk oblasts.
Russian authorities appointed Boris Kovalchuk, the son of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reported “personal banker” Yuri Kovalchuk, to a position within the Russian Presidential Administration.
Russian authorities threatened Russian election disruptors and some Russian citizens’ continued attempts to disrupt voting in the Russian presidential election on March 16.
Group of Seven (G7) countries issued a joint statement on March 15 warning Iran against transferring ballistic missiles or related technology to Russia.
Russian forces made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.
A Russian insider source claimed on March 16 that Rosgvardia Director Viktor Zolotov revoked a reported agreement allowing former Wagner Group units to operate independently within Rosgvardia.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 16 that Ukrainian forces repelled two Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups that tried to cross the international Russian-Ukrainian border into Sumy Oblast near Stara Huta and Brusky.[25]

Positional engagements continued along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on March 16, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Ukrainian and Russian sources stated that positional engagements continued northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka, southeast of Kupyansk near Tabaivka, west of Kreminna near Terny, and south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka.[26]

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

Positional fighting continued near Bakhmut on March 16, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut near Rozdolivka; northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka; west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske and east of Chasiv Yar; and southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Andriivka.[27] Elements of the Russian 58th Spetsnaz Battalion (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) are reportedly operating near Ivanivske, and elements of the Russian “Vostok” Volunteer Reconnaissance Assault Brigade (Russian Volunteer Corps) are reportedly operating in the direction of Chasiv Yar.[28]

Russian forces likely captured Tonenke (west of Avdiivka) and Nevelske (southwest of Avdiivka) no later than March 16. Geolocated footage published on March 15 shows that a Russian armored column recently advanced west of Tonenke, and additional geolocated footage published on March 16 shows elements of the Russian 110th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) advancing into and raising a flag in Nevelske.[29] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on March 12 that Russian forces captured Nevelske.[30] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced in Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka) and between Berdychi and Orlivka (west of Avdiivka).[31] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that an armored Russian group advanced west of Tonenke and reached the outskirts of Semenivka (west of Avdiivka) but did not advance further.[32] The milblogger claimed that Russian forces are struggling on the northern flank of Berdychi near Stepove (both northwest of Avdiivka) because Ukrainian forces still control tactical heights and conduct counterattacks in the area, but that it is more difficult for Ukrainian forces to counterattack near Orlivka and Tonenke (both west of Avdiivka). Positional fighting continued west of Avdiivka near Semenivka and southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske and Novokalynove.[33] Elements of the Chechen “Zapad-Akhmat” Battalion are reportedly operating near Orlivka.[34]

The commander of a Ukrainian battalion operating near Avdiivka stated on March 15 that Russian forces near Avdiivka are innovating and changing classical Wagner Group-style infantry-led “meat assaults” with assaults using armored vehicles to increase and maintain constant pressure on Ukrainian forces.[35] The Ukrainian commander stated that Russian forces are attacking with multiple “divisions” – likely referring to elements of divisions that are unlikely to be staffed and equipped at full end-strength – and that Russian forces aim to achieve a ten to one numerical superiority over Ukrainian forces in the Avdiivka direction. The commander stated that Ukrainian forces have slowed the Russian advance but cannot say confidently that the situation is stable. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian counterattacks near Avdiivka have lost momentum and suggested that Ukrainian forces either lack reserves or are withdrawing to lines further back, though ISW has not observed confirmation of these claims.[36] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces recovered “quickly enough” following the fall of Avdiivka and asserted that Ukrainian forces achieved numerical superiority in the Avdiivka direction, however, ISW is unable to confirm this claim as the tactical situation west of Avdiivka remains dynamic.[37]

Positional fighting continued west and southwest of Donetsk City on March 16, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional fighting continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Novomykhailivka and Volodymyrivka (southeast of Vuhledar on the T0509 Vuhledar-Volnovakha-Mariupol highway).[38] Elements of the Russian 39th Motorized Rifle Brigade (68th AC, Eastern Military District [EMD]) are reportedly operating near Novomykhailivka.[39]

Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Velyka Novosilka amid continued positional fighting in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on March 16. Geolocated footage published on March 16 shows that Russian forces recently advanced to a windbreak west of Pryyutne (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[40] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced one kilometer in depth north of Shevchenko (southeast of Velyka Novosilka), though ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[41] Positional fighting continued south of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske.[42] Elements of the Russian 5th Tank Brigade and 37th Motorized Rifle Brigade (both of the 36th Combined Arms Army [CAA], EMD) reportedly recently attacked west of Staromayorske and north of Novodonetske, respectively, and elements of the 60th Motorized Rifle Brigade and of the 127th Motorized Rifle Division (both of the 5th CAA, EMD) reportedly supported these assaults.[43]

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

Positional fighting continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne) in western Zaporizhia Oblast on March 16.[44] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the Russian 247th Airborne (VDV) Regiment (7th VDV Division) advanced up to a kilometer in depth north of Verbove, although ISW has not observed confirmation of this claim.[45]

Positional engagements continued in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast, including near Krynky, on March 16.[46] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces also maintain positions near the Antonivsky Bridge, but did not specify whether he was referring to the Antonivsky railway bridge or the Antonivsky roadway bridge.[47]

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

Russian forces conducted a limited series of drone and missile strikes against targets in Ukraine on the night of March 15 to 16. Sumy Oblast Military Administration reported that Russian forces struck civilian infrastructure in Konotop, Sumy Oblast with an unspecified missile on the evening of March 15.[48] Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Head Oleh Synehubov reported that Russian forces struck critical infrastructure in Kozacha Lopan with an unspecified number of Shahed-136/131 drones and Zolochiv with an Iskander missile on March 16.[49] Ukrainian officials in Donetsk Oblast reported that Russian forces struck Slovyansk with an unspecified missile and Myrnohrad with four S-300 missiles.[50]

Odesa Oblast Military Administration Head Oleh Kiper reported on March 16 that the death toll from a Russian Iskander missile strike on Odesa City on March 15 has risen to 20.[51] Russian sources asserted that Russian forces struck a sanatorium in Odesa City on March 15 and killed up to 550 Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) personnel, although ISW has not observed any evidence of these Russian claims.[52]

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

A Russian insider source claimed on March 16 that Rosgvardia Director Viktor Zolotov revoked a reported agreement allowing former Wagner Group units to operate independently within Rosgvardia.[53] The insider source claimed that Zolotov disbanded the former Wagner base in Kazachi Lageri, Rostov Oblast, which Wagner reportedly retained control over when operating as part of the Rosgvardia Volunteer Corps. Rosgvardia authorities reportedly assured former Wagner personnel that there would be “a new gathering” following the Russian presidential election, but that their units would no longer be considered “separate and independent.” Russian sources widely speculated about a reported agreement between the Wagner Council of Commanders and Rosgvardia that would allow Wagner to retain its existing command structure and independence while subordinated to Rosgvardia following the death of Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and founder Dmitry Utkin in September 2023.[54] Zolotov reportedly reneged on the purported agreement after learning that Wagner Commander Anton Yelizarov (call sign “Lotos”) severely overestimated his ability to convince additional former Wagner personnel to join Rosgvardia.[55]

Russian opposition outlet Mobilization News reported on March 15 that Russian officials are no longer providing combat veteran certificates for veterans of Russian “Storm Z” convict units in the Southern Military District.[56] Mobilization News reported that Russian officials refused to issue combat veteran certificates to “Storm Z” veterans in Krasnodar Krai, Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, and Astrakhan and Volgograd oblasts. This change, if confirmed, is likely a cost-saving measure to prevent ballooning costs related to providing Russian veterans service benefits.

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

Nothing significant to report.

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

Note: ISW will be publishing its coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts on a weekly basis in the Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment. ISW will continue to track developments in Ukrainian defense industrial efforts daily and will refer to these efforts in assessments within the daily Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment and other ISW products when necessary.

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

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

Note: ISW will be publishing coverage of activities in Russian-occupied areas twice a week in the Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment. ISW will continue to track activities in Russian-occupied areas daily and will refer to these activities in assessments within the daily Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment and other ISW products when necessary.

ISW is not publishing coverage of activities in Russian-occupied areas today.

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian authorities continue efforts to portray the Russian presidential election as a popular and legitimate election and claimed that Western states are interfering in the election. The Russian Central Election Commission stated that 51.77 percent of all eligible voters had voted as of 1620 Moscow time on March 16.[57] Kremlin newswire TASS stated on March 16 that foreign observers from several dozen countries are reportedly observing the elections.[58] Russian sources have reported on cases of irregularities and voting violations, however. Stanislav Andreychuk, the Co-Chairperson for the Russian “Golos” Movement for Defense of Voters’ Rights, reported on March 16 that “Golos” had observed footage of ballot stuffing in Krasnodar Krai.[59] Russian opposition outlet Vazhnye Istorii (iStories) reported on March 16 that observers in Moscow Oblast reported differences between data on claimed and actual voter turnout numbers and that Russian authorities registered on average 100 more ballots than were actually cast.[60] Russian Commissioner for Human Rights Tatyana Moskalkova claimed on March 16 that she appealed to the United Nations High Commission about the way Estonian authorities are allegedly obstructing Russian “compatriots” from voting there.[61] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed on March 16 that some “unfriendly countries” are threatening Russian citizens and physically obstructing them from voting abroad.[62] Zakharova also claimed that the Russian MFA may summon the British ambassador to Russia if alleged, unspecified attempts to interfere in the election do not stop.[63]

Russian actors are reportedly attempting to exploit the relatives of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) to incite domestic discontent in Ukraine, likely as part of the wider “Maidan-3” Russian information campaign. Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets stated on March 16 that unspecified Russian actors are calling relatives of Ukrainian POWs and claiming that Russia is ready to return Ukrainian POWs but that the Ukrainian leadership is preventing this. The Russian actors reportedly encourage the relatives to protest about this issue. Lubinets stated that Ukraine has never stopped POW exchanges. These Russian information operations are likely part of the “Maidan-3” information campaign, which Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) previously reported intends to sow domestic discontent in Ukraine and drive a wedge between civilians and military and political leadership.[64] Russia has successfully used information operations, including direct correspondence via cell phone to Ukrainian civilians, to foment violent protests in Ukraine before.[65]

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

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov stated on March 16 that Russian President Vladimir Putin held a telephone call with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and discussed bilateral issues and the regional situation.[66] Russian and Belarusian sources have yet to offer further details about the call.

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

16. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, March 16, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-16-2024

Key Takeaways:

Northern Gaza Strip: The IDF Nahal Brigade (162nd Division) conducted clearing operations in the northern and central Gaza Strip.
Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved plans for a military operation into Rafah.
Lebanon: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least six attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
West Bank: Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters in at least six locations in the West Bank.

IRAN UPDATE, MARCH 16, 2024

Mar 16, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, March 16, 2024

Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, and Brian Carter

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

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

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

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

CTP-ISW will publish abbreviated updates on March 16 and 17, 2024. Detailed coverage will resume Monday, March 18, 2024

Key Takeaways:

Northern Gaza Strip: The IDF Nahal Brigade (162nd Division) conducted clearing operations in the northern and central Gaza Strip.
Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved plans for a military operation into Rafah.
Lebanon: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least six attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
West Bank: Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian fighters in at least six locations in the West Bank.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Nahal Brigade (162nd Division) conducted clearing operations in the northern and central Gaza Strip on March 16.[1] The IDF Nahal Brigade has been operating at the intersection of the northern and central Gaza Strip for two weeks.[2] Israeli forces are launching raids from the ”Netzarim corridor” targeting Palestinian fighters. The “Netzarim corridor“ is where the IDF has been constructing a highway to support operations in the Gaza Strip.[3] Israeli forces have destroyed Hamas military infrastructure in the area including weapons depots and rocket launchers.

The IDF 215th Artillery Brigade (162nd Division) received intelligence about Palestinian fighters hiding inside a Hamas-affiliated building and directed an airstrike that targeted the fighters.[4] The IDF also killed a Hamas commander of a sniper unit.[5]

Israeli forces continued to conduct clearing operations in Khan Younis on March 16. Israeli infantrymen coordinated with the IDF Air Force to destroy a Hamas weapons depot.[6] Commercially available satellite imagery captured on March 15 shows flattened terrain north of Hamad in northern Khan Younis, indicating that Israeli tanks or bulldozers operated in the area. The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which is the self-proclaimed military wing of Fatah and aligned with Hamas in the war, detonated an unspecified explosive device targeting Israeli forces in Hamad.[7]

Fatah criticized Hamas for opposing PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ appointment of a new prime minister.[8] Hamas stated on March 15 that Abbas’ decision is an “individual decision” that is “devoid of substance,” noting that Palestinians have lost confidence in the PA’s policies.[9] Fatah officials argued that Hamas is responsible for the war in the Gaza Strip and unilaterally conducted the October 7 attack.[10]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved plans on March 15 for a military operation into Rafah.[11] The Prime Minister’s Office did not provide additional details. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the Biden administration has not seen the plan and the Biden administration does not know how Israel plans to protect civilians in Rafah.[12] The IDF said on March 13 that it plans to move civilians from Rafah to “humanitarian enclaves” in the central Gaza Strip before any Israeli offensive into Rafah.[13] There are approximately 1.4 million displaced Palestinian civilians currently in Rafah.

Israeli security officials told the Israeli security cabinet that the Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip on March 11 likely killed Hamas military wing deputy commander Marwan Issa.[14] Israeli media reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Issa’s death is an “is an important and significant achievement for Israel.”[15] Israeli journalists described Issa as the third most senior official in Hamas in the Gaza Strip.[16] Issa worked closely with Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar and Hamas military wing commander Mohammad Deif to plan the October 7 attack.[17]

Palestinian fighters have conducted at least two indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on March 15. PIJ fired rockets targeting Sderot in southern Israel on March 15.[18] Israeli air defenses intercepted one of the rockets and a second rocket landed outside the city.[19] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement fired rockets into southern Israel on March 16.[20] Israeli Army Radio reported red alerts in Nahal Oz on March 16.[21]

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

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Israeli forces have clashed with Palestinian fighters in at least six locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on March 15.[22] An imam from a local mosque fired small arms at an Israeli settlement in Hebron on March 16.[23] Israeli forces later engaged and killed him.[24]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least six attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on March 15.[25]

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

17. Iraq’s Dangerous Mix: 2,500 U.S. Troops, Iran-backed Militias and Battle for Influence

Iraq’s Dangerous Mix: 2,500 U.S. Troops, Iran-backed Militias and Battle for Influence

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/iraqs-dangerous-mix-2500-u-s-troops-iran-backed-militias-and-battle-for-influence

Posted: March 15th, 2024

By Hollie McKay

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING – Almost 21 years after the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, the nation is home to a contest between U.S. and Iranian interests. The war in Gaza has not only made that contest more dangerous for Iraq, it has also raised questions about the U.S. presence in the country.

“Iraq continues to pose a challenge for any successful U.S. policy,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, citing the recent spate of attacks by Iran-backed militias against American targets in Iraq, and calls by the Iraqi government for U.S. forces to leave the country.

For their part, “Iraqi leaders have no choice but to have ties to Iran because it is their largest neighbor, but they don’t trust Iran,” Michael Rubin, the Middle East Forum’s director of policy analysis, told The Cipher Brief. “If Iranians and Americans balance each other out, Iraqis have space to maneuver,” Rubin said. “When there is no balance between Iran and the U.S., Iraqis suffer.”

That balance exists because Iraq hosts armed forces from both the U.S. and Iran. Roughly 2,500 American troops are still there, a vestige of the battle against Islamic State (IS) forces that began a decade ago, and several Iran-supported militias maintain bases inside Iraq. For a time, the dual deployments caused little friction, because the U.S., Iran and Iraq were joined in the goal of driving the IS from the country. Now all that has changed.

Since the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel and the war in Gaza that followed, the Iran-backed militias have regularly targeted Americans in Iraq as well as U.S. forces in Syria – a total of nearly 200 attacks as of early March. The attacks did minimal damage until a January 28 drone strike that killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded 47 others at a remote base along the Syria-Jordan border.

The U.S. has responded with a series of air strikes, many of which have hit targets inside Iraq. Among those killed in the retaliatory bombings was Abu Baqir al-Saadi, a senior member of the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia, an umbrella organization of the Iranian proxies in Iraq. The U.S. claimed that that al-Saadi was “responsible for directly planning and participating in attacks on U.S. forces in the region.”

“The Iranian-backed militias in Iraq’s willingness to attack American targets risk Iraq’s stability and sovereignty,” Rubin said. “The Iraqi government, meanwhile, is increasingly afraid to tackle the militias.”

All this has left the U.S. and Iran trading blows on Iraqi territory, in what has become a dangerous sidebar to the Israel-Hamas war. And the exchanges have left Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in an increasingly precarious position.

“Our land and sovereign authority is not the right place for rival forces to send messages and show their strength,” al-Sudani said last month, after the U.S. killed al-Saadi.

But that is precisely what has happened in Iraq since October 7, and the strikes and counter-strikes carry dangers for all three countries, along with the risk of a wider regional war.

A 2020 assassination

More than three years before the latest Gaza war began, a U.S. military strike in Iraq changed the equation in the country.

On January 3, 2020, an American drone strike killed a leader of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, Qassim Suleimani, at Baghdad International Airport. The U.S. said it targeted Suleimani in retaliation for the killing of an American contractor in northern Iraq, and a history of attacks against American soldiers in the country. Iran vowed a fierce retaliation of its own, and urged Iraq to expel U.S. forces from the country.

The U.S. had pulled its troops from Iraq in 2011, the end of a long and controversial occupation, and returned at the invitation of the Iraqi government in 2014 to join the fight against the Islamic State. And while that battle was effectively won in 2019, the Americans stayed on, in part to ensure that IS forces would not return.

Iran by then held considerable political power in Iraq, and after Suleimani’s death, Iran used its forces in Iraq to take shots at U.S. bases in the country. But it was only after Israel’s invasion of Gaza last October that those attacks rose to another level of frequency and ferocity.

Stay or go?

The current goal for Iran and its Iraq-based proxies is clear: drive the Americans out of Iraq.

“Iran’s network in Iraq has steadily socialized calls for the eviction of U.S. forces while increasingly targeting positions affiliated with the U.S. force presence,” Taleblu told The Cipher Brief. The Iranian strategy, he added, rests on “the hopes of begetting a cycle of violence that can lead to the U.S. being evicted from Iraq.”

To some extent, the strategy is working. The recent strikes have sparked a vigorous debate about the American presence in the region. Some analysts and former military officials believe the Iraq and Syria deployments are more valuable now than they were before October 7, given the spike in regional tensions; others argue the mission isn’t worth the heightened risks, and that the troops’ presence raises the likelihood of tripwires that could lead to a wider war.

After the January 28 strike that killed the three Americans, Bernard Hudson, a former director of counterterrorism at the CIA, told The Cipher Brief that the attack “just underscores the vulnerability that U.S. forces have, scattered and dispersed as they are in Syria and in Iraq.” Even before the attack, Hudson had argued for removing the American troops, referring to them as “folks in harm’s way who can’t be protected and are surrounded by Iranian elements in both countries.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said that the U.S. is reviewing the posture of its troops in Iraq in conjunction with the Iraqi government. And Renad Mansour, Senior Research Fellow at the London-based Chatham House, said that while Iran has a long history of interest in – and conflict with – its Iraqi neighbors, American priorities may lie elsewhere.

“If you look at the Biden administration, before October 7, there was this idea that okay, we’re done with the Middle East,” Mansour told The Cipher Brief. “We have other issues, whether China, Russia, or Ukraine. But for Iran, Iraq will always be a key country.”

But others note that Iran’s power in Iraq is limited as well.

“I wouldn’t overestimate the closeness of Tehran and Baghdad,” said Jonathan Lord, Director for the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “The U.S. is more impactful by far. Iraq’s economy functions courtesy of the U.S. dollar. Its air force flies F-16s. Iran operates within and between the Iraqi institutions that are undergirded and built by Washington. Iran-backed militias can throw fastballs at our heads, but at the end of the day, everyone would be wise to remember the U.S. owns the stadium.”

Lord believes the Biden Administration erred in not recognizing that the mission to defeat the Islamic State had reached the end of its operational usefulness, and that the U.S. should have opened a new dialogue with Baghdad, “more broadly focused on creating lasting and sustainable security institutions in Iraq.”

“Washington needs to couch its Iraq-related policies in a narrative that’s receptive to Iraqis,” Lord said. “The U.S. policy in Iraq shouldn’t even mention Iran. Everything should be couched in the objective of strengthening Iraq’s national sovereignty, Iraq’s economy, and Iraq’s governing institutions.”

The view from Baghdad

For the Iraqi government, the U.S.-Iran balance looks more delicate and dangerous than ever. While Iraqi officials have condemned the attacks against U.S. forces, they have also criticized the U.S. response, particularly the fact that the retaliatory strikes have sometimes hit targets not directly associated with attacks on Americans. And the government has repeated its calls to expel the U.S. troops.

But Lord and others believe that Iraq welcomes the current U.S. presence in ways it won’t acknowledge publicly – in particular as a security and economic partner.

Most Iraqi politicians “recognize the importance of the U.S. relationship,” Lord told The Cipher Brief, “and thus far, it shows. Despite the political narratives and theatrics, nothing has changed, and Iraqis in positions of power would prefer to keep it that way.”

In other words, the calls for the Americans to leave may be meant to assuage public anger, while in private many officials would prefer that they stay. The U.S. has continued to train Iraqi forces, and there is an underlying concern that if those 2,500 American troops leave, the withdrawal might open the door for a revival of the Islamic State in Iraq.

Ultimately, it’s an almost no-win situation for the government in Baghdad. Despite a recent drop in the Iran-backed proxies’ strikes, the low-boil Iran-U.S. conflict continues. Al-Sudani’s foreign affairs advisor told Reuters recently that the Prime Minister “has worked with all relevant parties both inside and outside Iraq, warning them that (escalation) will destabilize Iraq and the region.”

18. Drones Reduce US Military Capabilities

Drones Reduce US Military Capabilities

By Bing West hoover.org4 min

March 15, 2024

View Original

Since 9/11, the U.S. military has employed a handful of long-range drones to acquire intelligence and to strike individual high-value targets. In 2019, Janes defense intelligence group projected that 82,000 drones would be purchased worldwide over the next decade. Then came the Ukraine war. In the past two years, drone warfare has burgeoned. Both Russia and Ukraine aim to produce a million such drones in 2024. No intelligence agency anticipated this enormous growth, fueled by its low costs.

The Ukraine battlefield now buzzes with swarms of First Person View (FPV) drones. Massing artillery, vehicles, or troops are perilous for both sides, thus slowing down maneuver and preventing surprise offensives. Drones pounce on any vehicle or soldier that can be seen, inflicting widespread fear along with tens of thousands of casualties.

Ukraine garage shops are churning out 62 different kinds of FPV drones, using parts from China, the world’s leader in “toy” drones. These tiny Ukrainian drones, costing $300 to $500 each and as rudimentary as bolt-action rifles, offset Russia’s edge in volume of artillery. A Russian 152mm shell costs $600, versus $3,000 to $9,000 for a NATO shell. Consequently, Russians are firing five artillery shells for every NATO-supplied shell fired by the Ukrainians. Equally disturbing, Russia has been jamming the GPS signal guiding HIMARS or Excalibur shells costing $240,000 each. In response, Ukraine is employing drones to direct barrages of “dumb,” less costly artillery shells. Overall, Ukraine is losing over ten thousand of these attritable (suicidal) drones each month. Because, based on data from prior wars, one hundred FPV drones or artillery shells inflict three or fewer casualties, massive numbers of drones (more than a million) are needed to complement as well as substitute for artillery.

The Pentagon, however, abhors cheapness; no production line exists for cheap drones or cheap artillery shells. The Pentagon can’t produce twenty thousand, let alone a million, drones because defense industry prices are prohibitively high. Official procurement figures are classified, but press reports indicate per unit costs for FPV drones vary from $6,000 to $58,000–– twelve to one hundred times more expensive than Ukraine’s home-assembled drones. Congress, however, has not authorized Ukraine to use U.S. funds for its garage-style drone factories.

The same cost disparity affects defense just as much as offense on land. In the past five months, our dozen-odd small bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked more than 170 times by cheap missiles and drones. To shoot them down, the U.S. Army has deployed an interceptor called Coyote that costs $100,000 per shot. In February, the Army contracted for an additional 6,700 Coyote interceptors for $670 million. It would be unsustainable for the United States to deploy forward bases and logistics depots in a major war when defense costs ten to twenty times more than offense.

At sea, the Biden administration, fearful of Putin’s response, has refused to give Ukraine anti-ship missiles. NATO and U.S. warships pulled out of the Black Sea before the war began two years ago, permitting the Russian navy to blockade Ukraine’s grain exports. So Ukraine rigged its own airborne and seaborne drones that sank seven Russian warships, forcing the Black Sea Fleet to retreat and grain exports to resume. In February, a Russian landing ship was sunk, to quote a U.S. Marine general, by “$60,000 worth of jet skis.”

In the Red Sea, it is embarrassing that the U.S. Navy must deploy a multi-billion-dollar carrier task force to semi-contain a tribe of pirates, rather than snuff out the threat. In January and February, U.S. Navy missiles intercepted more than 70 drones fired at vessels in the Red Sea by the Houthi tribe in Yemen. Drone costs to Iran (Houthi’s supplier): $2 million. Costs of the U.S. Navy’s SM-2 missiles fired: $140 million. This is an exorbitant cost to defend vessels against inexpensive drones. We don’t have the magazines or production lines for a full-on fight against China at such cost-exchange ratios.

Ukraine is producing one million drones; imagine how many China will produce. The U.S. Navy is also experimenting with offensive drones, including surface and submersible variants, to sink Chinese ships. One option envisions launching a swarm of 30 Coyotes, priced at $15,000 per unit. Each “swarm” costs $450,000. The Navy won’t do much swarming at that price tag.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced a program to produce thousands of “small, smart, cheap” drones to counter China. All details are classified, even though thousands may eventually be deployed. The per unit cost will range from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only in the Pentagon are per unit costs of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” labelled as “cheap.”

The Deputy Secretary said attritable offensive drones and their cyber/electronic systems will make up half a percent of the Pentagon budget, or about four billion dollars. Half a percent is a public relations gesture, not a serious effort. Judged by the budget rather than the rhetoric, the Pentagon believes offensive drones are a small niche in warfare. No trade-offs with large, expensive mainstay items like aircraft carriers are proposed. The result a few years hence will be twenty or thirty thousand offensive drones with high per unit costs.

Hopefully, the drones will benefit from AI. But to control the development of AI-enhanced weapons, the Pentagon has issued a 21-page bewildering directive that, inter alia, “recognizes privacy and civil liberties…and will establish transparent governance and compliance.” This DOD “compliance” will force AI software to include ideological emendations. How can a drone recognize civil liberties?

Culture eats strategy and paper plans for lunch. And the culture of the American military-industrial complex is fixed upon opulence that is not affordable. The ballooning national debt guarantees there will be no increase in the inadequate defense budget. Our defenses to counter drones cost ten times more than what our enemies are investing in offensive drones. The net result is that drones will reduce U.S. military capabilities because the Pentagon’s budget cannot sustain its expensive tastes.

19. Students without sunlight: the underground schoolkids of Kharkiv

Students without sunlight: the underground schoolkids of Kharkiv

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/students-without-sunlight-the-underground?utm=

They learn in subterranean classrooms, without hopskotch: inside the schools less than 20 miles from the Russian border. Later: how cell phone data could be used to track Zelenskyy - or you.

TIM MAK, CHRISTOPHER ALLBRITTON, AND OKSANA OSTAPCHUK

MAR 17, 2024

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Entering the ‘Metro School’ from the main subway station.

There’s a low rumbling that never quite stops below Kharkiv’s iconic Independence Square.

This morning, the sound is a metro train thundering into Universytet Station, just underneath the school children learning the basics of the four seasons and the seven days of the week.

But the vibrations and sounds can be anxiety-inducing, considering that within just a block or so, this area has been attacked by Russian missiles multiple times. And, being less than 20 miles from the Russian border, it is within range of Russian artillery.

It is here that psychologist Roman Cherkaskiy oversees dozens of children learning underground, in a school purpose-built to keep them safe from attacks.

A tour of one of the underground schools in Kharkiv

Ukraine’s children have been devastated by the outbreak of war – endangering the next generation and the country’s future potential. There have been more than 500 children killed and 1,250 wounded due to the Russian invasion, according to the Ukrainian government.

But the damage doesn’t stop merely at physical harm. Children’s learning has been deeply disturbed by the violence: the constant disruptions of air alarms; growing student anxiety; and a shortage of teaching equipment and reliable internet have contributed to a massive backslide in academic performance: 63 percent of Ukrainian teachers in one survey said that performance has declined.

These are all effects that these schools in Kharkiv are trying to combat – and in particular prevent the frequent disruption of classes by holding them underground.

“In normal schools, when there [is] an air alert, children constantly have to break their educational process in order to go down to the basement,” explained a school district administrator. “Here we actually have a different situation, because the moment we manage to put them here and start their class, they don't have to disrupt their studying process for anything.”

In fall 2023, the local education administrators picked five underground locations that could be used for schools. With funds from the municipal budget, as well as aid from the EU and UNICEF, they converted this former passageway connecting two metro stations into a series of classrooms. The process took about a month.

Roman Cherkaskiy, a school psychologist, speaks right outside the classroom where he works.

Roman always wanted to be a psychologist, but he never expected to be working his dream job here. Among the rumblings and the long pipes filled with ventilated air, parents bring their students to school here each day.

Aside from being one of Kharkiv’s first underground schools, the ‘Metroshkola’, or “Metro-School” in English, is also trying new educational approaches. Each classroom here has both a teacher and a psychologist present at all times.

Standing in front of the sound proofed classroom window that dampens the sounds of the metro below, Roman explains how he tries to dampen the stresses of war, too.

“We talk about everything connected to the war. We explain how to deal with stress independently, who to turn to when you are having a panic attack or if you are stressed or scared,” he said.

A look inside one of the classrooms. In the center is a poster of the Ukrainian trident in front of sunflowers.

But fundamentally, children in Kharkiv are like children from anywhere else.

“[Most people] think ‘Oh, they must have troubles related to the war,’ but no. They have usual kid problems,” Roman told The Counteroffensive. “Like one of them was telling me that they are really concerned that their rabbit is sick. You know, for us, that may sound like something even silly… but they take it really, really seriously. And for them it is an actual problem.”

Despite this not being an ordinary school or an ordinary city, the children are still very much ordinary children. In fact, these children face problems that any child might struggle with:

“We work on how to say ‘no,’ or how to come up to the blackboard… a lot of kids get very stressed when they are being examined by a teacher.”

Having in-person school serves the purpose of getting these young students the necessary socialization they need for healthy development.

Due to a lack of space, students rotate on a daily basis: every other day they show up for in-person classes; on the other days, they will learn online. And even though they’ve built up some capacity, only about three percent of the city’s children – the lucky 2,190 – will be able to use the underground schools.

But the Russian invasion has still robbed them of the fresh air and outdoor playtime that children in safer places get. Being underground, there is no hopskotch, nor ball courts; no place for tag or hide and seek.

Valeriy Shepel (right), from the Kharkiv Department of Education, speaks as our interpreter, Ross Pelekh (left) looks on.

"This is still a city, where, if it's not a missile, then an air alert every ten minutes or something," said Valeriy Shepel, who works for the Kharkiv Department of Education. There’s no way for the children to go outside and play ."Because of the proximity to the [Russian] border here, we don't have time to react."

As we speak, children are constantly coming to and fro, escorted by teachers to the bathroom at the end of the hall – the former subway bathrooms. The children seem somewhat oblivious to the circumstances: this war has now become deeply embedded into their lives now.

VIDEO: Children dancing to music during one of their classes

Just before we depart, we see a teacher start a song and start to dance. The kids jump to their feet and move back and forth excitedly. They wave at the strange journalists who are nearby, perhaps uncertain about why they have such interest in their classes. Other children eagerly eat sandwiches for lunch and laugh with one another.

With all the violence outside, they are very much the definition of innocent kids.

The Ukraine war isn’t merely about soldiers defending their homeland.

These kids are what those soldiers are fighting to defend.

After the paywall: Ukrainian drones target Russia on their election days, and disable Russia’s key oil refineries. In reporter’s notebook, we talk about what it is like to report in Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city — and we interview Byron Tau, the author of ‘Means of Control,’ a book about what happens when consumer data gets in the hands of governments.

NEWS OF THE DAY:

Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands. Here’s what we’re reading today:

Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s election days. The Russian defense ministry has reported 35 Ukrainian drone attacks overnight and into Sunday morning, reports the Guardian. The ministry stated that four drones were downed in the Moscow region, and two each in the neighboring Kaluga and Yaroslavl regions. The remaining drones targeted the Belgorod, Kursk, Rostov, and Krasnodar regions, which border Ukraine. Today is the last day of voting in the rigged Russian elections, which Vladimir Putin is set to win. Some protests remembering former opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, are expected.

Russia decreases arms exports. Russian arms sales in 2023 dropped by 52% compared to 2022, reports Ukrainska Pravda. Last year, Russia restricted the number of its arms trade partners to 12 countries, losing its position as the second-largest global arms exporter. UK Defence Intelligence has attributed the decrease in exports to Russia's mounting losses in Ukraine and the declining international demand due to the associated risk of sanctions.

Ukrainian drones disable 12 Russian oil refineries. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) conducted a drone attack on the Russian oil refinery in Slavyansk-on-Kuban in Krasnodar Krai, causing a massive fire, as reported by The Kyiv Independent. The most recent drone strike marks the 12th Ukrainian attack on Russian oil infrastructure, which collectively accounts for roughly 12% of Russia's overall oil processing capacity.

UK Defense minister cancels Odesa trip over security fears. Britain’s Grant Shapps arrived in Ukraine on 7 March, and was set to meet Volodymyr Zelensky in Odesa. However, according to the UK paper the Sunday Times, he had to abandon the trip after British intelligence warned that the Kremlin knew of the plans. The day before, Russians struck Odesa very close to Zelenskyy’s meeting with the Greek prime minister, killing at least 5 people.

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:

A dark scene in Kharkiv after the lights are turned off in the city center.

We spent the last few days in Kharkiv, a city constantly under bombardment due to its proximity to the Russian border.

There’s a sense of anticipation in the air – Russians who are fighting on behalf of Ukraine recently announced a series of incursions into Russia, and there have been shellings in the Russian region of Belgorod. This all comes as so-called ‘elections’ are taking place in that country.

‘Elections in Russia: It’s a Circus Show’ reads graffiti in Kharkiv.

But the recent Ukrainian incursions mean that Kharkiv residents are bracing for a Russian response – how will they get their revenge for those attacks?

The city is very much more on war footing than Kyiv is. As you can see in the photo above, the city’s lights begin to turn off at 9 p.m. The GPS doesn’t work here – apparently jammed to prevent attacks – meaning in order to travel reliably around the city you have to read maps in a pre-2000s, pre-digital manner: plotting your destination and checking your path against other waypoints along the route.

What I found is that while the residents in this city we talked to are tired, they’re nowhere close to giving up the fight. If you have many thoughts about the war ending soon because of fatigue, I’d suggest you dismiss that quickly.

Before I went to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, I had a long conversation with my good friend Byron Tau, the author of a new book titled ‘Means of Control.’

His book is about the ways that we might be vulnerable to privacy violations due to the technologies we’ve let into our lives; how apparently innocuous data available for sale in public marketplaces can be used to track us.

Governments are surreptitiously obtaining data from private companies in ways that can track persons of interest, for example.

“All of [these technologies] have ways in which data becomes available for either sale or for the taking, and that has remarkable surveillance potential,” Tau said. “[This] is transforming everything from public safety and law enforcement to intelligence and military operations.”

One example that comes up in the book is that Google Maps inadvertently revealed details of military movements. In another case, one Russian submarine commander who used to log his runs on the Strava app was potentially targeted for an assassination based on those exercise habits.

“Ukraine is just the most vivid demonstration of the reality of modern warfare that, you know, that everyone's carrying cell phones and cell phones are a lifeline in many ways for soldiers to communicate back home,” Tau explained. “But those cell phones generate tremendous amounts of data, and that data is militarily useful.”

A key area that Tau explores is how consumer advertising data – meant to help companies better target potential customers – can have dangerous effects when used in specific ways. A Pentagon demonstration of how this could be used involved tracking the position of Vladimir Putin by assembling the entourage of phone signals that seemed to move everywhere he did.

“They weren't getting data from the Russian president himself. But, you know, his staff is a proxy for him,” Tau explained. “And you could see, and map out these networks of people around world leaders. And that also includes us world leaders.”

“And you could do the same thing for Volodymyr Zelenskyy,” I said.

Tau responded, “You're only as good as the people around you, even if they've locked down Volodymyr Zelenskyy's phone.”

The book is an important reminder of how much information we have each ceded to private companies through our data, and how governments around the world – friendly or autocratic – can take advantage of that information on the open markets.

Today’s Cat of Conflict is is this fancy kitten yawning on the steps of clothing store in Kyiv!

Stay safe out there.

Best,

Tim

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3 Restacks

A guest post by

Christopher Allbritton

Founder of Back-to-Iraq.com, OG crowdfunded war correspondent, former Time Magazine reporter in Iraq and Reuters Bureau Chief in Pakistan and lover of cats (and dogs).

20. Will Political Hatred Spill Into the Streets?

We should all ask ourselves, if the election does not go your way will we "participate in the bloodshed" as some have called for?"

Is that how you defend the Constitution of the United States?

Will Political Hatred Spill Into the Streets?

The atmosphere in Biden-Trump America carries the odor of Weimar Germany or Chicago in 1968.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-political-hatred-spill-into-the-streets-riots-2024-presidential-election-trump-biden-f441f12b?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

By Lance Morrow

March 15, 2024 2:01 pm ET

Outside the Hilton in Chicago, Aug. 29, 1968. PHOTO: MICHAEL BOYER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

My mother hated Richard Nixon. She knew him when they were both young in Washington in the 1940s. He was an ambitious young congressman from California, and she wrote a weekly column for the Knight Syndicate and occasional articles for the Saturday Evening Post. They would sometimes run into each other at political dinners, like the one at the Shoreham Hotel one night when they both got a little drunk. Nixon couldn’t hold his liquor—his dark eyes, almost obsidian, would look wet, and he would slur a bit. My mother thought she could outdrink any man living. “Dick,” she told him, “you ought to get out of politics. You don’t like people, so why don’t you do everyone a favor and give it up?”

Nixon called my father next morning at his office and said in that growling basso of his: “Hugh, can’t you control your wife?”

The family thought the story was funny—typical Nixon, typical Mom—and passed it along down the years. But my mother’s hatred was serious and enduring. She really hated Nixon, and the hatred became, as it were, an aspect of her personality. Lots of people felt hatred toward Nixon. Hers lasted until her death in 2008. If I had mentioned his name to her on her death bed, her last words would have been: “That son of a bitch!”

I’m fascinated by politicians who are capable of arousing that kind of personal loathing. It’s the negative side of charisma—political magnetism as a repellent force, a pure distillate, well beyond the ambit of manners or compromise, demonic almost. The antimatter of politics.

Franklin D. Roosevelt brought forth that sort of hatred, especially on Wall Street: “That man!” was the withering understatement. Those of us who lived through the 1960s recall the visceral, unappeasable hatred that many Americans, especially young men vulnerable to the draft, felt for Lyndon Johnson. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The rage and loathing spilled into the streets during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was on Michigan Avenue outside the Hilton that I witnessed the purest and most violent demonstration of the kind of political hatred I’m talking about: National Guardsmen on one side of the barbed wire, Yippies and hippies and other ragamuffins on the other, most wearing football helmets to protect their skulls against what they knew was coming.

Sure enough, the spectacle of mutual political hatred enacted itself with the precision of Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. The protesters provoked; the cops poured out of Balbo Drive, a side street, waving riot clubs. They went to work on the football helmets or unprotected skull bones of the young. Blood flowed.

Likability and loathability, a political version of the good-cop-bad-cop routine, alternate in an approximate way in American history. No presidents, whatever their politics, were as likable, in an iconically American style, as Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Both turned sunny charisma to considerable—even historic—advantage.

But sometimes politicians suffer from what might be called a deficit of detestability. One glum day in January 1988, I was seated at the counter of a diner in New Hampshire, stirring a cup of tepid coffee. Beside me sat Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, a candidate for president. He was taking a break from the campaign. No one in the diner recognized him or paid the slightest attention to him. He had the snub nose, china-blue eyes and bleached-white eyebrows of a middle-aged altar boy, an air of vanilla innocence—of harmlessness that was almost embarrassing. He seemed a little disconsolate. We were talking about George Wallace’s fiery campaign for president in 1972 and the day someone shot him in a parking lot in Laurel, Md.

On an impulse, I asked Mr. Gephardt: “Do you ever get assassination threats?”

A faraway, wistful look came into his eyes, and he said: “Jeez, I wish.”

Although he won the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Gephardt’s campaign fizzled and he dropped out in March.

The Democratic field, which briefly included Sen. Joe Biden, was called the “Seven Dwarfs.” The party’s eventual nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, was a nice guy who lost in November to another nice guy, Vice President George H.W. Bush, “the last gentleman.” Bush, just in time, had fallen under the influence of a bare-knuckled political manager named Lee Atwater, who played dirty. Newsweek had published a cover story suggesting Bush was a “wimp”—entirely too much of a gentleman—and so for the duration of the ’88 campaign he impersonated a nasty brawler and good old boy who claimed that he loved to eat pork rinds and listen to country music. He went around saying “read my lips” and talking tough on crime, harping on the case of Willie Horton, a murderer who brutalized a Maryland couple while on furlough from prison in Mr. Dukakis’s Massachusetts.

For all that, nobody managed to hate George H.W. Bush very much. He was the sort of man who wrote thank-you notes, in longhand, on the same day, and no one quite hates a man like that. It remained for his son, George W. Bush, to arouse spasms of real loathing.

It’s the memory of Chicago in 1968, I’m afraid, that gives me a premonition of the presidential campaign of 2024. It’s possible that neither human nature nor political dynamics have changed much in the 56 years between then and now. If anything, both have deteriorated. This summer, the Democrats are again meeting in Chicago.

If there ever was a figure capable of conjuring up the kind of visceral hatred that my sainted mother used to feel, it is Donald Trump. If Messrs. Gephardt and Dukakis appeared in a police lineup next to Mr. Trump, they would look like a pair of accountants standing beside “Gorgeous George,” the professional wrestler of the 1940s and ’50s. George had long, dyed-platinum hair, a sequined robe and a ring valet named “Jeffries” who escorted him into the ring carrying a silver mirror and a vial of Chanel No. 5 with which he disinfected the ambient squalor. Gorgeous George’s motto was “Always cheat.” He did. He became, in wrestling terms, an immensely successful “heel.”

Mr. Trump has expanded and developed the theme: the heel as hero—the political outlaw, the white heartland’s Pancho Villa or Stagger Lee. Louisiana’s Huey Long played that role so successfully during the 1930s that the mighty FDR feared him. Mr. Trump’s fan base sticks with him no matter what. He is their favorite wrestler. Criminal indictments only strengthen his appeal. As a lightning rod of loathing, Mr. Trump is unlike anything previously seen in American politics. If he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, MAGA would praise his marksmanship and his demonstration of the Second Amendment in action. My mother had a vivid vocabulary; I can imagine the tirade she would have emitted at the mention of “President Trump.”

Here is the dark side: Politics in a democracy must rely on spoken and written language—on rhetoric, homiletics, invective. Its disputes and even hatreds must be rendered physically harmless, and at least half-civilized, by being translated into words. When Americans reach the limits of their political vocabularies, the game becomes dangerous. Sticks and stones will break your bones, and people will start setting things on fire. Mom, with her resources of billingsgate, never became violent. (In any case, she was 5-foot-1.)

This year—and it’s only March—the idiom of hatred, especially the invective directed at Mr. Trump and the equal-and-opposite invective fired back, has advanced to the brink of violence. The George Floyd summer, I’m afraid, was a foretaste of things to come.

The comparison of Mr. Trump to Hitler, the 20th century’s ne plus ultra of evil, has become a cliché. There they go again. A once-mighty insult, grown familiar and exhausted by overuse, tends to lose its power with the general public, if not with the accuser. When language becomes impotent, people reach for their clubs.

Maybe things will work out. But it’s the Weimar comparison—not the Hitler part, but the general disintegration—that comes back with an ugly pertinence. German political dialogue took to the streets, and the world became infinitely worse.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”

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