Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“If the literature we read does not wake us, why do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

- Franz Kafka

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”

- Ernest Hemingway

"A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue."

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 25, 2023

2. Opinion | The dollar is our superpower, and Russia and China are threatening it

3. Eisenhower, Dulles, and USIA: can the past provide lessons for the present? (Or, “The rhyming history of US public diplomacy”)

4. Russia Calls for U.N. Investigation of Nord Stream Attack, as Hersh Accuses White House of False Flag

5. The Russo-Ukrainian war and the illegal arms trade

6. In a New Cold War, Diplomacy Matters More Than Might

7. Putin Says He Could Put Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Belarus by Summer

8. Opinion | Was Iraq a Worse Disaster for America Than Vietnam?

9. Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans

10. Term of Art: What Joint Doctrine Gets Wrong about Operational Art and Why It Matters

11. Musicians of Mars in Multiple Domains: Expanding Combined Arms in the Twenty-First Century

12. Why is the US sending 'downgraded' weaponry to Ukraine?

13. Army pulls ‘Be All You Can Be’ ads after on-screen narrator arrested

14. ChatGPT just plugged itself into the internet. What next?

15. Stockpiling US arms in Taiwan a vital move

16. US X-Plane concept aims to redefine amphibious warfareUS X-Plane concept aims to redefine amphibious warfare

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 25, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-25-2023

Key Takeaways

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the predictable next information operation to discourage Ukrainian resistance and disrupt Western support for Ukraine as Russian offensives culminate and Ukraine prepares to launch counter-offensives in an interview with a state-owned Russian news channel on March 25.
Putin pushed the false narrative that the West cannot sustain weapons provision to Ukraine due to limited Western production and hyperbolized Russia’s potential to mobilize its own defense industrial base (DIB).
Putin advanced another information operation by announcing that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus by July 1 and renewed tired information operations about the potential for nuclear escalation.
Russian conventional forces may intervene in Wagner Group’s offensive around Bakhmut to prevent the offensive from culminating prematurely.
Russian forces do not have the degree of fire control over Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and likely other areas of the front that Russian milbloggers claim.
Russian forces conducted limited attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and gained limited ground in the city.
Russian forces reportedly conducted a mass rotation of forces in Nova Kakhovka on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin accused Russian authorities on March 25 of rewriting history to cut out Wagner by forcing state-controlled media outlet RT to cut some coverage of the Wagner Group.
The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on March 24 that Moscow elites are competing for funding to “restore” occupied territories and really plan to use the projects to further their own interests.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 25, 2023

Mar 25, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 25, 2023

Angela Howard, Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan

March 25, 10 pm ET

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

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the predictable next information operation to discourage Ukrainian resistance and disrupt Western support for Ukraine as Russian offensives culminate and Ukraine prepares to launch counter-offensives in an interview with a state-owned Russian news channel on March 25.[1]

Putin claimed that the West cannot sustain weapons provisions to Ukraine and exaggerated Russia’s potential to mobilize its own defense industrial base (DIB) to create the false impression that further Ukrainian resistance and Western support to Ukraine is futile. Putin claimed that Ukrainian forces expend up to 5,000 shells a day, while the United States produces an average of 14,000–15,000 shells a month. Putin alleged that planned Western defense production increases will not match Russian planned increases. Putin announced that Russia will build over 1,600 new tanks by the end of 2023 and that Russia will have more than three times the number of tanks as Ukraine at that time.[2] Putin likely seized the opportunity to advance this narrative based on The Financial Times’s March 19 report that European arms manufacturers are “hobbled” by an explosives shortage.[3] Putin argued that continued Western weapons provisions to Ukraine are merely an attempt to prolong the war.[4]

Putin compared the state of the Russian wartime DIB with current Western military industrial outputs, stating that the West would need to make significant sacrifices to civilian projects to increase military production to support war in Ukraine. Putin added that unlike the West, Russia does not need excessive militarization of the economy to expand its DIB capabilities. These claims are not supportable. The US GDP alone is 10 times the size of Russia’s. Germany, the UK, and France together have economies nearly five times the size of Russia’s.[5] The US and its allies certainly must make choices when considering spending the large sums required to support Ukraine, but the choices they face are nothing like as hard as those confronting Russia. The balance of overall available resources and industrial capacity is decisively weighted toward the West. Russian military industrial potential is, in fact, hopelessly outmatched by Western military industrial potential. Putin’s messaging is intended to persuade the West to commit less of that potential to supporting Ukraine by convincing the West, falsely, that it cannot match Russia. Russia must move to a full war footing to sustain its current military operations—something Putin has been very reluctant to do. The West does not need to shift to a wartime footing to continue to support Ukraine if it chooses to do so.

Putin’s stated goals for Russian tank production in 2023 and comparisons with Ukrainian tank stocks also disregard Russia’s limited industrial capacity to produce more advanced tanks rapidly and ignore Russian tank losses on the battlefield. Russia’s sole tank production factory, UralVagonZavod, reportedly produces 20 tanks a month.[6] It would take over six years to meet Putin’s goal at that rate. UralVagonZavod is unlikely to expand production of modern tanks such as the T-90 rapidly enough to meet these targets in nine months due to international sanctions and shortages of skilled labor.[7] The Kremlin will thus likely continue to pull archaic tanks from storage and may attempt to refurbish some older tanks to meet the stated quota. A Kremlin pundit stated on a live broadcast on March 25 that Russia would pull old T-34 tanks from storage and monuments if needed for the war effort while attempting to justify Russia’s recent deployments of the T-54 and T-55 tanks to the frontlines.[8] These tanks are not comparable to modern Abrams, Challenger, or Leopard tanks, or even to T-72s, in either armament or armor protection.

Even Putin’s announced (and unrealistic) production targets are actually close to the minimum level required to replace Russian battlefield losses. Russia has reportedly been losing 150 tanks per month and so would need to produce 1,350 tanks in the next nine months merely to remain at current levels.[9]

Putin’s observations also ignore the fact that the West has been providing Ukraine with smaller numbers of technologically advanced systems in part to offset the requirement to send masses of ammunition and equipment. Western militaries have historically held lower stocks of conventional artillery rounds, for example, because they rely on precision long-range fires such as the HIMARS systems the US has provided Ukraine. The Ukrainian military and its Western backers can confidently expect that loss rates in tank duels between M1s, Leopards, and Challengers, on the one hand, and T-55s, T-62s, or even T-72s, on the other, will be far from one-to-one. The US military, after all, has repeatedly demonstrated the relative effectiveness of M1s and T-72s on the battlefields of Iraq.

Putin’s comments are an information operation designed to revive the aura of Soviet-era military industry and massed forces. They do not reflect current Russian realities or the balance of economic power or military industrial capacity between Russia and the collective West.

Putin advanced another information operation by announcing that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus by July 1 and renewed tired information operations about the potential for nuclear escalation. Putin implied that the United Kingdom’s (UK) decision to send munitions containing depleted uranium – uranium that is significantly less radioactive than natural uranium – to Ukraine triggered his decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus for fear of nuclear escalation. Putin rejected Western statements that such munitions are safe to use and do not contain radioactive components. Putin insisted that the projectile core releases “radiation dust” and may sicken Ukrainian citizens and damage Ukraine’s environment.[10] Western anti-tank munitions commonly contain depleted uranium, which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) notes is “very suitable for military uses.”[11] Such munitions cannot be used to create either nuclear or radiological weapons.[12] Putin’s argument is false-to-fact, and even some domestic audiences likely realize it. A prominent Russian milblogger on March 25 challenged Putin’s argument and stated that it the Western provision of depleted uranium rounds is not a ”real problem.”[13] Putin’s concern for the well-being of the environment in Ukraine, furthermore, appears somewhat misplaced considering the massive damage Russian forces have inflicted on Ukraine’s agricultural lands, to say nothing of Ukraine’s cities and people. If Putin really is so concerned about the future of Ukraine’s ecology he could best serve it by withdrawing from Ukraine and allowing Ukraine and the rest of the world to begin repairing the damage the Russian invasion has caused.

The announcement of the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus is irrelevant to the risk of escalation to nuclear war, which remains extremely low. Putin is attempting to exploit Western fears of nuclear escalation by deploying tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. Russia has long fielded nuclear-capable weapons able to strike any target that tactical nuclear weapons based in Belarus could hit. ISW continues to assess that Putin is a risk-averse actor who repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons without any intention of following through in order to break Western resolve.[14] The Financial Times further reported on March 24 that EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell stated that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Russia reduced the chance that Russia forces would use nuclear weapons because Xi made it “very, very clear” to Putin that he should not deploy nuclear weapons.[15]

Putin has likely sought to deploy Russian nuclear weapons to Belarus since before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and has likely chosen this moment to do so in order to serve the immediate information operation he is now conducting. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko offered to host Russia nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory on November 30, 2021, and Belarus removed the constitutional clause enshrining Belarus’ neutral status in a referendum in February 2022.[16] ISW forecasted in January and February 2022 that Putin might seek to deploy tactical or strategic nuclear weapons to Belarus as part of a broader effort to deepen Russian control over Belarus.[17] Putin likely refrained from deploying the weapons to Belarus at the start of the 2022 invasion in order to preserve the option to deploy them as part of a future Russian information operation to manipulate the West.

Putin likely chose to push these narratives now in hopes of diminishing Ukrainian morale and Western aid to diminish the effectiveness of a rumored pending Ukrainian counteroffensive. Many prominent Russian milbloggers and officials warned that Ukrainian forces will likely attempt a major counteroffensive soon.[18] Putin’s actions suggest that he agrees and that he fears the potential success of a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Putin and senior Kremlin officials have previously leveraged narratives around Russian heightened nuclear readiness, false flag warnings, and vague statements about negative battlefield developments claiming that Russia is entitled to use nuclear weapons to defend itself in Ukraine in order to deter further Western support for or military aid to Ukraine.[19] ISW has previously reported on Putin’s escalation of nuclear rhetoric in September and October 2022 followed by a de-escalation in early November 2022 before the Russian loss of Kherson City and west (right) bank Kherson Oblast and assessed that the Kremlin might leverage further nuclear escalation rhetoric to coerce Western states to negotiate with Russia and halt further military aid to Ukraine.[20] ISW assesses that Putin's March 25 announcement is part of this effort and continues to assess that Russia is very unlikely to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine or elsewhere.

Ukrainian and Western officials offered various views of the state of the Russian offensive in Bakhmut on March 25, but all are consistent with the assessment that the Russian effort around Bakhmut is likely culminating. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (MoD) assessed on March 25 that the Russian offensive against Bakhmut is stalling and that Russian forces may shift their focus to the Avdiivka and Svatove-Kreminna areas.[21] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty cautioned that the recent decrease in reported Russian ground assaults near Bakhmut needs further analysis. Cherevaty also stated that unspecified Russian conventional forces are reinforcing Wagner Group forces, suggesting that Russian conventional forces are intervening to prevent the Wagner offensive from culminating prematurely.[22] Cherevaty noted that Russian forces conducted 18 ground attacks near Bakhmut on March 25 but recently conducted 40–50 attacks a day in the area, suggesting that exhausted Wagner forces are unable to sustain their prior tempo of operations alone but may increase their tempo to earlier levels with assistance from Russian conventional forces.[23] Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander in Chief General Valery Zaluzhny stated that the Bakhmut situation is stabilizing.[24] These statements are not mutually exclusive, however, and the Russian effort against Bakhmut is likely culminating. Russian forces may continue to attack Bakhmut frequently and aggressively even if the offensive has culminated with little to no success, as ISW has previously assessed, as culmination does not mean the absence of fighting.[25] Russian attacks in and around Bakhmut may resume at high levels without generating significant new gains if conventional Russian forces do, in fact, enter the fray. The commitment of conventional reserves could even prevent the attack from culminating and generate operationally significant advances or persuade Ukrainian forces to withdraw, although ISW regards those eventualities as unlikely at this time.

Russian forces do not have the degree of fire control over Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and likely other areas of the front that Russian milbloggers claim, further undermining the Russian effort to take Bakhmut. Recent footage shows that Ukrainian forces remain able to drive on the Bakhmut-Chasiv Yar and Bakhmut-Khromove roads despite Russian artillery targeting the Ukrainian vehicles.[26] Russian milbloggers likely based their fire control claims on Russian artillery system ranges, but even Russian ground advances close to these GLOCs have failed to prevent Ukrainian vehicles from using them at least on a small scale. Geolocated footage posted on March 25 shows that Wagner Group forces have crossed the T0504 but remain unable to establish sustained positions that would cut the GLOC.[27]

Key Takeaways

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the predictable next information operation to discourage Ukrainian resistance and disrupt Western support for Ukraine as Russian offensives culminate and Ukraine prepares to launch counter-offensives in an interview with a state-owned Russian news channel on March 25.
Putin pushed the false narrative that the West cannot sustain weapons provision to Ukraine due to limited Western production and hyperbolized Russia’s potential to mobilize its own defense industrial base (DIB).
Putin advanced another information operation by announcing that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus by July 1 and renewed tired information operations about the potential for nuclear escalation.
Russian conventional forces may intervene in Wagner Group’s offensive around Bakhmut to prevent the offensive from culminating prematurely.
Russian forces do not have the degree of fire control over Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and likely other areas of the front that Russian milbloggers claim.
Russian forces conducted limited attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and gained limited ground in the city.
Russian forces reportedly conducted a mass rotation of forces in Nova Kakhovka on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin accused Russian authorities on March 25 of rewriting history to cut out Wagner by forcing state-controlled media outlet RT to cut some coverage of the Wagner Group.
The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on March 24 that Moscow elites are competing for funding to “restore” occupied territories and really plan to use the projects to further their own interests.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and 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 Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1— Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and continue offensive operations into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk on March 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Hryanykivka (17km northeast of Kupyansk) and Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk).[28] Footage published on March 25 purportedly shows drone operators of the 138th Motorized Rifle Brigade (6th Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) striking Ukrainian positions in an unspecified location in Kharkiv Oblast.[29] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated that Russian forces are failing to make decisive advances along the Kupyansk-Lyman line despite using conventional units that act more cautiously, conduct reconnaissance, and use artillery.[30] Russian Western Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Sergey Zybinsky claimed that Russian forces destroyed five Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups in the Kupyansk direction and prevented Ukrainian forces from transferring troops to the Dvorichna (17km northeast of Kupyansk) area.[31] Zybinsky also claimed that Russian forces disrupted three Ukrainian forces’ troop rotations near Synkivka, Berestove (26km southeast of Kupyansk), and Myasozharivka (35km southeast of Kupyansk).[32] Kharkiv Oblast Occupation Administration Head Vitaly Ganchev claimed that Russian forces control 29 settlements in Kharkiv Oblast, claiming that Russian forces seized an additional nine settlements since Ganchev’s last statement on February 15.[33]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kremmina line on March 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), the Serebrianska forest area (10km south of Kreminna), Bilohorivka (11km south of Kreminna), Spirne (25km south of Kreminna), and Vyimka (26km south of Kreminna).[34] Geolocated footage published on March 24 indicates that Russian forces made a limited advance near Kovalivka (10km southwest of Svatove) and Verkhnokamianske (21km south of Kremmina).[35] A Russian milblogger claimed on March 25 that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked in the direction of Terny, Nevske, and Makiivka (within 21km northwest of Kreminna) and made marginal advances near Bilohorivka.[36]

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

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks in and around Bakhmut and gained ground in the city on March 25. Geolocated footage posted on March 25 shows that Russian forces have advanced up the T0513 highway in Bakhmut towards the city center and marginally in southwestern Bakhmut.[37] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks in Bakhmut, northwest of Bakhmut near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest) and Bohdanivka (5km northwest), and southwest of Bakhmut near Ivanivske (3km southwest), Stupochky (10km southwest), and Predtechyne (12km southwest).[38] Russian milbloggers also claimed that fighting is ongoing north of Bakhmut, in the Bakhmut city center, and southwest of Bakhmut, and that Russian forces gained ground in southwestern Bakhmut.[39] One Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced north of Bakhmut near Orikhovo-Vasylivka and Bohdanivka.[40] Geolocated footage posted on March 24 shows that Ukrainian forces regained some ground along the E40 highway north of Bakhmut during a recent counterattack, however.[41]

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on March 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Keramik (10km north of Avdiivka), Stepove (5km northwest of Avdiivka), Avdiivka, Tonenke (6km west of Avdiivka), Sieverne (5km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske, (11km southwest of Avdiivka) and Marinka.[42] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces continue attempting to approach Avdiivka from the north near Berdychi, Novobakhmutivka, Novokalynove, and Stepove, and from the south rather than conduct frontal assaults directly against the city.[43] Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting continues in western Marinka (4km west of Donetsk City).[44] Former Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) People’s Militia Spokesperson Eduard Basurin claimed that Ukrainian defenses in both Avdiivka and Bakhmut will collapse once Russian forces cut all GLOCs to the cities, and former Russian officer and convicted war criminal Igor Girkin attacked Basurin for stating the obvious.[45]

Russian forces continue to integrate irregular DNR forces into conventional Russian formations in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area. A group of Russian soldiers of the “Shtorm” formation claimed to be part of the 5th Brigade (1st Army Corps, 8th Guards Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District), indicating that Russia continues to formally integrate DNR and Russian conventional forces and deploy them along the same axes of advance.[46] Other Russian sources, including the Russian Ministry of Defense and DNR, claimed that Russian Southern Military District elements and the 1454th Self Propelled Artillery Regiment, 132nd Motorized Rifle Brigade, and 58th Spetsnaz Battalions (all of the 1st Army Corps) continue to operate in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City direction.[47]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on March 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Vuhledar and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[48] Russian forces continued to strike frontline areas in western Donetsk Oblast.[49]

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

Russian forces reportedly conducted a mass rotation of forces in Nova Kakhovka on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River. Head of the Ukrainian Southern Forces Joint Coordination Press Center Nataliya Humenyuk stated on March 25 that Russian forces conducted a mass rotation in Nova Kakhovka, which led Ukrainian military command to conclude that Russian forces had left city and share incorrect information.[50] Humenyuk noted that Russian forces usually arrive as part of a rotation, which Russian forces use to restore combat units that have returned from hot spots. The Ukrainian General Staff previously reported that Russian forces had left Nova Kakhovka on March 22, and quickly corrected itself to say that Russian forces maintain positions in the settlement.[51]

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Head Rafael Grossi will travel to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) next week. The IAEA announced on March 25 that Grossi will travel to the ZNPP to assess the nuclear safety and security at the facility and emphasize the need to protect it.[52] Grossi stated that the situation at the ZNPP has evolved since he last visited in September 2022, and he plans to talk with unspecified personnel operating the ZNPP. The IAEA also stated that Grossi’s visit aims to make sure the IAEA conducts its regular personnel rotation, as its prior rotation was delayed by over a month due to security issues.

Russian forces conducted routine shelling in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts on March 25.[53] Geolocated footage published on March 24 shows Ukrainian forces striking a Russian fuel depot in Nova Zburivka (24km southwest of Kherson City) and a Russian missile system south of Hola Prystan (21km southwest of Kherson City).[54]

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

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin accused Russian authorities on March 25 of rewriting the history of the war in Ukraine to cut out Wagner. Prigozhin claimed that unspecified Russian authorities forced state-controlled media outlet RT – which has consistently promoted Wagner operations in Ukraine – to cut the first half of a film on the role of Russian convicts in the war because it centered on the Wagner Group. Prigozhin claimed that Russian authorities want to convince the populace that “pomaded generals” in fancy offices really won the war.[55] This allegation, if true, may represent a new Kremlin strategy for limiting Prigozhin’s influence. Such censorship may also indicate that the Kremlin is becoming more sensitive to Prigozhin’s use of select Russian state media platforms to advertise himself and his forces.

Prigozhin continued to attack those who question the legitimacy of Wagner convict-soldiers and to fight for increased privileges for convict-soldiers. Prigozhin claimed on March 25 that Wagner’s 5,000 released convict-soldiers have a 0.3 percent recidivism rate within the first month of returning from the front lines in Ukraine.[56] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that this rate is far lower than the average for Russian criminals.[57] Prigozhin attacked a St. Petersburg local news outlet for calling the former Wagner soldiers “pardoned criminals” and amplifying the number of pardoned criminals released rather than their allegedly low recidivism rates.[58] Prigozhin’s statements also indicate that Wagner forces have likely released at least 5,000 servicemen at the end of their six-month contracts. The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) had previously assessed that Wagner would begin to experience personnel shortages as more convicts finish their contracts in the upcoming weeks.[59] Prigozhin also claimed that he appealed to Moscow Oblast Governor Andrey Vorobyov to allow him to construct a psychological treatment center for former convict soldiers in one of Moscow’s most upscale neighborhoods.[60]

Russian Head of the Foundation for the Defense of National Values — a Wagner Group public relations arm — Maxim Shugaley appealed to Russian Duma Defense Committee Chairman Andrey Kartopolov on March 25 and asked Kartopolov to consider legislation allowing contract and mobilized soldiers to serve in private military groups (PMCs) instead of in the Russian Armed Forces.[61] A prominent Russian milblogger amplified this open letter and implied that the freedom to choose to serve in PMCs would likely reveal shortcomings in the Russian Armed Forces if many soldiers chose to transfer, since soldiers would not seek to transfer out of good divisions.[62] Shugaley claimed that he “constantly” receives requests from contract and mobilized soldiers seeking to transfer to Wagner.[63] The European Union imposed sanctions on Shugaley in February 2023 due to his deep ties to Wagner.[64]

Russian leaks channel VChK-OGPU claimed on March 24 that Russian Duma deputy Dmitry Sablin will head a new Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS) volunteer detachment intended for Russia’s political elite to check the box of participating in the war in Ukraine.[65] Russian politicians will likely keep this unit far from the front lines or any unpleasant task while using their “service” to combat criticism that they are detached from the war.

Some Russian soldiers and civilians continue limited resistance to mobilization, criticism of mobilization implementation, and protests against the war in Ukraine.[66]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on March 24 that Moscow elites are competing for funding to “restore” occupied territories and really plan to use the projects to further their own interests.[67] Members of the Russian elite likely plan to divert funding to their own accounts while complying with the Kremlin’s primary interest: creating propaganda about Kremlin infrastructure projects. The Ukrainian Resistance Center noted that the Kremlin may be destroying infrastructure in occupied cities deliberately to blame the destruction on Ukrainians and create an ideal situation for restoration propaganda. The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated that top Kremlin officials have plans to construct “dummy” infrastructure to simulate investment in rebuilding efforts.

Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov stated on March 25 that Russian occupation authorities and Ukrainian collaborators held a secret meeting wherein they prepared plans to evacuate from Zaporizhia Oblast.[68] Such preparations are understandable due to pervasive Russian fear of a pending Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast, on which ISW has previously reported.[69] The reported readiness of occupation authorities to evacuate suggests that occupation authorities may have low confidence in the ability of Russian forces to stop a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The United Nations (UN) Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine released a report on March 24 investigating Russian and Ukrainian treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) and the impacts of the war on civilians.[70] The mission found that some soldiers in both Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted extrajudicial executions and mistreated some POWs. Russian human rights violations and violations of the international rules of war were significantly more severe and expansive than Ukrainian violations, however, according to the report. Multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions hold states rather than individuals responsible for war crimes depending on the state’s willingness to identify, investigate, and punish individual violators and take measures to prevent violations.[71] The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission noted that Ukrainian officials provided full access to the mission’s investigators and launched investigations into allegations raised by the UN.[72] Russian authorities refused to cooperate with investigators.[73]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.)

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on March 24 that the active phase of special training of the Belarusian signal forces is ending. The Belarusian MoD claimed that this training will support Belarusian command and control in the 2023 Belarusian-Russian Union Shield exercise scheduled for September 22-26.[74]

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.

[1] https://tass dot ru/politika/17369311; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369319; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369337; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369347; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369361; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369369; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369385; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369391; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369419; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369451; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369477; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369519; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369587

[2] https://tass dot ru/politika/17369311; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369319; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369337; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369347; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369361; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369369; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369385; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369391; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369419; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369451; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369477; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369519; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369587

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/aee0e1a1-c464-4af9-a1c8-73fcbc46ed17

[4] https://tass dot ru/politika/17369311; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369319; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369337; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369347; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369361; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369369; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369385; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369391; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369419; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369451; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369477; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369519; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369587

[5] Report for Selected Countries and Subjects (imf.org)

[6] https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Offensive...

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

[8] https://t.me/milinfolive/98451; https://twitter.com/oleksiireznikov/sta...

[9] https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Offensive...

[10] https://tass dot ru/politika/17369311; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369319; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369337; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369347; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369361; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369369; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369385; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369391; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369419; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369451; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/17369429; https://tass dot ru/ekonomika/17369477; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369519; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369527; https://tass dot ru/politika/17369587

[11] https://www.iaea.org/topics/spent-fuel-management/depleted-uranium; htt...

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

[13] https://t.me/vysokygovorit/11120

[14] https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/special-report-assessing-putin...

[15] https://www.ft.com/content/8f895b27-9e16-47b4-8608-dbd002facd65?fbclid=I... cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202302/t20230224_11030713.html

[16] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russia-review-december-1-2...

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-update-15

[17] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russia-review-december-1-2... https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/ukraine-conflict-update-15

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

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

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

[21] https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1639515935580225537

[22] https://suspilne.media/425031-mzs-sprostuvalo-zaavi-oon-sodo-zorstokogo-... https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/03/25/bahmut-zalyshayetsya-epiczentrom-bojovyh-dij-polkovnyk-sergij-cherevatyj/

[23] https://suspilne.media/425031-mzs-sprostuvalo-zaavi-oon-sodo-zorstokogo-... https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/03/25/bahmut-zalyshayetsya-epiczentrom-bojovyh-dij-polkovnyk-sergij-cherevatyj/

[24] https://suspilne dot media/424989-zaluznij-proviv-rozmovu-z-ocilnikom-zbrojnih-sil-britanii-pro-so-govorili/

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

[26] https://www.facebook.com/reel/1312155032681624/?s=single_unit; https://t.me/voenacher/41839; https://t.me/rybar/45035; https://t.me/R... https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639552215227543552

[27] https://twitter.com/Danspiun/status/1639673120939298816?s=20 ; https://twitter.com/PaulJawin/status/1639645881111650304?s=20 ; https://twitter.com/neonhandrail/status/1639674863702122496?s=20

[28] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0Fhj5Z12p7CSrUjvnZn5...

[29] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/81332

[30] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/03/25/bahmut-zalyshayetsya-epiczentrom-bojovyh-dij-polkovnyk-sergij-cherevatyj/

[31] https://t.me/readovkanews/55434

[32] https://t.me/readovkanews/55434

[33] https://t.me/readovkanews/52707; https://t.me/readovkanews/55432

[34] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0Fhj5Z12p7CSrUjvnZn5...

[35] https://twitter.com/DefMon3/status/1639342501059260416; https://twitter...

[36] https://t.me/wargonzo/11595

[37] https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1639392848779915267?s=20 ; https://twitter.com/War_cube_/status/1639581933905608705?s=20

[38] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0qzYwonWYeX9foRZcAS7... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0Fhj5Z12p7CSrUjvnZn5...

[39] https://t.me/milchronicles/1705; https://t.me/wargonzo/11595; https://... https://t.me/basurin_e/340

[40] https://t.me/readovkanews/55427

[41] https://t.me/aerobomber/72 ; https://twitter.com/Militarylandnet/status/1639354584064745476 ; https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1639286432702377986?s=20 ; https://twitter.com/xzerrrl/status/1639341567910486017?s=20

[42] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0qzYwonWYeX9foRZcAS7... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0Fhj5Z12p7CSrUjvnZn5...

[43] https://t.me/wargonzo/11595; https://t.me/readovkanews/55427

[44] https://t.me/wargonzo/11595; https://t.me/readovkanews/55427

[45] https://t.me/basurin_e/341; https://t.me/donbassr/36125; https://t.me/Ags_Donbass/157579; https://t.me/donbassr/36125; https://t.me/donrf22/17956; https://t.me/strelkovii/4340

[46] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639304993369993217; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639305673304424454?s=20; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639306689366183936?s=20; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639307839071035393?s=20

[47] https://t.me/mod_russia/25090; https://t.me/mod_russia/25089; https://t.me/nm_dnr/10048; https://t.me/epoddubny/15262; https://t.me/... https://t.me/milinfolive/98462; https://t.me/DRO_Wolves/666

[48] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0Fhj5Z12p7CSrUjvnZn5...

[49] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0Fhj5Z12p7CSrUjvnZn5...

[50] https://suspilne dot media/425343-rosijska-armia-provela-masovanu-rotaciu-gumenuk-pro-situaciu-v-novij-kahovci/

[51] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0fjgcEcq3ygTfLezopEA...

[52] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-director-general-gros...

[53] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0qzYwonWYeX9foRZcAS7...

[54] https://twitter.com/Danspiun/status/1639625648619520000?s=20; https://t...

[55] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/642

[56] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/640

[57] https://t.me/sashakots/39023

[58] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/641

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

[60] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/643

[61] https://eur-lex dot europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32023R0430; https://t.me/max_shugaley/693

[62] https://t.me/vysokygovorit/11121

[63] https://t.me/max_shugaley/693

[64] https://eur-lex dot europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32023R0430

[65] https://t.me/vchkogpu/37323

[66] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639304993369993217; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1639305673304424454?; https://t...

[67] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/03/24/chorna-byudzhetna-dira-na-tot-dlya-okupantiv/

[68] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/1570

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

[70] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/03/25/v-oon-zayavili-chto-k-ubiystvam-voennoplennyh-prichastny-kak-rossiya-tak-i-ukraina; https://ukraine.un.org/uk/224744-%D1%83%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D1...

[71] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/pt/customary-ihl/v2/rule157#:~:text=Under...

[72] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/03/25/v-oon-zayavili-chto-k-ubiystvam-voennoplennyh-prichastny-kak-rossiya-tak-i-ukraina; https://ukraine.un.org/uk/224744-%D1%83%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D1...

[73] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/03/25/v-oon-zayavili-chto-k-ubiystvam-voennoplennyh-prichastny-kak-rossiya-tak-i-ukraina; https://ukraine.un.org/uk/224744-%D1%83%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D1...

[74] https://t.me/modmilby/24831; https://eng.belta dot by/society/view/russia-to-host-belarusian-russian-army-exercise-union-shield-on-22-26-september-156799-2023/

Opinion | The dollar is our superpower, and Russia and China are threatening it

The Washington Post · by Fareed Zakaria · March 24, 2023

The most interesting outcome of the three-day summit between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping got limited media attention. Describing their talks, Putin said, “We are in favor of using the Chinese yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.” So the world’s second-largest economy and its largest energy exporter are actively trying to dent the dollar’s dominance as the anchor of the international financial system. Will they succeed?

The dollar is America’s superpower. It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.

Sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine combined with Washington’s increasingly confrontational approach to China have created a perfect storm in which both Russia and China are accelerating efforts to diversify away from the dollar. Their central banks are keeping less of their reserves in dollars, and most trade between them is being settled in the yuan. They are also, as Putin noted, making efforts to get other countries to follow suit.

The Biden administration has handled the economic war against Russia extremely effectively by building a coalition in support of Ukraine that includes almost all the world’s advanced economies. That makes it hard to escape from the dollar into other highly valued stable currencies such as the euro or the pound or the Canadian dollar, because those countries are also countering Russia.

Follow Fareed Zakaria's opinionsFollow

What might have been a sharper turning point for the dollar’s role was President Donald Trump’s decision in May 2018 to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and impose sanctions. The European Union, strenuously opposed to this move, watched as the dollar’s dominance meant that Iran was immediately excluded from much of the world economy, including its trading partners in Europe. Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the European Commission, proposed enhancing the euro’s role internationally to shield the continent from “selfish unilateralism.” The commission outlined a path to achieve this goal.

That hasn’t happened; there remain too many fundamental doubts about the future of the euro itself. Dollar dominance is firmly entrenched, for many good reasons. A globalized economy needs a single currency for ease and efficiency. The dollar is stable; you can buy and sell it anytime, and it is governed largely by the market and not a government’s whims. That’s why China’s efforts to expand the yuan’s role internationally have not worked. Ironically, if Xi wanted to cause the greatest pain to the United States, he would liberalize his financial sector and make the yuan a true competitor to the dollar, but that would take him in the direction of markets and openness that are the opposite of his own domestic goals.

All that said, Washington’s weaponizing of the dollar over the past decade has led many important countries to search for ways to make sure that they do not become the next Russia. The share of dollars in global central bank reserves has dropped from roughly 70 percent 20 years ago to less than 60 percent today, and falling steadily. The Europeans and the Chinese are trying to build international payment systems outside of the dollar-dominated SWIFT system. Saudi Arabia has flirted with the idea of pricing its oil in yuan. India is settling most of its oil purchases from Russia in nondollar currencies. Digital currencies, which are being explored by most nations, might be another alternative; in fact, China’s central bank has created one. All of these alternatives add costs, but the past few years should have taught us that nations are increasingly willing to pay a price for achieving political goals.

We keep searching for the single replacement for the dollar, and there will not be one. But could the currency suffer weakness by a thousand cuts? That seems a more likely scenario. The author and investor Ruchir Sharma points out, “Right now, for the first time in my memory, we have an international financial crisis in which the dollar has been weakening rather than strengthening. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come.”

If it is, Americans should worry. I wrote last week about the bad geopolitical habits Washington has developed because of its unrivaled unipolar status. That attitude is even more true economically. America’s politicians have gotten used to spending seemingly without any concerns about deficits — public debt has risen almost fivefold from roughly $6.5 trillion 20 years ago to $31.5 trillion today. The Fed has solved a series of financial crashes by massively expanding its balance sheet twelvefold, from around $730 billion 20 years ago to about $8.7 trillion today. All of this only works because of the dollar’s unique status. If that wanes, America will face a reckoning like none before.

The Washington Post · by Fareed Zakaria · March 24, 2023

3. Eisenhower, Dulles, and USIA: can the past provide lessons for the present? (Or, “The rhyming history of US public diplomacy”)

Few of us really understand this history of public diplomacy. We can see that in all the calls for re-establishing USIA. We are fortunate to have Mat Armstrong's experience, and deep historical knowledge due to his research to give us a better understanding of public diplomacy.

Ponder this conclusion:

To wrap up this really long item, the depth and breadth of discussions stand out for me about this episode. This stuff mattered, and people paid attention and sought solutions. This is in stark contrast to the present, where actions (i.e., spuriously creating new offices, appointments based on certain qualifications, lack of other appointments, lack of accountability, etc.) speak louder than the few words, too many of which are absurdly ill-informed, uttered around these topics.

Eisenhower, Dulles, and USIA: can the past provide lessons for the present? (Or, “The rhyming history of US public diplomacy”)

mountainrunner.us · by View all posts by Matt Armstrong

This post ~~first~~ appeared at mountainrunner.substack.com on 7 February 2023. It has been modified slightly for clarity. Subscribe to my free substack for new posts through email, the web, or through the substack app. Posts are copied here when I get around to it. However, in the case of this post, it originated here at the MountainRunner blog in September 2018 before going to the substack, so now it has returned in a revised form.

I started to write a different article that opened with this question: Can a term represent both a symptom and cause of a dumpster fire? Yes, unequivocally. The term in question is “public diplomacy,” and it was adopted – it was not “coined,” please stop writing it was “coined” – in 1965 as part of a public relations campaign to further segregate and elevate the activities of one bureaucracy to be at least on par with another. The US Information Agency operated for more than a decade without this term, and the State Department had managed to run more than USIA’s relatively small portfolio for nearly a decade prior. Despite this, there is surprisingly little serious inquiry let alone understanding into why “public diplomacy” emerged in 1965 as part of a name at a center established at Tufts University. I don’t want, nor do I really have the time right now, so read my chapter on Google Books that discusses the common use of the term before 1965. For now, it is easy to stipulate the confusion around what is, and is not public diplomacy, and who does, and does not, “do” public diplomacy, derives from its original application to an agency and not to activities, methods, or outcomes. The result has been catastrophic programmatically, conceptually, and organizationally.

Due to other priorities, what followed that opening began to take more time and energy than I have, so that’s on hold. In place of that, below is a version of a post published on mountainrunner.us in September 2018. Besides correcting some misinformation – and, arguably, disinformation – around the Smith-Mundt Act, it may provide some relevant forgotten history for those interested in “public diplomacy,” information warfare, etc., today.

On Friday morning, January 18, 1957, Arthur Larson gave a lengthy and wide-ranging presentation on the United States Information Agency to President Eisenhower’s cabinet. After a 22-month stint as undersecretary at the Labor Department, and now one month as USIA Director, Larson used charts, maps, and film clips to describe the agency, then a little more than three years old. The nearly three dozen attendees included the President, Vice President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell.

Larson focused on the agency’s importance to the entire government, emphasizing the agency’s role at the center of a whole of government effort. Larson described “the need for the help of all Cabinet members since the program for telling the United States’ story can succeed only if everyone in public and private life is alert to the impact of our actions on world opinion.”

At the end of his nearly ninety-minute briefing, he made three specific requests to the cabinet. First, every department and agency needed to designate a liaison – a “watchdog,” as he called it – to stay on top of USIA’s activities and maintain conversations between their agency and both the State Department and USIA. Second, these liaisons must regularly meet as a group. And third, the briefing presented to the cabinet be repeated for the “top officials of each agency.”

The meeting minutes reflected the cabinet concurred with each request. The cabinet also “decided to ensure that the foreign opinion factor would be weighed in deciding upon actions and statements and that the Department of State and USIA would be informed in advance when such actions or statements would have an impact abroad.”

Attorney General Brownell inquired about “the foundation for charges by the press that USIA was engaged in undue competition with the regularly established press.” Congress threatened to limit or reduce USIA’s budget as a response to these concerns. In modern academic reviews, the nature of these charges would have different meanings, but that’s for a different time.

Members of Congress were channeling a few wire services, some newspapers, and the National Broadcasting Corporation. Not all of the media leveled these charges. The Associated Press and, to a lesser extent, the United Press pressed the competition argument since the government’s peacetime broadcasting plan started to form in October 1945. Such was the climate when Ike appointed Larson, a former Rhodes scholar and law professor, as Director of the agency.

In 1946, the American Society of Newspaper Editors dismissed the bulk of the AP’s concerns, concluding that “the present uncertainties in international relations justify an effort by the United States Government to make its activities and its policies clear to the people of the world through the agency set up in the State Department.” ASNE agreed with the State Department’s position that the government was intended only to fill in “the gaps where private agencies don’t do the job.”

The AP frequently raised the point that since the Kremlin’s media used the AP wire service, this meant western information got into Russia and a US government news program, first in the form of Voice of America and later more broadly as part of the State Department’s US Information Service, were unnecessary. This argument was countered by other media leaders who noted that Moscow was selective in which stories from the AP and the stories were carefully edited. As for other nations, the AP’s chief, Kent Cooper, would later say that “all countries of any importance actually avail themselves” of news of the American wire services. As the State Department pointed out at the time, many of the countries, the department intended to engage, such as Russia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Iran, “either do not get these reports or [Soviet Union-related services] process them beyond recognition.” An analysis requested by the State Department in 1946 found significant limitations in the ability of private agencies to deliver information abroad as structural problems in critical markets prevented private enterprises, whether American or otherwise, from operating effectively or at all.

As the war of ideologies proceeds, people in Europe are being super-saturated with statized propaganda. This is dramatically shown by the poor response to Russian movies even in countries like Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the full power of the regime is thrownbehind them. In contrast, there is a refreshing quality of interest and believability in America’s free and uncensored movies, books, magazines, and newspapers — where they can get through. [Emphasis in the original]

But, in too many places they are not getting through. It is naive to say “Let private enterprise carry the ball,” and at the same time ignore the fact that there are widening areas in which private enterprise can no longer operate in a normal manner.

The structural problems limiting private media from effectively operating in these markets ranged from currency conversation challenges to infrastructure to censorship. The report laid out three categories of countries. In “Free Zone” countries–including Canada, Cuba, and Mexico–commercial media had access and the potential for profits (that could be repatriated). “Iron Curtain” countries – Russia and Yugoslavia – were where a private operation was virtually impossible, commercial opportunities non-existent, and the state threatened potential consumers. The third category, “Mixed,” was “shaky” countries–including France and Italy–where a combined effort by private and government was necessary, partly because a distinguishing feature of these markets was the non-convertibility of currency that limited incentives for U.S. media.

The May 1947 version of a bill known as the Smith-Mundt Act contained language to directly address competition concerns like those of the APs.

[T]he Secretary shall encourage and facilitate by appropriate means the dissemination abroad of information about the United States by private American individuals and agencies, shall supplement such private information dissemination where necessary, and shall reduce such Government information activities whenever corresponding private information dissemination is found to be adequate.

Through various markups, this language evolved until the final Smith-Mundt Act was signed into law by Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948. The original Section 502 was split into two: Section 502 (“Policies Governing Information Activities”) and Section 1005 (“Utilization of Private Agencies”).

In authorizing international information activities under this Act, it is the sense of the Congress (1) that the Secretary shall reduce such Government information activities whenever corresponding private information dissemination is found to be adequate; (2) that nothing in this Act shall be construed to give the Department a monopoly in the production or sponsorship on the air of short-wave broadcasting programs, or a monopoly on any other medium of information.

In carrying out the provisions of this Act it shall be the duty of the Secretary to utilize, to the maximum extent practicable, the services and facilities of private agencies, including existing American press, publishing, radio, motion picture, and other agencies, through contractual arrangements or otherwise. It is the intent of Congress that the Secretary shall encourage participation in carrying out the purposes of this Act by the maximum number of different private agencies in each field consistent with the present or potential market for their services in each country.

Both of these protections remain today. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 specifically called out both in Section 208, the passage addressing concerns of domestic dissemination of information by the agencies covered by the Act, where were the then-Broadcasting Board of Governors and the public diplomacy elements of the State Department. The concern about domestic access to these programs, including radio broadcasting, did not exist for the first two decades of Smith-Mundt. It was not the mid-1960s when Senator J. William Fulbright tried to abolish USIA, VOA, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty, which he described in 1972 as “cold war relics.” Fulbright’s attack included requiring USIA be reauthorized annually and amending Smith-Mundt in a way that began falsely casting the law as an “anti-propaganda” law, a narrative that would be cemented in 1985 by Senator Edward Zorinsky.

However, when Larson took over USIA near the end of 1956, the repeating cycle of charges of unfair competition with private agencies did have some truth. Foreign papers were using USIA’s news services delivered over the air and in print instead of paying for American wire services or entering into contracts with American newspapers. Congress and State Department intended that the information service use, to the “maximum extent practicable, the services and facilities of private agencies, including existing American press, publishing, radio, motion picture, and other agencies, through contractual arrangements or otherwise. This did happen at first, but it was curtailed quickly in 1946 due to a lack of oversight over programs written and produced by contractors (one of the examples is, separated by time, humorous). Through a separate amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, the Informational Media Guarantee, passed as part of the European Recovery Program, provided an additional channel to support the distribution of domestic media (often books and films) abroad. But the specter of competition, real or perceived, remained.

The Attorney General’s question sparked discussion beyond the cabinet meeting. An Editorial Note posted on the State Department Historian’s website about the cabinet meeting above first appeared in the 1987 publication of Volume IX (“Foreign Economic Policy; Foreign Information Program”) of the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957. This Editorial Note came to my attention because of what it suggests: that the Eisenhower Administration considered abolishing USIA in 1957, barely four years after creating it.

The Historian’s three-decade-old Editorial Note requires context. The following four points, three of which begin with a passage from the Editorial Note, provide the background I believe is necessary to understand the commentary better.

First point:

In an April 26 request to C.D. Jackson, USIA Deputy Director Washburn cited the anti-USIA campaign by Roy Howard [of Scripps-Howard News Service] and criticism by the Information Chief of NBC as contributing to the USIA Congressional problems. In a memorandum of May 14 [1957], USIA Director Larson asked David G. Briggs, IPS, to investigate complaints from the United Press and Associated Press about USIA press file competition. Larson was especially concerned over the charges made by Frank J. Starsel, General Manager of the Associated Press, to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate Democratic leader and Appropriations Committee Chairman, that USIA was carrying on unfair competition against private United States press agencies.

Opposition to the State Department’s news division focused on, but not limited to, the broadcasting entity inherited from the abolishment of OWI on Aug 31, 1945, and known as the Voice of America, came from a minority of the American news media. As described above, the AP led the opposition, but the UP soon joined them. The AP’s resistance began after Reuters, its partner in a global news cartel, felt attacked by how it was portrayed in two brief footnotes in a report about the postwar information environment commissioned by the State Department in early 1945.

The dust-up between the AP and State was so intense by January 1946 that Congress stopped working on the legislation that would later become the Smith-Mundt Act. This bill gave permanent authorization for information and exchange programs of all kinds. The majority of the US media, including the International News Service (INS), William Randolph Hearst’s service, and later the “I” in UPI when the two merged later, supported the foreign intervention by State. This collective bunch, including those who opposed government radio before the war. Among the supportive journalists and editors was Mark Ethridge, who had been hired by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1938 to oppose Congressional attempts to launch a government radio service aimed at Latin America. But in 1946, Ethridge described the AP and UP as “exceedingly smug in their assumption they are the sole possessors of purity.” He criticized the wire services for imagining they could penetrate countries “where they cannot go” at a time “when we are trying to win the peace—now, while we are in an ideological war.”

The AP, however, argued it had demonstrable reach abroad, citing its contracts abroad, including behind the Iron Curtain, such as TASS, the Russian news agency. Most in the media and government found this unconvincing owing to the Kremlin’s penchant for being highly selective and often re-editing stories. Many in the American press also highlighted the inconsistency of the AP refusing to sell its service to the State Department on the grounds the AP would be tainted by association with a government broadcaster while having no such qualm selling to Moscow. (As an aside, the AP successfully campaigned to keep VOA out of the Senate press gallery for decades until the 1980s, long after Moscow’s news services were allowed in.)

Second Point:

After hearing opposition to the proposal by his staff, Secretary Dulles on May 17 expressed his objections to the President of any absorption by the Department of State of USIA. The President, who initially voiced some support for the measure, authorized Dulles to maintain his stand against a merger of USIA with the Department of State.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was against State having a non-traditional role in diplomacy. He supported the creation of USIA in 1953, which was the natural result of State’s rejection of the public diplomacy programs it was charged with beginning in late 1945 by Executive Order and through early 1948 through appropriations, and finally from early 1948 on by legislative authority (the Smith-Mundt Act) onward. About that time, incidentally, Dulles argued for the need for a separate government agency “dedicated to the task of nonmilitary defense” with “adequate personnel and ample funds.”

Creating USIA and removing the information and (some) cultural programs from the State Department reduced the department’s workforce by 40%. In addition to the broadcasting service, there were extensive information programs involving posters, books, movies, libraries, training, and exchanges of all types – technical, governmental, cultural, and educational – that require “front line” staff (i.e., public affairs officers) and “back office.” By reducing the headcount and simplifying the department’s mission, the Secretary could focus on the traditional role of a foreign ministry. Such was the claim at the time. Dulles supported the split and did not want USIA’s operations to return four years later when USIA’s staff numbered around 7,000.

The argument to create USIA in the first place was because State was again rejecting and refusing to acknowledge a role in direct engagement abroad (the department similarly refused to engage in 1916 and 1938, and both times resulted in the creation of agencies designed to bypass the department: the foreign section of the Committee on Public Information and later the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs). The people who were in place in 1945-1947 that brought about the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act that made these programs permanent were gone by 1949. People like C.D. Jackson and Nelson Rockefeller, who previously supported State owning these responsibilities, came to accept creating a separate USIA as long as certain conditions were satisfied. Spoiler: the conditions were not met, and the short-lived International Information Administration was snuffed out by Dulles, who rejected an operational role for the department. In his autobiography, Dean Acheson lamented how the department rejected various operational responsibilities, from information to economic warfare to intelligence. (In his book, Present at the Creation, see chapter 18, called “The Department Muffs Its Intelligence Role,” and a few pages at the end of chapter 17.)

When Eisenhower created USIA, the information piece was the lesser of a two-part government reorganization along the organizationally focused DIME (Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economics) model. In 1953, the new Eisenhower Administration consolidated foreign policymaking and execution by streamlining leadership, authorities, and appropriations. While some argued against this separation, those supported it, especially at the State Department. The administration tried to move “separate and self-contained pieces” of the foreign policy process under a single leadership through two plans. A single roof would increase efficiency and efficacy through synchronization, reduce costs, and simplify interaction with Congress. The first, Plan No. 7, established the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) by consolidating several foreign affairs and aid activities under one roof. FOA was a hybrid agency bringing together Treasury, Defense, and State, with State being the greater of among equals. The second, Plan No. 8, created USIA, which State supported so it could return to what it viewed as its “traditional” role in diplomacy.

Also, it is important to remember Senator Fulbright’s tepid support in 1953 Plan No. 8. He expected USIA would be shuttered within three years, or “maybe 10.” Whether intentional or not, ten years later, he began attacking the agency with vigor, as briefly mentioned above.

Third Point:

On May 29, Congress sent to the President a bill providing $96.2 million for the USIA 1958 budget. Part of the bill included a provision barring USIA from competing with or duplicating the services of private agencies in news or pictures.

As noted above, the Smith-Mundt Act already has a non-compete clause. This language also doubled as a sunset clause to shutter the activities. In short, the government would defer to private media whenever possible and reduce activities when the private press was deemed adequate. The redundancy of this text highlights reflects the agency’s failure to support the existing law (i.e., the language appears as a stern reminder), a breakdown of the Hill to exercise oversight over the authorities granted in legislation or lip service to the news media.

Fourth and final Point:

Not found in the Historian’s note is the overall opposition and confusion over what USIA was and was not. By the mid-1950s, discussions about the ongoing political warfare of the “cold war” (which would not be a capitalized proper noun for another decade) were happening in Congress, in newspapers and magazines, and on radio news programs. While some in Congress were interested in vigorously defending against and fighting Russian subversion (aka “political warfare,” sometimes today referred to as “hybrid warfare” or “information warfare“) and USIA was simply not a part of that conversation as it was not charged with, resourced, or trained to counter Russian political warfare. There were also concerns about USIA being “un-American” because, in part, of certain books available in USIA’s libraries abroad.

Also, not in the Editorial Note was the cause of the repurposing of the term “public diplomacy.” In the 1950s, public diplomacy was a diplomat leaving a closed-door negotiation and speaking to the press because the other side, often the Americans, did so (if they did). By the 1960s, “public diplomacy” emerged to stake out important turf that was not “diplomacy.” This was part of an effort to intentionally place USIA and its FSIOs (Foreign Service Information Officers) on equal footing with State and FSOs.

After Dulles asked his staff whether USIA should be reincorporated into State, he reversed his apparent willingness to entertain the merger. Congress would continue to pressure USIA, with some seeking to end the agency’s “semi-autonomous” status while eliminating redundancies by merging USIA into State. The House proposed reducing the $144 million budget by nearly 10%, while the Senate discussed cutting more than 30% of the budget. In the end, the budget was cut by 33%. And there was Arthur Larson, who was seen as a “propagandist” for Eisenhower more than the country. Larson would remain at USIA for less than a year, leaving in October 1957 to become a special assistant to the president. Larson was succeeded by Ambassador George V. Allen, a career diplomat who previously served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, 1948-1950. (Allen was one of two career Foreign Service Officers confirmed as Director of USIA. This is in contrast to not a single career Foreign Service Officer being nominated to be the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.) In that role, he managed the international information programs, exchange programs, and radio broadcasting operations than in the State Department before they were removed in 1953 to form USIA. When Allen took over, his “minor” problems were described as “slumping morale, administrative laxness, and a dearth of first-class information experts.” The major problem was three fundamental questions voiced by an increasing number in Congress: why does the agency exist? what job should it do? and what status should it hold in the hierarchy of the Executive?

USIA would continue to be a separate agency until it was abolished in 1999 following an April 1997 agreement. Today, there are calls to recreate USIA, most of which are ill-informed on what USIA was and was not, and none consider substantial organization questions. Today, like in 1997 and 1957, when Allen took over, the three fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Can we learn lessons from Arthur Larson’s briefing and the subsequent discussion? First, we need the president and the cabinet to accept the necessity of coordination and collaboration on policies, particularly regarding the information environment. Second, there is no practical separation of “there” from “here,” as reflected in Eisenhower’s statement, “Everything we say and do, and everything we fail to say and do, will have an impact in other lands.” This is more true than when Ike said it, but it was true nonetheless (this was and remains particularly true in regard to problems in the US with civil rights). Third, there are political risks when the president installs a political actor as the central head of information. Republicans and Democrats alike did not like Larson, which led to a less-than-year-long tenure as director.

To wrap up this really long item, the depth and breadth of discussions stand out for me about this episode. This stuff mattered, and people paid attention and sought solutions. This is in stark contrast to the present, where actions (i.e., spuriously creating new offices, appointments based on certain qualifications, lack of other appointments, lack of accountability, etc.) speak louder than the few words, too many of which are absurdly ill-informed, uttered around these topics.

Footnotes

1 This oft-heard statement that it was coined, such as with this statement at USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, accessed today (7 Feb ‘23), is not accurate, a reality revealed by a simple inquiry and Gullion’s own words: “As coined in the mid-1960s by former U.S. diplomat Edmund Gullion, public diplomacy was developed partly to distance overseas governmental information activities from the term propaganda, which had acquired pejorative connotations.” For a brief discussion on the term, see my chapter Operationalizing Public Diplomacy (2020).

2 Consider the emergence of “global public affairs,” a lovely distortion when considering public affairs had been global until “public diplomacy” came around. For what it’s worth, and our rejection of even knowing our history confirms it’s not worth much, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, originally “for Public and Cultural Relations,” was charged with global informational and engagement activities with a breadth far greater than USIA ever had. And then there’s “domestic public diplomacy,” which… never mind…

3 Memo from William Nichols to Howland Sargeant, “Private Enterprise and the U.S. Information Program — Preliminary Report.” October 18, 1947.

4 Section 502 of HR 3342 “United States Information and Exchange Act of 1947,” as of May 13, 1947.

5 Section 502, Public Law 80-402

6 Section 1005, Public Law 80-402

7 In early 1972, Fulbright declared, “These radios [VOA, RFE, and RL] should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold war relics.” Source: Gwertzman, Bernard, “Funding Near End for U.s. Stations Aimed At Red Bloc.” The New York Times, February 21, 1972. This isn’t commonly known, and less commonly known is a retort given by Leopold Labedz. Testifying before a Senate committee commenting on what he described as Fulbright’s “semantic blackmail” around USIA, Labedz questioned the Senator’s dominance in the subject: “Looking at the voting record of the union Senator from Arkansas Negro rights, I wonder why nobody refers to him as a ‘relic of the Second Zulu War.’” Personally, I suggest Fulbright be referred to as a false deity of public diplomacy as he is held out as a great person in this area even though he, by far, did more damage to US public diplomacy efforts and organization than any single person. Source: Negotiation and Statecraft Hearings, Ninety-Third Congress, First Session. Pursuant to Section 4, Senate Resolution 46, 93d Congress [and Section 4, Senate Resolution 49, 94th Congress] (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1973), p66.

8 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v09/d203

9 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v09/d203

10 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v09/d203

mountainrunner.us · by View all posts by Matt Armstrong

4. Russia Calls for U.N. Investigation of Nord Stream Attack, as Hersh Accuses White House of False Flag

Are Hersh and Scahill supporting Russian disinformation?

Russia Calls for U.N. Investigation of Nord Stream Attack, as Hersh Accuses White House of False Flag

Moscow claims Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are engaged in a U.S.-backed cover-up, as the war to control the narrative — and the evidence — intensifies.

Jeremy Scahill

March 25 2023, 1:40 p.m.

The Intercept · by Jeremy Scahill · March 25, 2023

The Russian government has accused Germany, Denmark, and Sweden of a cover-up in their investigations into the sabotage attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines last September. Moscow, with the support of China, plans to introduce a resolution before the United Nations Security Council on Monday calling for an independent international investigation.

The White House declined to answer questions from The Intercept about whether the U.S. has ordered its own investigation, saying only that it is supporting its allies in their individual probes. Germany, along with Denmark and Sweden, are each conducting separate investigations but say they are cooperating with one another.

In a series of letters to European governments and the United States in February, made public by Moscow earlier this month, Russian officials complained that they have been barred from examining evidence gathered from the sites where the blasts occurred. Despite Russia’s majority ownership of the pipelines, Russian officials said, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden have rejected Russia’s repeated requests for a joint investigation — confirming their “suspicions that these countries are trying to conceal evidence, or to cover up the sponsors and perpetrators of these acts of sabotages.”

Russia has been doing its own investigation into the sabotage, including underwater surveys. It has not, to date, released any forensic evidence to support its assertion that “Anglo-Saxon” powers or the U.S. were behind the explosions. At a U.N. Security Council meeting in February, Russia’s representative Vassily Nebenzia cited investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report accusing the U.S. of carrying out the attack. “This journalist is telling the truth,” he said. “This is more than just a smoking gun that detectives love in Hollywood blockbusters. It’s a basic principle of justice; everything is in your hands, and we can resolve this today.”

I’m in

Denmark and Sweden have cited procedural matters and national regulations as to why they aren’t collaborating with Russia. But it’s pretty obvious that they have also adopted the position that Russia should be viewed as a suspect in the sabotage and wouldn’t want to invite it into the probe, particularly given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It should be noted that Sweden also refused an official joint investigation with its own allies from the onset, opting for a less formal cooperative arrangement. German officials have publicly confirmed their investigation into a “pro-Ukrainian” group and its possible connection to the attack on the pipeline, but have also cautioned that it could be a “false flag” intended to conceal the sponsor.

Russia’s recent maneuvers signal that it is becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric toward the two Scandinavian nations and Germany and is breaking some diplomatic protocols by making public its private communications with various nations. It is effectively arguing that the three national probes, which are backed by the U.S., are part of the Nord Stream bombing plot, and it wants to pull the U.N. in, where Russia would find a more neutral audience than NATO or the European Union. The backdrop to all of this, of course, is the public display of Russia-China unity that’s unfolded over the past year, culminating with President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow. China, which is officially co-sponsoring the Russian resolution, has said it believes the attack was carried out by a state actor and that a U.N. investigation is needed to “uncover the truth and identify those responsible.”

Underwater Evidence?

Almost immediately after the pipeline explosion on September 26, 2022, the Russian government asked the governments of Sweden, Germany, and Denmark to participate in their national investigations into “deliberate acts of sabotage” against “one of the most important investment projects of the Russian Federation.” All three governments rejected Russia’s requests, and Moscow has said that they are not sharing any meaningful information with Russian authorities.

That position is hardly surprising given the war in Ukraine and the massive NATO and European weapons shipments aimed at defeating Moscow. Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Vladimir Barbin, has been outspoken in his criticisms of the Danish government’s refusal to cooperate with Russia. He has rejected speculation Russia was behind the attacks, saying that its ships did not have access to the waters where the explosives were placed. “The preparation of such attacks requires time and direct presence in the area of sabotage, which was carried out in the exclusive economic zones of Denmark and Sweden,” Barbin said. “The Russian side, unlike the others, did not have permission for any underwater work or research in this area before the gas pipelines were blown up.”

Russia is effectively arguing that the three national probes, which are backed by the U.S., are part of the Nord Stream bombing plot.

The sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines occurred in the Baltic Sea waters stretching around the Danish island of Bornholm and extending to the southeast of the Swedish coast. The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, nestled between Lithuania and Poland, is to the east of the area. The Nord Stream pipelines are majority-owned by Russia’s state-run energy firm Gazprom.

In contrast to Barbin’s contentions, a new report published by the German outlet T-Online, asserts that Russian vessels, possibly including a mini-submarine, were operating in the waters near the blast sites days before the sabotage. The article cites open-source satellite data and relied on information provided by an anonymous “intelligence source.”

On February 17, the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry fired off letters not only to Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, but also to the U.S. and Norway, charging an apparent cover-up. On March 1, Russia submitted its correspondence with those nations to the U.N. Security Council as part of Moscow’s push for the U.N. to initiate its own independent probe of the Nord Stream attack.

The U.S., which opposes the resolution, has portrayed Russia’s efforts to litigate the pipeline bombing at the security council as a “blatant attempt to distract” from its yearlong war in Ukraine. In a joint letter submitted to the council in late February, Germany, Sweden and Denmark claimed, “Russian authorities have been informed regarding the ongoing investigations,” adding that the three nations “have been in dialogue regarding the investigation of the gas leaks, and the dialogue will continue to the relevant extent.”

On February 21, a Gazprom-contracted ship doing a survey discovered an antenna-like device that Russia alleged might be a component of the materials used in the sabotage of the pipeline or part of a triggering mechanism for an unexploded bomb on an underwater pipe. “Specialists believe it might be an antenna to receive a signal to detonate an explosive device that could have been — I’m not certain, but it’s possible — planted under the pipeline system,” said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in an interview with Russian television on March 14. “It appears that several explosive devices were planted,” Putin said, adding, “Some of them went off, and some didn’t. The reasons are unclear.”

He also alleged that the device was discovered attached to an undersea pipe junction on the only string of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline where no explosion was registered last September. “We would like to receive permission from the Danish government [to] conduct the necessary examination either on our own, or jointly with them,” Putin said. “Better yet, establish an international group of experts and bomb engineers that could work at a depth like that. And if need be, to defuse the explosive device, of course, if there is one down there.” Putin said his government had made discreet inquiries to the Danish authorities proposing a joint effort. “Their response was ambiguous,” he said. “To put it bluntly, there was really no answer at all. They said that [we] need to wait.”

Denmark’s government ultimately confirmed that there was an object in the area identified by the Russians and that it was investigating. There was a flurry of activity in late March — with Danish military vessels and diving ships congregating in the waters around the site identified by the personnel aboard the Glomar Worker, the ship that reportedly found the suspicious object. On March 21, the Danish newspaper Berlingske reported that Russia believes the “antenna” was “part of a device from an explosive charge on the last of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines.” Only three of the lines were successfully damaged in the sabotage, and it has confounded researchers why one was left intact. “It is a cylindrical object about 30 centimeters high and 10-15 centimeters in diameter and was located approximately 28 kilometers from the explosion site,” Barbin said in a statement to Berlingske. “It was installed at a welding joint on the B line.”

On March 23, the Danish Energy Agency released a photograph of an object roughly fitting the dimensions offered by Russia. The object appeared to have been submerged for a long time and was covered by a layer of algae or other foliage. “It is possible that the object is a maritime smoke buoy,” asserted the Danish statement. Such devices are commonly used to mark an area where someone has gone overboard or to alert other ships to a problem. The government agency said it had invited the owners of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, effectively Russia, to participate in the salvage. The Kremlin labeled the Danish invitation “positive news.”

It’s possible that the Danish government was essentially trolling the Russians by posting the photo and making a public offering to allow Russia to participate in the retrieval of what Denmark alleged is a harmless civilian device but that Moscow implied was potentially an unexploded bomb.

In its initial news report on the Danish invitation to Russia to participate in retrieving the object, the Russian state-owned TASS news agency did not mention the possibility it was a “smoke buoy,” instead doubling down on Russian theories it may be a component of an unexploded device. “It is critically important to determine what kind of object it is, whether it is related to this terrorist act — apparently it is — and to continue this investigation,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on March 24. “And this investigation must be transparent.” Denmark has said “the object does not pose an immediate safety risk.”

That chapter of this story appears to have ended with a whimper rather than a bang. “I do not think it makes sense for us to get into that now, since one of the NATO countries, or Denmark, told us that they had already examined it, which means that the situation is not explosive,” Putin told a Russian news network on May 25, adding that it no longer was necessary for Russian specialists to participate in a retrieval operation. “Honestly speaking, for us, the point was not to incriminate someone, but to ensure security so that there would be no other explosions,” he said. “If the Danes say that it is no longer explosive, well, thank God.”

In a recent op-ed in the Danish newspaper Altinget, Barbin, the Russian ambassador, accused Denmark of engaging in speculative analysis since the explosion last September with an aim to assign blame for the attack. In Danish media, some prominent military analysts have spent considerable time discussing potential Russian culpability for blowing up its own pipeline. Barbin asserted that this “intellectual exercise, without presenting facts that should be verifiable, leads to a dead end and benefits only those who are afraid of the truth.” He said Denmark should provide an update to a variety of questions: “Which naval vessels — including military ships — were present in the sabotage area? Are there any witnesses who have been questioned and what is their testimony? Were fragments of broken gas pipelines raised and what are the results of their research? Which companies — especially foreign ones — were allowed to work in Denmark’s and Sweden’s exclusive economic zone, and were their activities audited?”

These are all fair questions, which may well be answered once the governments complete their probes. Denmark and Sweden have both remained tightlipped, and scant details have leaked from either government. While there are likely multiple layers contributing to the hyper-secrecy, the stakes are obviously high, particularly if evidence leads to a nation-state actor, such as the U.S., Russia, or Ukraine, as the perpetrator.

The Andromeda, a 50-foot recreational sailing yacht, which German investigators searched recently and suspect a six-person crew used it to sail to the Baltic Sea and plant explosives, seen on March 17, 2023 near Dranske, Germany.

Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

False Flag vs. “False Concoctions”

In the public discourse, Seymour Hersh’s report in February that the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up in a covert operation authorized by President Joe Biden has become something of a Rorschach test in the broader context of the war in Ukraine and the hostilities between the U.S., NATO, and Russia.

Hersh himself appears entirely unfazed by the mounting attacks on his credibility. This, he asserts, is what powerful forces do: They seek to destroy the messenger to distract from the crime. When pressed on some of the criticism of his reporting, including apparent inconsistencies raised by open-source data on ship and aircraft movements during the alleged operation, Hersh has cut his questioners short and asserted that he hasn’t even published 20 percent of what he knows or what his sources have told him. He has all but said that he used additional sources and is playing his own game of cat and mouse to protect them. Moreover, he has argued, these OSINT warriors are naive to believe that the CIA and other U.S. agencies would not have taken extensive steps to cloak the operation.

▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄

At 85 years old, Hersh is staking his storied and well-earned reputation as one of the premiere muckrakers in modern U.S. history on the veracity of this one story. It may appear to be a crazy gamble, particularly if it is based on a single source, but it also serves as a powerful symbol of how right Hersh believes he is. In essence, Hersh is forcing the question: Do we really believe Sy Hersh would do this if it wasn’t true?

This same dynamic has played out with several of Hersh’s stories over the past decade since he left the New Yorker. It was true of his 2015 story for the London Review of Books alleging that President Barack Obama and his administration lied about almost every detail of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And it was also the case with both his 2013 LRB article and his 2017 story for the German newspaper Welt asserting that the U.S. was falsely accusing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian army of using chemical weapons. Hersh’s detractors say he is not the journalist he once was and is peddling false theories based on dubious or fictional assertions from anonymous sources. Hersh maintains he got these stories right and that he continues to use the same quality of fact-checker, editor, and lawyer he had reviewing his work at the New Yorker.

In his most recent post on Substack, Hersh criticizes reports in the New York Times and multiple German media outlets that among the perpetrators of the sabotage was a “pro-Ukrainian group” that rented a private boat using false passports. Hersh alleged that the entire story, based on anonymous U.S. intelligence and German law enforcement sources, was a false-flag operation and that the assertions published by the Times and Die Zeit “originated with a group of CIA experts in deception and propaganda whose mission was to feed the newspaper a cover story—and to protect a president who made an unwise decision and is now lying about it.” Hersh writes:

“It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” I was told by a source within the American intelligence community. The disinformation professionals inside the CIA understand that a propaganda gambit can only work if those on receiving are desperate for a story that can diminish or displace an unwanted truth. And the truth in question is that President Joe Biden authorized the destruction of the pipelines and will have a difficult time explaining away his action as Germany and its Western European neighbors suffer as businesses are shuttered amid high day-to-day energy costs.

Hersh also asserted that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to the White House in early March was, in part, aimed at preparing the rollout of the cover story developed by the CIA and its German counterparts. “I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2,” Hersh writes. “In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was ‘to pulse the system’ in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction.”

Hersh is staking his storied and well-earned reputation as one of the premiere muckrakers in modern U.S. history on the veracity of this one story.

For people who have already concluded that Hersh is either fabricating this story or relying on bad sources, his latest story is evidence that he is trapped in a hall of mirrors and seeing conspiracies in every direction he looks. Holger Stark, the lead reporter on the German story Hersh claims was the product of a CIA deception campaign, addressed Hersh in a tweet: “Sy, old colleague, I admire your historical work and it hurts tremendously to say it: But this is, at least in respect to our work at Die Zeit, complete BS. And if you write about me: call next time before you publish. You would avoid a lot of mistakes.” Stark has collaborated with The Intercept on an investigation into the U.S. drone program and Germany’s role and was one of the main German journalists reporting on Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency documents for Der Spiegel.

For those who believe that Hersh has correctly identified the perpetrator of the Nord Stream bombing — the U.S. government — it is plausible that the information fed to the Times and German news outlets about the “pro-Ukrainian group” is suspicious and part of a deception operation. Last June — two months before the Nord Stream explosions — the CIA reportedly offered German intelligence and other European governments a “strategic warning” of a potential plot to blow up the pipeline. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The warning included information about three Ukrainian nationals who were trying to rent out ships in countries bordering the Baltic Sea, including Sweden.”

It could well be that the U.S. was simply sharing its intel with allies with a direct stake in such an action. It could also be that this is where a potential deception operation involving a “pro-Ukrainian group” began. What does not seem likely is that the cover story was created in response to Hersh. More plausible, if this is indeed a cover story, was that it was planned long before Hersh wrote his story and was designed to deceive or misdirect U.S. allies and the world about who was responsible. Stark, the German journalist who heads Die Zeit’s investigative unit, said he had been working on his story, based on the German criminal probe, for months and rushed to publish only after he learned the New York Times was going to post its “pro-Ukraine group” story, which was based on the claims of anonymous U.S. intelligence operatives. Hersh later updated his piece to reflect this.

In his latest story, Hersh lambasted the U.S. press corps for refusing to ask the White House about his assertions the U.S. blew up the pipeline. “There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally ‘task’ the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea. According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he. Why not? Because he knows the answer.”

I asked the White House Hersh’s specific question and also for comment on Hersh’s assertions about the private meeting between Biden and Scholz and the CIA manufacturing a cover story. In a statement, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson did not directly address any of my questions. “These stories are totally false concoctions,” Watson said. “We can say categorically that the United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosions in any way. We continue to support efforts with our allies and partners to get to the bottom of what happened.”

During Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appearance before the House Committee on Appropriations on March 23, Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, asked Blinken: “You’re now in a formal setting. Can you assure the world that no agency of the U.S. government blew up those pipelines or facilitated that action?”

“Yes, I can,” Blinken replied.

Update: March 25, 2023, 8:00 p.m. ET

This piece has been updated with comments made by Putin on March 25 saying Russia would not retrieve the underwater object.

The Intercept · by Jeremy Scahill · March 25, 2023

5. The Russo-Ukrainian war and the illegal arms trade

It is Putin's War. Just saying.

The 48 page report can be downloaded here: https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Mark-Galeotti-and-Anna-Arutunyan-Peace-and-proliferation-The-Russo-Ukrainian-war-and-the-illegal-arms-trade-GI-TOC-March-2023.pdf

The Russo-Ukrainian war and the illegal arms trade

globalinitiative.net · by Mark Galeotti

AUTHOR(S)

Mark Galeotti

Anna Arutunyan

English

Posted on 22 Mar 2023

Wars create the conditions for the accumulation of weapons, often outside direct state control; the ends of wars tend to lead to an illegal outflow of those weapons into the hands of criminal and insurgent groups both within the combatant nations and beyond.

Despite some over-heated claims, there is currently no substantial outflow of weapons from the Ukrainian conflict zone. However, every precedent suggests that, especially if the threat is not addressed proactively and imaginatively, when the current war ends, Ukraine’s battlefields could and will become the new arsenal of anarchy, arming everyone from insurgents in Africa to gangsters in the streets of Europe.

Eastern flows of weapons, 2022–2023 (Page 16)

This report explores the current situation in Ukraine in terms of the spread of weapons into non-state hands and clandestine supply chains. It considers the prospects for more serious levels of proliferation after the end of hostilities, and makes practical recommendations for Ukraine and its foreign partners.

Author(s)

Mark Galeotti

Anna Arutunyan

Downloads

Research report

globalinitiative.net · by Mark Galeotti

6. In a New Cold War, Diplomacy Matters More Than Might

Excerpts:

The U.S. and its partners need a soft-power strategy for countering this non-military—but very serious—set of challenges. Thankfully some steps have been taken. At one point three years ago, China ran four of the 15 most important United Nations technical agencies and was on its way to winning the leadership race for a fifth agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization. The Trump administration and the Biden administration have woken up to the challenge in the multilateral system and China now runs only the FAO.

Some of this strategy requires thinking differently about America's foreign aid, some of this means thinking differently about our trade relationships, and some of this will require new forms of public diplomacy.

If we are in a new Cold War or just a frosty great power competition, China sees the future in a stronger set of soft power tools. The U.S. and our allies are going to have to up our game in terms of diplomacy and development.

In a New Cold War, Diplomacy Matters More Than Might

Newsweek · by Ellis Henican · March 23, 2023

If we are approaching a second Cold War, this time with China and other strategic competitors, most of the action will take place in the realms of diplomacy, development, and economics. China certainly thinks so. Earlier this month, China announced a 12 percent increase in its diplomatic budget compared to a 7 percent increase in its military budget.

Of course, we should watch China's military spending and ensure that the United States and its allies have the qualitative and quantitative military edge against China. But the intentional focus by China on diplomacy, foreign aid, monies for "public diplomacy" and more money for international organizations should be a wake up call for the West that China understands that great power competition will not play out in Europe or even East Asia, but largely in Africa, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and other parts of the "developing world" or the "Global South."

China has embassies in over 170 countries, has a very well-trained diplomatic corps that speaks English, French and increasingly local languages. In the last six weeks, China brokered a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Honduras announced that it would recognize the People's Republic of China after 82 years of recognizing Taiwan. This is merely part of a much bigger diplomatic and soft power push by China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi Jinping make a toast during a reception following their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21. PAVEL BYRKIN/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images

Just a month ago, South Africa hosted joint naval exercises with China and Russia, a form of military cooperation but also a form of diplomacy. In the last week, the outgoing president of the Federated States of Micronesia, a Pacific Island nation considering switching recognition to Taiwan from the mainland, accused the Chinese Communist Party of bribery, threats, and "political warfare."

Clearly, China, as the world's second largest economy, is flexing its diplomatic, security, economic, and development muscles in its long-term quest to create a new global system led by China. It is not 2003 anymore, China and sometimes Russia can fill vacuums that the U.S. and the West leave behind. Twenty years ago, the U.S. was the largest trading partner for more than 100 countries. Today, China is the largest trading partner for more than 100 countries. In the longer run, if China and Russia fill too many vacuums, a new system built around rules set by the Chinese Communist Party will take over. This is a world where cyber-authoritarianism is exported and strengthened; where corruption will be feature, not a bug, in the global operating system; where the minerals needed for a carbon transition are controlled by the CCP; and religious and political freedoms are deeply curtailed.

The U.S. and its partners need a soft-power strategy for countering this non-military—but very serious—set of challenges. Thankfully some steps have been taken. At one point three years ago, China ran four of the 15 most important United Nations technical agencies and was on its way to winning the leadership race for a fifth agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization. The Trump administration and the Biden administration have woken up to the challenge in the multilateral system and China now runs only the FAO.

Some of this strategy requires thinking differently about America's foreign aid, some of this means thinking differently about our trade relationships, and some of this will require new forms of public diplomacy.

If we are in a new Cold War or just a frosty great power competition, China sees the future in a stronger set of soft power tools. The U.S. and our allies are going to have to up our game in terms of diplomacy and development.

Daniel F. Runde is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also the author of the recently published book "The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership Through Soft Power" (Bombardier Books, 2023).

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Newsweek · by Ellis Henican · March 23, 2023

7. Putin Says He Could Put Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Belarus by Summer

Putin Says He Could Put Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Belarus by Summer

By Vivek Shankar and Anton Troianovski

March 26, 2023

Updated 8:35 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Vivek Shankar · March 26, 2023

The proposal from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, talked of since last year, would be provocative without changing the West’s battlefield calculus.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, right, with his counterpart in Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, in Minsk last year.Credit...Pavel Bednyakov/Sputnik, via Shutterstock

March 26, 2023Updated 5:58 a.m. ET

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said he would be able to position tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by the summer, a move that threatened to increase tensions with the United States and Europe while his forces wage war in Ukraine.

The Russian leader has repeatedly raised the specter of using nuclear weapons since ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. While U.S. officials have said they have seen no effort by Russia to move or employ its nuclear weapons and believe the risk of their use is low, worries have lingered.

Mr. Putin’s remarks about stationing weapons in Belarus — a prospect he first floated last year — could again be saber rattling. It would not necessarily change the battlefield calculus: Any targets that Moscow can strike from Belarus, which borders three NATO members, it can already strike from Russian territory.

American officials indicated that they did not immediately sense an escalation.

In an interview with state media released online on Saturday, Mr. Putin said that construction on a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus would be completed by July 1, according to the Tass news agency, though it was not immediately clear if or when nuclear weapons would be moved there.

Increasingly isolated from the West, Mr. Putin has been relying on allies like Belarus — a country bordering Ukraine that was used as a staging ground for the full-scale invasion. Mr. Putin said that President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus had requested that Moscow station the weapons on his soil.

The State of the War

Military Aid: Ukrainian commanders are hoping that Western tanks will give them the upper hand against the Russians, but the slow pace of deliveries is leaving them frustrated. Days after Poland and Slovakia pledged to send Soviet-designed MIG-29 fighters to Ukraine, Slovakia began to deliver its share.
Zelensky in Kherson: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine traveled to the southern region in his second trip near the front line in two days. The trip came as the World Bank released a report that put the cost of rebuilding Ukraine at $411 billion.
Xi’s Visit to Russia: President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomed Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, in Moscow during a state visit carefully choreographed to project unity. The two leaders declared an enduring economic partnership, reinforcing their shared opposition to American dominance.

Mr. Putin’s statements came after Russia criticized Britain for giving Ukraine weapons with depleted uranium, falsely claiming that the material had a “nuclear component.” But Mr. Putin cast his announcement as “nothing unusual,” saying the United States has long deployed its own nuclear weapons within the borders of its European allies.

“We will do the same,” Mr. Putin said on Saturday, according to the state-run Tass agency. “Without violating, I want to emphasize this, our international obligations on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons,” he added.

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Lukashenko of Belarus.

Oleksiy Danilov, the head of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, accused the Kremlin of taking Belarus “as a nuclear hostage.” Germany’s foreign ministry called Mr. Putin’s announcement “another attempt at nuclear intimidation,” according to the German news agency D.P.A.

Late on Saturday, the Pentagon released an email statement saying: “We have seen reports of Russia’s announcement and will continue to monitor this situation.” It added: “We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor any indications Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon. We remain committed to the collective defense of the NATO alliance.”

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, dismissed Mr. Putin’s announcement as an “information operation” with little risk of escalation.

“Putin is attempting to exploit Western fears of nuclear escalation,” it said, adding that the group “continues to assess that Putin is a risk-averse actor who repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons without any intention of following through in order to break Western resolve.”

Russia has as many as 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which have a lower yield than the strategic kind that can traverse entire continents. A tactical nuclear weapon has never been used in combat, but one could be deployed in a number of ways, including by missile or artillery shell.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Vivek Shankar · March 26, 2023

8. Opinion | Was Iraq a Worse Disaster for America Than Vietnam?

Excerpts:

Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Almost nobody in 1985 realized just how quickly the Soviet Union would collapse, and perhaps today the American comeback is already beginning. We have resources and forms of legitimacy that are lacking in our more authoritarian rivals; their systems are persistently vulnerable to the follies of autocratic decision making. And the Ukraine conflict, for some, is seen as a possible doorway to revival, reinvigorating the West much as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II once did, drawing Putin into the same sort of quagmire that Afghanistan offered to the Soviets, helping us shake our Iraq distemper on a different timetable than with our Vietnam syndrome, but with similar results.

It’s not a coincidence that among those most invested in this hope are some of the Iraq war’s most ardent advocates. They want redemption, understandably, for their vision of American power, if not for the Iraq decision itself.

I don’t share their optimism, but I’m not surprised at its resilience. Especially when the alternative possibility, that a single choice made with such confidence 20 years ago still has our empire on a sunset path today, seems too terrible to bear.

Opinion | Was Iraq a Worse Disaster for America Than Vietnam?

The New York Times · by Ross Douthat · March 24, 2023

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Ross Douthat

Was Iraq a Worse Disaster for America Than Vietnam?

March 24, 2023, 11:30 a.m. ET

Credit...Alain Pilon

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Opinion Columnist

At the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, we stand in the same position relative to the initial invasion as America stood in 1985 relative to the 1965 arrival of our first combat troops in Vietnam. This makes it a useful moment to compare the two conflicts and their effects, and to consider — provisionally, always provisionally — which was more disastrous, which intervention deserves to be remembered as the worst foreign policy decision in our history.

For some time, even after my own initial support for the war dissolved and its folly became obvious, I doubted that Iraq could outstrip Vietnam in the ranks of American debacles. More than 12 times as many American troops died in the Vietnam War as died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath. The bloodletting among Iraqis was terrible, but so was the civilian toll in Southeast Asia. The United States lost the Vietnam War completely; in Iraq we left behind an unsteady and corrupt republic rather than a new dictatorship, with a government that still allows an American military presence.

Domestically, the period around the Vietnam War was dreadful — a wave of domestic terrorism, a crisis of authority, the 1960s curdling into the 1970s. The immediate aftermath of Iraq was sour and paranoid in its own way, but even with the Great Recession there wasn’t the same kind of radicalism and social breakdown. When Barack Obama was elected president, American conservatism seemed shattered by Iraq, as American liberalism was shattered by Vietnam, but by his second term there was a return to ideological stalemate.

At various times, then — at the 10th anniversary of the war, maybe even at the 15th — it was possible to imagine a long-term future where Iraq was ultimately remembered more like our bloody counterinsurgency in the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century than like the trauma of Vietnam. As a bad war, but not an era-defining one. As a squandering of blood and treasure and moral credibility, but one whose overarching strategic costs were not so great.

But today there’s a stronger case for seeing Iraq as a more epochal disaster. In American domestic life the Vietnam effect was more of a fever, whereas the Iraq effect seems like a wasting or relapsing disease. The war’s influence has percolated inside other social crises, like the opioid epidemic, that have become more visible and destructive over time. Its lingering effects have made the body politic more susceptible to left-wing radicalism and right-wing demagogy, while contributing to a persistent mood of pessimism and disappointment that’s then been exacerbated by other forces (social media, the coronavirus pandemic).

In our political coalitions, these disillusioning effects look even more substantial and permanent than they appeared in 2010 or 2015. Ever since the war discredited and helped dissolve the hawkish center-left, nobody has been able to reconstitute a strong centrist faction within liberalism, with the result that liberal institutions have been pulled ever leftward since 2004. Ever since the war discredited both neoconservatism specifically and the Republican establishment generally, nobody has been able to maintain a successful counterweight to the various forms of right-wing populism, Tea Party and Trumpian, that have made the G.O.P. ungovernable and incapable of governing.

And there is a special irony that even with the intellectual ferment on the Trump-era right, the attempts to forge a “national conservatism” or a socially conservative populism, sometimes look like efforts to grope backward to George W. Bush’s platform in 2000, before he traded his humble foreign policy for a grand crusade.

But it is in the effect on America’s global position that the costs of the Iraq war really keep compounding. It’s now clear that not just the war alone but its ever-spreading secondary consequences — which included our futile overinvestment in Afghanistan, fatefully cast as the “good war” by many Democrats opposed to the Iraq invasion — kept us tied us down during critical years of geopolitical realignment, making it hard to even think about, let alone cope with the revival of Russian power and the rise of China to superpower status.

The all-but-certain influence of our final defeat in Afghanistan on Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was just one link in a long chain of consequences forged by the Iraq war. Likewise, our newly aggressive posture toward the Chinese regime is a risky attempt to play catch-up to shifts that we should have been more attuned to a decade ago.

And while the effects of the Iraq war on the developing world’s attitudes toward the United States can be overstated, our initial invasion clearly made us seem like a less trustworthy hegemon, reckless and revisionist rather than steady and reliable. Then the way the war contributed to our internal divisions and derangements also made American culture seem less admirable and the broader liberal-democratic project seem less inevitable. So not only Russia and China but other power centers, from India to Turkey, were pushed toward post-American and post-Western paths by everything that followed.

Now return to the comparison between 2023 and our Reagan-era situation, barely a decade after the last helicopters left Saigon. By 1985, we had managed to separate China from Russia, the Soviet economy was faltering and Mikhail Gorbachev had just been elected general secretary of the Communist Party, with glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall just around the corner. Today, with Russia and China increasingly aligned together against us and Chinese influence increasing, we seem to be descending back into the kind of twilight struggle that in ’85 we were poised to finally transcend. So if Vietnam 20 years on looked like a disaster that in our strength we were able to absorb, a surmountable obstacle to American ascent, Iraq 20 years on looks more like our empire’s nemesis, full stop.

Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Almost nobody in 1985 realized just how quickly the Soviet Union would collapse, and perhaps today the American comeback is already beginning. We have resources and forms of legitimacy that are lacking in our more authoritarian rivals; their systems are persistently vulnerable to the follies of autocratic decision making. And the Ukraine conflict, for some, is seen as a possible doorway to revival, reinvigorating the West much as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II once did, drawing Putin into the same sort of quagmire that Afghanistan offered to the Soviets, helping us shake our Iraq distemper on a different timetable than with our Vietnam syndrome, but with similar results.

It’s not a coincidence that among those most invested in this hope are some of the Iraq war’s most ardent advocates. They want redemption, understandably, for their vision of American power, if not for the Iraq decision itself.

I don’t share their optimism, but I’m not surprised at its resilience. Especially when the alternative possibility, that a single choice made with such confidence 20 years ago still has our empire on a sunset path today, seems too terrible to bear.

Breviary

Daniel McCarthy on why the paleoconservatives were right about Iraq.

James Pethokoukis looks back on the long boom that wasn’t.

Musa al-Gharbi on the unhappiness of liberals.

Cleo Nardo on why training A.I. for goodness can also train it for villainy.

An anatomy of my favorite “Succession” character.

The 2009 book that explains the collapse of South Africa.

This Week in Decadence

“After sitting through countless community meetings and reading thousands of public comments, I’ve noticed that opposition to local projects doesn’t always come from an easily caricatured millionaire homeowner; typically, it’s from people of all sorts who are afraid of change. These status-quo defenders are often asking for the impossible: for someone to tell them exactly how their lives will look in the future. How will this affect my commute? What kinds of neighbors will live near me? And in their fear, they ask for caution, for further study, for more deliberation. They ask for time.

“Caution and deliberation are good in moderation, but waiting cannot relieve this uncertainty; it merely changes its form. Doing can cause harm, but not doing won’t preserve the world in amber. Neighborhoods in desirable communities that don’t build more housing see skyrocketing prices and demographic shifts toward high-income, white and older residents. And nations that don’t build the necessary renewable-energy infrastructure will be subject to the very environmental degradation that 20th-century activists tried so hard to prevent.

“The unforeseen consequences of blocking change should weigh as heavily as the ones that come from allowing it. Those lost students, missing refugees, absent neighbors and failed government projects may never intrude on our sight line or cause us frustration during our commutes, but they cost us all the same.”

— Jerusalem Demsas, “The Great Defenders of the Status Quo,” The Atlantic (March 16)

Advertisements for Myself

I will be moderating a panel discussion on Tuesday, March 28, at 6:30 p.m. at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on the question of “What Is Euthanasia Doing to the West?” I will also be speaking on Thursday, March 30, at 4:30 p.m. at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., on the subject of “Religious Faith in a Secular Age: What Do Young People Believe?” Both events are free and open to the public.

The New York Times · by Ross Douthat · March 24, 2023

9. Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans

I think Amazon also benefits as many TikTokers sell on Amazon Storefront. Other US retailers benefit as well.

Excerpts:

One illustration of how immersed American consumers are in an app ecosystem created by Chinese companies: Under the hashtags #temuhaul or #sheinhaul, Gen-Z shoppers have taken to display the result of their shopping sprees in TikTok videos with captions such as “$50 worth of very RANDOM items on TEMU.”

The apps came out of companies founded by a younger generation of tech entrepreneurs who are looking for global growth as China’s firewalled market becomes saturated. They are backed by China’s vast pool of tech talent: While Temu is a shopping site, more than half its workforce are engineers focused on getting people to swipe and buy.

Chinese internet companies’ organizational efficiency is overlooked by their American competitors, say investors, engineers and analysts. The Chinese firms spend lavishly to push their apps in the U.S. They leverage China’s one billion internet users to test user preferences and optimize their AI models at home, then export the tech overseas.

“They are totally killing it in markets where they need to constantly reiterate products to meet user demands,” said Guo Yu, a former senior principal engineer at TikTok’s parent ByteDance Ltd. who worked at the company between 2014 and 2020.

Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans

It isn’t just the algorithms, but lessons from a cutthroat culture

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-chinese-apps-are-the-favorites-of-young-americans-a9a5064a

By Shen LuFollow

, Karen HaoFollow

and Raffaele HuangFollow

March 26, 2023 5:30 am ET

The concern around TikTok in Washington is drawing fresh attention to how Chinese apps have woven themselves into the fabric of young Americans’ lives—and what makes them so popular.

Four of the five hottest apps in the U.S. in March were forged in China. Algorithms are often cited as their secret sauce. An often overlooked facet is how cutthroat competition for users at home has given Chinese firms a leg up over Western rivals.

Much like during China’s rise to manufacturing dominance a few decades ago, Chinese tech companies have harnessed a labor pool of affordable talent to constantly fine-tune product features.

The nonstop drive to get better even has a term in China’s tech industry: “embroidery.”

“Everybody works on improving their craft, stitch by stitch,” said Fan Lu, a venture-capital investor who invested in TikTok’s predecessor Musical.ly.

Seven-month-old Temu was the most downloaded app across U.S. app stores during the first three weeks of March, according to market-insights firm Sensor Tower. It was followed by TikTok’s video-editing partner app CapCut and TikTok itself. Fast-fashion retailer Shein came in fourth. Then came Facebook, the only non-Chinese app among the top five.

Apple app store rankings of four popular Chinese apps, monthly

Temu

CapCut

TikTok

Shein

Previously 381

2021

’22

’23

Source: Data.ai

One illustration of how immersed American consumers are in an app ecosystem created by Chinese companies: Under the hashtags #temuhaul or #sheinhaul, Gen-Z shoppers have taken to display the result of their shopping sprees in TikTok videos with captions such as “$50 worth of very RANDOM items on TEMU.”

The apps came out of companies founded by a younger generation of tech entrepreneurs who are looking for global growth as China’s firewalled market becomes saturated. They are backed by China’s vast pool of tech talent: While Temu is a shopping site, more than half its workforce are engineers focused on getting people to swipe and buy.

Chinese internet companies’ organizational efficiency is overlooked by their American competitors, say investors, engineers and analysts. The Chinese firms spend lavishly to push their apps in the U.S. They leverage China’s one billion internet users to test user preferences and optimize their AI models at home, then export the tech overseas.

“They are totally killing it in markets where they need to constantly reiterate products to meet user demands,” said Guo Yu, a former senior principal engineer at TikTok’s parent ByteDance Ltd. who worked at the company between 2014 and 2020.

TikTok, ByteDance, Temu, its parent company PDD Holdings Inc., and Shein didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Temu was the most downloaded app across U.S. app stores during the first three weeks of March.

PHOTO: LAM YIK/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The popularity of the apps has gotten them caught in the crossfire of U.S.-China geopolitical tension—TikTok in particular. The Biden administration has threatened a possible ban on the app if ByteDance doesn’t sell its stakes in TikTok, citing national-security concerns. On Thursday, U.S. lawmakers pummeled TikTok’s Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew about Beijing’s potential influence over the app.

Beijing has opposed a TikTok sale and said it would never require companies to illegally gather data from overseas. Meanwhile, a bill gaining momentum in Washington would result in a blanket ban of broad categories of Chinese technology, including American teenagers’ favorite apps, if it is passed.

it becomes clear which version is performing better, the winning team is given more resources while the other versions are scrapped, these people say.

“People sometimes said the company was heartless because no one had complete control over a product design from start to finish,” Mr. Guo said.

Watch: TikTok CEO Faces Off With Lawmakers Over Security Concerns

Term of Art: What Joint Doctrine Gets Wrong about Operational Art and Why It Matters

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Term of Art

What Joint Doctrine Gets Wrong about Operational Art and Why It Matters

Maj. Rick Chersicla, U.S. Army

Download the PDF

Maj. Christopher Colyer, assigned to the Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) future operations cell, gives a briefing 22 March 2022 during the command’s spring mission planning conference at the Phantom Warrior Center on Fort Hood, Texas. The event was held to enhance mission understanding and interoperability among JTF-CS key mission partners. (Photo by Chief Mass Communication Spc. Barry Riley, U.S. Navy)

Fixing the Problem

The 2020 edition of Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Planning, defines operational art as “the cognitive approach by commanders and staffs—supported by their skill, knowledge, expertise, creativity, and judgement—to develop strategies, campaigns, and operations to organize and employ military forces by integrating ends, ways, means, and risks.”1 The problem with this definition is twofold. First, it is overly wordy—the original sin for many doctrinal terms (albeit a common one). Second, even with the second clause removed, it is an empty definition that conflates operational art with the widely accepted ends, ways, and means formulation typically associated with strategy.2 The joint force would be better served by returning to the definition offered in the U.S. Army’s 2016 version of Army Doctrine Publication 3-0, Operations, or a variation thereof. The 2016 edition succinctly defined operational art as “the pursuit of strategic objectives, in whole or in part, through the arrangement of tactical actions in time, space, and purpose.”3

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

There is, admittedly, one good component of the current definition of operational art. Expressing operational art as a “cognitive approach” does at least frame it as a way of thinking. Operational art as a cognitive approach arose out of necessity due to changes in the character of warfare. The genesis of operational art is the end of the era of decisive battle—after Napoleon, the scope and scale of battle precluded the single decisive battle from determining the outcome of a war.4 As warfare shifted away from the war of a “single point,” battles came to be seen as parts of a larger whole, and a new way of thinking became necessary to organize battles into campaigns.5 Modern operational art came into being as a cognitive activity that takes battles or tactical actions and purposefully arranges them into campaigns in order to achieve the overall strategic aim.6

Informed no doubt by the current, overly broad doctrinal definition, mischaracterizations of operational art abound. Operational art is not a level of war, and neither is it the “entirety of warfare.”7 By defining it as “a way of thinking,” operational art can be thought of as an activity analogous to composing music. The operational artist arranges tactical actions for a broader strategic purpose as the composer arranges a symphony.8 Individual notes played by desynchronized sections may be pleasing to the ear individually but taken together the result is incoherent and chaotic—noise without purpose. The composer must arrange them in time and space to create the song, mindful of things like time, changes in tempo, and how instruments interact with each other. While it can be framed as a methodology, operational art is not a prescriptive process. It is instead a “balancing mental interaction between strategic and tactical reasoning.”9

Operational art is not the same thing as strategy—it requires an independent definitional space. Thus, the inclusion of any reference to “ends, ways, and means” serves only to muddy the waters when discussing operational art, as that familiar triad is already associated with the Lykke model of strategy formulation.10 Instead, operational art is the “servant” of strategy; it enables strategy by building the campaigns that help achieve strategic aims.11 Strategy has a wider purview than operational art and considers the distribution and application “of military means to fulfill the ends of policy” more broadly, potentially across multiple theaters.12 Since operational art ultimately serves strategy, the strategic aim of the campaign is the operational artist’s lodestar.

Why a Better Definition Matters

The need to better define operational art extends beyond clarifying a doctrinal publication. Rather, likely changes in the future character of war—namely, modern distributed operations—necessitate a clear definition for, and deeper understanding of, operational art. Using the 2016 Army definition and emphasizing that the heart of operational art is the “arrangement of tactical actions in time, space and purpose” to achieve strategic ends better orients the planner or strategist on what James Schneider called the defining characteristic of operational art “the employment of forces in deep distributed operations.”13

Distributed operations—in every domain—will likely become a defining characteristic of the next evolution in the character of war. As scenario-based wargames are confirming, combat power in the form of ships, aircraft, or other forces are particularly vulnerable when gathered together to reinforce each other, given the type of modern weapons our adversaries are known to possess.14 Mass has long been a principle of war, and while modern forces do not necessarily need to physically come together in order to concentrate the effects of combat power, military forces have historically tended to physically concentrate to fight. But, it is no surprise that if the joint force is aggregated and the enemy has modern long range fires, sensors, and networked systems, the force is vulnerable. For protection, the force will have to be disaggregated, for on the future battlefield—one defined in part by ubiquitous sensors—massing forces becomes a literal and figurative dead end.

Increased dispersion increases the need for disparate tactical actions to be synchronized in time, space, and purpose for their individual outcomes to register as cumulative operational effects.

In addition to anticipating changes in the character of war, a revised, simplified definition of operational art would better prepare the department to fight as a joint force. Joint doctrine consists of “fundamental principles” that allow planners from all services to speak a common language; it “provides authoritative guidance from which joint operations are planned and executed.”15 An imprecise definition results in hollow concepts that cannot be understood with any true meaning. For something as important as operational art, an unclear definition can have serious repercussions when tactical actions do not build toward a campaign that achieves a larger political purpose. Operational art organizes battles into a campaign for the purposes of the war—the strategic aim.16 As single battles no longer win wars, operational art is required to serve as the cognitive bridge between tactics and strategy in the design of campaigns that accomplish strategic goals.

Defining and understanding operational art is the first step in ensuring the elements of operational art are synchronized. It is no great exaggeration that in any hypothetical conflict in the Pacific or in Europe, the United States and presumably allied and partner forces would be required to fight across great distances that would challenge operational reach. Operational reach challenges influence tempo and vice versa, which in turn impacts culmination—how are planners to integrate the elements of operational art if the overarching definition of the term does not illuminate for planners what the concept is meant to do? The answer is simple—we cannot expect planners to be skilled in operational art if we as a joint force cannot first succinctly define the term.

Conclusion

The Army’s 2016 definition tells planners what operational art should do in ways that the current joint definition does not. Operational art is described as the “arrangement” of tactical actions—meaning tactical actions are the building blocks of operational art, and the operational artist takes those blocks to build the path toward strategic aims. Where tactics are limited in time and space and are concerned with the outcomes of battles, operational art seeks to stitch together those events for a larger purpose. While tactics determine conduct on the battlefield in relationship to the terrain and the enemy at specific locations and focuses on ending the engagement, operational art can be pictured holistically as the connective tissue that links those tactical actions to strategy through effective campaigns.17

Michael Collins, Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) deputy to the commander, gives opening remarks during the command’s spring mission planning conference 22 March 2022 at the Phantom Warrior Center on Fort Hood, Texas. The event was held to enhance mission understanding and interoperability between JTF-CS key mission partners. (Photo by Chief Mass Communication Spc. Barry Riley, U.S. Navy)

Simply put, we must concisely define operational art as the arranging of tactical actions in time, space, and purpose to achieve strategic aims.18 This succinct definition tells the joint force what operational art is meant to do while also implying that operational art requires an understanding of the overall strategic aims. The current definition, by comparison, simply tries to do too much and in doing so, loses focus and utility. Using the proposed, revised definition also serves a forcing function that is left out of the current definition; to arrange tactical actions in time, space, and purpose, one must understand the interplay of the elements of operational design (when assigned to a joint staff), and the interplay of the elements of operational art (on an Army staff).19 For a corps to employ operational art, for example, it is not enough to understand the need for basing—the staff must understand basing as it relates to tempo, operational reach, and culmination.20 The joint force must discard superfluous phrasing and instead embrace thinking about operational art in these terms to better prepare for distributed operations across large areas—the type of conflict that would likely emerge during a conflict with our two primary competitors, China and Russia.

The author is grateful for the introduction to and instruction in operational art that he received from Dr. Bruce Stanley and the late Dr. Peter Schifferle at the School of Advanced Military Studies.

Notes

Joint Publication (JP) 5-0, Joint Planning (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office [GPO], 2020), IV-1, accessed 29 July 2022, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp5_0.pdf?ver=us_fQ_pGS_u65ateysmAng%3d%3d.
Arthur Lykke Jr., “Defining Military Strategy = Ends + Ways + Means,” Military Review 69, no. 5 (May 1989): 2–8, accessed 29 July 2022, https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p124201coll1/id/504/rec/8.
Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 11 November 2016), 4, accessed 29 July 2022, https://usacac.army.mil/sites/default/files/publications/ADRP%203-0%20OPERATIONS%2011NOV16.pdf.
Georgii Samoilovich Isserson, The Evolution of Operational Art, trans. Bruce W. Menning (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2013), 16.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., xi.
Huba Wass de Czege, “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer: Operational Art Is Not a Level of War,” Small Wars Journal, 14 March 2011, 4 accessed 29 July 2022, https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/710-deczege.pdf; Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, September 2009), accessed 29 July 2022, https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/2027.pdf.
Confutatis K.626 - Scrolling Score, YouTube video, posted by “gerubach,” 26 October 2011, accessed 8 August 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMwaiA581AQ. This thinking is influenced by a video made to graphically represent a conversation from the movie Amadeus including the composition of a symphony between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri.
Wass de Czege, “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer,” 4.
Lykke, “Defining Military Strategy,” 2.
Kelly and Brennan, Alien, 2.
B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 321.
James Schneider, “Vulcan’s Anvil: The American Civil War and the Foundations of Operational Art” (unpublished manuscript, 16 June 1992), 28, accessed 29 July 2022, https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll11/id/9.
Tara Copp, “It Failed Miserably: After Wargaming Loss, Joint Chiefs Are Overhauling How U.S. Military Will Fight,” Defense One, 26 July 2021, accessed 29 July 2022, https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/.
JP-1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2013 [incorporating Change 1, 12 July 2017]), xxv, accessed 29 July 2022, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp1_ch1.pdf?ver=2019-02-11-174350-967.
Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 128. This is to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote that “tactics teaches us the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war,” in Book II of his seminal On War. Clausewitz’s use of strategy is closer to our modern definition of operational art, which makes sense considering his historical context as a contemporary (and adversary) of Napoleon.
Dan Madden et al. Toward Operational Art in Special Warfare (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016), xvii, accessed 29 July 2022, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR779.html.
ADP 3-0, Operations, 4. This definition is inspired by and draws from earlier doctrinal definitions of operational art as opposed to the overly inclusive current definition.
Field Manual (FM) 5-0, Planning and Orders Production (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 16 May 2022), 2-12, accessed 29 July 2022, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35403-FM_5-0-000-WEB-1.pdf.
See ibid., para. 2-47–2-76, for an in-depth discussion of the elements of operational art.

Maj. Rick Chersicla, U.S. Army, is an FA59 (strategist) serving as a joint planner in Stuttgart, Germany. He holds a BA from Fordham University, an MA from Georgetown University, and an MA from the School of Advanced Military Studies.

March-April 2023

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11. Musicians of Mars in Multiple Domains: Expanding Combined Arms in the Twenty-First Century

Conclusion:

We know that the observations of these icons of military thought do not provide a magic bullet for how to win wars. Their resonance over time, however, suggests that the idea of employing combinations during war in ways that surprise and overwhelm enemy forces is more than a passing fad. It is, in fact, part of the very fabric of what makes a military organization successful. Leaders who are masters of their craft, able to incorporate all available capabilities in ways that are surprising and overwhelming to enemy forces, can take a modest update to doctrine and turn it into an overwhelming advantage provided by Army forces to the joint force.

Musicians of Mars in Multiple Domains: Expanding Combined Arms in the Twenty-First Century

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Musicians of Mars in Multiple Domains

Expanding Combined Arms in the Twenty-First Century

Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle Jr., U.S. Army

Col. Richard Creed, U.S. Army, Retired

Lt. Col. Matt Farmer, U.S. Army, Retired

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(Image by Spencer Bowers)

To get harmony in battle, each weapon must support the other. Team play wins. You musicians of Mars ... must come into the concert at the proper place and at the proper time.

—George S. Patton

Over eighty years ago at the outset of World War II, then Maj. Gen. George S. Patton described how he wanted to fight to the 2nd Armored Division using a musical metaphor—an odd choice reflecting the ease with which the general often combined the profound with the profane. The instruments of battle are different today and so is the operational environment, but the metaphor still rings true. The new version of Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations, emphasizes the time-tested combined arms approach to operations, expanded to meet the challenges posed today by threats like China and Russia.1 Both adversaries possess large, modern militaries that can contest the U.S. joint force through land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace—an environment in which the U.S. Army has not fought for decades. Army forces meet this challenge through multidomain operations, the operational concept described in the new FM 3-0:

Multidomain operations are the combined arms employment of joint and Army capabilities to create and exploit relative advantages that achieve objectives, defeat enemy forces, and consolidate gains on behalf of joint force commanders.2

At the core of multidomain operations is the expansion of combined arms beyond traditional one- and two-domain approaches to include all domains—land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace. The multidomain approach increases options for Army and joint force commanders to create exploitable advantages against enemy forces with peer capabilities. Effective integration of all available capabilities and methods demands leaders who understand doctrine and are masters of their craft. Reading FM 3-0 and other doctrine is essential, but mastery requires application during leader development and training at home station and combat training centers.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (left) and Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe watch a joint military exercise by Russia and China held 13 August 2021 in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of China. (Photo by Savitskiy Vadim, Russian Defence Ministry via Associated Press)

From its inception in 2016, multidomain operations were threat informed. The entry point for understanding multidomain operations is therefore an understanding of the Chinese and Russian threats.

Challenges Posed by China and Russia

Chinese and Russian military modernization and the proliferation of space, cyberspace, and nuclear capabilities with military applications are the key factors driving change in security policy and doctrine. Although several adversaries can contest the joint force in multiple domains, China and Russia remain the most dangerous. They possess operationally durable formations and capabilities that are resilient and adaptable. Defeating either of them rapidly in a single decisive effort is unlikely. Army forces must therefore be able to mass combat power against multiple decisive points, accrue advantages over time, and defeat enemy forces in detail by creating and exploiting favorable force ratios.3

To read Field Manual 3-0, Operations, visit https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN36290-FM_3-0-000-WEB-2.pdf.

At the strategic level, China and Russia present different threats and at different scales. However, both adversaries employ standoff approaches, utilizing networked sensor and long-range fires capabilities to deny the U.S. joint force access to strategically valuable areas necessary for force projection and global response from the continental United States. Both nations concluded from U.S. operations against Iraq and Afghanistan that the best way to defend themselves was to prevent enemies from building up combat power close to their borders.4 Joint doctrine describes these standoff approaches as antiaccess and area denial. Antiaccess typically refers to long-range capabilities that prevent the joint force from entering an area. Area denial typically refers to mid- and short-range capabilities that limit a force’s freedom of maneuver once they are in an area. These standoff approaches make China and Russia capable of doing things to the U.S. joint force that we have been able to do to others with impunity since the end of the Cold War. One of the strategic impacts of peer-threat standoff approaches is an increase in the potential cost in terms of money, time, and lives to the joint force and our allies in the event of armed conflict, effectively increasing the threshold at which the United States might respond to provocation with force. By diluting the effectiveness of conventional deterrence, adversaries have greater freedom of action to expand aggression and conduct malign activities, including information warfare. China and Russia continue to advance their interests with limited risk of having to engage U.S. military forces in close combat. The development of multidomain operations took these strategic considerations into account.5

At the operational level, there are two basic fights relevant to Army forces: (1) the joint fight, enabled by Army capabilities, to defeat the enemy antiaccess and area denial approaches; and (2) the land fight, enabled by joint capabilities, to defeat enemy forces, control key terrain and populations, and accomplish national objectives for joint force commanders. Critical to both fights is the role of Army corps fighting as formations to defeat components of the enemy’s integrated air defense system and overall integrated fires command.

The tactical challenge also has two components. First is how forward-postured forces will defend critical terrain and joint infrastructure at risk from no-notice enemy aggression and offensive action. Second is how Army forces will conduct expeditionary offensive operations against peer threats employing a layered deliberate defense enabled by global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Threat defenses have many initial advantages, including time to prepare, lines of communications relatively close to their national borders, better understanding of terrain and populations, forces available, and the ability to rapidly mass high volumes of fires. During both defensive and offensive friendly operations, enemy forces will target friendly logistics and command and control (C2) nodes, degrade friendly communications through electromagnetic warfare, and target our will to fight through information warfare. Should deterrence fail, it is likely that Army tactical formations will need to fight and win with an ally while outnumbered and isolated from the rest of the U.S. joint force.

Meeting the Challenge: Multidomain Operations

Multidomain operations are the Army’s contribution to joint campaigns that achieve sustainable policy outcomes. All operations depend, in some way, on capabilities and operations through multiple domains. Multidomain operations apply at every echelon, though in different ways. Corps and above typically have the lead role in allocating or integrating joint and Army capabilities, which are inherently multidomain, into their subordinate formations. Divisions may play an integrating role as well in some instances. However, even when a formation is not allocated joint capabilities, it must be aware of the threats posed by enemy capabilities from all domains and take appropriate measures to mitigate them. Preserving combat power requires a high level of situational awareness and physical exertion, which are imperatives in FM 3-0.

Figure. Domains and Dimensions of an Operational Environment

(Figure from Field Manual 3-0, Operations)

Multidomain operations are built on the foundation of a joint and combined arms approach to operations in a coalition environment. The operational concept emphasizes the need to understand the effects and processes for employing all available capabilities. FM 3-0 provides a model to help leaders view the operational environment through five domains, understood across three dimensions—physical, information, and human (see figure). Multidomain operations focus on large-scale combat operations but describe how Army forces integrate operations as part of joint campaigns during competition, crisis, and armed conflict in complementary and reinforcing ways. Four tenets and nine imperatives guide the conduct of operations, providing options for how leaders apply and preserve combat power against specific challenges posed by peer threats. Multidomain operations emphasize the use of defeat mechanisms and defeating enemy forces in detail while maintaining the cohesion of friendly operations. FM 3-0 describes how Army forces integrate deep, close, support, and rear operations within and between echelons to generate combat power and employ it to the greatest possible effect against enemy forces.

Combined Arms

Expanding combined arms is at the core of what makes multidomain operations a step forward. The complementary and reinforcing effects created through the combined arms employment of capabilities from different domains are unlocked through the integration and synchronization that occurs during the operations process. Integration is about determining which formations at which echelon require which capabilities to achieve their assigned objectives, and then allocating those capabilities. Synchronization is about applying combinations of those capabilities in time and space to create dilemmas for which the enemy has no good solutions. Leaders integrate and synchronize conventional forces, multinational forces, special operations forces, irregular forces, and all available unified action partners. Each contributing member of the expanded combined arms team has strengths that the others can reinforce and limitations that the others can mitigate. Understanding how different types of capabilities work together and employing them in ways the enemy does not expect is critical to success against opponents expecting us to be predictable. Leaders must understand how their formation and capabilities enable the higher headquarters, adjacent units, and the joint campaign. They also must understand how capabilities and formations they do not control can enable their operations.

Success demands leader commitment to the highest possible level of subject-matter expertise across branches and occupational specialties. Leaders must further understand how to balance effectiveness and efficiency when integrating or allocating capabilities across Army echelons in a risk-informed manner. This reality means that our point of departure, regardless of at what echelon one is assigned, is a clear understanding of the operational environment in terms of friendly and adversary assigned areas and their areas of influence.

Understanding the Operational Environment: Domains and Dimensions

Multidomain operations requires that leaders understand their operational environment through the five domains and their physical, information, and human dimensions. “A domain is a physically defined portion of an operational environment requiring a unique set of warfighting capabilities and skills.”6

Leaders do not need to understand every technical aspect of joint or Army capabilities, but they need to understand how they can be employed in mutually beneficial ways, and how to request those capabilities to support operations on land. Likewise, Army leaders at echelons above brigade need to advocate for the employment of Army capabilities to create freedom of action for the other service components of the joint force.

Although physical characteristics define the domains, multidomain operations emphasize the importance of factors beyond the physical. FM 3-0 notes that “understanding the physical, information, and human dimensions of each domain helps commanders and staffs assess and anticipate the impacts of their operations.”7

Although most Army operations initiate action through the physical dimension, they ultimately must influence (through the information dimension) to impact the adversary’s will (the human dimension). FM 3-0 also emphasizes the continued importance of intangible factors for friendly forces, like leadership and the mission command approach to C2.

See Yourself: Generating and Applying Combat Power

The warfighting functions and dynamics of combat power play a key role in helping leaders see their units and understand how to employ capabilities against the enemy to best effect. FM 3-0 identifies six warfighting functions:

Command and Control
Movement and Maneuver
Intelligence
Fires
Sustainment
Protection8

FM 3-0 modifies the combat power model. It aligns the definition of combat power with the joint definition and emphasizes what lethal and disruptive means can be applied against the enemy. It changes the components of combat power from “elements” to “dynamics” to reinforce the idea that combat power consists of variables that are interactive and subject to changes in the environment. FM 3-0 deliberately differentiates the dynamics of combat power from the warfighting functions. It defines combat power as “the total means of destructive and disruptive force that a military unit/formation can apply against an enemy at a given time (JP 3-0)” and identifies the dynamics of combat power as the following:

Leadership
Firepower
Information
Mobility
Survivability9

See the Enemy: Threats and Their Methods

Army forces conduct operations oriented on the threat. The threat is always thinking and adapting, so understanding the threat is a continuous requirement during operations. FM 3-0 notes, “Threats faced by Army forces are, by nature, hybrid. They include individuals, groups of individuals, paramilitary or military forces, criminal elements, nation-states, or national alliances.”10

Chinese troops parade during the Vostok-2018 military drills on 13 September 2018 at Tsugol Training Ground in Siberia, not far from Russia’s borders with China and Mongolia. (Photo by Mladen Antonov, Agence France-Presse)

China and Russia combine five broad methods to achieve their objectives during competition, crisis, and conflict:

Information warfare is the use of information activities such as cyberspace operations, electronic warfare, psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, and other deception operations to achieve objectives.
Systems warfare is the use of networked mutually supporting systems, like Integrated Air Defense Systems and the Integrated Fire Complexes, to achieve objectives. Threats protect their own systems while disintegrating their opponent’s systems.
Preclusion is the use of standoff approaches to deny the joint force access to strategically important areas.
Isolation is the use of national instruments of power to separate coalition partners, components of the joint force, or forward positioned forces from external support.
Sanctuary is the positioning of threat forces beyond the reach of friendly forces.11

China and Russia apply the threat methods in different ways at the operational and tactical levels. Leaders use the threat methods to better understand enemy tactics, anticipate enemy actions, and evaluate friendly courses of action.

Operations During Competition, Crisis, and Armed Conflict

Multidomain operations are the contribution of Army forces to joint operations and typically involve allies and partners. Harnessing the advantages provided by the joint force and our multinational partners is a critical consideration in every context. The strategic contexts—competition, crisis, and armed conflict—help commanders understand their role in the context of a joint campaign and prepare for their missions. During competition, Army forces counter adversary activities and demonstrate warfighting credibility through training and interoperability with allies and partners. This activity sets conditions for successful combat operations, recognizing that there is no extra time to prepare for conflict—Army forces deter conflict by continuously preparing for it. During crisis, Army forces provide options to joint force commanders to deter further aggression and protect national interests. During armed conflict, Army forces defeat enemy forces and control key terrain and populations. Regardless of strategic context, Army forces continuously consolidate gains in support of the joint force so that it achieves sustainable political outcomes.12

Fundamentals of Multidomain Operations: Tenets and Imperatives

Tenets and imperatives characterize effective operations and help guide leaders through the operations process.

Tenets. Four tenets characterize desirable qualities of operations: agility, convergence, endurance, and depth. They all link to the core idea of combined arms employment of all available combat power from multiple domains to create and exploit advantages.

Agility encompasses many considerations. Agile commands transition rapidly between phases, contexts, and task organizations. Agile leaders devise operational approaches designed to exploit fleeting windows of opportunity. Agile forces rapidly disperse to hinder enemy targeting, rapidly concentrate when required, and adapt more rapidly than the enemy as conditions change.

Convergence ensures that echelons above brigade employ all available Army and joint capabilities to maximize relative combat power in ways that create opportunities to defeat capable enemy forces. Convergence creates opportunities for maneuver and close operations but requires agile Army forces to rapidly exploit those opportunities.

Endurance reflects the ability to absorb the enemy’s attacks and press the fight over the time and space necessary to accomplish the mission. It is a function of protection, sustainment, and managing tempo.

Depth applies combat power throughout the enemy’s formations and the operational environment, securing successive operational objectives and consolidating gains for the joint force. Operations in depth disrupt the enemy’s preferred approach, disintegrate the interdependent elements of enemy systems, and make enemy forces vulnerable to defeat in detail.13

Imperatives. Nine imperatives describe what units must do to win at acceptable cost on the modern battlefield. They are derived from the principles of war but are tailored to current challenges. They should heavily inform how we develop our leaders and train our formations because they must drive the necessary cultural change to prevail during large-scale combat operations in the twenty-first century. The nine imperatives are as follows:

See yourself, see the enemy, and understand the operational environment.
Account for being under constant observation and all forms of enemy contact.
Create and exploit relative physical, information, and human advantages in pursuit of decision dominance.
Make initial contact with the smallest element possible.
Impose multiple dilemmas on the enemy.
Anticipate, plan, and execute transitions.
Designate, weight, and sustain the main effort.
Consolidate gains continuously.
Understand and manage the effects of operations on units and soldiers.14

The second imperative—account for constant enemy observation and all forms of contact—is one that affects every rank and military occupational specialty in our Army. It addresses the importance of not presenting lucrative targets to enemy fires. As FM 3-0 succinctly states, “That which can be detected can be targeted for attack and killed.”15 Units must employ combinations of capabilities and techniques to ensure dispersion, cover, concealment, camouflage, masking of electromagnetic radiation signatures, operations security, and deception. Accounting for continuous enemy observation operationalizes protection, which is ultimately an outcome requiring continuous leader attention to the realities of the increasingly transparent operational environment.16

Defeating Enemy Forces

Defeat in detail is concentrating overwhelming combat power against separate parts of a force rather than defeating the entire force at once.17

Defeating an evenly matched, adaptive enemy operating with complex capabilities and formations in a single, decisive effort is highly unlikely. FM 3-0 therefore provides an approach to defeating enemy forces in detail. Defeating enemy forces in detail allows commanders to bring superior combat power to bear against portions of a potentially superior enemy force and the systems that enable it, like integrated fires commands and integrated air defense systems. Commanders apply combinations of defeat mechanisms to do so. As FM 3-0 describes, “Multidomain operations fracture the coherence of threat operational approaches by repeatedly destroying, dislocating, isolating, and disintegrating their interdependent systems and formations, and exploiting the opportunities to defeat enemy forces in detail.”18

Operational Framework

Battlefields are chaotic environments. Enemy and friendly forces are intermingled, with friendly units often separated by long distances or operating under different commands. Commanders use the operational framework to help impose order and focus on the forces they control and to manage the application of violence. FM 3-0 describes the operational framework as “a cognitive tool used to assist commanders and staffs in clearly visualizing and describing the application of combat power in time, space, purpose, and resources in the concept of operations (ADP 1-01).”19 The three models commonly used to build an operational framework are assigned areas; deep, close, and rear operations; and main effort, supporting effort, and reserve.20

The focus on ‘operations’ in this version of FM 3-0 helps clarify a unit’s role in terms of purpose—areas define a unit’s location; operations define a unit’s purpose.

Leaders should not take an overly rigid approach to the operational framework. They should only use models when they apply and should feel free to adapt a model to the unique requirements of a situation. If an entirely different model better suits their needs, then they must coordinate higher and lower to ensure each echelon understands and follows the same approach. When adapting models, leaders must ensure that their framework still nests with their higher echelon’s framework.

Commanders consider mutual support between subordinate forces when assigning areas. Mutual support can include supporting ranges between weapons and capabilities. It also includes consideration of the supporting distances between units. Corps and divisions operating along multiple axes will have noncontiguous subordinate formations. When a higher echelon assigns noncontiguous assigned areas, it maintains responsibility for the risk associated with the areas for which it does not assign responsibility. An assigned area may be an area of operations, a zone, or a sector depending on the type of operation and level of control required by the higher echelon. Assigned areas should be large enough to support subordinate maneuver and their ability to distribute forces to mitigate the effects of enemy targeting. However, they should not extend too far beyond subordinate areas of influence, which would impose uncertain or excessive levels of risk on the subordinate formation. When an echelon retains areas it also retains the associated risk with those areas. During noncontiguous operations, leaders must continuously assess the risk in those retained areas, especially regarding C2 and sustainment nodes.

Within assigned areas, commanders organize their operations in terms of time, space, and purpose by synchronizing deep, close, support, and rear operations. Divisions and higher may also echelon their formations according to deep, close, support, and rear areas because of the size and scale of their operations during large-scale combat. The focus on “operations” in this version of FM 3-0 helps clarify a unit’s role in terms of purpose—areas define a unit’s location; operations define a unit’s purpose.

Seizing and defending contested land areas require close operations and typically involve close combat or the threat of close combat. Close combat is the highest risk activity for conventional forces. Deep and rear operations are generally conducted to enable success during close operations and establish favorable conditions for maneuver in close combat. “Deep operations are tactical actions against enemy forces, typically out of direct contact with friendly forces, intended to shape future close operations and protect rear operations. … Close operations are tactical actions of subordinate maneuver forces and the forces providing immediate support to them, whose purpose is to employ maneuver and fires to close with and destroy enemy forces. … Rear operations are tactical actions behind major subordinate maneuver forces that facilitate movement, extend operational reach, and maintain desired tempo.”21

The land component may often support the air and maritime components, which is a switch from what Army forces have been accustomed to in recent decades.

Because Army forces will fight in contested communications environments, the mission command approach to command and control is more essential than ever. One way in which commanders enable disciplined initiative and the ability to assume risk is by describing each echelon’s role in time, space, and purpose. FM 3-0 provides some general considerations:

During large-scale combat operations, brigade combat teams (BCTs) and divisions generally focus on defeating enemy maneuver formations. Corps and higher echelons generally focus on defeating enemy integrated air defense systems and portions of the enemy’s integrated fires command according to the JFC [joint force commander’s] plan and priorities.22

Corps fight their divisions, divisions fight their brigades, and brigades fight their battalions. Each higher echelon seeks to set conditions for its subordinate formations to achieve their assigned objectives while providing them the resources, guidance, and situational awareness to do so. Corps and divisions fight as formations, which requires an integrated approach to deep, close, support, and rear operations—no echelon can afford to have a myopic focus on one part of the battlefield.

Consolidating Gains

The 2017 FM 3-0 introduced the idea of consolidating gains, and the 2019 Army Doctrine Publication 3-0, Operations, continued to clarify the necessity to do so. The 2022 version of FM 3-0 affirms the importance of continuous consolidation of gains as an imperative and key consideration for operations during competition, crisis, and armed conflict. Consolidating gains achieves the ultimate purpose of the operations Army forces conduct. It is not a phase—it is the exploitation of tactical objectives for strategic outcomes. Consolidating gains requires leaders to conduct operations with the end state in mind and take the actions required to achieve that overall end state as rapidly as possible. Consolidating gains starts with a clear description of the purpose of an operation and shared understanding for how to achieve it. Then, as units achieve objectives and defeat enemy forces, they take action to make their gains more permanent. Consolidating gains may start out as a small unit consolidating on an objective. It can include a division assigning a brigade the mission to defeat a bypassed enemy force to set conditions for stability operations. Asking an ally or partner to conduct essential stability tasks in an urban area would be a potentially effective means of consolidating gains.

Higher echelons request resources to increase the scale and accelerate the tempo of consolidating gains. Their access to host nation forces, joint fires, security force assistance capabilities, special operations forces, civil affairs, public affairs, engineers, and space and cyberspace capabilities provides opportunities to coalesce and expand the success of subordinate units. During major campaigns and operations, consolidating gains is the yardstick that drives toward transition of responsibility for areas and populations to other legitimate authorities and, ultimately, sustainable policy outcomes. During postconflict competition, Army forces continue to consolidate gains for the joint force, expanding or maintaining stability of the desirable conditions.

Maritime Environments

A decade after the Pacific Pivot, it is critical that Army doctrine begin to account for the unique considerations of operating in maritime environments like the Indo-Pacific theater.23 Chapter 7 addresses many of those considerations, and likewise describes aspects of operating in the Arctic, which is also heavily influenced by the maritime environment.

Operating in maritime environments requires the employment of joint and Army capabilities in mutually supporting ways. Sustainment, communication, protection, and mobility are challenging for land forces in maritime environments and require an even higher level of integration with the joint force. The land component may often support the air and maritime components, which is a switch from what Army forces have been accustomed to in recent decades. Maritime operations depend on land forces to secure bases, ports, and maritime choke points. Land forces enable air and maritime operations with surface-to-surface and surface-to-air fires while allowing the joint force to retain or seize critical landmasses and infrastructure.24

Contested Deployments

Army forces should expect challenges by the threat from home station all the way to their assembly areas overseas. Since World War II, “U.S. military forces conducted uncontested and generally predictable deployments from home stations to operational theaters because our enemies lacked the capability to significantly affect deploying units at home station or while in transit to a theater of operations. This is no longer the case.”25 Annex C in FM 3-0 describes how we plan to deal with peer threats able to observe, disrupt, delay, and attack U.S. forces at any stage of force projection, including while still positioned at home stations in the United States and overseas. “Commanders and staffs must therefore plan and execute deployments with the assumption that friendly forces are always under observation and in contact”—a multidomain operations imperative.26

Multidomain Operations into the Future

FM 3-0 is a catalyst for change across the Army. Multidomain operations doctrine will drive an update to other Army doctrine and influence future force design. Professional military education must account for its tenets, imperatives, and approach to the operational environment. Multidomain operations will drive changes to collective training at unit home stations and combat training centers. Interoperability with allies and partners is more important than ever before and should address technical, human, and procedural requirements. Our focus must be on being a good ally or partner, not only having allies and partners.

Just as AirLand Battle doctrine drove a deeper level of air-ground integration by the joint force, multidomain operations will drive the continued development of tactics, techniques, and procedures for integrating maritime, space, and cyberspace capabilities in support of operations on land. Organizations, such as the multidomain task force and the theater fires command are first steps. Units must develop and experiment with solutions for how to integrate new capabilities with existing Army and joint structures and processes. The experimentation may result in new or adjusted Army and joint processes or adjustments to our existing organizations. Whatever changes we make as an Army and joint force must be informed by a shared understanding of how we fight, however. That shared understanding starts with our doctrine.

This version of multidomain operations is not the “end of doctrine.” It will continue to evolve as Army forces learn, train, and refine the ideas in FM 3-0 to reach the Army of 2030. Future versions of multidomain operations will continue to update key ideas and account for new capabilities, informed by the experience of the force.

Patton used the metaphor of an orchestra and the role of each instrument in his “Musicians from Mars” speech to describe the combined arms approach for how he wanted to fight. Across the globe and two millennia earlier, Sun Tzu identified the advantage of combinations in his axioms on music, color, and taste:

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.27

We know that the observations of these icons of military thought do not provide a magic bullet for how to win wars. Their resonance over time, however, suggests that the idea of employing combinations during war in ways that surprise and overwhelm enemy forces is more than a passing fad. It is, in fact, part of the very fabric of what makes a military organization successful. Leaders who are masters of their craft, able to incorporate all available capabilities in ways that are surprising and overwhelming to enemy forces, can take a modest update to doctrine and turn it into an overwhelming advantage provided by Army forces to the joint force.

Notes

Epigraph. George S. Patton, quoted in Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) Publication 90-6, The Musicians of Mars: A Story of Synchronization for the Company/Team Commander (Fort Leavenworth, KS: CALL, June 1990), 4.

Huba Wass de Czege, “Lessons from the Past: Making the Army’s Doctrine ‘Right Enough’ Today,” Institute of Land Warfare Publication No. 06-2 (Arlington, VA: Association of the United States Army, September 2006), 15, accessed 1 December 2022, https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LPE-06-2-Lessons-from-the-Past-Making-the-Armys-Doctrine-Right-Enough-Today.pdf. This essay provides a guide for how to develop a successful operations doctrine. In it, Wass de Czege noted the importance of minimizing change in doctrine so that it is easier for the force to assimilate it. He wrote that “many key ideas of AirLand Battle merely require recultivation.”
Field Manual 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office [GPO], 2022), 1-2.
Ibid., 1-3.
Army Techniques Publication 7-100.3, Chinese Tactics (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2021), 1-10.
FM 3-0, Operations, 1-3–1-4.
Ibid., 1-18.
Ibid., 1-21.
Ibid., 2-1.
Ibid., 2-3.
Ibid., 2-6.
Ibid., 2-7–2-12.
Ibid., 1-14–1-16.
Ibid., 3-2–3-7.
Ibid., 3-8.
Ibid., 3-10.
Ibid., 3-10–3-13.
Army Doctrine Publication 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2010), 3-19.
FM 3-0, Operations, 1-3.
Ibid., 3-23.
Ibid.
Ibid., 3-27–3-31.
Ibid., 6-10.
For more on the Pacific Pivot, see Christopher H. Robertson, The Obama Administration’s Pacific Pivot Strategy: An Assessment (Fort Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies, 25 May 2017), accessed 1 December 2022, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1039909.pdf.
FM 3-0, Operations, 7-1.
Ibid., C-1.
Ibid.
Sun Tzu, quoted in Thomas R. Phillips, ed., Roots of Strategy (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1985), 28.

Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle Jr., U.S. Army, is the commanding general of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center on Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is responsible for integrating the modernization of the fielded Army across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy. He has served in multiple leadership capacities from platoon through division level, and his career deployments span the globe from Hawaii to the Republic of Korea. He previously served as the commanding general of 10th Mountain Division (Light). He holds a BS from South Carolina State University, an MS from Kansas State University, an MS from the School of Advanced Military Studies, and an MS from the Army War College.

Col. Richard Creed, U.S. Army, retired, is the director of the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and one of the authors and editors of both the 2017 and 2022 editions of Field Manual 3-0, Operations. He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy, an MS from the School of Advanced Military Studies, and an MS from the Army War College. His previous assignments include G-3 of the 2nd Infantry Division, and he has completed tours in Germany, Korea, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He commanded at company, battalion, and brigade levels.

Lt. Col. Matt Farmer, U.S. Army, retired, is a doctrine developer in the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and one of the authors of the 2022 edition of Field Manual 3-0, Operations. He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy, an MS from the National Defense Intelligence University, and an MS from the School of Advanced Military Studies. His assignments include tours in Europe, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Korea.

To learn more about the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD), visit https://usacac.army.mil/organizations/mccoe/cadd.

March-April 2023

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12. Why is the US sending 'downgraded' weaponry to Ukraine?

You have to also assume that weapons will fall into the hands of US enemies which could compromise the most advanced US capabilities. Or give our enemies an advantage when they reverse engineer our advanced systems. I think it is common that we do not always expert our most advanced capabilities. That is why the US defense industry will produce "expert versions of weapons and equipment.

Why is the US sending 'downgraded' weaponry to Ukraine? – DW – 03/25/2023

Roman Goncharenko

20 hours ago20 hours ago

Howitzers without GPS, rocket launchers restricted to short-range: The US is sending Ukraine weapons with critical limitations. Observers say US officials are trying to avoid a confrontation with Russia.

Whether Leopard 2 battle tanks from Norway, or MiG-29 fighter jets from Slovakia, Ukraine receives pledges for the delivery of heavy weapons from its international allies almost daily. On March 20, the United States announced a new military aid package worth $350 million (€325 million). But the M1 Abrams main battle tanks previously promised were not included.

US officials said they were seeking to shorten delivery times and they would deliver older models by fall. In January, Politico reported that, because of export regulations, the United States intended to strip the Abrams tanks of their classified armor package, which includes depleted uranium, before sending them to Ukraine.

Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow who specializes in armed conflict and military affairs at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told DW that this is nothing unusual. "Ukraine is receiving the export variant of the Abrams, the same ones that are used in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq,” Gressel said. He added that the armor is comparable to that of the older German Leopard 2A4 tanks that Norway and, earlier, Poland had delivered to Ukraine. Gressel said the older Abrams was "still a good battle tank: It has a good thermal imaging camera and a powerful cannon, and is superior to Russian tanks in terms of handling.”

What makes the Leopard 2 the battle tank of choice?

'Captured and analyzed'

Export regulations are one of the reasons why the United States is only delivering certain weapons to Ukraine in modified editions. But that is not the only reason. "In Ukraine, they are asking themselves what would happen if a tank falls behind and is captured and analyzed by the Russians,” Gressel said. This concern also extends to the M777 howitzers that the US has been delivering to Ukraine since April 2022. These howitzers were handed over without GPS navigation and associated onboard computers. Weapons without GPS are generally less accurate.

Ukraine's army quickly found a solution and installed its own systems, including GIS Arta military software developed in Ukraine to coordinate artillery strikes. In May, media reported that Ukraine had deployed M777 howitzers using GIS Arta software to stop the advance of a particularly large number of Russian troops crossing the Siverskyi Donets river near the village Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region. "With artillery, firing orders go much faster digitally," Gressel said. For Russia, he added, "much is still being done with radiotelephony."

Serhiy Hrabsky, a former officer in Ukraine's armed forces, told DW that he is not concerned by the limitations of weapons systems sent by Ukraine's allies. "All guidance information systems are integrated into NATO command structures," Hrabsky said. They can only be used in the framework of NATO tasks." He said this was common practice and Ukraine used its own systems.

Ukrainian forces have thwarted Russia's advance with the help of international armsImage: Libkos/AP Photo/picture alliance

Short-range HIMARS launchers

The situation is different with US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, which Ukraine has successfully been using since summer for precision strikes deep behind the front line. The United States has been supplying missiles with a range of about 80 kilometers (50 miles), but not the far-more-powerful Army Tactical Missile System missiles, which can hit targets up to 300 kilometers away.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States modified these rocket launchers prior to delivery so that missiles with a longer range could not be fired — even if Ukraine could procure them on the global market. The paper cited an anonymous source from the US government as saying the decision was made to reduce the risk of escalating the standoff between the United States and Russia. In September, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said long-range missiles would be a "red line" that would make the United States a party to the conflict. Gressel said the technical limitations could be reversed on the HIMARS launchers should the United States choose to do so.

Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who specializes in Russia and a former professor at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, said the limitations on weapon systems had to do with a "fear of Russia and an escalation of the war by Russia." However, Blank said he considered such concerns exaggerated. "I think we are too afraid of a escalation by Russia," Blank said. "I don't understand why Russian territory should be excluded from Ukrainian strikes. Russia started this war and has destroyed Ukraine." On the battle field, Blank said he saw a "significant difference" in the fact that Russia could concentrate its military equipment on the border with Ukraine and "fire at will" without fearing a counterattack. "If they could not do that anymore," Blank said, "that would be a great advantage for Ukraine." Blank advocates for demonstrating that Ukraine "won't be pushed around."

At them beginning of 2023, international allies promised Ukraine missiles with a range of 150 kilometers. At the time, Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said Ukraine would pledge not to fire them into Russia. But that did not go for areas occupied by Russia.

As Ukraine war anniversary nears, Putin issues rallying call

Blank said Ukraine's allies within Europe were more worried than US officials are. He said the administration of US President Joe Biden sought to preserve NATO unity and was therefore taking such concerns into account. The alliance has repeatedly emphasized that it is not a party to the war and will not be drawn into it. Gressel also does not think that NATO should engage directly, but he criticizes the apparent notion in the United States that the war could be "micromanaged in a way that it ends in a desired stalemate." He said that war is "too complex and too chaotic to be micromanaged."

"This just signals to Putin that he has a certain chance of winning the war by sitting it out," Gressel said. "Any restraint in Western weapon deliveries is a signal to him that we are not serious."

This article was originally written in German.

13. Army pulls ‘Be All You Can Be’ ads after on-screen narrator arrested

More Army bad luck.

Army pulls ‘Be All You Can Be’ ads after on-screen narrator arrested

militarytimes.com · by Davis Winkie · March 26, 2023

The Army paused its new multi-million dollar advertising campaign Sunday after its featured actor was arrested the day before, officials said.

Jonathan Majors, who stars as the on-screen narrator in the first wave of “Be All You Can Be” advertisements, faces charges of assault, strangulation and harassment, a New York Police Department official told Army Times.

The police official said officers responded to a 911 call shortly after 11:00 a.m. at an apartment in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood, where they found Majors and a 30-year-old woman with injuries to her head and neck. Officers did a “preliminary investigation” and arrested the actor.

The case involved a “domestic dispute,” police said. First responders took the woman to a local hospital.

The actor’s publicist did not respond to a query from Army Times but told other news outlets, “He’s done nothing wrong. We look forward to clearing his name and clearing this up.”

But in the arrest’s wake, the Army threw the brakes on its rebranding campaign.

How embracing ‘Be all you can be’ resurrected Army marketing

The rebrand is the latest move in a series of service-wide efforts that may reduce recent years’ recruiting struggles.

“The U.S. Army is aware of the arrest of Jonathan Majors and we are deeply concerned by the allegations surrounding his arrest,” said Laura DeFrancisco, spokesperson for the Army Enterprise Marketing Office. The Chicago-based enterprise office oversees a multi-billion dollar contract with advertising conglomerate DDB to oversee and execute the service’s marketing efforts.

“While Mr. Majors is innocent until proven guilty, prudence dictates that we pull our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete.” DeFrancisco added.

The financial impact of the pause is unclear, but the service invested millions of dollars in high-visibility advertisement purchases for the 2023 NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, more commonly known as March Madness. For this year’s final game, a 30-second commercial cost around $2.2 million, according to sports news site Sportico.

Army Times previously reported the “be all you can be” launch would include immersive in-person events in Texas for the tournament’s Final Four. It’s not clear if or how the pause on advertising spots featuring Majors will change those events.

Service officials couldn’t answer whether they could speed up the next round of advertisements in the works for the campaign. A senior marketing official told Army Times the next commercials were expected to arrive in August — but that was before Majors’ arrest and the advertising pause.

About Davis Winkie

Davis Winkie is a senior reporter covering the Army, specializing in accountability reporting, personnel issues and military justice. He joined Military Times in 2020. Davis studied history at Vanderbilt University and UNC-Chapel Hill, writing a master's thesis about how the Cold War-era Defense Department influenced Hollywood's WWII movies.

14. ChatGPT just plugged itself into the internet. What next?

ChatGPT just plugged itself into the internet. What next? | Digital Trends

Digital Trends · by Alan Truly · March 24, 2023

OpenAI just announced that ChatGPT is getting even more powerful with plugins that allow the AI to access portions of the internet. This expansion could simplify tasks like shopping and planning trips without the need to access various websites for research.

This new web integration is in testing with select partners at the moment. The list includes Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.

Stockpiling US arms in Taiwan a vital move

By Yao Chung-yuan 姚中原
A potential stockpile of munitions the US wants to establish in Taiwan has sparked controversy and concern within the ruling and opposition camps.
Earlier this month, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) confirmed speculation that the US is discussing the creation of such an arms reserve as a contingency for critical situations, not just in the Taiwan Strait, but around the western Pacific region.
Some opposition legislators have opposed the proposal, saying it could turn Taiwan into “East Asia’s ammunition room” and could speed the increase of tensions in the Taiwan Strait, compromising the nation’s safety and pushing Taiwan to the front line of war.
Such opposition is not only unconvincing, but also groundless and misleading.
The administration of US President Joe Biden is pushing to stockpile arms in Taiwan based on a professional security assessment.
Apart from the strategic function of hosting an arms supply in the event of a cross-strait war, such a move would deter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military aggression against Taiwan.
By extension, the maneuver would add some measure of security to the Indo-Pacific region.
Washington stores weapons and munitions on the territories of other Asian military allies on the advice of a security assessment — the US, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines — where US troops are stationed.
Although the US and Taiwan are not officially military allies, and US troops are not stationed in the country, the US Congress this year regardless passed a provision in the US National Defense Authorization Act for its military to store a cache of weapons in Taiwan.
The authorization is of great importance, showing that the Taiwan-US military relationship is moving toward a new milestone. Specifically, it shows that if the CCP invades or blockades Taiwan, the US could have difficulty transporting military supplies to Taiwan in a timely manner. Stockpiling munitions in advance of an attack would seems to be a necessary precautionary measure.
The US has been stockpiling weapons around Asia according to its overall strategic considerations. The arms are not limited to local use, as they could be sent to nearby countries in times of conflict. Crucially, weapons stockpiled in Japan, South Korea or the Philippines could support Taiwan if a cross-strait war were to occur.
Similarly, a war in the Korean Peninsula could benefit from munitions stored in Taiwan. If the US engages in war with North Korea, allies such as South Korea and Japan might participate in the effort against a common enemy. Taiwan’s alliance with the US and the local arms cache would bolster security in Northeast Asia.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula have been identified and watched as places where a similar conflict might occur.
Whether the CCP invades Taiwan is an issue of concern to the US and its democratic allies, because the nation’s strategic position is crucial to global security interests.
Based on these factors, the US security assessment of Taiwan concluded that a stockpile of munitions in Taiwan is an urgent priority for contingency purposes. This pragmatic approach is likely to deter CCP ambitions around Taiwan, and effectively respond to potential emergencies in the strait.
Yao Chung-yuan is a professor and former deputy director of the Ministry of National Defense’s strategic planning department.
Translated by Eddy Chang

16. US X-Plane concept aims to redefine amphibious warfareUS X-Plane concept aims to redefine amphibious warfare

Fascinating photos at the link.

US X-Plane concept aims to redefine amphibious warfare

Liberty Lifter flying boat would keep US island missile bases stocked and facilitate over-the-horizon amphibious operations

https://asiatimes.com/2023/03/us-x-plane-concept-aims-to-redefine-amphibious-warfare/https://asiatimes.com/2023/03/us-x-plane-concept-aims-to-redefine-amphibious-warfare/

By GABRIEL HONRADA

MARCH 23, 2023

The Liberty Lifter aims to change the complexion of amphibious warfare. Image: DARPA

The US has unveiled concepts for a new type of amphibious flying boat, revitalizing an old idea that it hopes will revolutionize amphibious warfare.

This week, The Debrief reported that the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is pursuing the so-called “Liberty Lifter” X-Plane program to develop a large, long-range experimental flying boat with ground-effect capability for seaborne strategic and tactical heavy-lift purposes.

By flying close to the water’s surface, the ground effect reduces drag and makes detection by missile radars harder due to radar clutter from the water’s surface.

The report notes that the Liberty Lifter is envisioned to fly at a maximum altitude of 3,000 meters and a range of 7,400 kilometers. While in ground effect mode, it has a projected speed of 460 kilometers per hour and can carry 90 tons of cargo which it can offload using nose or tail ramps.

DARPA has selected General Atomics and Aurora Flight Sciences to develop designs for the Liberty Lifter in a US$55 million conceptual phase.

The report notes that General Atomics’ design is a twin-hull, mid-wing design employing a distributed propulsion system using 12 turboshaft engines. In contrast, Aurora Flight Sciences will use a more traditional flying boat design, with a single hull, high wing and eight turboprops for primary propulsion.

DARPA hopes to select one of the designs for fabrication and assembly by 2026, start flight testing by the end of 2027 and transfer the Liberty Lifter to operational military service by 2028, as noted by the source.

Interestingly, the US has explored an ad hoc solution to fill the capability gap addressed by the Liberty Lifter.

Photo: Liberty Lifter concept via General Atomics-Aeronautical Systems, Inc / DARPA

For example, in a September 2021 article for Forbes, David Axe mentioned that the US Special Operations Command had developed removable floats for its MC—130J Commando II transports, turning the aircraft into improvised seaplanes capable of taking off and landing from any reasonably smooth stretch of water to drop off or extract special forces teams.

Axe also mentions that while the US extensively operated seaplanes during World War II, they fell out of favor after the war, as the advent of the helicopter, extended range of fixed-wing aircraft, and the US’ extensive network of island bases in the Pacific seemed to make seaplanes obsolete.

However, China and North Korea’s advances in missile technology have forced the US to disperse the deployment of its forces to increase survivability and reduce vulnerability. In that connection, Asia Times reported in December 2022 that the US is building a “missile wall” consisting of land-based missile launchers stretched across its Pacific outposts and regional allies to deter China.

These outposts must be defended and incessantly resupplied to maintain a constant and high rate of fire against enemy targets. However, Axe mentions that some US island outposts lack airstrips and that helicopters lack the range and payload of fixed-wing planes, which makes seaplanes invaluable for supplying them.

Apart from resupply operations for island outposts, the Liberty Lifter may address one of the biggest challenges in mounting amphibious operations.

As noted by Guillaume Garnier in a February 2014 IFRI report, the greatest vulnerability for an amphibious attacker occurs during the ship-to-shore transfer, wherein a defender can halt an amphibious assault by destroying the attacker’s landing craft, thus preventing the attacker from organizing tactically and establishing a beachhead.

Garnier also notes that the defender has the advantage in amphibious operations, as it has multiple options to repel an amphibious assault such as static defenses, counterattacks against an enemy beachhead and defense-in-depth to wear down an attacker via attrition.

Advances in weaponry have potentially made seaborne amphibious assaults costly to the point of infeasibility. For example, in a June 2014 article for The Diplomat, Zachary Keck points out that in amphibious operations, the attacker has to fight out in the open against a well-entrenched defender with precision-guided munitions such as anti-ship missiles and anti-tank guided missiles.

That, Keck notes, forces the attacker to station ships and disembark landing forces ashore, which extends the vulnerable period between ship-to-shore transfer.

However, amphibious operations are still the most forceful way of taking military operations into an adversary’s territory. Over-the-horizon (OTH) amphibious operations may be the key to minimizing such operations’ vulnerabilities and enormous costs.

Such considerations for OTH amphibious operations are not new, as Jerome Bierly and Thomas Seal discussed in a June 1991 article for the US Marine Corps Association.

Photo: Liberty Lifter concept via Aurora Flight Sciences / DARPA

In contrast to traditional amphibious operations, Bierly and Seal note that in OTH amphibious operations beaches and landing zones are just points for entry and control measures for landing forces, emphasizing that the concept’s point is to get mobile, combined arms teams ashore quickly, merge them into combat formations while on the move and drive deep into the enemy’s rear positions.

They note that OTH amphibious operations remove the need to set up a beachhead to organize land combat and prepare for a massive logistics buildup, depriving the enemy of a lucrative target and eliminating the operational pause associated with landing on the beachhead and advancing to seize inland objectives.

The Liberty Lifter may thus add another dimension to the US Marine Corps’ current OTH amphibious assault capabilities that are built around hovercrafts, amphibious assault vehicles and rotary-wing aircraft, complementing the strengths of these assets while offsetting their weaknesses.

In a 2020 study for the US Marine Corps University, Steven Yeadon notes that while hovercrafts are the only surface connectors that can carry heavy equipment at high speed, they are relatively fragile and lack the firepower and protection to assault a defended beach.

Yeadon also mentions that while amphibious assault vehicles have armor and weapons for opposed landings, they lack the range and speed for OTH operations, have insufficient protection against anti-tank weapons and are too lightly armed to take on main battle tanks.

He also says that air superiority is only sometimes assured in amphibious operations, and the threat of anti-aircraft defenses may preclude or limit aircraft use.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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Moscow claims Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are engaged in a U.S.-backed cover-up, as the war to control the narrative — and the evidence — intensifies.

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Why is the US sending 'downgraded' weaponry to Ukraine? – DW – 03/25/2023

What makes the Leopard 2 the battle tank of choice?

'Captured and analyzed'

Short-range HIMARS launchers

As Ukraine war anniversary nears, Putin issues rallying call

Army pulls ‘Be All You Can Be’ ads after on-screen narrator arrested

ChatGPT just plugged itself into the internet. What next? | Digital Trends

Stockpiling US arms in Taiwan a vital move

US X-Plane concept aims to redefine amphibious warfare