Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called "wars of liberation," to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the U.S.

Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 06, 1962

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"An unexamined life is not worth living."

– Socrates

"But there are some people, nevertheless - and I am one of them - who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy."

– G. K. Chesterton

"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."

– Will Durant

1. US must establish independent military cyber service to fix 'alarming' problems — report

2. FOLLOW-UP Comments: Army puts drones front and center in unfunded wishlist

3. What Ukraine Needs from NATO

4. Israel Cancels Visit to Washington After U.S. Abstains on U.N. Cease-Fire Resolution

5. Arab Nations Balk at Funding U.N. Aid Agency Vital to Palestinians

6. Why America Is Still Failing in Iraq

7. ‘Duty to warn’ guided US advance warning of the Moscow attack. Adversaries don’t always listen

8. ‘The goal was a massacre on Tel Aviv’: Hamas's full plan for October 7 revealed

9. More upheaval at Pentagon policy shop as top official steps down

10. The Bitter Choices in Fighting Terrorism by Walter Russell Mead

11. China’s Third Plenum Is Long Overdue. That’s a Red Flag.

12. Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

13. Is This a Revolution? Or Are People Just Very Ticked Off?

14. Rebel groups kill officials recruiting for Myanmar’s junta

15. The robots are coming: US Army experiments with human-machine warfare

16. Ukraine relies on Starlink for its drone war. Russia appears to be bypassing sanctions to use the devices too

17. Millions of Americans caught up in Chinese hacking plot - US

18. House speaker picks China panel leader to replace Gallagher

19. Organizing to Deter or Prevail in Space Warfare

20. The Indo-Pacific strategy's fatal blind spot

21. Can Startup Culture and Army Culture Coexist? Lessons from the Creation of the 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade

22. The biggest threat from China is right under our noses — and on our screens

23. How to keep China out of the Pentagon’s weapons

24. China’s Gray Zone Air Power

25. When Understanding Goes M.I.A: Lost in Metaphors, Idioms, and Analogies

1. US must establish independent military cyber service to fix 'alarming' problems — report

Download the 44 page monograph at this link:https://www.fdd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/fdd-report-united-states-cyber-force.pdf

Impacts the Army, USSOCOM, and CYBERCOM and all the services.

Excerpt:

The report’s authors were sure to explain they’re not necessarily wedded to what a cyber force could look like if the Department of Defense has ideas for it.

But it did recommend placing it within the Department of the Army, with Cybercom continuing to be the force employer. Montgomery believes the Army has done the best in cyber, relative to the other services, placing cyber in the hands of general officers. Additionally, the other military departments already have subordinate forces: the Space Force under the Department of the Air Force and the Marine Corps under the Department of the Navy.

“Standing up this new service would be relatively straightforward. Initially, the Cyber Force would encompass the billets that currently comprise the CMF: a 6,200-person mission group consisting of servicemembers, civilians, and contractors,” the report stated. “Beyond the CMF, the Cyber Force could also absorb a select number of billets for cyberspace operators that currently fall within the SOCOM enterprise. The Cyber Force could draw on lessons from the Space Force, which has encountered few issues filling its new roles even though it requires highly technical and skilled personnel.”

US must establish independent military cyber service to fix 'alarming' problems — report

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · March 25, 2024

The current model for military services providing forces to U.S. Cyber Command is broken, and the only way to fix it is to create an independent Cyber Force, a new report asserts.

“America’s cyber force generation system is clearly broken. Fixing it demands nothing less than the establishment of an independent cyber service,” a report published Monday by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies states. “This research paints an alarming picture. The inefficient division of labor between the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps prevents the generation of a cyber force ready to carry out its mission. Recruitment suffers because cyber operations are not a top priority for any of the services … The current system compounds these force-generation challenges. Each of the services has developed its own solutions, leading to both inconsistencies and shortcomings.”

The report’s authors — retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who is senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, and Erica Lonergan, an assistant professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University — interviewed over 75 active duty and retired U.S. military officers with significant leadership and command experience within cyber. Both authors were members of the now-sunset Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

While not all interviewees believe the creation of a new service is the answer, “everyone agrees that the status quo is not sustainable, even if not everyone we interviewed agreed that necessarily that the solution is to establish an independent uniformed service for cyberspace,” Lonergan told reporters ahead of the report’s release.

Each of the military services is responsible for providing personnel for a set number of teams to U.S. Cyber Command, which then employs those forces in operations for the other geographic combatant commands.

Proponents of an independent cyber service argue the cyber operators have no distinct identity — as they are still members of their respective services — as well as that there are readiness issues associated with each service resourcing their cyber contributions differently, lexicon and pay scales are different for the members of each service, and that command and control structures are confusing.

In one of the most pertinent and striking examples, Congress recently was forced to act in directing the Navy to create cyber-specific work roles as it was the only service to date that had not done so. Navy service members were rotating too frequently in and out of the cyber mission force creating continuity issues, forcing retraining, and ultimately, readiness issues.

Those cyber mission force teams — offensive and defensive — were initially designed to be joint from the outset, trained to the same standards so they could be interchangeable and operate alongside one another. But individual service intricacies have plagued that design, the report alleges.

“The services do not coordinate to ensure that trainees acquire a consistent set of skills or that their skills correspond to the roles they will ultimately fulfill at CYBERCOM … At root, the current readiness issue stems from the fact that none of the existing services prioritizes cyberspace,” it states. “Promotion systems often hold back skilled cyber personnel because the systems were designed to evaluate servicemembers who operate on land, at sea, or in the air, not in cyberspace. Retention rates for qualified personnel are low because of inconsistent policies, institutional cultures that do not value cyber expertise, and insufficient opportunities for advanced training.”

The report, as well as sources who detailed the issue to DefenseScoop previously, allege the services played “shell games” when it comes to staffing the team, oftentimes double counting personnel to make the teams look fully manned.

‘The status quo isn’t working’

There has been frustration among many outside the military that despite readiness shortfalls, not much to date has been done to address how forces are presented.

“This is also a concern that this poor force generation model is negatively impacting readiness. It’s preventing the cyber mission force from conducting operations or really from growing and expanding,” Montgomery told reporters. “We need to absolutely get better or we’re going to create a catastrophic condition where an adversary’s cyber capabilities either enable him to do something we can’t stop or him to stop us from doing something we need to do. I think we’re rapidly getting to that.”

The cyber mission force was conceived in 2012-2013 and began building then. At the time, it envisioned 133 teams. However, that force has remained steady until the fiscal 2022 budget that, for the first time, authorized growth for the cyber mission force approving 14 additional teams.

For Montgomery, the growth and maturation of the force has not been enough to keep pace with America’s adversaries.

“Over the last 14 years, one thing I can definitely say by the Chinese and Russians is their capacity has grown, and the idea that we’ve maintained the exact same level is really concerning. I think we’re there because we’re not able to get the maximum readiness out of that lower level, much less grow and expand it,” he said.

Each of the service chiefs has pledged to make cyber mission force readiness a top priority. However, Montgomery contends the services have completely failed thus far.

“It is definitely a criticism of [the] services. There’s no two ways about it,” he said.

Lonergan noted that there is beginning to be recognition that the current status quo is inefficient and changes must be made.

“The consensus is that the status quo isn’t working and I think I can say that that’s the consensus of our military leaders in cyberspace, too. That’s what’s driving this Cybercom 2.0 effort to do this kind of holistic, comprehensive review of Cybercom,” she said.

Cybercom 2.0 is a holistic top-to-bottom review underway by the command to examine how to reshape its organization and forces and ensure it’s best postured for the future and emerging threats. It’s meant to look at force presentation, force composition, acquisition and other improvements and changes as it evolves.

Last year, Congress attempted to begin evaluating the prospect of creating an independent cyber service. However, efforts in both the House and Senate were struck from the annual defense policy bill, one of which would have required an independent body to study the merits of establishing a new force.

Advocates for a cyber force are pushing hard this year to ensure something makes it into legislation.

“We do not take lightly the many challenges still ahead in implementing the recommendation for creation of a dedicated Cyber Force, but AUSCF calls upon our nation’s Executive and Congressional leaders to act, through policy and legislation, to meet this call for what our nation so urgently needs in support of national security. The creation of a Cyber Force is a clear message, both to our adversaries and our own citizens, that freedom of action in the cyberspace domain, and protection of our critical infrastructure and sovereignty, are priority responsibilities that the United States takes seriously and will meet with the best our nation can provide,” the Association of US Cyber Forces (AUSCF), a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the capabilities and effectiveness of the United States in the cyber domain, said in a statement provided to DefenseScoop ahead of the release of the FDD report.

Opponents of an independent cyber service argue that now is not the time. The current model has not had enough time to prove itself, the argument goes. Moreover, Cybercom is on the precipice of inheriting significantly more authority. Through what’s known as enhanced budget authority, Cybercom is slated to gain more service-like authorities from full budget ownership of cyber and direction of cyber forces. That was supposed to culminate at the beginning of fiscal 2024.

Others note that the command modeled itself off U.S. Special Operations Command, a combatant command with unique service-like authorities. However, the report notes incongruencies between special operations forces and cyber forces.

“In the SOCOM model, each of the services provides the force employer — SOCOM — with expert personnel who possess skills suited to their particular domain. For instance, an Army Ranger trains for special operations on land, while Navy SEALs possess skills tailored to maritime special operations. Rangers and SEALs are not interchangeable. The Army cannot train SEALS, nor the Navy Rangers. Thus, SOCOM actually gains strength from this one-of-a-kind distributed force-generation model,” the report states. “However, there are no land, sea, or air-specific cyber functions that only particular services can provide.”

As was stated previously, the cyber mission force was designed to be joint from the outset and trained to the same standards so individuals could be interchanged from team to team, offense or defense.

Department of Army and Cyber?

The report’s authors were sure to explain they’re not necessarily wedded to what a cyber force could look like if the Department of Defense has ideas for it.

But it did recommend placing it within the Department of the Army, with Cybercom continuing to be the force employer. Montgomery believes the Army has done the best in cyber, relative to the other services, placing cyber in the hands of general officers. Additionally, the other military departments already have subordinate forces: the Space Force under the Department of the Air Force and the Marine Corps under the Department of the Navy.

“Standing up this new service would be relatively straightforward. Initially, the Cyber Force would encompass the billets that currently comprise the CMF: a 6,200-person mission group consisting of servicemembers, civilians, and contractors,” the report stated. “Beyond the CMF, the Cyber Force could also absorb a select number of billets for cyberspace operators that currently fall within the SOCOM enterprise. The Cyber Force could draw on lessons from the Space Force, which has encountered few issues filling its new roles even though it requires highly technical and skilled personnel.”

The authors were also sure to note the services should keep their organic cyber and IT personnel, meaning the new cyber force wouldn’t suck up all the cyber expertise, leaving the services with nothing.

Ultimately, having a single service — with a service secretary adhering to civilian control of the military — that can solely focus on providing forces for cyberspace operations will improve the readiness of cyber forces and retention, the authors contend.

Montgomery explained that if Cybercom needed to grow, it would be as simple as working with one service as opposed to four right now.

“Cyber Command [could] say, ‘Hey, I need to be 20 teams bigger, to do that I need an extra 1,000 operators.’ He could talk to the cyber force chief and the two of them would then go see the chairman and the Secretary of Defense … and make that argument and then it’d be properly sized,” he said. “I think it would make Cyber Command much more effective and agile. You have a more ready force and then an ability to grow the force. Right now, if he wants to grow the force, he’s got to convince each of the services.”

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · March 25, 2024

2. FOLLOW-UP Comments: Army puts drones front and center in unfunded wishlist

I received some feedback on this article.

This is a budget tactic perfected by Navy. We have funded the ships, but you have to give us more for boomer subs

But it does not look like this is a budget tactic based on some of the information I have received.

Yes, there is more than $500 million in the supplemental request for coyote interceptors to protect our troops.

I have learned that UFRs are now UPLs.

As you know the budget is developed a few years out and is not particularly flexible – we included UAS, C-UAS and HMI in the UPL because they are emerging requirements. C-UAS is also featured heavily in the supplemental.

The supplemental would be the best way to fund some of these very necessary capabilities.

It’s not at all that Army leaders didn’t think important enough, it’s the fact that when the 2025 budget was developed before these requirements existed in such stark contrast.

When dealing with UFRs (unfinanced requirements) in the past the question was always if the requirements are mission critical why did we put them on the UFR list? What capabilities that are already funded would you eliminate to fund the UFRs?

The very first sentence gets to this question - Army leaders want these capabilities but not quite enough to put them in the budget request.

Army puts drones front and center in unfunded wishlist

List includes commercial drones for infantry units, plus more counter-drone gear.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

What do Army leaders want—but not quite enough to include in their formal 2025 budget request? Aerial drones, counter-drone tech, and ground robots for smaller units, according to the service's "unfunded priorities" list, obtained by Defense One Friday.

Service leaders have repeatedly said they aim to put more experimental technology in the hands of units for testing, so it's no surprise that the list includes $10 million for small drones for companies and $25 million for the acquisition of commercially available drones for infantry brigade combat teams.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George has made acquisition of commercial drones a particular priority, with news of the cancellation of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft accompanied by the announcement that the Army was phasing out existing drones in favor of commercial ones.

Talking with soldiers at a recent training event, George said troops were eager to get more small drones into their units.

"Most of the complaints [related to drones] were, how can I have this right now?" George said during an interview with Defense One for the State of Defense. Training for some of the drones can take as little as a day, he added.

"We're going to see robotics inside the formation, on the ground and in the air," George said.

The Army can currently buy commercial drones off of the Blue UAS list, a list of drones vetted for government use. Such drones, however, can be eight to 14 times more expensive than those sold by Chinese companies, the Financial Times reported in 2021.

The Army is hoping that increasing demand will drive down cost, though, said George. "I think once we start to show a demand for more of these, and people are producing them, the prices will continue to come down," the general said during the State of Defense event.

The Army also hopes to push extra cash toward its program to field one-way attack drones to infantry, dubbed the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance, or LASSO, program. The list includes $10 million for LASSO.

Doug Bush, assistant Army secretary for acquisition, told Defense One at AUSA that the Army had ordered more than 100 Switchblade 600s for testing under the LASSO program. The Army budget request for fiscal year 2025 includes a request for $120 million worth of LASSO program drones.

The unfunded list also includes $26.5 million for Short Range Reconnaissance and $34 million for Medium Range Reconnaissance programs. Dronemaker Skydio entered the final phase of testing in the Army's Short Range Reconnaissance program in January.

The list includes $449 million for counter-drone capabilities for force protection and $292 million for short- to long-range air defense amid frequent drone attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East and the rise in drone warfare in Ukraine.

Half of the counter-drone capabilities, worth $185 million, are for interceptors. These interceptors may be Raytheon's Coyote drone interceptors, which the Army has praised as effective in destroying the drones that regularly attack military bases in the Middle East.

The base budget for fiscal year 2025 calls for $117 million in Coyote interceptors, which can cost $125,000 per unit.

Other counter-drone sections under the list's force protection category include $4.5 million in research and development for Anduril's Roadrunner-M drone interceptor. It also includes $91 million for anti-air Stinger missiles and $10 million for a previously unidentified program called the "Family of Counter-sUAS system" or FoCUS.

The list also includes a further $84 million in funding for the Joint Counter Small Unmanned Systems University, which teaches soldiers to use hand-held counter-drone jammers and other counter drone devices.

The list also pressed forward with Army plans to bring more robotics into Army units, with $55.5 million requested for human machine integration, a category that includes using robotic, gun-toting vehicles to make first contact with enemy forces. A separate category requests $69.5 million for human machine integration experimentation with the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program.

Earlier in March, soldiers in an Army robotics and autonomous systems platoon in the 82nd Airborne division demonstrated attacking an enemy-held town with a mix of drones and robots at the Army's Fort Irwin National Training Center.

A separate line calls for $16 million for the Silent Tactical Energy Dismount (STEED), a robot used to carry equipment and evacuate casualties.

Amid increasing use among Starlink and other low earth satellite orbit systems in Army units, the proposed budget also requests $4 million for "proliferated low earth orbit" in the tactical network category.

Other items on the list include $98 million for Precision Strike Missiles (PRSM) and $138 million for Patriot Advanced Capability Three (PAC-3) missiles.

3. What Ukraine Needs from NATO

Excerpts:

This initial hesitation may have been understandable, given the uncertainty over how Ukraine would fare. But some countries have been too cautious for too long. A number of NATO members, such as Germany and the United States, had expressed concerns about sending everything from tanks to F-16 fighter jets. But the situation has changed. Having finally secured U.S. approval last year, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway will soon send F-16s, which will help Kyiv counter Russian airstrikes and hit deeper behind enemy lines. The United Kingdom and France were the first to send long-range missiles last year, allowing Ukraine to hit targets in Crimea.

There is a bright line between confronting Russian forces directly and providing Ukraine with the means to defend itself. NATO combat troops would fall on the wrong side. But supplying Ukraine with training, intelligence, surveillance, jamming, and military equipment falls on the right side. NATO members have wrestled with finding the right balance between fear of escalation and faith in deterrence. Although NATO countries should remain vigilant in avoiding escalation, they can do more to ensure that Russia does not win.

Putin denies Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation; he sees Ukraine as an integral part of what he calls “the Russian world” (Russkiy Mir). Yet if his goal in invading the country was to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, he achieved exactly the opposite. The war ignited a fierce Ukrainian nationalism that hadn’t existed before. And Ukraine is never going back.

What’s more, NATO’s eastern enlargement, which was one of the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine, has only continued. His actions have made the country’s membership in NATO more likely, not less. And when Finland joined NATO last April, as a direct result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s land border with Russia more than doubled. Sweden’s accession earlier this month turned the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. For all these reasons, the war has been a strategic failure for Russia. The day Ukraine formally joins NATO will be Russia’s ultimate strategic defeat—and Ukraine and all of Europe will be the safer for it.

What Ukraine Needs from NATO

Advanced Weapons—and Clarity on What Membership Will Require

By Ivo Daalder and Karen Donfried

March 26, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Ivo Daalder and Karen Donfried · March 26, 2024

Ukraine is bleeding. Without new U.S. military assistance, Ukrainian ground forces may not be able to hold the line against a relentless Russian military. The U.S. House of Representatives must vote now to pass the emergency spending package that the Senate overwhelmingly approved last month. The most urgent priority is to appropriate funds to resupply Kyiv with artillery shells, air defense missiles, deep-strike rockets, and other critical military needs.

But even once Ukraine receives this much-needed support, a fundamental question remains: how to help Ukraine secure its future. That is a question NATO leaders will need to answer when they meet this July in Washington for their 75th anniversary summit.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is about more than just territory: it is about Ukraine’s political future. The Kremlin seeks to make sure that Ukraine’s future is decided in Moscow, not Kyiv. Ukraine is fighting for the freedom to chart its own future—and a vast majority of Ukrainians want their country to become a member of NATO and the European Union.

Last year, the EU opened accession talks with Kyiv. But that process will take years to complete. Meanwhile, Ukraine seeks an invitation to join NATO. But NATO countries are divided over when Kyiv should join. Some members, led by the Baltics, Poland, and France, want the alliance to issue a formal invitation at this July’s Washington summit. They believe that the persistence of security vacuums in Europe entices Moscow to fill those gray areas militarily—as it has in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. Other members, including the United States and Germany, are not prepared to move that fast. The outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who may well be NATO’s next secretary-general, captured this perspective at the Munich Security Conference last month: “As long as the war is raging, Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO.”

Former officials have proposed various ideas to bridge this chasm. One is to issue an invitation to Ukraine but not act on it until some later, unspecified time. This would be an empty gesture, as no treaty provisions would apply until all 32 members ratify Ukraine’s accession. Another idea is to invite Ukraine to begin accession talks, a model borrowed from the EU enlargement process. But EU candidate countries follow a well-trodden path, adopting and implementing the EU’s body of law over years. NATO’s equivalent is the Membership Action Plan, but in Vilnius last year, NATO members agreed that Kyiv “had moved beyond the need” for MAP. Unless the goal and timing of the accession talks are clearly defined, an invitation to begin talks would leave Ukraine in the same netherworld where it has been since 2008, when NATO agreed that Ukraine “will become” a NATO member.

The Washington summit provides an opportunity to bridge this chasm and build consensus on Ukraine within the alliance. The first step is to clarify the reforms Ukraine must complete and , the conditions that need to prevail on the ground before it can join the alliance. Second, NATO needs to take over the coordination of military assistance provided by the 50-plus-nation coalition and help Ukraine build a modern, interoperable military. Finally, NATO leaders need to step up their support for Ukraine’s defense by supplying advanced weapons, such as long-range missiles, that some NATO members have been reluctant to provide.

CLARITY DISPARITY

At the Vilnius summit, rather than agreeing to give Ukraine the invitation it desired, NATO leaders promised that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” while noting that they would extend an invitation only “when Allies agree and conditions are met,” kicking the issue down the road.

While it’s clear that Ukraine will not get an invitation at the Washington summit, the Vilnius language suggests a way forward: NATO must clarify what “conditions” must be met, then invite Kyiv to engage in direct talks in the NATO-Ukraine Council about when and how that can be done.

To create consensus among allies, NATO leaders should agree on two conditions that must be met before they formally invite Ukraine to join the alliance. First, Ukraine should complete the democratic, anticorruption, and security sector reforms outlined in Ukraine’s Annual National Program, the formal structure that prepares Ukraine for membership. At the Washington summit, NATO leaders should commit to working together to help Kyiv finalize these reforms within a year. Second, the fighting in Ukraine must end. As long as there is an active military conflict in Ukraine, Ukraine’s membership in the alliance could lead to a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia—a gamble most NATO members are not prepared to take.

Before the second condition can be met, NATO must stipulate what it would consider a satisfactory end to the fighting. It cannot be an end to the war, for that presupposes a peace agreement, which would be exceedingly difficult to accomplish anytime soon. The common belief that all wars end through negotiations is wrong. Most wars end through mutual exhaustion or one-sided victory; very few end with a negotiated peace. For the foreseeable future, the most that can be hoped for is a frozen conflict—a cessation of hostilities without a political solution.

NATO must clarify what “conditions” must be met before they formally invite Ukraine to join the alliance.

At the Washington summit, NATO leaders should agree to invite Ukraine when the fighting has effectively ended, either through an unlikely Ukrainian victory or through a durable cease-fire or armistice. At the conclusion of active conflict, Kyiv need not accept any loss of territory to Russia as permanent, only that any change to the status quo would need to be achieved politically, not militarily.

After Ukraine joins NATO, the alliance’s collective defense commitment under Article 5 would apply only to the territories under Kyiv’s control. This condition would be painful for Kyiv to accept, as Ukrainians will fear a lasting division of the country. But the reality of a frozen conflict may lead Kyiv to decide to consolidate the territory it controls and lock in NATO membership. Alliance leaders may want to make clear that if fighting were to resume because of military actions taken by Ukraine, Article 5 would not apply.

There are precedents for extending a security guarantee to a country with contested borders. The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, signed in 1960, commits the United States to defend only “the territories under the administration of Japan,” not in the Northern Territories seized by the Soviet Union at the conclusion of World War II (and occupied by Russia until this day). Similarly, the Federal Republic of Germany’s accession to NATO in 1955 extended Article 5 only to West Germany; communist East Germany, including the democratic enclave of West Berlin, were excluded until the country’s peaceful reunification in 1990. Before being granted membership, West Germany had to agree “never to have recourse to force to achieve the reunification of Germany or the modification of the present boundaries of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

At last year’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukrainian officials were understandably concerned that “conditions” was code for ever-moving goalposts. If NATO never defined the conditions, it could always add additional hurdles for Ukraine to clear. Ukraine deserves clarity, and NATO needs to define the term for its own internal unity and cohesion. At this year’s summit, all 32 members must coalesce around a shared understanding of Ukraine’s path to NATO membership.

NATO AT THE HELM

To be sure, making an end to armed conflict a condition for Ukraine’s accession to NATO gives Moscow an incentivize to prolong the war. For as long as Russia continues fighting, NATO will not accept Ukraine as a new member. That is why Kyiv and its allies must demonstrate their resolve; they must convince Moscow that it is fighting an unwinnable war. To that end, NATO leaders should agree on three additional measures, all aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s defense and helping it build a modern military.

First, NATO must take over from the United States in leading the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a roughly 50-country coalition that meets regularly to discuss Ukraine’s military needs and decides which country will provide the required equipment. Expanding NATO’s role would institutionalize the alliance’s support of Ukraine, ensuring continuity at a time when the United States’ commitment to Ukraine is in question.

Second, NATO must work with Ukraine to articulate a long-term vision for the country’s military. Currently, there are multiple coalitions focused on its various components: demining, F-16 capabilities, information technology infrastructure, armor and artillery, and long-range strike capacity. NATO can and should coordinate these efforts, which would help the Ukrainian military develop into a fully integrated and interoperable force.

Third, NATO should establish a Ukraine training mission, taking over the coordination of training Ukrainian forces from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other individual countries. Training is critical for Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield today, as well as for the interoperability of Ukraine’s future force.

The shared aim of these three measures is not to diminish the engagement of individual countries but to enhance the efficiency of existing efforts in support of Ukraine by bringing them under NATO’s purview. Institutionalizing these functions within NATO will signal to the Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will not outlast Western support for Ukraine.

PUTIN’S ULTIMATE STRATEGIC DEFEAT

No longer-term efforts will matter, however, if Ukraine loses the war. That is why NATO must fortify Ukraine’s defenses and consider supplying Kyiv with weapons that are currently off the table, such as U.S. ATACMS and German Taurus long-range missiles. At the outset of the war, NATO members sought to balance support for Ukraine with the need to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia. NATO countries restricted the kinds of weapons they would send and limited the ways in which Ukrainian forces would be permitted to use them (for example, no attacks on Russian soil).

This initial hesitation may have been understandable, given the uncertainty over how Ukraine would fare. But some countries have been too cautious for too long. A number of NATO members, such as Germany and the United States, had expressed concerns about sending everything from tanks to F-16 fighter jets. But the situation has changed. Having finally secured U.S. approval last year, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway will soon send F-16s, which will help Kyiv counter Russian airstrikes and hit deeper behind enemy lines. The United Kingdom and France were the first to send long-range missiles last year, allowing Ukraine to hit targets in Crimea.

There is a bright line between confronting Russian forces directly and providing Ukraine with the means to defend itself. NATO combat troops would fall on the wrong side. But supplying Ukraine with training, intelligence, surveillance, jamming, and military equipment falls on the right side. NATO members have wrestled with finding the right balance between fear of escalation and faith in deterrence. Although NATO countries should remain vigilant in avoiding escalation, they can do more to ensure that Russia does not win.

Putin denies Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation; he sees Ukraine as an integral part of what he calls “the Russian world” (Russkiy Mir). Yet if his goal in invading the country was to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, he achieved exactly the opposite. The war ignited a fierce Ukrainian nationalism that hadn’t existed before. And Ukraine is never going back.

What’s more, NATO’s eastern enlargement, which was one of the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine, has only continued. His actions have made the country’s membership in NATO more likely, not less. And when Finland joined NATO last April, as a direct result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s land border with Russia more than doubled. Sweden’s accession earlier this month turned the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. For all these reasons, the war has been a strategic failure for Russia. The day Ukraine formally joins NATO will be Russia’s ultimate strategic defeat—and Ukraine and all of Europe will be the safer for it.

IVO DAALDER is CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO.
KAREN DONFRIED is a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

Foreign Affairs · by Ivo Daalder and Karen Donfried · March 26, 2024

4. Israel Cancels Visit to Washington After U.S. Abstains on U.N. Cease-Fire Resolution

Excerpts:

The Biden administration had vetoed three previous U.N. resolutions since the conflict began, two of which would have demanded an immediate cease-fire and were opposed by Israel. The abstention Monday came after a push Friday by the U.S. to pass a resolution that it sponsored calling for a cease-fire. The measure was vetoed by Russia and China.

The U.S. decision not to veto the resolution was “a very bad omen,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and adviser to several prime ministers. “If things continue this way,” he said, the so-called special relationship between Israel and the U.S. “will become less special.”

Washington has traditionally used its Security Council veto to shield Israel from proposals that it opposes. It is rare for the U.S. to abstain on resolutions Israel opposes, and the U.S. does so to signal distance from its closest Mideast ally without voting against it.

The U.S. also withheld its veto from an anti-Israel resolution in 2016 when then-President Barack Obama allowed a resolution criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“Maybe the most important thing the U.S. does politically for Israel is to protect the Israelis from U.N. resolutions that rarely take Israeli concerns into account,” said Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Middle East peace envoy who is now counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. The decision to abstain is “a pretty potent symbol,” he added.

Netanyahu has already publicly rebuffed the Biden administration’s call to abandon the Rafah ground operation but had said last week that he would send his aides to listen to White House objections and ideas for safeguarding civilians.

Israel Cancels Visit to Washington After U.S. Abstains on U.N. Cease-Fire Resolution

U.S. move signals frustration with Netanyahu amid strained relations

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hostage-talks-stall-as-israeli-defense-minister-arrives-in-washington-ea36821d?mod=hp_lead_pos10

By Michael R. GordonFollow

, Vivian SalamaFollow

and Dov Lieber

Updated March 25, 2024 5:57 pm ET

The United Nations Security Council approved a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza after the U.S. allowed it to pass by abstaining, prompting Israel to withdraw from coming high-level meetings with the Biden administration.

The unusual U.S. move signaled the administration’s growing frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose relations with the White House have deteriorated over their clashing political agendas and conflicting views of military tactics.

By abstaining rather than vetoing the resolution, the U.S. enabled the Security Council for the first time since the war began in October to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire.

The resolution calls for “an immediate cease-fire” during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends April 9, “leading to a lasting sustainable cease-fire, and also the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant arriving Monday at the State Department in Washington. PHOTO: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Netanyahu’s office said that the wording of the resolution was unacceptable because it didn’t explicitly make a cease-fire conditional on the release of hostages held by Hamas.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told the Security Council the American position on that link was unchanged. “A cease-fire of any duration must come with the release of hostages,” she said. “This is the only path.”

Despite Israel’s objections, U.S. officials said the language was an improvement over previous resolutions they had vetoed, including the call for a short-term cease-fire, but said they couldn’t vote in favor of it because it didn’t condemn Hamas.

Netanyahu had planned to send two of his closest aides—Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and National Security Council head Tzachi Hanegbi—for meetings beginning Tuesday on a planned ground operation in Rafah, in southern Gaza. The U.S. has tried to head off the operation out of concern that it could cause extensive casualties among the more than 1 million civilians who have taken refuge in the city.

Cancellation of the talks marks a significant setback for the White House, which strongly backed Israel’s Gaza invasion when it started nearly six months ago but is now urging that Israel fundamentally rethink its approach to Rafah, where four battalions of Hamas fighters appear determined to make a last stand.

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The U.N. Security Council approved a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza after the U.S. refrained from using its veto power. Photo: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

It comes as the public rift between Netanyahu and President Biden over Israel’s operations in Gaza continues to widen as both leaders try to navigate political headwinds at home.

Allowing a cease-fire resolution to pass could help Biden politically with Democrats who say he hasn’t done enough to rein in Netanyahu. In canceling the Washington talks, Netanyahu underscored his distance from Biden, a stance that could help him as he battles to keep intact his far-right governing coalition.

Netanyahu’s government has grown increasingly isolated abroad over the impact of the Israeli military operation on Gaza’s civilian population, and U.S. officials acknowledge that supporting Israel’s military campaign is coming at a growing political cost.

The Biden administration had vetoed three previous U.N. resolutions since the conflict began, two of which would have demanded an immediate cease-fire and were opposed by Israel. The abstention Monday came after a push Friday by the U.S. to pass a resolution that it sponsored calling for a cease-fire. The measure was vetoed by Russia and China.

The U.S. decision not to veto the resolution was “a very bad omen,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and adviser to several prime ministers. “If things continue this way,” he said, the so-called special relationship between Israel and the U.S. “will become less special.”

Washington has traditionally used its Security Council veto to shield Israel from proposals that it opposes. It is rare for the U.S. to abstain on resolutions Israel opposes, and the U.S. does so to signal distance from its closest Mideast ally without voting against it.

The U.S. also withheld its veto from an anti-Israel resolution in 2016 when then-President Barack Obama allowed a resolution criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“Maybe the most important thing the U.S. does politically for Israel is to protect the Israelis from U.N. resolutions that rarely take Israeli concerns into account,” said Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Middle East peace envoy who is now counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. The decision to abstain is “a pretty potent symbol,” he added.

Netanyahu has already publicly rebuffed the Biden administration’s call to abandon the Rafah ground operation but had said last week that he would send his aides to listen to White House objections and ideas for safeguarding civilians.

A man sits by the bodies of relatives after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, southern Gaza. PHOTO: HAITHAM IMAD/SHUTTERSTOCK

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the Biden administration still planned to take up its concerns over the looming Rafah offensive with Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, who is on a separate visit to Washington and planned to meet Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

“It’s disappointing,” Kirby said of the canceled visit by the other Israeli officials, saying the U.S. had hoped “to have a fulsome conversation with them about viable alternatives to going in on the ground in Rafah.”

The rift over the Monday vote in the Security Council, some former officials said, will only complicate the continuing discussions about military strategy.

“The administration abstained on a Security Council resolution that will make no difference on the ground,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. peace negotiator and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Netanyahu’s antics in canceling the delegation’s visit and attacking the administration will make it that much harder to get a hostage deal and come up with an alternative plan for Rafah.”

Despite the growing tensions, the Biden administration has stopped short of taking more dramatic steps, such as withholding arms from Israel.

In contrast to Netanyahu, his chief political rival Benny Gantz, head of the centrist National Unity party and a member of the war cabinet with close ties to Washington, said the resolution had “no operational significance” for Israel.

“Israel will continue to listen to our allies while doing what is best for our national security,” said Gantz, who called on Netanyahu to go to Washington and hold direct talks with Biden.

In response, Netanyahu released a statement chastising Gantz for wanting to send a delegation to Washington today, even after Hamas welcomed the U.N. resolution the U.S. allowed to pass.

Gilad Kariv, an opposition lawmaker in Israel’s left-wing Labor party, said on social media that canceling the delegation’s visit would only deepen Israeli’s isolation.

“Israel’s enemies are rubbing their hands with pleasure in the face of the international isolation to which the State of Israel is being pushed, which is a direct result of Netanyahu’s arrogance and irresponsible conduct,” wrote Kariv.

Meanwhile, talks on a temporary cease-fire stalled after negotiators failed to bridge key divides between Israel and Hamas, Arab mediators said.

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The majority of Gaza’s displaced population is sheltering in Rafah after Israeli forces gradually forced them south. Satellite images show there are few options in Gaza where they can go if Israel proceeds with a ground operation. Illustration: Annie Zhao

Failure to reach a deal could accelerate the timeline for Israel to move ahead with the planned Rafah operation. It could also dampen hopes for a major humanitarian relief effort in the enclave, where international organizations say some areas are facing the prospect of famine and shortages of medical supplies are widespread.

More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting, according to Palestinian health authorities, whose numbers don’t distinguish between militants and noncombatants.

Israel says 130 hostages abducted on Oct. 7 are still being held in Gaza. They were taken when Hamas stormed across the border and killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

Damage from Israeli airstrikes in Rafah. PHOTO: AHMAD HASABALLAH/GETTY IMAGES

The aftermath of an Israeli strike in Rafah. PHOTO: MOHAMMED SALEM/REUTERS

Netanyahu says that he is committed to getting a deal to release the hostages but faces record-low approval ratings, and his delicate, far-right coalition may fray under the strain of a hostage deal that includes significant Israeli concessions.

Some analysts and former security officials say Netanyahu is more focused on his own political survival than reaching a deal.

“Netanyahu is currently the one in the Israeli government who is delaying a hostage deal,” said Noam Tibon, a retired Israeli general. “What guides him is not a hostage deal but the survival of his government.”

People in Rafah break their fast during Ramadan. PHOTO: MOHAMMED ABED/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Summer Said, Carrie Keller-Lynn and Anat Peled contributed to this article.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Vivian Salama at vivian.salama@wsj.com

5. Arab Nations Balk at Funding U.N. Aid Agency Vital to Palestinians

Do Arab countries really not care about the Palestinian people? Why was the US (and now European nations) the main source of funding for this organization?

Excerpts:

The U.S. provided the agency with $71 million so far this year before the funding pause, according to a State Department official. The U.S. generally made the payments in three tranches a year, meaning the cutoff in funding will become particularly acute in coming months. Germany, previously Unrwa’s second-largest donor, has made no contributions to the agency this year.

Unrwa was already struggling financially before the war in Gaza started.

Unlike most U.N. agencies, Unrwa doesn’t draw on the U.N. general budget, except to help cover salaries for its small number of international staff. Instead, it relies on voluntary and unpredictable contributions from donors. The agency never fully recovered from the decision by the Trump administration that stopped its funding between 2018 and 2020.

At that time, countries including Germany and Gulf monarchies sharply raised their annual contributions, but not enough to wholly make up for the lost U.S. funding. Unrwa used the little savings it had to make up for those losses. Despite the resumption of U.S. assistance under Biden, Unrwa says it has ended each of the recent financial years with tens of millions of dollars in overdue bills to everyone from staff doctors to toilet-paper suppliers.

The funding suspensions announced in January risked having a near-immediate impact on Unrwa. Lazzarini’s diplomatic push helped delay that by quickly securing additional cash from countries such as Spain and Ireland. The European Union earlier this month said it would make an initial €50 million payment to Unrwa, equivalent to $54 million, after the agency agreed to allow EU-appointed experts to audit the way it screens staff.

Arab Nations Balk at Funding U.N. Aid Agency Vital to Palestinians

Future of United Nations agency in the air as Arab countries fail to fill funding gap left by U.S.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/arab-nations-balk-at-funding-u-n-aid-agency-vital-to-palestinians-5f79a5e9?mod=hp_lead_pos2

By Margherita StancatiFollow

and Stephen KalinFollow

Updated March 26, 2024 12:51 am ET

About a week after the U.S. and other Western countries froze funding to a U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees called Unrwa in late January, its top official flew to the Arab Gulf, hoping wealthy Arab monarchies would save the organization at a time when it is the main provider of humanitarian aid in Gaza.

The effort came up lacking. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, raised $85 million from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for 2024, far short of the funding lost when the U.S. and others cut off aid following allegations that at least a dozen agency employees took part in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Last year, the U.S. alone gave the agency over $422 million.

The cash that Lazzarini has scrambled to pull together so far is enough to cover Unrwa’s expenses through May, agency officials say. Beyond then, without new funds, Unrwa says it will be forced to scale back its humanitarian activities in Gaza, which includes feeding and sheltering over a million people. Other U.N. agencies and charity groups rely heavily on Unrwa, with some 3,000 of its employees within the enclave overseeing most aid distribution and primary healthcare.

Lazzarini said the recent contributions by Arab and other donors have enabled the agency to continue to assist Palestinians. “But for how long? We are functioning hand-to-mouth. Without additional funding we will be in uncharted territory,” he told the U.N. recently.

Already, the majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are displaced, without access to adequate medical care and on the brink of famine. The prospect that the situation could worsen further persuaded several countries—including Canada, Sweden, Australia and Finland—to resume initially suspended funding in recent weeks.

Palestinian children suffering from malnutrition at a healthcare center. Without new funds, Unrwa says it will be forced to scale back its humanitarian activities in Gaza. PHOTO: MOHAMMED SALEM/REUTERS

Unrwa has been embroiled in controversy since Israel accused at least a dozen employees, including schoolteachers, of taking part in the Hamas-led attacks. Israel has also alleged that hundreds more Unrwa employees are members of armed wings of militant groups like Hamas. The agency fired the staffers allegedly linked to the attacks, and says Israel hasn’t provided evidence that the involvement in militant groups goes beyond a few individuals. The U.N. has launched two investigations into the agency’s neutrality.

Israel is pushing for Unrwa to be gradually phased out of Gaza and is lobbying its allies to replace the agency with other humanitarian groups there. Unrwa on Sunday said the Israeli military has barred the agency from delivering food to the northern part of the enclave, an area suffering from widespread acute malnutrition.

The U.S. won’t resume funding anytime soon. A new spending package passed by Congress and that President Biden signed into law includes a provision that blocks Unrwa from receiving funds until at least March 2025. If Republican candidate Donald Trump is elected in November, it seems even less likely funding will resume: His administration cut off funding for Unrwa in 2018, saying its business model was “irredeemably flawed.”

A Palestinian woman in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday. The majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are displaced. PHOTO: SAID KHATIB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

“Nothing can entirely fill the gap that the U.S. will leave if the U.S. doesn’t resume funding,” says Tamara Al-Rifai, an Unrwa spokeswoman. “These emergency measures help us deal with immediate needs. We should be having longer-term, strategic conversations about whether Unrwa is sustainable.”

Without new funding, the U.N. could be forced to rethink the agency’s unusually broad mandate. It was created with the goal of providing emergency relief to refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. It has since grown into a quasi-government structure, running primary and secondary schools, healthcare centers and even trash collection for stateless Palestinians across the Levant. Its annual expenses top $1.4 billion, the bulk of which is used to cover salaries for its 30,000 employees across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

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While most of the initial 700,000 or so refugees from the 1948 conflict have since died, Unrwa now looks after their descendants, a number that has grown to more than 5 million. No Arab country other than Jordan has been willing to give a significant number of the Palestinian refugees citizenship, leaving it to the U.N. to look after them. The U.S. has provided the bulk of Unrwa funding over the decades, but growing numbers of politicians in both major parties have concerns about the agency and its open-ended mission.

Arab monarchies have long preferred donating bilaterally to humanitarian causes rather than through the U.N. They don’t want Unrwa to collapse but also see benefits in reforming it, such as by improving the way it screens staff to prevent Hamas from infiltrating it. They also don’t see it as their job to step in fully to replace Western funding, according to people familiar with Gulf governments’ thinking.

Saudi Arabia last week pledged $40 million to Unrwa, earmarking it for the humanitarian response in Gaza. It is the single biggest contribution by a country to the agency since the scandal broke. But that compares with the $400 million in humanitarian aid for Ukraine that the kingdom announced in 2022.

Palestinians at a school operated by Unrwa in the central Gaza Strip. The agency has been embroiled in controversy since Israel accused at least a dozen of its employees, including schoolteachers, of taking part in the Hamas-led attacks. PHOTO: MAJDI FATHI/NURPHOTO/ZUMA PRESS

Palestinians crossing to southern Gaza from the north, which is suffering from widespread acute malnutrition. PHOTO: MOHAMMED SABER/SHUTTERSTOCK

The U.A.E. recently disbursed $20 million to Unrwa, funds it had promised last year but hadn’t delivered. The country gave it on condition that the agency wouldn’t frame it as new aid, or meant to bridge the other countries’ suspension of funds, according to people familiar with their thinking. Qatar pledged $25 million for 2024. Kuwait has made no commitment so far.

Some Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, are reluctant to commit large sums of money to Gaza until there is greater clarity on the enclave’s political future. The kingdom has been pushing for a two-state solution in which a reformed Palestinian Authority would play a role—a possibility that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far ruled out.

“They have their eyes on post-war reconstruction. Footing the bill for Unrwa reinforces the image that the Gulf will always come to the rescue,” said Bader al-Saif, an expert on Persian Gulf and Arabian affairs at Kuwait University. “They are certainly not rebuilding if that’s not tied to concessions from Israel, and I don’t know how that’s going to come through in the current climate.”

The U.S. provided the agency with $71 million so far this year before the funding pause, according to a State Department official. The U.S. generally made the payments in three tranches a year, meaning the cutoff in funding will become particularly acute in coming months. Germany, previously Unrwa’s second-largest donor, has made no contributions to the agency this year.

Unrwa was already struggling financially before the war in Gaza started.

Unlike most U.N. agencies, Unrwa doesn’t draw on the U.N. general budget, except to help cover salaries for its small number of international staff. Instead, it relies on voluntary and unpredictable contributions from donors. The agency never fully recovered from the decision by the Trump administration that stopped its funding between 2018 and 2020.

At that time, countries including Germany and Gulf monarchies sharply raised their annual contributions, but not enough to wholly make up for the lost U.S. funding. Unrwa used the little savings it had to make up for those losses. Despite the resumption of U.S. assistance under Biden, Unrwa says it has ended each of the recent financial years with tens of millions of dollars in overdue bills to everyone from staff doctors to toilet-paper suppliers.

The funding suspensions announced in January risked having a near-immediate impact on Unrwa. Lazzarini’s diplomatic push helped delay that by quickly securing additional cash from countries such as Spain and Ireland. The European Union earlier this month said it would make an initial €50 million payment to Unrwa, equivalent to $54 million, after the agency agreed to allow EU-appointed experts to audit the way it screens staff.

Damaged buildings in the Gaza Strip on Monday following overnight Israeli bombardment. PHOTO: SAEED JARAS/APA IMAGES/ZUMA PRESS

Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com

6. Why America Is Still Failing in Iraq

Excerpts:

At the heart of the United States’ failure to find a way to deal with these groups is a fundamental misreading of their nature, their interrelationships, and their connections to the region’s governments. These armed groups are not exclusively military organizations that can be isolated from wider political, economic, social or ideological networks that cross state and nonstate lines. Rather, many of them have their own political parties that are active both locally and nationally. Moreover, these groups have allies in the civil service, the judiciary, and the military. They often fight side by side with government forces to defend the state against insurgent groups, including ISIS, or against protest movements, as was seen in Iraq in 2019. The ties between these armed groups and political and social institutions mean that any direct military attempt to isolate and remove them will not affect their power or the influence of their wider networks.

A different approach is needed. It must begin with a recognition that these groups are not independent anomalies but are indivisible from the networks of power that govern Middle Eastern countries, in which ruling elites rely on their own militias to maintain power. In the short term, the Biden administration and the government in Baghdad, which includes the domestically focused PMF leaders, are on the same page. They want to maintain the cease-fire with the “axis of resistance” and push forward with the Higher Military Commission (HMC) to renegotiate the bilateral relationship between the two countries, including the withdrawal of current U.S. forces. This will, though, require pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza, as Israel’s actions have had consequences across the region.

In the longer term a more sustainable approach to these armed groups is required. Washington should shift its approach away from focusing only on armed groups and instead examine the features of the political settlements that allow these groups to proliferate. The key to ensuring that cease-fires last, and do not unravel and draw the United States back in, is promoting accountability. Washington and its like-minded allies should, then, focus on reforming the states whose leaders harm their publics on a daily basis. Corruption in these countries is rife and offers both financial rewards and impunity for those leaders and armed groups who have captured government bureaucracies. The only challenge to this system and its elites remains the public, who protest and call for a better life. The key, then, for the United States and its allies is ensuring that their strategy supports these civil society movements and finds a way to reduce everyday conflict. That, not military strikes, is the way to peace.

Why America Is Still Failing in Iraq

U.S. Military Force and Sanctions Can’t Fix the Country’s Broken Politics

By Renad Mansour

March 26, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Renad Mansour · March 26, 2024

Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip began a fresh eruption of violence across the Middle East. Peace in the region, which has long been Washington’s stated aim, has proved illusory once again. No matter how many times the United States has tried to pivot away from the Middle East, violence always seems to pull it back in. In this latest cycle, the Biden administration’s hasty withdrawal from the region was based on its claim that it was the most stable it had been for decades. And yet, in Iraq, U.S. bases are once again under attack from armed groups, endangering the temporary ceasefire which had allowed Baghdad and Washington to sign the Joint Security Cooperation Dialogue in August 2023 and to begin wider negotiations, including on the removal of U.S. troops from the country. Regional violence after October 7 has complicated this process.

So has the rise of an “axis of resistance,” a network of Iran-allied armed groups that includes Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. These groups are politically, economically, militarily, and ideologically entrenched in their states, and are united by their shared opposition to foreign occupation.

U.S. forces have attacked these groups in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, killing their senior leaders and destroying their trading hubs and weapons depots. Washington has also sanctioned their banks and businesses. But these strikes and punitive measures—described by a senior U.S. official as “whack-a-mole”—have not been successful in securing peace or stability. The groups that Washington targeted have not gone away. Instead, they have flourished, becoming even more powerful within their countries and the wider region. Washington has proved itself unable to tackle the true sources of these groups’ power, which lie not in military infrastructure alone but in the social and political structures of the Middle East. Armed groups thrive under fragile governments, and their networks include cabinet ministers, parliamentarians, judges, senior bureaucrats, and civil society organizers. This influence allows these groups, along with the wider political establishment in these countries, to profit from state coffers and enjoy impunity from any prosecution—all while performing key state functions at the national and local level.

Washington’s use of violence and of sanctions has done little to dampen the strength of these groups or to diminish their power. This is because bombs and sanctions do not produce political reform. A more coherent and comprehensive U.S. response is needed to encourage Middle Eastern governments’ accountability and to check the elite power and impunity that are rife in in the region. This is the only way to move beyond the cycle of quick-wins and temporary ceasefires, which never hold.

FORCE FAILS

Armed groups in Iraq and Syria became powerful during the fight against the Islamic State, which in 2014 conquered a third of Iraq and almost half of Syria. When the U.S.-trained and U.S.-funded Iraqi military crumbled overnight, these groups joined the newly formed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which was the first group to respond and resist further ISIS advances. The PMF includes dozens of armed groups across the ethnosectarian—though predominantly Shia—spectrum, with varying ideologies. Some are domestically minded, focusing on the Iraqi state, whereas others see themselves as part of a wider transnational and pan-Shia vanguard struggle, in partnership with Iran, to support allies including the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. For several years, these groups fought on the same side as Washington to drive ISIS from Iraq and Syria. However, following victory over their common enemy, U.S. and PMF forces turned on each other and began to fight. Washington, particularly during the Trump administration, sought to target Iran by attacking its allies in the region, principally PMF groups in Iraq and Syria. To that end, in January 2020, U.S. forces killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qasem Soleimani and PMF leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

A senior U.S. official told me in 2019 that groups including Kataib Hezbollah are like a “cancerous tumor that need to be surgically removed.” These groups’ supposed malignancy means that Washington’s preferred method for dealing with them is invariably violent. This was seen most recently when Kataib Hezbollah killed three U.S. servicemembers in Jordan on January 28, and the Biden administration responded on February 2 by launching airstrikes across 85 targets in seven locations in Iraq and Syria. Bases and arms depots were hit, with further strikes on two Kataib Hezbollah leaders in downtown Baghdad following days later.

Many U.S. officials and analysts supported this response, although some, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike Turner complained that the response was not enough and should have come quicker and with more force. They argued that the delay gave Iran and its allies too much time to prepare and move away from potential U.S. targets. Nonetheless, the attacks led to a cessation of hostilities, with Kataib Hezbollah immediately declaring a cease-fire, and the other groups following suit. This has happened before: strikes produce periodic cease-fires without reducing the influence of these networks or leading to a more stable region. The cease-fires never last long.

BEYOND THE BOMBINGS

The United States has used other weapons to weaken these groups’ influence, including sanctions. The U.S. State Department has designated several PMF groups and leaders as terrorist organizations or individuals, and in the most recent round, announced in January, Washington added dozens of banks and individuals to the list. This included the Iraqi airline company Fly Baghdad, which has apparently been transporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ assets.

For groups deemed more acceptable—including the Atabat groups that remain loyal to Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, or even the Badr Organization, which is one of the larger PMF groups and more integrated into the Iraqi government—the United States has tried cooption. Washington has proved itself willing to work with those PMF groups it deems to be less aligned to Iran or the axis of resistance and more focused on the Iraqi state. To that end, the United States has attempted to induce PMF leaders, including its commission’s chair, Falih al-Fayadh, and the Badr Organization head, Hadi al-Ameri, to integrate into the governments and political settlements of their countries. Washington has sought to incentivize these groups by promising them political backing. One senior U.S. official told me in 2021 that some of the groups linked to the PMF in Baghdad were better off being part of the Iraqi government because it would make them more answerable to the state and, therefore, the public.

Time and again, however, Washington has proved itself unable to pursue a coherent strategy and navigate the networks that make up the Iraqi state. Isolating the good and targeting the bad has not always proved easy. For example, assassinating Soleimani, Muhandis, and other military leaders has made it more difficult for the co-optable individuals from these networks to keep their agreements with the United States. This is partly because the value of U.S. backing—a key incentive in post-2003 Iraq—wanes with every American attack or foreign policy blunder. More critically, simply integrating militias into the government and hoping that they become more accountable has not worked. In the years following the U.S. invasion, the Badr Organization, the Sadrists, and others were integrated into government departments, including the ministries of interior and defense, as well as the national security agency. The lack of accountability in these institutions meant that these fighters served the interests of their ruling elites, not their government superiors or the institutions themselves.

WASHINGTON’S CHOICE

Not only are U.S. policies ineffective in reducing the influence of these armed groups but they have come at a cost. Killing senior leaders has at times disrupted the chain of command, leading to an increase in freewheeling, undisciplined groups willing to strike without the consent of the PMF leadership or its Iranian allies. The death of Iraqi researcher Hisham al-Hashimi in July 2020, for instance, was a consequence of the chaos that ensued after the killing of Muhandis, who in the past could better control these militias. Indeed, U.S. strikes can make the command structures only more incoherent, as was seen by Kataib Hezbollah’s killing of three servicepeople in Jordan. The strike went against the interests of the domestically focused PMF groups, such as Badr or Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which benefit from the status quo in Baghdad and want to minimize any regional escalation that could jeopardize their domestic power.

At the heart of the United States’ failure to find a way to deal with these groups is a fundamental misreading of their nature, their interrelationships, and their connections to the region’s governments. These armed groups are not exclusively military organizations that can be isolated from wider political, economic, social or ideological networks that cross state and nonstate lines. Rather, many of them have their own political parties that are active both locally and nationally. Moreover, these groups have allies in the civil service, the judiciary, and the military. They often fight side by side with government forces to defend the state against insurgent groups, including ISIS, or against protest movements, as was seen in Iraq in 2019. The ties between these armed groups and political and social institutions mean that any direct military attempt to isolate and remove them will not affect their power or the influence of their wider networks.

A different approach is needed. It must begin with a recognition that these groups are not independent anomalies but are indivisible from the networks of power that govern Middle Eastern countries, in which ruling elites rely on their own militias to maintain power. In the short term, the Biden administration and the government in Baghdad, which includes the domestically focused PMF leaders, are on the same page. They want to maintain the cease-fire with the “axis of resistance” and push forward with the Higher Military Commission (HMC) to renegotiate the bilateral relationship between the two countries, including the withdrawal of current U.S. forces. This will, though, require pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza, as Israel’s actions have had consequences across the region.

In the longer term a more sustainable approach to these armed groups is required. Washington should shift its approach away from focusing only on armed groups and instead examine the features of the political settlements that allow these groups to proliferate. The key to ensuring that cease-fires last, and do not unravel and draw the United States back in, is promoting accountability. Washington and its like-minded allies should, then, focus on reforming the states whose leaders harm their publics on a daily basis. Corruption in these countries is rife and offers both financial rewards and impunity for those leaders and armed groups who have captured government bureaucracies. The only challenge to this system and its elites remains the public, who protest and call for a better life. The key, then, for the United States and its allies is ensuring that their strategy supports these civil society movements and finds a way to reduce everyday conflict. That, not military strikes, is the way to peace.

RENAD MANSOUR is a Senior Research Fellow and Project Director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House.

Foreign Affairs · by Renad Mansour · March 26, 2024

7. ‘Duty to warn’ guided US advance warning of the Moscow attack. Adversaries don’t always listen

Key points:

AHEAD OF THE ATTACK, A CLEAR US WARNING

DUTY TO WARN

SHARED WARNINGS AND THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION

SHARING ISN’T ALWAYS CARING

‘Duty to warn’ guided US advance warning of the Moscow attack. Adversaries don’t always listen

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · March 26, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. warning to Russia couldn’t have been plainer: Two weeks before the deadliest attack in Russia in years, Americans had publicly and privately advised President Vladimir Putin’s government that “extremists” had “imminent plans” for just such slaughter.

The United States shared those advance intelligence indications under a tenet of the U.S. intelligence community called the “duty to warn,” which obliges U.S. intelligence officials to lean toward sharing knowledge of a dire threat if conditions allow. That holds whether the targets are allies, adversaries or somewhere in between.

There’s little sign Russia acted to try to head off Friday’s attack at a concert hall on Moscow’s edge, which killed more than 130 people. The Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan claimed responsibility, and the U.S. said it has information backing up the extremist group’s claim.

John Kirby, the Biden administration’s national security spokesman, made clear that the warning shouldn’t be seen as a breakthrough in U.S.-Russian relations or intelligence-sharing. “Yeah, look, there’s not going to be security assistance with Russia and the United States,” Kirby told reporters Monday.

“We had a duty to warn them of information that we had, clearly that they didn’t have. We did that,” Kirby said.

Such warnings aren’t always heeded — the United States has dropped the ball in the past on at least one Russian warning of extremist threats in the United States.

Here’s a look at the duty to warn, how it came about, and how it can play out when American intelligence officers learn militants are poised to strike.

AHEAD OF THE ATTACK, A CLEAR US WARNING

On March 7, the U.S. government went public with a remarkably precise warning: The U.S. Embassy in Moscow was monitoring unspecified reports that “extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts.” It warned U.S. citizens in Moscow to avoid big events over the next 48 hours.

U.S. officials said after the attack that they had shared the warning with Russian officials as well, under the duty to warn, but gave no details how.

Putin’s public reaction was dismissive. Three days before the attack, he condemned what he called “provocative statements” from the West about possible attacks within Russia. Such warnings were aimed at intimidating Russians and destabilizing the country, he said.

DUTY TO WARN

The U.S. emphasis on sharing threat warnings increased after al-Qaeda’s Aug. 7, 1998, attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. While dozens of U.S. citizens and government employees of different nationalities were killed, Kenyans made up the majority of the victims.

In 2015, then national intelligence director James Clapper formalized duty to warn in an official directive: The U.S. intelligence community bore “a responsibility to warn U.S. and non-U.S. persons of impending threats of intentional killing, serious bodily injury or kidnapping.”

The order also spelled out occasions when intelligence officials could waive the duty to warn and stay silent despite looming danger. That includes when the target is an assassin or other extreme bad guy, or when disclosing the warning could “unduly endanger” U.S. personnel or their sources, those of intelligence partners among foreign governments, or their intelligence or defense operations.

SHARED WARNINGS AND THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION

The intelligence community under former President Donald Trump faced accusations it had failed to warn U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi of a complex plot by Saudi officials that ended with his 2018 killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Media foundations say U.S. intelligence agencies did not respond to requests for any records showing whether they knew of the plot in advance.

Under the Biden administration, the sharing of threats to other governments has flourished, although there’s no way to know of any threats that the U.S. intelligence community may have decided to let play out, without warning the targets.

Strategic U.S. dissemination of intelligence hit a high point in the months before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That’s when the U.S. opted to declassify key intelligence on Russia’s invasion plans to rally allies and Ukraine, and — unsuccessfully — to pressure Russia to call off its troops.

In a Foreign Affairs article this spring, CIA Director William Burns spoke of a growing awareness of the value of “intelligence diplomacy” — the strategic use of intelligence findings to bolster allies and confound adversaries.

SHARING ISN’T ALWAYS CARING

The duty to warn doesn’t mean the other side has a duty to listen. That’s especially so when the other side is an adversary.

In January, a U.S. official said, Americans had given a similar warning to Iranian officials ahead of bombings in the Iranian city of Kerman. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for that attack, twin suicide bombings that killed 95 people.

It’s not clear if the warning led to any additional security precautions at the event, a commemoration of the 2020 killing of an Iranian general by a U.S. drone strike.

In 2004, another adversary, the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, an anti-U.S. populist, was “suspicious and incredulous” when U.S. officials relayed a warning of an extremist plot to kill him, Stephen McFarland, a former U.S. diplomat in Central and South America, said Monday on X.

That kind of deep distrust has often kept threat warnings from landing as intended when it comes to Russia and the United States. That’s true even with common dangers that both face, including the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Historically, Russians can regard any U.S. attempt at counterintelligence cooperation against that kind of shared threat as naive, and look for any openings to use it for political gain or to undermine U.S. intelligence-gathering, Steven Hall, a longtime U.S. intelligence official in the former Soviet Union, wrote after his retirement in 2015.

In 2013, it was U.S. officials who, tragically, failed adequately to follow up on a Russian warning, a U.S. government review concluded later.

Concerned the man posed a threat to Russia as well, Russia’s Federal Security Service in 2011 warned U.S. officials that a U.S. resident, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was an adherent of extremist groups. After U.S. officials concluded Tsarnaev was not a threat in the U.S., he and his younger brother planted bombs along the route of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds.

___

AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · March 26, 2024

8. ‘The goal was a massacre on Tel Aviv’: Hamas's full plan for October 7 revealed

Excerpt:

"Towards noon on October 7, when Sinwar and his central command realized that they had achieved success above and beyond what was expected, an order was given to the forces of phase two to set off. Here, they encountered a big surprise because unlike in the morning - when the fence was broken and there was minimal IDF presence in the area - there was already an assessment and a huge influx of forces into the Nevatim area where a large blockade was carried out. There is no doubt that if Hamas had carried out its second phase, the trauma and disaster on October 7 would have been doubled."

‘The goal was a massacre on Tel Aviv’: Hamas's full plan for October 7 revealed

As the horrors of October 7 unfolded, Hamas sought to initiate a second stage to their attack, which would have seen attacks on Tel Aviv and Dimona.

By MAARIV ONLINE

MARCH 26, 2024 02:23

Updated: MARCH 26, 2024 07:48

Jerusalem Post

In an interview with KAN to promote his new book, Ilan Kfir claimed that Hamas had an operative plan to reach the heart of Tel Aviv on October 7, but was ultimately thwarted. The veteran journalist published "Gaza Division Conquered," in March, the first book published in Hebrew about the October 7 massacre.

"Today the picture is much clearer than it was on October 7. Hamas was not satisfied with the phase one plan - but the test was if the phase one plan was successful, they would go on to phase two - and it was prepared with large forces ready on standby and prepared to set off at noon. At the heart of the plan was a breach in two areas, in the north as well as in the south and east, towards Dimona, which was singled out by the group as a very central target. The goal of the operation would have been a raid on Tel Aviv. They marked several focal points in the city that were expected to be crowded in the afternoon and evening in order to carry out a mass massacre in the city," the author stated.

“Whoever from Hamas was planning to arrive in Tel Aviv and the north would have been forces with the mental willingness to commit suicide, because they knew they had no chance of returning from there. It was a plan that was formulated and in very advanced stages," Kfir said.

Hamas sought to initiate second phase on October 7

"Towards noon on October 7, when Sinwar and his central command realized that they had achieved success above and beyond what was expected, an order was given to the forces of phase two to set off. Here, they encountered a big surprise because unlike in the morning - when the fence was broken and there was minimal IDF presence in the area - there was already an assessment and a huge influx of forces into the Nevatim area where a large blockade was carried out. There is no doubt that if Hamas had carried out its second phase, the trauma and disaster on October 7 would have been doubled."

A man walks behind a glass with bullet holes following the deadly October 7 attack by gunmen from Palestinian militant group Hamas from the Gaza Strip, in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel November 21, 2023. (credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS)

Kfir hypothesized that had "Sinwar believed that if an attack on Tel Aviv and Dimona were reported in the news, Hezbollah in the north and the other terrorist organizations in Judea and Samaria would also attack. This is a diabolical plan, and if it had succeeded, the reality would have been many times worse."

He also said that "maps found with terrorists indicated that they intended to reach Kiryat Gat. After that, a plan was discovered by a certain force to attack Shikma Prison in Ashkelon and release terrorists. Another plan was to attack the Hatzerim air base. All this testified to Sinwar's pretensions of carrying out something that had never before been done."

Jerusalem Post

9. More upheaval at Pentagon policy shop as top official steps down

We have not had a confirmed number 3 at the Pentagon since Colin Kahl. And we have lost a number of senior officials within USD(P)

I had forgotten that the current nominee was having a difficult time with Senate confirmation.

Excerpt:

The nominee to be the next undersecretary for policy, Derek Chollet, has faced backlash from Republicans in Congress over his involvement in the Afghanistan evacuation, the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy and other issues. GOP senators tore into Chollet, a former State Department official, during his September confirmation hearing over Afghanistan, as well as his previous comments defending former President Barack Obama, for calling the security threat at the southern border “preposterous” and for saying the Army “is a pretty bubba-oriented system.” His nomination continues to remain in limbo in the Senate.

More upheaval at Pentagon policy shop as top official steps down

Politico

The departure comes as the nominee to head the policy office languishes in the Senate.

Sasha Baker is leaving just a few months after another top Pentagon official stepped down in December, deepening an existing gap in confirmed leaders at the department’s policy shop. | Heath Zeigler/U.S. Navy

03/25/2024 12:00 PM EDT

A top Pentagon official is stepping down this spring, bringing more upheaval to the department’s policy shop as the Biden administration struggles to confirm top civilian officials.

Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Sasha Baker is departing the Pentagon to spend more time with her family, according to a senior DOD official and a DOD spokesperson, both of whom were granted anonymity to speak ahead of an announcement. Baker has a 14-month-old, and was asked to become the acting policy chief last summer just months after returning from maternity leave.

Amanda Dory, a career civil servant and currently the director of the Africa Center of Strategic Studies at National Defense University, will replace Baker in the role, according to the spokesperson. After this story first appeared Monday morning, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed the news to reporters.

Baker, as the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, is the senior adviser to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for all Pentagon policy affairs, overseeing issues such as support to Ukraine and the Middle East buildup after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

The news comes as the Pentagon is struggling to confirm its remaining nominees for top civilian jobs, including President Joe Biden’s pick to run the policy office. Baker has filled the position since last July, after Colin Kahl, Biden’s only confirmed official in that job, left office.

The nominee to be the next undersecretary for policy, Derek Chollet, has faced backlash from Republicans in Congress over his involvement in the Afghanistan evacuation, the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy and other issues. GOP senators tore into Chollet, a former State Department official, during his September confirmation hearing over Afghanistan, as well as his previous comments defending former President Barack Obama, for calling the security threat at the southern border “preposterous” and for saying the Army “is a pretty bubba-oriented system.” His nomination continues to remain in limbo in the Senate.

The policy shop has lost several key officials since Kahl stepped down. In December, POLITICO first reported the departure of Mara Karlin, who was confirmed as the assistant secretary for strategy, plans and capabilities but had been performing the duties of the deputy policy chief since Kahl departed.

Meanwhile, Melissa Dalton, who took on the No. 2 policy job in an acting role after Karlin left, could also soon leave. Last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee advanced her nomination to be undersecretary of the Air Force. She now awaits a vote by the full Senate.

POLITICO

Politico

10. The Bitter Choices in Fighting Terrorism by Walter Russell Mead

Conclusion:

The fight against the re-energized forces of fanaticism won’t be easy. We must deny them the victories that inspire potential recruits. We must be steadfast against the fear they provoke, neither cowering and appeasing nor lashing out blindly to fight on their terms. And while never giving up on the compassion that is part of what makes us human, we must not let concern for their captives stand in the way of breaking the power of the guilty. To do anything else concedes the ultimate power over our world to hate-maddened killers and thugs.

The Bitter Choices in Fighting Terrorism

Leaders must measure the demands of compassion against the needs of strategy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bitter-choices-in-fighting-terrorism-94c5a028?mod

By Walter Russell Mead

March 25, 2024 4:59 pm ET

Emergency workers clear debris at the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, Russia, March 24. PHOTO: VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV/ZUMA PRESS

President Biden’s churchgoing appears to be paying off. The first big international terror attack planned in the newly strengthened terrorist haven of Afghanistan struck Russia, not the U.S. Let’s hope Mr. Biden’s luck holds. A similarly audacious attack on America that was orchestrated in Afghanistan and involved operatives who entered through America’s chaotic southern border would hit the Biden administration like a nuclear bomb.

For now, it is Vladimir Putin who must manage the attack’s political aftermath. So far he is doing all he can to blame Ukraine and the U.S. for ISIS-Khorasan’s raid Friday on a concert hall near Moscow. This is neither surprising nor particularly effective. But what Mr. Putin must now face is a problem for everyone.

Between the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, the global backlash against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, a string of jihadi successes in Africa, the failure to clear the Red Sea of Houthi attacks, and now a daring strike in the heart of Mr. Putin’s police state, the terrorists are crushing it.

Not that the terrorists are all on the same side. From the government of Iran to the militias it has spawned across the Middle East, the Shiite terrorsphere hates the Sunni terrorsphere almost as much as they both hate Western civilization. The Sunnis are divided among themselves. ISIS hates al Qaeda and they both hate the Shiites. But none of that stops Shiite Iran from arming, training and funding Sunni Hamas to murder Jews, nor will it stop other forms of tactical cooperation when it comes to slaughtering Americans, Russians, Europeans or Indians.

We oversimplify when we characterize these movements as “terrorist.” Fear is only one of the emotions these groups hope to spark as they wage war against the rest of the human race. Their goal is to manipulate a range of feelings through atrocity, hostage-taking and propaganda.

The widespread publicity about ISIS’s atrocities and slave markets wasn’t intended only to terrify enemies. It was intended to inspire potential recruits and supporters. We are winners, their recruiters say to disaffected youth around the world. Join us to kill your enemies and take their women as slaves even as you serve and please Almighty God.

Victories raise the spirits of current fighters and make it easier to recruit new ones. When the Americans left Afghanistan in disorderly haste, when fanatical Hamas paragliders raped their way through a music festival in Israel and uploaded their exploits to the internet, and when ISIS-K murdered more than 130 people in the heart of Mr. Putin’s Russia, morale in both terrorspheres soared.

Beyond fear and hope, our enemies also seek to use compassion as a weapon to divide us and ultimately paralyze our response. Even in hawkish Israel, the resolve to fight Hamas is pitted against the desire to free the hostages. Distraught friends, relatives and sympathetic members of the public agitate for something, anything, to free the hostages in Gaza at almost any cost. This is understandable and even commendable. But public safety requires that leaders measure the demands of compassion against the requirements of strategy. Hard, bitter choices are part of the job.

Israelis taken on Oct. 7 are only a small minority of the civilians Hamas holds hostage. As Hamas fighters lurk in and beneath schools, hospitals and civilian homes, looting aid shipments and murdering dissidents, Gaza’s civilian population has become a human shield. While some of the worldwide sympathy for Palestinian civilians caught up in the horrors of the Gaza war reflects pure hatred of Israel, many of those protesting Israel’s campaign are driven by natural human sympathy for innocent people ensnared in the horror of war.

Israel and all others fighting depraved terrorists must exercise great care to avoid civilian deaths. But ultimately these criminal organizations have to be destroyed. Had Franklin D. Roosevelt let concern for civilians in Germany and Japan paralyze his war strategy, the Allies would have lost World War II and many more innocent people would have died.

The fight against the re-energized forces of fanaticism won’t be easy. We must deny them the victories that inspire potential recruits. We must be steadfast against the fear they provoke, neither cowering and appeasing nor lashing out blindly to fight on their terms. And while never giving up on the compassion that is part of what makes us human, we must not let concern for their captives stand in the way of breaking the power of the guilty. To do anything else concedes the ultimate power over our world to hate-maddened killers and thugs.

WSJ Opinion: The $7.3 Trillion Budget That Ignores Defense

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Wonder Land: Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to growing threats abroad with a much needed U.S. defense buildup. The Biden Democrats' approach is to focus on domestic spending only. Images: AP/Bloomberg News Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the March 26, 2024, print edition as 'The Bitter Choices in Fighting Terrorism'.

11. China’s Third Plenum Is Long Overdue. That’s a Red Flag.

I look forward to the comments and assessment from China hands.

The "shark theory:"

Excerpts:

The Communist Party is like a shark; once it stops moving, it dies. Currently, China is not moving; it is finding new directions. People have attempted to decipher the recent Two Sessions and find directions in Premier Li Qiang’s government work report. While Li’s report said the right things, it lacks a clear sense of direction; it reads more like a summary of Xi Jinping’s speeches.

Consequently, a prevailing sense of uncertainty will persist until an authoritative signal from Beijing, possibly through a party plenum, announces China’s new direction.

China’s Third Plenum Is Long Overdue. That’s a Red Flag.

thediplomat.com · by Zhuoran Li

The absence of the Third Plenum is consequential and dangerous for China; it both reflects a notable divide within the CCP and causes greater political instability.

March 25, 2024

Delegates attend the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of China’s ruling Communist Party at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 22, 2022.

Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

For observers of Chinese politics, the most significant development in the second half of 2023 was not what occurred, but rather what failed to happen: The 20th Central Committee’s Third Plenum, which typically takes place in late October or early November the year after the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was notably absent.

The CCP is a party of rhythm, adhering to routines and cycles in its organizational processes. It usually follows a five-year cycle for National Party Congresses. Since the Cultural Revolution, the CCP has hosted Party Congresses in years ending with 7 and 2.

These congresses represent the most prominent gatherings for the CCP, where representatives of all party members convene in Beijing. The general secretary – currently Xi Jinping – initiates the proceedings with a Party Work Report, summarizing the achievements of the past five years. Subsequently, party representatives participate in the election of the new Central Committee and Central Committee of Discipline Inspection, even though the list is likely predetermined. Following this, party representatives vote on amendments to the Party Constitution.

Immediately following the National Party Congress, the CCP convenes the First Plenum of the new Central Committee, tasked with electing crucial party positions, including the general secretary, members of the Politburo, and its Standing Committee. Additionally, Politburo Standing Committee members nominate officials for the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Military Commission.

The Second Plenum takes place in the spring following the first plenum, just before the Two Sessions. During this session, the CCP nominates officials for the new government, the National People’s Congress, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. These nominations encompass positions such as premier, State Council members, and ministers.

The Third Plenum, typically occurring in the fall of the same year, is dedicated to promoting new national and party-wide reform agendas. The Fourth Plenum focuses on essential party-building, state governance, and political-legal issues. The Fifth Plenum centers on the economy and approves Five-Year Plans. The Sixth Plenum addresses critical party ideological matters. The Seventh Plenum, occurring just before the next National Party Congress, is dedicated to preparing for the upcoming congress, which leads to the start of a new five-year cycle.

To provide a concrete example, the previous Central Committee (the 19th) was appointed at the National Party Congress in October 2017. It held its First Plenum in October 2017, its Second Plenum in January 2018, its Third Plenum in February 2018, its Fourth Plenum in October 2019, its Fifth Plenum in October 2020, its Sixth Plenum in November 2021, and the Seventh Plenum in October 2022.

The CCP strategically utilizes the Third Plenum to champion its reform agenda, designating it as the party’s top priority for the next five years. Among these, the 11th Central Committee’ Third Plenum in 1978 stands out as particularly consequential, marking Deng Xiaoping’s announcement of his groundbreaking economic reform plan. In recent decades, the Third Plenum has also served as a signal for the direction the CCP intends to take during the term of each Central Committee.

The 16th Central Committee’s Third Plenum in 2002 played a crucial role in passing measures to further liberalize the domestic economy, following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization the previous year. Similarly, the 17th Central Committee’s Third Plenum in 2008 focused on rural policy reform, aiming to accelerate the implementation of the Socialist New Village policy – a trademark initiative of Hu Jintao designed to address urban-rural inequality. The 18th Central Committee’s Third Plenum in 2013 unveiled newly appointed General Secretary Xi Jinping’s ambitious plan for comprehensive reform, encompassing areas such as deepening the market economy, reforming state-owned enterprises, and restructuring the fiscal system.

The 19th Central Committee’s Third Plenum in 2018 deviated from the usual fall schedule, occurring in the spring immediately before the Two Sessions. This particular plenum outlined government institutional reforms in critical areas, including environmental protection, agriculture, and market regulation.

The Plenum Process

Each plenum serves as a forum for consensus, with the report reflecting unanimous support from the entire party leadership after months of careful deliberation. The party leader wields the authority to determine the topic for the upcoming plenum, a decision that involves extensive contemplation over an extended period.

As an illustration, Xi Jinping initiated considerations for the 19th Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum’s topic immediately after the Third Plenum, nearly a year before the actual drafting process commenced. Generally, the drafting process for the plenum report initiates in the spring, at least six months before the scheduled plenum.

Once Xi announces the topic in a Politburo meeting, the CCP selects a drafting committee, headed by Xi and comprising top party leaders and experts. Xi actively engages in the drafting process, establishing the thematic framework for the final report. Following the first meeting, the drafting committee dispatches research teams nationwide for fieldwork. Simultaneously, CCP leadership instructs lower party organs to deliberate on the plenum topic and provide feedback. Inclusionary measures involve inviting selected non-party members to offer their perspectives, with recent initiatives even incorporating internet polls to gather opinions from a broader audience.

Over the next few months, the drafting committee incorporates feedback from lower party organs and fieldwork into the initial draft, with Xi playing a central role in editing alongside committee members. Following the completion of the first draft, the Politburo Standing Committee provides comments during its meetings. After Standing Committee approval, the entire Politburo reviews and endorses the draft. Subsequently, Xi announces the draft during a study session for provincial and ministerial leaders, gathering their insights and comments.

At this stage, the draft transforms into a commenting draft, primed to receive input from a broader CCP audience. Following approval from the party’s central leaders, the committee disseminates the commenting draft to various government agencies and heads of China’s military regions, allowing Xi to gather comments from local officials and the military. Notably, party seniors also offer feedback and endorse the draft during the summer Beidaihe meeting. Extending the consultation process beyond party members, Xi conducts meetings with representatives from the CCP’s satellite parties, people’s organizations, and non-party experts, seeking their valuable opinions.

After assimilating the feedback from the commenting draft, both the Politburo Standing Committee and the full Politburo engage in the process, providing comments and ultimately approving the final draft. The culmination of this meticulous process results in the official announcement of the final draft during the plenum. (For an example of the National Party Congress/plenum report drafting process, please see here.)

Where Is the Third Plenum?

Given this background, we can conclude that the delay in holding the Third Plenum – which is now over five months late, based on recent precedent – is a sign of a notable divide within the CCP, particularly among its top leaders.

Xi Jinping sees the Third Plenum as an opportunity to chart the direction for China, especially after securing his historic third term in the 20th Party Congress. Based on Xi’s “dual circulation” and “common prosperity” initiatives, one can conclude that Xi’s preferred agenda for the Third Plenum involves wealth redistribution, self-reliance, and technology development to transition the economy to a domestic consumption model based on innovation.

However, since the 20th Party Congress, Xi has confronted significant challenges related to the conclusion of the zero-COVID Policy, economic recovery, and China’s complex relationship with the United States. In addition, Xi’s attempt to regulate the real estate and the tech sectors are the direct cause of the current economic difficulties. This confluence of issues has prevented the party from reaching a consensus on how to navigate these challenges.

Reports from Nikkei indicate that during the Beidaihe meeting in the summer of 2023, a faction of party seniors, led by former Politburo Standing Committee member Zeng Qinghong, expressed dissatisfaction with Xi Jinping. This group reprimanded Xi and demanded effective countermeasures to address the economic, social, and political turmoil in China.

The lack of agreement within the CCP’s top leadership has likely contributed to the postponement of the Third Plenum, as divergent perspectives on crucial issues need to be reconciled before a unified direction can be set for the country.

The Implications

The absence of the Third Plenum is consequential and dangerous for China; it causes political instability due to confusion among officials.

Since 2023, Chinese governments at all levels have initiated policies to create a more favorable investment and business environment. At the central level, the government dismantled barriers to market entry and eliminated unfair procurement practices. In addition, various local governments compete to attract investments by offering competitive terms such as tax breaks and discounted land; localities even brought back targets for investment attractions. As a result, some local party secretaries spent more time traveling around China to meet with business executives than working in the office.

However, local officials are still unsure about the center’s policy direction. One official said that even though governments are working on attracting investments, they don’t know how long the policy will continue. They are afraid that a new directive from Beijing will waste all their efforts.

In addition, despite harboring enthusiasm to attract investments, local governments are reluctant to initiate new growth policies, particularly as their reliance on the old land-based approach reaches an impasse. Fearful of aligning themselves against the political tide, especially since the current politics emphasizes loyalty over competence, as evident in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, cadres hesitate to champion new initiatives.

The business community certainly shares this feeling of uncertainty. Many businesses believe China now is a “buyer’s market” due to government investment support policies. However, despite the positive sentiments, a considerable number of businesses remain hesitant. Businesses want predictability, something they cannot find in China today.

The uncertainties of recent years have instilled a cautious approach, prompting these businesses to await more definitive signals. Business people fear that a deal made today with local governments might not be implemented due to sudden political change. If that happens, they can only accept the investment as a lost cause, given their lack of protection from the government. In the worst-case scenario, they might find themselves facing heavy-handed regulations like the tech sector crackdown.

The Communist Party is like a shark; once it stops moving, it dies. Currently, China is not moving; it is finding new directions. People have attempted to decipher the recent Two Sessions and find directions in Premier Li Qiang’s government work report. While Li’s report said the right things, it lacks a clear sense of direction; it reads more like a summary of Xi Jinping’s speeches.

Consequently, a prevailing sense of uncertainty will persist until an authoritative signal from Beijing, possibly through a party plenum, announces China’s new direction.

Authors

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Zhuoran Li

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thediplomat.com · by Zhuoran Li

12. Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

Excerpts:

Putin’s descent into tyranny has been accompanied by his gradual isolation from the rest of society. Like the latter-day Stalin, Putin began living an isolated life as a bachelor even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like the later Stalin, Putin lacks a stable family life and is believed to have replaced it with a string of mistresses, some of whom are reported to have borne him children for whom he remains a remote figure. Like Stalin, he stays up late into the early-morning hours, and like the Soviet dictator, Putin has assembled around him a small coterie of trusted intimates, mostly men in their 60s and 70s, with whom he has maintained friendships for decades, including businessmen Yury Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and security chief Nikolai Patrushev. This coterie resembles Stalin’s small network of cronies: security chief Lavrentiy Beria, military leader Kliment Voroshilov, and Communist Party official Georgy Malenkov. To others in leadership positions, Putin is a distant, absolute leader who openly humiliates seemingly powerful officials, such as spy chief Sergey Naryshkin, when the latter seemed to hesitate in his support during Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.

Through near-total control of domestic civic life and media, his widening campaign of repression and terror, relentless state propaganda promoting his personality cult, and his vast geopolitical ambitions, Putin is consciously mimicking the Stalin playbook, especially the parts of that playbook dealing with World War II. Even if Putin has no love for Soviet Communist ideology, he has transformed Russia and its people in ways that are no less fundamental than Stalin’s efforts to shape a new Soviet man.

Putin’s massive victory in a Soviet-style election last weekend represents the ratification by the Russian people of his brutal war, militarization of Russian society, and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. It is a good moment to acknowledge that Russia’s descent into tyranny, mobilization of society onto a war footing, spread of hatred for the West, and indoctrination of the population in imperialist tropes represent far more than a threat to Ukraine. Russia’s transformation into a neo-Stalinist, neo-imperialist power represents a rising threat to the United States, its European allies, and other states on Russia’s periphery. By recognizing how deeply Russia has changed and how significantly Putin is borrowing from Stalin’s playbook, we can better understand that meeting the modern-day Russian threat will require as much consistency and as deep a commitment as when the West faced down Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future

With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

MARCH 24, 2024, 8:13 AM

By Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the founder of Myrmidon Group.

Foreign Policy · by Adrian Karatnycky

Human Rights
Russia

In 1968, the American scholar Jerome M. Gilison described Soviet elections as a “psychological curiosity”—a ritualized, performative affirmation of the regime rather than a real vote in any sense of the word. These staged elections with their nearly unanimous official results, Gilison wrote, served to isolate non-conformists and weld the people to their regime.

Last Sunday, Russia completed the circle and returned to Soviet practice. State election officials reported that 87 percent of Russians had cast their vote for Vladimir Putin in national elections, giving the Russian president a fifth term in office. Not only were many of the reported election numbers mathematically impossible, but there was also no longer much of a choice: All prominent opposition figures had been either murdered, imprisoned, or exiled. Like in Soviet times, the election also welded Russians to their regime by serving as a referendum on Putin’s war against Ukraine. All in all, last weekend’s Soviet-style election sealed Putin’s transformation of post-Communist Russia into a repressive society with many of the features of Soviet totalitarianism.

Russia’s return to Soviet practice goes far beyond elections. A recent study by exiled Russian journalists from Proekt Media used data to determine that Russia is more politically repressive today than the Soviet Union under all leaders since Joseph Stalin. During the last six years, the study reports, the Putin regime has indicted 5,613 Russians on explicitly political charges—including “discrediting the army,” “disseminating misinformation,” “justification of terrorism,” and other purported crimes, which have been widely used to punish criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine and justification of Ukraine’s defense of its territory. This number is significantly greater than in any other six-year period of Soviet rule after 1956—all the more glaring given that Russia’s population is only half that of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

In addition to repressive criminal charges and sentences, over the last six years more than 105,000 people have been tried on administrative charges, which carry heavy fines and compulsory labor for up to 30 days without appeal. Many of these individuals were punished for taking part in unsanctioned marches or political activity, including anti-war protests. Others were charged with violations of COVID pandemic regulations. Such administrative punishments are administered and implemented rapidly, without time for an appeal.

On March 4, 2022, a little over a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Russia’s puppet parliament rapidly adopted amendments to the Russian Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code that established criminal and administrative punishments for the vague transgressions of “discrediting” the Russian military or disseminating “false information” about it. This widely expanded the repressive powers of the state to criminally prosecute political beliefs and activity. Prosecutions have surged since the new laws were passed, likely leading to a dramatic increase in the number of political prisoners in the coming years. In particular, punishments for “discrediting the army” or “justification of terrorism”—which includes voicing support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself—have resulted in hundreds of sentences meted out each year since the war began. The most recent such case: On Feb. 27, the 70-year-old co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian military.

As the Proekt report ominously concludes, “[I]n terms of repression, Putin has long ago surpassed almost all Soviet general secretaries, except for one—Joseph Stalin.” While this conclusion is in itself significant, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the totalitarian state Putin has gradually and systematically rebuilt.

A man wearing a dark puffy coat and holding a piece of paper pushes a curtain aside as he steps out of a voting booth adorned with the crest of Russia. Behind him is a map of Russia with clocks of different time zones. A Russian flag on a stand is in front of the map.

A man votes in Russia’s presidential election in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on March 15. ladimir Nikolayev/AFP via Getty Images

As in the Soviet years, there is no independent media in Russia today. The last of these news organizations were banned or fled the country after Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine, including Proekt, Meduza, Ekho Moskvy, Nobel Prize-winning Novaya Gazeta, and TV Dozhd. In their place, strictly regime-aligned newspapers, social media, and television and radio stations emit a steady drumbeat of militaristic propaganda, promote Russian imperialist grandeur, and celebrate Putin as the country’s infallible commander in chief. In another reprise of totalitarian practice, lists of banned books have been dramatically expanded and thousands of titles have been removed from the shelves of Russian libraries and bookstores. Bans have been extended to numerous Wikipedia pages, social media channels, and websites.

Human rights activists and independent civic leaders have been jailed, physically attacked, intimidated into silence, or driven into exile. Civic organizations that show independence from the state are banned as “undesirable” and subjected to fines and prosecution if they continue to operate. The most recent such organizations include the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, Memorial, the legendary Moscow Helsinki Group, and the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum. In their place, the state finances a vast array of pro-regime and pro-war groups, with significant state resources supporting youth groups that promote the cult of Putin and educate children in martial values to prepare them for military service. Then there are the numerous murders of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists at home and abroad. Through these various means, almost all critical Russian voices have been silenced.

Private and family life is also increasingly coming under the scope of government regulation and persecution. The web of repression particularly affects the LGBT community, putting large numbers of Russians in direct peril. A court ruling in 2023 declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist and banned the rainbow flag as a forbidden symbol, which was quickly followed by raids and arrests. Homosexuality has been reclassified as an illness, and Russian gay rights organizations have shut down their operations for fear of prosecution. Legislation aimed at reinforcing “traditional values”—including the right of husbands to discipline their wives—has led to the reduction in sentences and the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence.

Jade McGlynn’s books paint an unsettling picture of ordinary Russians’ support for the invasion and occupation of Ukraine.

Many of the techniques of totalitarian control now operating throughout Russia were first incubated in territories where the Kremlin spread war and conflict. Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration camps that recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

As Russia’s violence in Ukraine has expanded, so, too, has the acceptance of these abominations throughout the state and in much of society. As during the Stalin era, the cult of cruelty and the culture of fear are now the legal and moral standards. The climate of fear initially employed to assert order in occupied regions is now being applied to Russia itself. In this context, the murder of Alexei Navalny ahead of the presidential election was an important message from Putin to the Russian people: There is no longer any alternative to the war and repressive political order he has imposed, of which Navalny’s elimination is a part.

People carry posters of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders in Moscow.

People carry posters of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders in Moscow on Nov. 7, 1952. AFP via Getty Images

Supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin gather for a rally to celebrate the fourth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea at Sevastopol’s Nakhimov Square.

Supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin gather for a rally to celebrate the fourth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea at Sevastopol’s Nakhimov Square on March 14, 2018. Yuri Kadobnov/AFP via Getty Images

All the techniques and means of repression bespeak a criminal regime that now closely resembles the totalitarian rule of Stalin, whom Putin now fully embraces. After Putin first came to power in 1999, he often praised Stalin as a great war leader while disapproving of his cruelty and brutality. But as Putin pivoted toward war and repression, Russia has systematically promoted a more positive image of Stalin. High school textbooks not only celebrate his legacy but also whitewash his terror regime. There has been a proliferation of new Stalin monuments, with more than 100 throughout the country today. On state-controlled media, Russian propagandists consistently hammer away on the theme of Stalin’s greatness and underscore similarities between his wartime leadership and Putin’s. Discussion of Stalinist terror has disappeared, as has the memorialization of his millions of victims. Whereas only one in five Russians had a positive view of Stalin in the 1990s, polls conducted over the last five years show that number has risen to between 60 percent and 70 percent. In normalizing Stalin, Putin is not glossing over the tyrant’s crimes; rather, he is deliberately normalizing Stalin as a justification for his own war-making and repression.

Putin now resembles Stalin more closely than any other Soviet or Russian leader. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov—not to mention Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—Putin has unquestioned power that is not shared or limited in any way by parliament, courts, or a Politburo. State propaganda has created a Stalin-like personality cult that lionizes Putin’s absolute power, genius as a leader, and role as a brilliant wartime generalissimo. It projects him as the fearsome and all-powerful head of a militarized nation aiming, like Stalin, to defeat a “Nazi” regime in Ukraine and reassert hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe. Just as Stalin made effective use of the Russian Orthodox Church to support Russia’s effort during World War II, Putin has effectively used Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill as a critical ally and cheerleader of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. And just like Stalin, Putin has made invading neighboring countries and annexing territory a central focus of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

A young man wearing a scarf, stocking cap, and winter coat holds a flag with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin depicted on it along with Cyrillic text and a hammer and scythe symbol. Behind him are the buildings of Red Square.

A young Communist holds a flag depicting Stalin before placing flowers on his tomb in Moscow on March 5, during a memorial ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Soviet leader’s death.Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

Putin’s descent into tyranny has been accompanied by his gradual isolation from the rest of society. Like the latter-day Stalin, Putin began living an isolated life as a bachelor even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like the later Stalin, Putin lacks a stable family life and is believed to have replaced it with a string of mistresses, some of whom are reported to have borne him children for whom he remains a remote figure. Like Stalin, he stays up late into the early-morning hours, and like the Soviet dictator, Putin has assembled around him a small coterie of trusted intimates, mostly men in their 60s and 70s, with whom he has maintained friendships for decades, including businessmen Yury Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and security chief Nikolai Patrushev. This coterie resembles Stalin’s small network of cronies: security chief Lavrentiy Beria, military leader Kliment Voroshilov, and Communist Party official Georgy Malenkov. To others in leadership positions, Putin is a distant, absolute leader who openly humiliates seemingly powerful officials, such as spy chief Sergey Naryshkin, when the latter seemed to hesitate in his support during Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.

Through near-total control of domestic civic life and media, his widening campaign of repression and terror, relentless state propaganda promoting his personality cult, and his vast geopolitical ambitions, Putin is consciously mimicking the Stalin playbook, especially the parts of that playbook dealing with World War II. Even if Putin has no love for Soviet Communist ideology, he has transformed Russia and its people in ways that are no less fundamental than Stalin’s efforts to shape a new Soviet man.

Putin’s massive victory in a Soviet-style election last weekend represents the ratification by the Russian people of his brutal war, militarization of Russian society, and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. It is a good moment to acknowledge that Russia’s descent into tyranny, mobilization of society onto a war footing, spread of hatred for the West, and indoctrination of the population in imperialist tropes represent far more than a threat to Ukraine. Russia’s transformation into a neo-Stalinist, neo-imperialist power represents a rising threat to the United States, its European allies, and other states on Russia’s periphery. By recognizing how deeply Russia has changed and how significantly Putin is borrowing from Stalin’s playbook, we can better understand that meeting the modern-day Russian threat will require as much consistency and as deep a commitment as when the West faced down Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Foreign Policy · by Adrian Karatnycky

13. Is This a Revolution? Or Are People Just Very Ticked Off?

Revolution, resistance, insurgency, and civil war. Some of the most difficult forms of conflict short of major theater war among nation states.

For those who call for revolution, do they really know what they are talking about? Do they know what it takes? And do they have. a vision for what comes next?

But the $64,000 question is is the rules based international order necessary and if so can it be saved?

Excerpts:

In the interim, perhaps we can save what remains of that order. For all of America’s problems, it is still by far the dominant power in terms of its military, economy and technological edge. And we are all still benefiting from an unprecedentedly peaceful moment in human history: Never before has an international system been so all-encompassing, with an array of secondary but rising powers so co-opted by that system. The prosperity and stability provided by this system has created, despite the inequities of globalization and the resurgence of protectionism, a powerful and enduring motivation for nations to remain part of it. Among these beneficiaries, crucially, is China, which is far more integrated into the world economy than Russia and has been enriched by it as much as the United States, Europe and Japan.

Which forces will prevail in the end: the revolutions that created the world we know today, or the counter-revolutions seeking to undo it?

A key question is whether Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership will accept this reality, at least in part—or whether Xi, a would-be Mao Zedong, is too frightened by the threat economic liberalism poses to the legitimacy of the Communist Party. Much depends on Washington’s and Beijing’s willingness to “live in peaceful albeit energetic competition” —an outcome, Zakaria writes, “most of the world would fervently choose.”

After the March 5 Super Tuesday primary results, which all but guaranteed a 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump, the president said: “Are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office?” Biden has hardly been a perfect president—but, yes, those are pretty much the stakes for the challenge that Zakaria lays out in his book. Which forces will prevail in the end: the revolutions that created the world we know today, or the counter-revolutions seeking to undo it?

We just don’t know. Trump is truly a historical oddity who could, at the helm of the biggest power in the world, make all the difference in this outcome. Tolstoy was probably right: Human history isn’t decided by “great” men. But the opposite has too often been true: Power-hungry maniacs seeking personal gain have sometimes decided things for the rest of us, and for ages to come. Perhaps, if Trump is elected, China and Russia will someday thank him. Or at the very least, maybe they’ll erect a statue to honor Trump—our modern-day Ozymandias—amid the ruins he leaves behind.

Is This a Revolution? Or Are People Just Very Ticked Off?

In a new book, Fareed Zakaria explores how much the times are a-changin’. At risk, he says, is the entire global system.

MARCH 25, 2024, 8:39 AM

By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Michael Hirsh

Politics
Geopolitics
United States

… something is happening here but you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

—Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

… something is happening here but you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?

—Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

Something is happening to us—to Americans, to the world—and we don’t know what it is. Is the United States in the throes of some kind of revolution, with a vampiric Donald Trump rising from the political undead to threaten (more openly, this time around) the destruction of the U.S. Constitution itself? Is the entire post-World War II global system—or what remains of it—facing some kind of revolutionary upheaval as well? Russia’s murderous president, Vladimir Putin, continues to violate every postwar norm, territorially and otherwise, with China mostly on his side. Together they are helping to unravel an ever-more ragged global consensus that, if Trump is reelected U.S. president eight months from now, he could well rip apart for good. “Where Globalism Goes to Die” was the motto of the 50th annual Conservative Political Action Conference held in February at National Harbor, Maryland, where Trump was welcomed as a conquering hero.

Or are we, instead, engaged not so much in revolution as a series of counter-revolutions—in other words, a domestic and global reactionary backlash that seeks to restore the world that used to be (or what many people wishfully think it used to be)? Trump, of course, is leading the way, once more spuriously promising to “Make America Great Again.” Trump is embracing a radical agenda that seeks to reverse what the Republican Party—of which he is now sole owner and proprietor—views as nearly a century of liberal encroachment on Washington since the New Deal. He pledges to exile or even to imprison anyone who stands in his way. Much of this amounts to a rebellion by Trump’s riled-up MAGA base against the values of the American Revolution itself—its pledge of a common nationhood and constitutionalism, and its quixotic effort to “live out the true meaning of its creed,” in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, by striving for equality among races and ethnic groups (as well as, more recently, every sort of sexual identity).

The cover of Fareed Zakaria's book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria, W. W. Norton & Company, 400 pp., $29.99, March 2024

Along with that comes a Trumpian backlash against his predecessors’ attempt, in the last century, to extend the values of the American Revolution worldwide through Wilsonian globalism, and instead to return to some version of America’s pre-World War II isolationism and protectionism. More broadly we seem to be in the middle of a worldwide counter-revolution against what has reigned, for 80 years, as a truly revolutionary postwar global system. A century’s worth of Western (mostly American) institution-building had once appeared to fulfill the conditions for abolishing great-power war, for the first time in recorded history. It did this by creating a truly global economic system and international community and thus, as Walter Lippmann once wrote, “an international conscience which will play the part which war has always played in human affairs.” That system promised peace and prosperity for all, delivered it only to some—far too few, we must now acknowledge—and is now in danger of disintegrating despite having given us the longest period in modern history without a great-power war, as Fareed Zakaria observes in his important new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.

The question is why—and is the rot in the system fixable or fatal? In his book, Zakaria performs an invaluable service in framing these questions precisely the right way. How sturdy, in the end, will the American and global systems prove against all these hurricane-force winds of change? And even if Trump is defeated in November, will policy-makers be smart enough to reform sufficiently, and quickly enough, to prevent a full-scale degringolade?

What’s at stake is modernity itself, writes Zakaria. The well-known host of CNN’s “GPS” program, Zakaria enjoys a lot of credibility on this subject. More than a quarter century ago, he became one of the first pundits to identify and trace the advent of what he called “illiberal democracy,” and later the “rise of the rest,” foreseeing a more challenging post-Cold War environment than most people expected. Now Zakaria seeks to preserve what’s left of the future by finding lessons in the past. Beginning with the Netherlands, whose successful “liberal revolution” invented modernity in the 1600s, Zakaria puts today’s crises in the appropriate context–that of the centuries-long interplay between “two competing plotlines: liberalism, meaning progress, growth, disruption, revolution in the sense of radical advance; and illiberalism, standing for regression, restriction, nostalgia, revolution in the sense of returning to the past.” The convulsions we are seeing in the early 21st century may prove to be just another stutter-step on the long road toward modern civilization as these two tendencies, liberalism and illiberalism, collide once again, Zakaria says. But that’s only if we address them correctly.

As a result, Zakaria desperately wants the United States to realize what’s at stake and not give up “on the world it made,” as he put it forthrightly in a recent Foreign Affairs cover article titled “The Self-Doubting Superpower.” But, ever the realist, Zakaria also writes in his book that America’s post-Cold War hegemony was always destined to take a hit: “The unipolar moment could not last forever. History had to return.”

Perhaps. But one thing is certain: Washington gave history one hell of a tailwind, thanks to the colossal errors of its politicians and policy-makers. That’s why so much of the revolution—or counter-revolution—involves a backlash against American arrogance and overconfidence in overseeing the world system that Washington helped create after World War II. This hubris in the triumphalist aftermath of the Cold War led Washington to invade another country (Iraq) without cause (which in turn contributed to another debacle, the loss of Afghanistan to the resurgent Taliban); to fecklessly throw open capital markets all at once to Wall Street’s predations (free markets are always good, right? after all they won the Cold War), leading to the 2008 financial crisis and far-reaching economic instability; and to arguably overextend NATO smack up against Russia’s borders. It is noteworthy that many foreign policy experts (Zakaria among them) believe that, whatever the complex historical reasons for Putin’s Ukraine invasion, the Americans provoked him unnecessarily at the NATO summit at Bucharest in 2008 by raising the possibility that Ukraine might join NATO but without making a formal offer. This, Zakaria, writes, “was the worst of both worlds—enraging Russia without giving Ukraine any path to certainty.” Putin himself, in his Feb. 21, 2022, speech justifying the invasion, cited as precedent “the invasion of Iraq without any legal grounds.” China has also invoked the theme of U.S. hubris and irresponsibility in mismanaging the world system: Zhao Lijian, then the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, in 2022 called the U.S. “the leading instigator of the Ukraine crisis” because it “led NATO in pursuing five rounds of eastward expansion.” And as Zakaria observes, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is quite brazenly leading a “cultural counterrevolution” built on a nostalgic (and likely untrue) version of a once-dominant Chinese nationalism that rejects U.S. hegemony.

The question, again, is how far will all these convulsions go in threatening to overturn all of what we consider, today, world civilization—which is why we need to get the framing of the challenge right. Zakaria writes that we’ve moved way beyond the old ideological division between right versus left, which has existed since the French Revolution but has broken down completely. Instead, today’s political divide can be defined more as what former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called “open versus closed.” In practical terms that means neo-isolationist and neo-protectionist populism (both on the far right and far left) versus a more or less internationalist establishment (both left of center and right of center).

A man wearing jeans and a dark jacket lifts a pick ax to slam into a graffiti-covered section of the the Berlin Wall. Other protesters are seen behind him.

A man attacks the Berlin Wall with a pickax on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, a pivotal moment in the fall of communism.Robert Wallis/Corbis via Getty Images

Zakaria wrestles with whether this was all inevitable, a kind of “Thucydides Trap” by which rising powers (read: China) always challenge established ones, or whether our politicians and policy-makers brought it on themselves. He writes that one of the mistakes made during the “hyper-globalization” of the post-Cold War period—that “end of history” moment when “all competing ideologies and economic systems seemed to have lost legitimacy and support”—was that it all happened too fast. We in the West were expecting too much too quickly, particularly of the former Soviet Union and those countries that were once part of the Soviet sphere. “Because the developing world did not have the time to slowly develop its institutions, democratization in the 1980s and ‘90s was swift and shallow,” he writes. “Countries failed to embed the protections and freedoms promised by liberalism. The masses, in turn, did not know what to expect or demand from this new system and, in many cases, were left to weather the disruptions of market liberalism with no institutional insulation to protect them.”

Zakaria writes that one of the mistakes made during the “hyper-globalization” of the post-Cold War period was that it all happened too fast.

This was particularly true of Russia after the USSR collapsed. Zakaria quotes Boris Yelstin, Putin’s predecessor, as describing the liberal democratic and free-market institutions pressed on Moscow by the West in the 1990s as “beautiful structures and beautiful titles with nothing behind them.” Is Putin—and the anti-Western counter-revolution he is leading—somehow a monster that we ourselves created? Zakaria does not go into great detail about this, but an argument can certainly be made that Putin and Putinism are largely the product of excessive American triumphalism, and not just because of NATO expansion. Soon after the Soviet Union disappeared from the map, the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton pushed “shock therapy” in the form of a lot of facile, pro-market solutions on Moscow, helped by the International Monetary Fund and free-market advocates at the Harvard Institute for International Development. As a result of this bad advice, privatization of the former communist production system swiftly degenerated into what the Russians called prikhvatizatsiya, or “grabification,” the seizure of state assets by government apparatchiks-turned-oligarchs, and corruption was rampant. “By paying insufficient attention to the institutional infrastructure that would allow a market economy to flourish—and by easing the flow of capital in and out of Russia—the IMF and Treasury had laid the groundwork for the oligarchs’ plundering,” wrote the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who had warned against too-rapid privatization.

The result, as former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott lamented, was “too much shock and too little therapy”—and, in the end, a populist right-wing reaction in the form of Putin. No less a free-market eminence than the Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman later admitted to me, in a 2002 interview, that he and other advocates of hyper-globalization had been wrong about post-Soviet Russia and cautious progressives such as Stiglitz, who urged more institution building and legal protections, had read the situation correctly. “In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union,” Friedman said, “I kept being asked what Russia should do. I said, privatize, privatize, privatize. I was wrong. He [Stiglitz] was right. What we want is privatization and the rule of law.”

A 1870s oil painting depicts a jumble of workers toiling at an iron mill.

A painting by Adolph Menzel depicts a German factory in the 1870s during the Industrial Revolution. Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

A giant trojan horse installation made up of electric components stands on a street. Behind it is a university building draped with OpenAI banners.

Banners of the U.S. artificial intelligence company OpenAI fly near an installation depicting a Trojan horse made up of microelectronic circuit boards and other computer components on the Tel Aviv University campus in Israel on June 5, 2023. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

Is there anything we can do about this now? One big problem, Zakaria writes, is that not only can’t we unwind the clock, a lot of new things are happening so quickly they’re out of our control. Much of his book deals with the way the industrial revolution—the “mother of all revolutions,” he calls it—transformed society and politics forever. But that took centuries, whereas information technology and AI are having a similar impact in months. “It took almost four years to get one hundred million people worldwide to use Facebook, over two years to get that same number on Instagram, and just two months to get one hundred million people using ChatGPT,” he writes. The digital revolution has made things enormously better for average working people–with the latest information, entertainment and efficient purchasing power at the fingertips of just about everybody in the developed world–but it may be a “Faustian bargain” that comes at the cost of community and, ultimately, a firm handle on truth, Zakaria writes. “The mom-and-pop store? Gone, unable to compete with Amazon. The corner arcade? Displaced by online gambling. The local movie theater? Run out of town by Netflix,” he writes. In traditional communities everyone knew who the town drunk was, and the lone lunatic shouting on the street corner found himself ostracized. No longer: Online the lunatics have found each other and formed new and often violent virtual communities unhinged from reality.

“Many adults, living lives of greater isolation, have gone online and found a sense of shared purpose in the increasingly virulent politics of the day. As disturbing and fantastical as some conspiracy theories can be—dark visions of globalist cabals and child sex rings hidden in pizza shops—such worldviews may provide a perverse kind of comfort, a coherent narrative to replace randomness,” he writes. The machinery of liberal democracy looks slow and cumbersome too, he says, compared to “one-click ordering on Amazon,” and this need for easy answers also helped give rise to Trump, who was “catapulted” into the White House by the internet.

Republican Congressman Brandon Williams of New York holds an Israeli flag as he looks down on a crowd of protesters below as they stage a demonstration in support of a cease fire in Gaza. The crowd holds signs that say Ceasefire, Jews Say Ceasefire Now, and Philly Jews Say Never Again is Now. Reporters and photographers are seen on the columned balcony framing the scene in the Cannon House Office Building.

Is America Really ‘Indispensable’ Again?

The new debates over aid to Ukraine and Israel have opened an old wound: avoiding too many foreign entanglements.

A painting depicts the Burning of the Chateau d'Eau at the Palais-Royal of Paris with soldiers in the foreground and fire in the bulidings.

Why Some Revolutions Fail to Make History

Europe’s tumultuous year of 1848 is often forgotten, but a new book argues that it could teach us a lot about politics today.

A photo illustration showing major geopolitical events with a down arrow cracking the earth to illustrate a hard landing

A Geopolitical Hard Landing Is All Too Possible

The time for intervention is now.

“His communication style was made for the times,” Zakaria writes. “As soon as he had a thought, he simply blasted it on social media. … He was able to speak directly to his followers and dominate the ever-shortening news cycle. And his simplistic policy prescriptions—solve illegal immigration by building a wall (and making Mexico pay for it), restore American manufacturing by imposing tariffs (that other countries would supposedly pay for)—promised a kind of instant gratification at no cost, something people have come to expect in the internet era.”

And yet there is much that is not new—much that suggests civilization is simply suffering through another bout with what Lippmann, in his 1929 book Preface to Morals, called the “acids of modernity.” These have corroded traditional belief systems and “are so powerful that they do not tolerate a crystallization of ideas which will serve as a new orthodoxy into which men can retreat.”

Ultimately, in the crucible of depression and world war, the world did find a new “orthodoxy”—the eight-decades-old international system. Can we do so again, but without a bloody trauma this time? Zakaria quotes Lippmann to good effect on this and other issues in suggesting that part of the solution lies in studying how we dealt with rapid change in the past. As in past periods of successful upheaval—say, England’s Glorious Revolution—society needs to balance “the push and pull between the past and the future.” Zakaria’s answer is to find inspiration in the stories of immigrants who seek both the best modern advantages for their children in the global economy and yet come to regret “the culture and community they left behind.” We must, instead, find a way to achieve the future—modernity—while holding onto the best parts of the past. “Liberalism’s problem in many ways is that it has been too successful,” he writes. The acids of modernity must be offset more effectively by a sturdy base of alkaline conservativism.

Zakaria harks back to previous important historical moments when there were similar convulsions but critical compromises were found. His beau ideals are enlightened 19th century politicians such as British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and today, believe it or not, the much-harried U.S. president, Joe Biden. Zakaria favorably invokes the British conservatives of the 19th century who “made their peace” with the gradual democratization of the Great Reform Act and embraced the credo, “Reform, that you may preserve.” Biden, he says, also understands “the need to pivot the neoliberal consensus toward some modest, reformist versions of certain populist policies” in order to save the larger system. “Extremism may feel satisfying,” Zakaria writes, “but gradual reform more often produces lasting change.”

A painting shows British troops fighting with American troops using bayonets and swords. Several from each side appear dead on the ground. Gen. George Washington is seen on a horse in the background in front of an early American flag.

A painting by John Trumbull depicts the death of Gen. Hugh Mercer in battle during the American Revolution. H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson wearing a dark suit and holding a hat stands on a stage in front of a giant crowd in the stands. In the foreground, men in suits, one with a camera, cluster in front of him.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson addresses a crowd in Tacoma, Washington, during his League of Nations Peace Tour. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Zakaria’s once-over-lightly approach to history—with five centuries of it crammed into 350-odd pages—can sometimes grate. In his eagerness to bear out his major theme—that the current crisis is survivable if one learns from the past—he occasionally rushes through events, failing to connect some dots. For example, even while he acknowledges that the U.S. “sapped its strength” with debacles such as Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis—a moment of disillusionment for China when as a senior Chinese official, Wang Qishan, told then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, “We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore”—he sometimes rather glibly describes sequences of things in simplistic terms. When the Cold War ended, Zakaria says, the country achieved a “consensus on economic policy” that “opened the door for social issues to come to the fore.” It was a bit more complicated, actually. There was a misguided consensus on neoliberalism, but the deep inequalities this created actually caused many of these social issues to erupt. And after social issues came to the fore the economic debate reerupted, giving rise to Trump’s vicious populism, as angry whites began objecting to the widening distribution of economic benefits to ethnic minorities and immigration became a huge and volatile issue.

It is also rather odd that Zakaria decides to mostly ignore the significance of the American Revolution, writing that it was not a real revolution in that it “served more to reaffirm than subvert existing hierarchies” and that “for all its political audacity, it did not immediately transform society’s deeper structures.” Okay, maybe not immediately—but ultimately the American Revolution transformed the entire world of political philosophy as well as its practice. At least as much as the Industrial Revolution, it got us where we are today reconceived as Wilsonianism, which remade much of the globe because America’s postwar world-builders believed, as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson himself declared in launching the League of Nations in 1918, that there should be “no difference between American principles and those of mankind.” (China and Russia, along with Iran and other nations, beg to differ, and it is no accident that the Trumpian reaction in the U.S. has spawned so many imitators abroad, from Viktor Orban to Jair Bolsonaro.) As far as subverting old hierarchies goes, Trump has now achieved that end completely, at least in the Republican Party, thanks to the transformation of electoral power (especially in the last half century or so as party nominations devolved from party bosses in smoke-filled rooms to a more radicalized primary electorate).

The American Revolution got us where we are today reconceived as Wilsonianism, which remade much of the globe because America’s postwar world-builders believed that there should be “no difference between American principles and those of mankind.”

As Zakaria breezes his way through titanic epochs like the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, the reader would be advised to keep by his side a copy of, say, Christopher Clark’s new book Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-49, a profound look at what “a non-linear, convulsive, intermittently violent and transformative ‘unfinished revolution’” really looks like. The effects of some revolutions can suffer from long delays, writes Clark, a Cambridge University historian. This may have happened in the Arab Spring; Clark writes that the European revolutions of 1848 were also known as the “springtime of the peoples” but like the Arab Spring were crushed by revanchist forces. Clark observes that “in their swarming multitudinousness, in the unpredictable interaction of so many forces, the tumults of the mid-nineteenth century resembled the chaotic upheavals of our own day, in which clearly defined endpoints are hard to come by.” He concludes: “If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.”

Zakaria also briefly cites the quasi-revolutions of 1848 in Europe as a cautionary tale, a “similarly revolutionary age when the old agricultural world was rapidly being replaced by new industrial one, when politics, culture, identity and geopolitics were all being upended by gale-forced winds of structural change.” In the short run, he notes, “the Revolutions of 1848 failed. But in the ensuing years many of the revolutionaries’ ideas were quietly adopted,” preventing a deeper trauma.

Yet that took a very long time, and today’s issues are also likely to remain unresolved for a very long time. “Most likely, the world we are going to live in will lie uneasily”, Zakaria writes, between what he calls “the dual revolutions,” the return of great-power politics and the rise of the liberal order.

A police officer in riot gear pins down a protester holding a 13-star U.S. flag on the marble surface outside the Capitol.

A police officer detains a pro-Trump protester holding a 13-star U.S. flag as a mob storms the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

In the interim, perhaps we can save what remains of that order. For all of America’s problems, it is still by far the dominant power in terms of its military, economy and technological edge. And we are all still benefiting from an unprecedentedly peaceful moment in human history: Never before has an international system been so all-encompassing, with an array of secondary but rising powers so co-opted by that system. The prosperity and stability provided by this system has created, despite the inequities of globalization and the resurgence of protectionism, a powerful and enduring motivation for nations to remain part of it. Among these beneficiaries, crucially, is China, which is far more integrated into the world economy than Russia and has been enriched by it as much as the United States, Europe and Japan.

Which forces will prevail in the end: the revolutions that created the world we know today, or the counter-revolutions seeking to undo it?

A key question is whether Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership will accept this reality, at least in part—or whether Xi, a would-be Mao Zedong, is too frightened by the threat economic liberalism poses to the legitimacy of the Communist Party. Much depends on Washington’s and Beijing’s willingness to “live in peaceful albeit energetic competition” —an outcome, Zakaria writes, “most of the world would fervently choose.”

After the March 5 Super Tuesday primary results, which all but guaranteed a 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump, the president said: “Are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office?” Biden has hardly been a perfect president—but, yes, those are pretty much the stakes for the challenge that Zakaria lays out in his book. Which forces will prevail in the end: the revolutions that created the world we know today, or the counter-revolutions seeking to undo it?

We just don’t know. Trump is truly a historical oddity who could, at the helm of the biggest power in the world, make all the difference in this outcome. Tolstoy was probably right: Human history isn’t decided by “great” men. But the opposite has too often been true: Power-hungry maniacs seeking personal gain have sometimes decided things for the rest of us, and for ages to come. Perhaps, if Trump is elected, China and Russia will someday thank him. Or at the very least, maybe they’ll erect a statue to honor Trump—our modern-day Ozymandias—amid the ruins he leaves behind.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Foreign Policy · by Michael Hirsh

14. Rebel groups kill officials recruiting for Myanmar’s junta

Rebel groups kill officials recruiting for Myanmar’s junta

Faced with the wrath of residents and rebel groups, some administrators are simply refusing junta orders.

By RFA Burmese

2024.03.23

rfa.org

Rebel groups around Myanmar have killed at least six officials documenting draft-eligible residents this week, undermining the junta’s efforts to roll out the country’s military conscription law, sources said Friday.

The killings follow the junta’s Feb. 10 enactment of the law, with a plan to begin conscription in April to shore up troop shortages resulting from months of mounting losses and surrenders to insurgents in Myanmar’s three-year civil war.

In the weeks since the announcement, youths in many cities have fled abroad or to rebel-controlled territories to avoid the draft, refusing to fight for the military that seized control of the country in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup d’etat.

In recent weeks, RFA has received reports of forced recruitment and officials compiling lists of residents of fighting age, as well as draft lotteries to select who will serve.

But rebel forces are fighting back against those doing the junta’s bidding, according to sources who spoke to RFA Burmese on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

On Thursday, the anti-junta People’s Defense Force, or PDF, from Bago region’s Pyay township attacked Myint Swe and Ko Phyo – the administrator and office clerk of Thegon township’s Zigon village – as they rode a motorcycle home after compiling a list of draft-eligible residents in nearby Thar Paung village, residents said.

Myint Swe was shot dead and Ko Phyo was gravely wounded in the 11:30 am attack, an official from the Thegon Township Social Assistance Association told RFA. Ko Phyo was taken to a hospital for treatment in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon, 250 kilometers (155 miles) to the south, he said.

“We had to go because the police informed us,” he said. “One died and one was sent to Yangon Hospital from Thegon.”

The PDF has not claimed responsibility for the attack.

Thandwe township killings

Also on Thursday, in Rakhine state’s Thandwe township, unidentified attackers killed Win Shwe, the head of 100 households in Dar Wa village’s Shwe Hlaw village tract, as he returned home from the township seat, where he was documenting residents eligible for military service.

Win Shwe’s body was discovered on Thursday evening under a pile of leaves in a creek bed near Dar Wa, according to a village resident, who said he was likely targeted because of his role in military recruitment.

“According to the people who took the body, he died of stab wounds to the neck,” he said. “Now, in Thandwe Township, the administrators and the 100 household leaders of the villages are collecting lists for military service. But none of the villagers want to join the army.”

The PDF in Magway region’s Yenangyaung township claimed responsibility for the Wednesday shooting deaths of Tin Win Khaing and San Naing, the administrator and clerk of Oke Shit Kone village tract, as they returned home from compiling draft lists in the township seat.

A PDF official told RFA on Friday that his group warned the men not to take part in the conscription process on five separate occasions before carrying out the attack.

“We repeatedly warned them with calls and letters,” he said. “Nobody [publicly] spoke out against them because they were armed and protected by the junta, so we were compelled to act after receiving numerous complaints.”

The PDF official claimed that the men had been “collecting money” and “choosing people at random” to serve, instead of using a lottery system. RFA was unable to independently verify the official’s claims.

Families threatened

Also in Magway, members of the Salin Township PDF shot and killed Myint Htoo, the administrator of Pu Khat Taing village, as he called on residents to enlist for military service with a loudspeaker on Monday, according to sources in the township.

The following day, unidentified attackers killed Maung Pu, the administrator of Mandalay region’s Wundwin township, while he worked to recruit soldiers for the junta, township residents said. Details of the attack were not immediately available.

The junta has yet to issue an official statement on any of the killings.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta spokesmen in the regions and states where the attacks occurred went unanswered Friday, with the exception of Tin Oo in Bago region, who refused to comment, citing an ongoing investigation and the sensitive nature of the incident.

Residents said junta troops are threatening families with arrest and violence if their sons and daughters refuse to serve in the military after being selected by lottery.

Meanwhile, the country’s PDFs are issuing warnings to anyone helping to enforce the junta’s conscription campaign.

Refusing orders

Facing the wrath of residents and the PDF on one side and pressure from the junta to fill recruitment quotas, some administrators have simply refused orders to compile lists of those eligible for military service.

Village and ward administrators in Rakhine’s Munaung township told RFA on Friday that at a March 15 meeting at the township’s General Administration Department Hall, junta authorities ordered them to recruit up to five people between the ages of 24 and 30 per village tract.

“[Junta troops] asked if there had been a census conducted and told us we had to sign a document [agreeing to their recruitment terms],” said one administrator, who declined to be named. “However, we informed them of our inability to proceed.”

The administrator said that no one had resigned, and that there was “no immediate military pressure” to comply.

“However, the local youth are reluctant to participate, feeling fearful and evasive,” he said.

Administrators of all of Munaung township’s 41 villages and wards refused to carry out the recruitment order, he said.

Another administrator confirmed the refusal, saying that he, like the others, “always orient myself towards the people.”

RFA was unable to reach Hla Thein, the junta’s attorney general and spokesperson for Rakhine state, for comment on the administrators’ refusal to follow recruitment orders.

In Rakhine’s Thandwe township, 21 village tract administrators submitted their resignations on Monday, citing the junta’s orders to compile military service lists and form militias.

Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

rfa.org

15. The robots are coming: US Army experiments with human-machine warfare

The robots are coming: US Army experiments with human-machine warfare

armytimes.com · by Jen Judson · March 25, 2024

FORT IRWIN, Calif. — Looking like a toy helicopter, a small black drone rose up over a cluster of adobe buildings in a quiet desert village, emitting a faint buzz.

The drone, an Anduril Industries’ Ghost-X, paused and then rose higher, disappearing into the clouds. Another followed.

Seemingly small and unthreatening, the drones were serving as the eyes of an infantry company concealed by the surrounding mountains and readying to reclaim a village held by the enemy.

And those drones were not alone.

All at once, an overwhelming group of air- and ground-based machine fighters burst onto the scene. An “octocopter” lumbered through the sky with precision munitions and other robots attached to its belly, dropping three 60mm mortar rounds on a roof and other small, hand-held, cylindrical “throwbots” on the ground.

Staff Sgt. Daniel Turnley-Butts tosses a Throwbot during a demonstration Aug. 5, 2020, at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. (Samuel King Jr./US. Air Force)

Robotic combat vehicles rolled into view, armed with .50-caliber and M240 machine guns, firing on enemy positions and providing cover for troops maneuvering into the village.

Meanwhile, a four-legged dog robot stepped out from a thick cloud of smoke, giving the soldiers monitoring from afar another view.

The scene was the culmination of a U.S. Army effort to understand how it can use human and machines together on the battlefield. Service leaders descended on Fort Irwin, California — home to the National Training Center — in March for a large exercise known as Project Convergence.

The demonstration was a glimpse of the Army’s future, according to top officials. Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, expects the service’s future force to be so integrated with machines that humans will face a much lower risk.

“We will never again trade blood for first contact,” he frequently says, promising to deploy robots instead.

But getting these formations right won’t be easy, leaders acknowledge. For human-machine integration to work, a functional and user-friendly network must underpin it, it requires protection from cyberattacks, and the systems must have the right amount of autonomy.

U.S. soldiers take part in a human-machine integration demonstration using Ghost Robotics' dog unmanned ground system and the Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport, background, in Fort Irwin, Calif., on March 15, 2024. (Spc. Samarion Hicks/U.S. Army)

Leaders also say it’s not technology that will prove the most difficult factor, but rather breaking from antiquated acquisition processes that prevent rapid purchases and slow down deliveries to soldiers.

“The pace of the threat and the pace of technology — the evolution is much faster, and there’s no way that we’re going to succeed if we continue to acquire technology or even choose to develop” it at the usual pace, Joseph Welch, the Army’s C5ISR Center director, said at the March event.

Forward progress

The Project Convergence exercise followed months of effort focused on integrating humans and machines into service formations. It was a chance to see what works and what doesn’t as the Army prepares for a fight against adversaries with advanced capabilities.

The service insists it’s now ready to move forward with human-machine integrated formations.

The fiscal 2025 budget request marks the first time the Army has included funding for these formations, also called H-MIF. It’s seeking $33 million for the first step, which provides an initial human-machine integration capability to infantry and armor formations. The Army was experimenting with both at Project Convergence.

The service wants machines in these new formations to “offload risk” and provide soldiers with “additional information for decision making,” according to the service’s budget documents.

The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is spearheading the effort for Futures Command. The office is creating prototypes using existing air and ground robotic programs and payloads while incorporating common architecture, communications and network capabilities.

The FY25 funding, the Army has said, will fund the movement of concepts through prototyping as well as enable soldiers to evaluate them in exercises and experiments.

A drone deploys munitions during experimentation at Project Convergence in Fort Irwin, Calif., on March 18, 2024. The drone employs interchangeable anti-personnel and anti-armor warheads at multiple targets. (Sgt. Brahim Douglas/U.S. Army)

At the Project Convergence event, the Army flooded the battlefield with robots, sensors and other machines meant to help soldiers in complex flights. The experiment included air and ground robots with reconfigurable payloads, tethered drones, counter-drone systems, and a ventriloquist decoy emitter that emulates radio frequency traffic to confuse the enemy.

The service used more than 240 pieces of technology, including capabilities from allied militaries in the U.K., Canada, Australia, France and Japan.

The pressure to transform

The decision to rely more on robots isn’t a choice, according to Alexander Miller, who is now serving as chief technology officer to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

George and Miller both watched the experiment in March; Miller carried a cellphone with an app demonstrating the Army’s new Tactical Assault Kit. The app superimposes the location of soldiers and robots as well as enemy positions in real time.

The service knows it has to do this, or “we will fall radically behind,” Miller said of human-machine integration. “There are bad people who are willing to use robotics, and if we don’t figure it out we will be behind the curve, we will put men and women in harm’s way.”

Integrating robots into formations is also accelerating because “there has been a cultural shift,” Miller said. “It’s been 12-18 months where we have stopped treating robots as a one-for-one augmentation for soldiers and started saying: ‘What are the dull, dirty, dangerous, disruptive things that robots can really do that are not just combat power? How do we augment them without taking a single rifleman off or multiple riflemen off the line to control a robot?’ ”

A soldier at Project Convergence demonstrates the use of an augmented reality headset to identify a threat and call for fires. (Jen Judson/Staff)

At the March experiment, for instance, the Army sent a ground robot with a mine-clearing line charge to deploy along enemy lines. As it fights the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military is using these to disarm enemy minefields and trenches, but transporting them in crewed vehicles.

At the experiment, the robot shot the line charge out of a small launcher. The line didn’t explode as intended.

Army leaders said glitches are common and making this work would provide a much safer way for soldiers to clear mine fields.

Also enabling new models for human-machine integration is the progress of commercial technology, according to Welch. “That has accelerated tremendously across many different technical domains,” he said.

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter; sensors are getting smaller, lighter and more versatile; connectivity solutions are more abundant; and air-, ground- and space-based capabilities are easier to use.

Obstacles ahead

Army leaders acknowledge there is plenty of work ahead to integrate robots and soldiers on the battlefield. The experiment itself illustrated “just how complicated it’s going to be ... where we really proliferate lower-cost, cheaper options and we clutter the environment intentionally,” Miller said.

At one point during Project Convergence, the Army jammed itself, causing a friendly drone swarm to fall out of the sky. The service fixed the problem by turning on a capability allowing smart routing management for its Wi-Fi, Miller said.

Beyond technical challenges, George said, the Army must convince Congress to alter the procurement process so the service can acquire or adapt capabilities within broader funding lines. The goal, he explained, is to be more responsive to what is working for soldiers and to able to rapidly buy small amounts of that equipment.

He said he’s working with Congress “so that we can move money a little bit.”

“We want and need the oversight, [but] it’s a matter of how we go back to them and tell them, ‘Here’s what we’re going to buy inside that funding line, and here’s how we’re doing it,’ and get feedback,” George added.

Indeed, one focus is on marking sure the Army can change systems without needing reprogramming authorization or new funding.

The technical and operational ways the Army is going to employ human-machine integrated formations today “doesn’t mean that’s how we’re going to employ it two years from now,” said Mark Kitz, the service’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical.

“We don’t historically treat robotics as a software program. It’s really a software program,” Kitz explained. “So how do we use some of our unique acquisition authorities then to build that flexibility upfront?”

HIVE unmanned aircraft systems prepares to take flight during a human-machine integration experiment during Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, Calif., on March 11, 2024. The drones provide service members on the ground with real-time situational awareness. (Sgt. Gianna Chiavarone/U.S. Army)

Miller said another potential obstacle is ensuring sufficient U.S. production of components.

“We have to have components that are approved and valid and we aren’t scared to employ because they were made by an adversary,” he said. Welch noted the Army is working with U.S. government labs to address some of the component concerns.

The service is also working internally to revamp its approach to finding capabilities.

“There’s a much tighter coupling ... not only externally with our industry partners and other key stakeholders, whether it be over on [Capitol] Hill or up in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], but also internally,” said Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff in charge of command, control, communications, cyber operations and networks. “We’ve got requirements with acquisition, with testers, and they’re all centered around soldiers, getting that direct feedback.”

Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank where he focuses on wargaming, said he’s “optimistic” about human-machine integration but that it may take longer than the service expects.

“Most people overestimate the speed at which you can develop new concepts of employment around even proven engineering,” he said. “It often takes years outside of a major war to build entirely new formations and structures.”

About Jen Judson

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

16. Ukraine relies on Starlink for its drone war. Russia appears to be bypassing sanctions to use the devices too

Ukraine relies on Starlink for its drone war. Russia appears to be bypassing sanctions to use the devices too | CNN

CNN · by Nick Paton Walsh, Alex Marquardt, Florence Davey-Attlee, Kosta Gak · March 26, 2024

Ukraine destroying Musk's Starlink systems being used by Russia

03:56 - Source: CNN

CNN —

Ukrainian front-line troops say they are experiencing connection problems with the vital Starlink internet service, owned by Elon Musk and used to run Kyiv’s fleet of attack drones, while also reporting an increase in Russian use of the devices, despite this being prohibited by US sanctions.

In a series of interviews across the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers have said connection speeds have dropped in the past months, and reported other connection problems. The complaints coincide with a rise in Ukrainian sightings of Russian uses of the satellite internet service, run by Musk’s SpaceX, and social media posts in which Russian crowdfunders claim to have successfully bypassed sanctions on Russian use of the devices, buying them in third countries.

The reason for the reports of a deteriorating service in Ukraine are unclear, and Starlink, SpaceX and Musk declined to comment. Yet troops and analysts suggested there may be more Starlinks in contested areas than months earlier, on both sides of the lines, which could impact connection speeds.

The Starlink internet service has provided a significant frontline advantage to Ukraine’s smaller military since the 2022 invasion, permitting its forces to share real-time drone feeds between units, and communicate in areas where combat has disrupted cellphone service.

One communications operator in the Zaporizhzhia area, who asked to be named Misha, told CNN the issues had begun in the past three weeks. “We started noticing (a) bad quality connection,” he said.

“It breaks up all the time, it needs to be rebooted for it to start working properly. But soon the speed starts to decrease and the connection breaks up again. It brings rather unpleasant complications” for their work, he added.

He said adverse weather might be a factor, although CNN has spoken to units across the front lines reporting similar issues.

A Ukrainian frontline paramedic uses a Starlink internet connection in a basement living quarters as Russian shells land nearby above ground on February 20, 2023 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

John Moore/Getty Images

Another drone operator, a commander of one of the dozens of units flying single-use attack drones at Russian targets, also in the Zaporizhzhia area, said his unit’s issues had begun in January.

“Before New Year the speed was much higher,” said the commander, Anton, from the 65th Mechanised Brigade. “Now it (has) decreased by half. I saw information about the Russians buying Starlinks through the neutral countries and using them on the Zaporizhzhia front line for their purposes.”

He said the same number of Starlink satellites were now serving twice as many units, so “of course the speed dropped down.”

Multiple Ukrainian units across the front lines told CNN they had experienced speed problems with Starlink, and noted Russian use, but declined to be named discussing a sensitive issue.

Smoke rises during the aftermath of what Ukraine's state hydropower company says is a Russian missile strike on Ukraine's largest dam, the DniproHES in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine March 22, 2024, in this screengrab obtained from a social media video. VIDEO OBTAINED BY REUTERS/via REUTERS NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES.

Reuters

Ukrainian officials first sounded the alarm about Russian Starlink use in early February, suggesting they were working with SpaceX and Musk to reduce Moscow’s front-line access to the units. Yet they declined to comment for this article, with some experts citing the need to keep the unpredictable businessman on board as a reason for discretion.

“Musk is a big child, so it’s important to talk to him and don’t offend him here because he might make some quick decisions that might not be very good for everyone,” said Oleg Kutkov, a Kyiv-based internet analyst. He said Starlink should be able to restrict access to Russian-held terminals, but their purchase through third countries by Russian crowdfunders might complicate the task.

“The problem is to identify the actual owner of the account. It might be that in one location there are two terminals both (bought) from Poland, and one is working for (the) Ukrainian side and one for the Russian side. And SpaceX just don’t know who they should block,” he said.

In a bid to crack down on Russian Starlink use in occupied areas, Ukraine has sought to impose new legal conditions on satellite communications like Starlink terminals, creating a “whitelist” of registered devices authorised for use by Kyiv. SpaceX, Starlink’s owner, has sought Pentagon advice, according to a person familiar with the matter, on how to deal with the challenge of both satisfying Kyiv’s wishes that Starlink be accessible to Ukrainian forces across all Ukrainian territory, yet also denying Russian forces the service in front-line areas where opposing sides are often so close it is hard to determine the user of each terminal.

The behind-the-scenes diplomacy has been extremely delicate, according to a second source familiar with those discussions. Ukrainian officials for their part have in recent days quietly communicated with both SpaceX representatives and US officials about the importance of implementing the whitelist system of authorized terminals.

Even with the Starlink devices that are firmly in the Ukrainian military’s control, there is a concern among Ukrainian officials that Russians may hijack their communications or hack them. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service claimed last year that Russian military hackers were trying to steal battlefield communications sent from Ukrainian soldiers’ mobile devices to Starlink terminals.

A Pentagon spokesman, Jeff Jurgensen, referred questions to the Ukrainian government, saying: “While we’re aware of the reporting on this issue, and we’d expect Russia may attempt to leverage any technology that might give them an operational advantage against Ukraine, we have no additional details or information to provide.”

In February, Musk responded to Ukrainian claims the Russians were using Starlink by stating that his company did not do business with the Russian government, and that the system would not work in Russia.

But Starlink was unclear if the technology might work in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

“If SpaceX obtains knowledge that a Starlink terminal is being used by a sanctioned or unauthorized party, we investigate the claim and take actions to deactivate the terminal if confirmed,” the company said then in a statement.

A Ukrainian serviceman stands next to a vehicle that carries a Starlink satellite internet system near the front line in Donetsk region, Ukraine, on February 27, 2023.

Lisi Niesner/Reuters

In recent months, Russian social media channels run by crowdfunders have been increasingly open about Starlink purchases.

One such supplier, posting on the Telegram messaging under the handle Katya Valya, shared a video in which a woman is seen giving two Russian soldiers multiple drones, but also what appeared to be five Starlink terminals. She promised 30 at a later date, and also posted images of a stack of 20 apparent donated Starlink units. Another blogger, CedarWoods, posted images of donated Starlinks and described the damage done to one Russian unit after a “lucky” Ukrainian strike.

Ukrainian units have also been posting footage of multiple drone strikes against Russian trenches where Starlink terminals have been spotted. CNN also obtained a video of a Russian drone feed from the front lines, in which the unit attacks a Ukrainian vehicle, suggesting Moscow has sought to replicate the success of Kyiv’s fleet of cheap, single-use attack drones.

Democrats on the US Congressional Oversight Committee have written to Starlink demanding an urgent briefing on Russian use of the devices, expressing their “grave concern” that Moscow is using the terminals in occupied Ukraine, in contravention of US sanctions.

“We are concerned that you may not have appropriate guardrails and policies in place to ensure your technology is neither acquired directly or indirectly, nor used illegally by Russia,” the committee wrote earlier this month.

CNN’s Sean Lyngaas contributed to this report.

CNN · by Nick Paton Walsh, Alex Marquardt, Florence Davey-Attlee, Kosta Gak · March 26, 2024

17. Millions of Americans caught up in Chinese hacking plot - US

Millions of Americans caught up in Chinese hacking plot - US

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68659095

16 hours ago

By Mattea Bubalo,

BBC News

US Department of Justice

Seven Chinese men have been charged with enacting a widespread "malicious" cyber-attack campaign

Millions of Americans' online accounts have been caught up in a "sinister" Chinese hacking plot that targeted US officials, the justice department and FBI said on Monday.

Seven Chinese nationals have been charged with enacting a widespread cyber-attack campaign.

They are accused of ties to a hacking operation that ran for 14 years.

The US state department announced a reward of up to $10m (£8m) for information on the seven men.

The justice department said hackers had targeted US and foreign critics of China, businesses, and politicians.

The seven men allegedly sent over 10,000 "malicious emails, impacting thousands of victims, across multiple continents", in what the justice department called a "prolific global hacking operation" backed by China's government.

"Today's announcement exposes China's continuous and brash efforts to undermine our nation's cybersecurity and target Americans and our innovation," FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

"As long as China continues to target the US and our partners, the FBI will continue to send a clear message that cyber espionage will not be tolerated, and we will tirelessly pursue those who threaten our nation's security and prosperity," he added.

The charges come after the UK's government also accused China of being responsible for "malicious cyber campaigns" targeting the country's Electoral Commission and politicians. Diplomats at the Chinese embassy in London said it "strongly opposes" the accusations, calling them "completely fabricated and malicious slanders".

New Zealand's government also said its parliament had been targeted by China-backed hackers, the New Zealand Herald reported.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington DC said "without valid evidence, relevant countries jumped to an unwarranted conclusion" and "made groundless accusations".

UK hits out at Chinese-backed cyber-attacks

In an indictment setting out charges against the seven Chinese men, US prosecutors said the hacking resulted in the confirmed or potential compromise of work accounts, personal emails, online storage and telephone call records.

The emails they are accused of sending targets often appeared to be from prominent news outlets or journalists, containing hidden tracking links. If a person opened the email sent to them, their information - including their location and IP addresses - would be sent to a server allegedly controlled by the seven defendants.

This information was then used to enable more "direct and sophisticated targeted hacking, such as compromising the recipients' home routers and other electronic devices", US prosecutors said.

As well as targeting US government officials working at the White House and US state departments, and in some cases their spouses, they were also said to have targeted foreign dissidents globally.

In one example cited by the justice department, the men "successfully compromised Hong Kong pro-democracy activists and their associates located in Hong Kong, the United States, and other foreign locations with identical malware".

US companies were hacked too, with the men allegedly targeting defence, information technology, telecommunications, manufacturing and trade, finance, consulting, legal, and research industries.

Companies targeted included defence contractors who provide services to the US military and "a leading provider of 5G network equipment", the justice department said.

18. House speaker picks China panel leader to replace Gallagher

House speaker picks China panel leader to replace Gallagher

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · March 25, 2024

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has selected a new Republican to head the China panel after its current leader, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., abruptly announced on Friday his departure from Congress.

Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., said Monday that Johnson had selected him to fill the vacancy atop the House’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

“I am thankful to the Speaker for this appointment, and I look forward to working with Ranking Member [Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill.], the members of the Select Committee, House leaders and the standing committees in the weeks and months ahead,” Moolenaar said in a statement on Monday. “Together we can help our country prepare for the challenges that we face from the Chinese Communist Party and win the competition against the CCP.”

Moolenaar already sits on the 24-member committee, which House Republicans established last year to put forth a wide array of U.S.-China policy recommendations. While Gallagher also sits on the Armed Services Committee, and chairs its cyber and information technology panel, Moolenaar does not sit on any of the other national security committees. As an appropriator, Moolenaar sits on the agriculture and labor spending panels.

Under Gallagher, the China panel advanced 10 bipartisan recommendations last year to deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan shortly after the panel hosted war games that found the U.S. would quickly run out of munitions in the event of a war.

The recommendations included the establishment of a war reserve stockpile in Taiwan, prioritizing weapons deliveries for Taipei, speeding up the roughly $19 billion arms sale backlog to the island and authorizing multiyear munitions procurement contracts.

The China panel is one of the few committees to work across party lines in an increasingly polarized legislature where the right-flank of the razor-thin Republican majority has hurled various procedural road blocks against leadership – often grinding House business to a halt.

The outgoing Gallagher had already announced that he would not seek reelection this year, but announced he would leave early in a surprise announcement March 22 shortly after Congress passed a fiscal 2024 spending package nearly six months late.

Gallagher said he would leave office on April 19, ensuring that his seat will remain vacant through the rest of the year. If Gallagher leaves before April 9, Wisconsin state law stipulates that there would be a special election to fill his seat before the end of the year.

The timing ensures House Republicans will operate on a one-vote margin after Gallagher’s departure given the immediate resignation last Friday of Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo. The special election to replace Buck in Colorado is slated for June 25.

House Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger, R-Texas, also announced Friday she would step down as head of the powerful panel, citing her expectation that the FY25 appropriations process will spill over into next year after she leaves Congress. While Granger is not seeking reelection either, she intends to serve out the rest of her term in Congress through December.

Shortly after Granger’s announcement on Friday, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., a defense appropriator and the Rules Committee chairman, said he would like to take her place as Appropriations chairman.

“At the end of the day, I am a budget hawk,” Cole said in a statement. “I believe in stretching our budget’s dollars as far as we can, but I also recognize there are critical needs and challenges that must be funded if our great nation is going to be protected, preserve and improved. However, as chairman, I will ensure that, in doing this, we are not wasting and abusing.”

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

19. Organizing to Deter or Prevail in Space Warfare

Excerpt:

Conclusion

It is essential for U.S. decision-makers to ensure the nation is properly organized to deter or prevail in a war involving outer space. As successive presidential administrations of both political parties have stated, unimpeded access to and use of space are a vital national interest because of its criticality to America’s security and economic well-being. The question of whether to sustain both the Space Force and Space Command thus is significant, particularly considering the actions foreign powers are taking to make space an increasingly dangerous operating environment.

The recommendation to eliminate Space Command because of alleged redundancy with the Space Force and opportunities for cost savings is unwise and unpersuasive. The nation both needs and benefits from the division of labor between the armed service and unified combatant command. Ensuring that interservice rivalries and self-interests will not dominate the common needs of the Defense Department and combatant commands is as important for military operations in space as it is on Earth. America’s ability to employ spacepower as an instrument of statecraft and warfare will be strengthened by sustaining both a space-oriented service and a unified command as well as properly resourcing both organizations to perform their distinct missions, roles, and functions.

Organizing to Deter or Prevail in Space Warfare - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Marc Berkowitz · March 26, 2024

Does the United States need both an armed service and a unified combatant command to defend its national interests in outer space? The answer is yes, given the imperatives to counter threats posed by foreign powers to the freedom of space and assure effective support to joint or combined military operations. Indeed, as former Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson stated, “Both China and Russia are regularly attacking U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio frequency jammers, and cyber-attacks.”

The U.S. Space Force was founded as the sixth military branch and U.S. Space Command was reestablished as the eleventh combatant command in 2019 in response to the renewed threat to U.S. interests in space. Questions about the need for both organizations were addressed before President Donald Trump issued Space Policy Directive 4 directing the secretary of defense to develop a legislative proposal for the U.S. Space Force and the memorandum directing reestablishment of Space Command as a unified command. Similarly, they were considered by Congress before it passed legislation to create the Space Force within the Department of the Air Force.

Nonetheless, some commentators are again questioning the need for both the Space Force and Space Command. In War on the Rocks, for example, Mackenzie Eaglen and Todd Harrison asserted the debate about locating the command’s headquarters in either Alabama or Colorado obscures the issue of whether the command should exist at all. They argue that it should not for organizational and economic reasons. As the former assistant deputy under secretary of defense for space policy, I am very familiar with the debate about U.S. national security space management and organization reforms and am in a good position to assess the argument for eliminating Space Command.

The argument to eliminate Space Command because of perceived redundancy with the Space Force and opportunities to save costs is neither persuasive nor prudent. The armed service and unified combatant command have different missions, roles, and functions. Elimination of Space Command will not save costs given the increasing need to allocate resources for protecting and defending U.S. interests in a contested space operating environment. The division of labor between the service and combatant command is effective and consistent with how the Department of Defense is organized for other domains. Eliminating Space Command would unnecessarily risk creating interservice rivalries and adversely impacting jointness. A unified command has a joint perspective and personnel with a better mix of knowledge and experience than a service to integrate space capabilities into joint and combined operations. The Space Force is still in the early stages of development and should strive to excel at its core responsibility of organizing, training, and equipping space forces. Additional organization churn would unnecessarily perturbate the national security space enterprise. In short, eliminating Space Command would unnecessarily risk undermining America’s ability to employ spacepower as an instrument of statecraft and warfare.

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Context

The decision to establish the Space Force and Space Command was bold given that national security space management and organization were a recurring and unresolved issue. Since the Cold War ended, there were more than 25 reviews, studies, boards, panels, and commissions, including the 2001 Rumsfeld Commission and 2007 Allard Commission, which examined the subject. These considered the advantages and disadvantages of alternative models including a military department, armed service, corps, defense agency, combat support agency, and combatant command with budget and acquisition authority.

The concerns expressed by executive and legislative overseers about the national security space program included fragmented management and organization, inadequate advocacy and stewardship, and misaligned authority, responsibility, and accountability. Symptoms of those problems included erosion of U.S. strategic advantages in space, lack of preparedness for the threat or use of force in space, cumbersome decision-making processes, architectural churn, acquisition inefficiencies, program and budget instability, inadequate personnel management, and lack of a warfighting culture and ethos.

The Space Force and Space Command are intended to resolve the problem and counter the threat. U.S. adversaries learned from the Persian Gulf and Kosovo wars how the integration of space capabilities into military operations increased America’s ability to project power with precision, speed, and lethality. Subsequently, Russia and China created space forces, dramatically increased their numbers of satellite systems, and are developing, testing, and fielding weapon systems that threaten freedom of action in space, jeopardize U.S. and allied military forces, and put America’s and allies’ homelands at risk. This includes various cyber, electronic warfare, kinetic energy, directed energy, nuclear, and orbital weapons. Iran and North Korea also have cyber, electronic warfare, and missile capabilities to interfere with space operations.

The division of labor between the Space Force and Space Command is consistent with the principles of the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. That legislation, named for its co-authors, Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative Bill Nichols, reorganized the Department of Defense to improve its management and the effectiveness of military operations. The Goldwater-Nichols Act, among other things, reformed the organizational model that allowed the services’ rivalries and parochial interests to dominate the joint interests of the department and unified commands.

Consequently, the Space Force is a service with responsibility to organize, train, and equip space forces and present them to Space Command and other combatant commands, while Space Command is a unified command with responsibility to plan and execute space operations, deliver space capabilities to joint and combined forces, and defend the space domain. In short, the Space Force is a force provider to Space Command. A unified command includes components from two or more services. In addition, under the president’s unified command plan, which establishes the missions, responsibilities, and geographic areas of responsibility for commanders of combatant commands, Space Command is a geographic combatant command with an area of responsibility beginning at 100 kilometers (62 miles) above mean sea level and extending beyond.

In terms of command and support relationships with other combatant commands, the designation of Space Command as a geographic command is noteworthy. As such, it may be supported by other combatant commands as well as provide support to them. A supported commander has the authority to exercise direction of efforts to support operations. This includes designation and prioritization of targets or objectives, timing and duration of supporting actions, and other guidance to ensure the efficiency and success of the supported operation. In its previous instantiation, Space Command was a functional command without an area of responsibility. It was only a supporting command to the geographic commands.

Assessment

The two main arguments put forward for eliminating Space Command are organizational and economic. The former involves the assertion that there is unnecessary redundancy with the Space Force. In large part, this is because the Space Force has the preponderance of military space forces, has established a major command for space operations, and is in the process of creating component field commands to support the geographic combatant commands. Eliminating Space Command thus would eliminate the alleged duplication of effort. The latter involves the assertion that eliminating Space Command would produce substantial cost savings. According to Eaglen and Harrison,

Alongside a fully functional Space Force, however, Space Command serves little added purpose. The Space Force, which accounts for the vast majority of the U.S. military’s space forces, capabilities, and command structure, is fully capable of managing the joint space operations of the U.S. military without the redundant bureaucratic overhead of a geographic combatant command. Simultaneously, Space Command is costing the Department of Defense hundreds of millions in increasingly stretched defense dollars that could be spent more effectively elsewhere. These redundancies and high costs should be cause for the Department of Defense to consider merging Space Command into the Space Force.

The Department of the Air Force’s desire to have the dominant or exclusive responsibility for military space activities is not new. Indeed, it was a recurrent theme since the beginning of the space age. Instead of making the Air Force responsible for all overhead reconnaissance, however, President Dwight Eisenhower created the National Reconnaissance Office as a joint activity of the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan founded Space Command as a unified command that included Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Naval Space Command, and Air Force Space Command components. Subsequently, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld merged Space Command and U.S. Strategic Command following the 9/11 terrorist attacks to create strategic forces comprised of nuclear weapons systems, non-nuclear strategic weapons, and space capabilities to strengthen deterrence by providing the president with increased options for rapidly striking anywhere in the world.

While the creation of the Space Force with a four-star chief of space operations who is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is an essential step to address concerns about space management and organization, it is only part of a series of reforms directed by recent policy and law. The changes also included establishing an assistant secretary of defense for space policy, an assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, a space acquisition council, and Space Command. Indeed, the reforms were designed to be implemented together to redress fragmented management and organization, inadequate advocacy and stewardship, and misaligned authority, responsibility, and accountability.

Merging Space Command into the Space Force, as Eaglen and Harrison recommend, likely will create new intradepartmental friction and interservice rivalries and undermine the jointness contributing to America’s military prowess. It could unnecessarily complicate the relationship between the service branches and combatant commands. Goldwater-Nichols intentionally removed the secretaries of the military departments and the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the operational chain of command. That chain now runs from the president as the commander-in-chief, through the secretary of defense, directly to the combatant commanders. Similarly, the administrative chain of command now runs from the president to the secretary of defense, through the secretaries of the military departments, and, as prescribed by the secretaries, to the commanders of the services.

When the commander of U.S. Space Command and the commander of Air Force Space Command were dual-hatted (that is, the same general officer served in both roles), the commands often took different positions on the same issue. Similarly, differences of opinion between the commander of Space Command and chief of space operations are not uncommon. Such disagreements are productive in informing deliberations by the president, National Security Council, and secretary of defense. Might such differences between the service and command exist if Space Command is merged into the Space Force?

While creation of a specified rather than a unified combatant command for space is feasible, it would disenfranchise the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard from the planning and execution of military space operations. Doing so would be imprudent because the Space Force is nascent, continuing to evolve under only its second chief of space operations, and still forming its own culture and ethos. It would be unwarranted because the Space Force has yet to demonstrate consistent proficiency at its core responsibility for organizing, training, and equipping space forces, and further churn would unnecessarily perturbate the enterprise. Moreover, it would be ill advised given the Army’s and Navy’s significant legacies and capabilities in space programs and activities as well as other services’ perspectives, knowledge, and operational and tactical experience in employing space systems to support operations in the land, maritime, air, and cyber domains.

Indeed, the Space Force must overcome its Air Force heritage to form its own culture and ethos. America must have joint warfighters who understand that space capabilities are the leading edge of information-age military power to realize the full potential of spacepower. For decades, however, Air Force Space Command suffered from having to conform to the dominant airpower culture within the service, which subjugated space to a supporting role. This led the Air Force space community to attempt to force-fit airpower doctrine into space operations doctrine despite the differences between the air and space domains as well as the physics of flight in the atmosphere and space. While borrowing analogies from other domains has its limits, developing space doctrine, operations concepts, and war plans would benefit from knowledge of operational experience in the maritime domain, particularly sub-surface operations, given its similarities in certain respects to the space domain.

As a unified command, Space Command now has warfighting units, including Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Naval Space Command, Marine Corps Forces Space Command, Air Forces Space, U.S. Space Forces — Space, and Joint Functional Component Command for Missile Defense. They provide a diversity and depth of knowledge and experience to perform the command’s missions. If it were a specified command comprised of only Space Force units, however, it would have limited knowledge and operational experience in other domains. This would have an adverse impact on its ability to synchronize and integrate space with joint or combined operations. A unified command with a joint perspective will have a different mindset than a Space Force–centric specified command. It will inherently think about what’s best for the joint force rather than for the service. Rather than normalizing space, a specified command for space would be different than how the U.S. military has organized for the terrestrial and cyber domains.

Whether as a unified or specified combatant commander, the military officer leading Space Command will face the challenges of preventing the hostile use of space and utilizing the domain to support joint and combined operations. The trust of the other combatant commands, with forces educated and trained by other services, will be essential to the Space Command’s ability to perform its missions as well as implement joint doctrine and operations concepts in wartime. Space capabilities are part of the glue that holds together joint doctrine and enables information-enabled warfighting. Decisions about how, when, and where to allocate the command’s limited resources for either space or terrestrial campaigns in the event of a war that begins in or extends to outer space will be critical to mission achievement. Indeed, the ability to assure support to joint and combined forces under contested, degraded, and operationally limited conditions might be decisive in influencing the course and outcome of a future conflict, given that America is more dependent than its rivals on the use of space to project power to Eurasia and the Middle East.

Finally, the assertion that there are substantial costs to be saved by eliminating Space Command presumes there is significant redundancy between the Space Force and the command. Given the different responsibilities of services and combatant commands, this is not the case. Indeed, there should be synergy if the service and command stay in their lanes and work together. Consequently, the pertinent question may be: Why is the Space Force creating field units to support combatant commands rather than providing Space Command with the resources to do so? Even setting aside the questionable allegation of unnecessary duplicative efforts and associated costs, the opportunity cost of eliminating Space Command as a unified command with components from all the services would be considerable for the reasons discussed above. In fact, the costs of protecting U.S. interests in space are likely to continue to increase regardless of whether Space Command is a unified or specified command, given adversaries’ view that space is a domain in which America can be coerced given its dependence on satellite systems and their determination to hold such assets at risk.

Conclusion

It is essential for U.S. decision-makers to ensure the nation is properly organized to deter or prevail in a war involving outer space. As successive presidential administrations of both political parties have stated, unimpeded access to and use of space are a vital national interest because of its criticality to America’s security and economic well-being. The question of whether to sustain both the Space Force and Space Command thus is significant, particularly considering the actions foreign powers are taking to make space an increasingly dangerous operating environment.

The recommendation to eliminate Space Command because of alleged redundancy with the Space Force and opportunities for cost savings is unwise and unpersuasive. The nation both needs and benefits from the division of labor between the armed service and unified combatant command. Ensuring that interservice rivalries and self-interests will not dominate the common needs of the Defense Department and combatant commands is as important for military operations in space as it is on Earth. America’s ability to employ spacepower as an instrument of statecraft and warfare will be strengthened by sustaining both a space-oriented service and a unified command as well as properly resourcing both organizations to perform their distinct missions, roles, and functions.

Become a Member

Marc Berkowitz is an independent consultant and advisor to U.S. government and private sector clients. Previously, he served as the assistant deputy under secretary of defense for space policy and as a vice president for strategic planning at Lockheed Martin Corporation. The views expressed herein are solely those of the author.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Marc Berkowitz · March 26, 2024

20. The Indo-Pacific strategy's fatal blind spot

Excerpts:

Western strategists neglect this key strategic relationship at their peril. Indo-Pacific thinking views China as the paramount force, and Russia as a secondary, more peripheral European issue. But if the two Eurasian powers are driven by the same historical urge, that fact must not be ignored.

This Eurasian perspective will not be as obvious in Washington or Canberra as it is in Tokyo. As for Delhi, Indian policymakers seem to be under the illusion that maintaining friendly relations with the Kremlin might prevent Russia from getting too close to China. Yet it should be obvious where Russia will stand in any new confrontation in the Himalayas.

The stronger the two Eurasian powers are, the greater the advantages that each can derive from the other. Both will be emboldened by their perceived triumphs, and the region’s peripheries will be the first to face the consequences. The West urgently needs to start applying a Eurasian lens. Relying too heavily on the Indo-Pacific perspective would be a big mistake.

The Indo-Pacific strategy's fatal blind spot

The Korea Times · March 26, 2024

By Carl Bildt

Carl Bildt

STOCKHOLM – Is the dominance of “Indo-Pacific” thinking leading Western strategists astray?

Originating in Australian foreign policy circles, the United States adopted this label in 2018, when the Hawaii-based U.S. Pacific Command was officially renamed the Indo-Pacific Command. The status of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“Quad”), comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the US, was duly elevated, and Europe, too, got on board, with a minor avalanche of policy documents bearing the same label.

In pushing the Indo-Pacific line, Western strategists usually emphasize the importance of bringing India into the fold. But the real objective – though it is seldom stated explicitly – is to contain China in the region.

The Indo-Pacific narrative undoubtedly has merits. It rests on a strong historical foundation, and the policies it has inspired are important for meeting many looming global challenges. The problem is that it also threatens to distract us from an equally important alternative narrative: the Eurasian one.

Which is more immediately relevant to the challenges the West faces? While the Indo-Pacific framework has an obvious maritime foundation – framing the Indian and Pacific Oceans as the single most important geopolitical theater – the Eurasian one is almost completely terrestrial. Each reflects a different approach to empire, which in recent centuries has been established either through naval power, or through old-fashioned land wars. For obvious historical reasons, the Indo-Pacific narrative comes more naturally to much of the Anglo-Saxon world, while the Eurasian perspective makes intuitive sense to policymakers in Beijing and Moscow.

That being the case, Western strategic thinking urgently needs to adapt. Not only have China and Russia announced a “no-limits” partnership; they also happen to dominate the vast Eurasian landmass. Though there remain significant differences between the two powers – not to mention a sometimes-fierce historical rivalry – they are now united by a common determination to revise both the regional and the wider global order.

For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to resurrect the Russian Empire – starting in Ukraine, where his war of aggression is now in its third year. Similarly, Chinese President Xi Jinping – invoking memories of China’s “century of humiliation” – hopes to establish an empire that will cast its heavy shadow over East, South, and Central Asia.

Each project depends on Russia and China maintaining a basic strategic alignment. Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow. The two theaters are deeply interconnected – not least by Russia, which shares a border with Japan. The outcome of one conflict will determine the shape of others to come. If Putin succeeds in conquering Ukraine, Xi undoubtedly will feel emboldened to move on Taiwan. This is where Eurasian thinking leads, even if neither Putin nor Xi would openly describe the situation in these terms.

True, China does not appear to have been especially enthusiastic about Putin launching his war. But once he made his move, China’s leaders saw a Russian victory as being in their interest. The fall of Ukraine would weaken the Western periphery of Eurasia, shatter confidence in American power, and create new opportunities for China to expand its own influence in other parts of Eurasia and adjacent areas.

Putin may well have been emboldened by America’s shambolic abandonment of Afghanistan the previous summer. He (and Xi) probably envisioned the spectacle of U.S. helicopters evacuating the embassy in Kyiv, just as they had done in Kabul in 2021 and Saigon in 1975. But it is important to remember that the logic of Sino-Russian alignment works in reverse, too. Were Putin clearly to fail in Ukraine, Xi’s own options would be narrowed dramatically.

Western strategists neglect this key strategic relationship at their peril. Indo-Pacific thinking views China as the paramount force, and Russia as a secondary, more peripheral European issue. But if the two Eurasian powers are driven by the same historical urge, that fact must not be ignored.

This Eurasian perspective will not be as obvious in Washington or Canberra as it is in Tokyo. As for Delhi, Indian policymakers seem to be under the illusion that maintaining friendly relations with the Kremlin might prevent Russia from getting too close to China. Yet it should be obvious where Russia will stand in any new confrontation in the Himalayas.

The stronger the two Eurasian powers are, the greater the advantages that each can derive from the other. Both will be emboldened by their perceived triumphs, and the region’s peripheries will be the first to face the consequences. The West urgently needs to start applying a Eurasian lens. Relying too heavily on the Indo-Pacific perspective would be a big mistake.

Carl Bildt is a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden. This article was distributed by Project Syndicate.

The Korea Times · March 26, 2024

21. Can Startup Culture and Army Culture Coexist? Lessons from the Creation of the 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade

Excerpts:

While some already view SFABs, despite only being activated in the past six years, as legacy formations from an era of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, Rowland’s book illustrates how SFABs contribute to interoperability among allied and partner military forces, while also increasing the military effectiveness of host-nation forces they advise and cooperate with. His discussions throughout also highlight why SFABs are uniquely designed to work with foreign militaries in ways that conventional and special operations forces do not. Simply put, this is the kind of book that illustrates the value of having dedicated organizations full of professional advisors that are neither conventional nor special operations units.

...

Readers without an Army background and consequently lacking knowledge of the complicated set of jargon and acronyms used in the service will appreciate Rowland’s accessible language and simple explanations, including describing military life and Army bureaucracy in a way that is easy to understand and relate to. For instance, the US Army often uses a standard, eight-step training model: (1) plan the training event, (2) train and certify leaders, (3) reconnoiter the training site, (4) issue the event operations order, (5) rehearse, (6) execute the training, (7) conduct an after-action review, and (8) conduct retraining. Rowland describes the practical challenges his new advisor units faced in applying this model with host-nation forces with widely divergent capability levels—and how they overcame those challenges. In another example, Rowland demonstrated how his unit used the RSOI framework (reception, staging, onward movement, and integration) to facilitate a Royal Thai Army visit to their base for military exercises. Do these subjects—applying training models and facilitating foreign military visits—typically make for compelling reading? Probably not. But they are precisely the type of work SFABs are specifically designed for. Unlike conventional forces, SFABs’ top priority is working with foreign militaries, and Rowland’s accessible descriptions of this type of work adds important value to discussions about how much of a security force assistance capability the Army needs.

Ultimately, Green Light, Go! checks a lot of boxes. For military generalists, it is an easy-to-follow introductory read about the role and function of an SFAB in an era of strategic competition. It is also a useful resource for any leader that might be thrust into the position of having to innovatively create a new military unit or organization. The startup approach described by Rowland demonstrates leadership lessons that apply to any organization that must identify gaps and opportunities when working in a novel environment or with a new partner. Finally, the book provides a strong argument for SFABs to remain a permeant fixture of the US Army. Many SFAB advisors I have interviewed have emphasized the multiplicative effects that compound as they work with partners and enhance their interoperability with the US Army. Given the nature of the business that SFABs are in, readers will come away from Rowland’s book with an appreciation of SFABs as an important tool of American influence—one that is necessary for the future of US strategic competition around the globe.

Can Startup Culture and Army Culture Coexist? Lessons from the Creation of the 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jahara Matisek · March 26, 2024

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David B. Rowland, Green Light, Go! The Story of an Army Start Up (Koehler Books, 2023)

Growing concern about the US Army’s force structure is leading to both internal and external discussions about cutting the number of Army personnel involved in the advising and training of foreign militaries. Against that backdrop, US Army Colonel David B. Rowland’s recently published book, Green Light, Go! The Story of an Army Start Up, comes at an opportune time. It injects a much-needed perspective into discussions about Army security force assistance capabilities—specifically why security force assistance brigades (SFABs) are needed for the future of American strategic competition. While some already view SFABs, despite only being activated in the past six years, as legacy formations from an era of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, Rowland’s book illustrates how SFABs contribute to interoperability among allied and partner military forces, while also increasing the military effectiveness of host-nation forces they advise and cooperate with. His discussions throughout also highlight why SFABs are uniquely designed to work with foreign militaries in ways that conventional and special operations forces do not. Simply put, this is the kind of book that illustrates the value of having dedicated organizations full of professional advisors that are neither conventional nor special operations units.

First conceptualized in 2017 by General Mark Milley, the US Army created six SFABs—five in the active component, each aligned with one of the five overseas geographic combatant commands, and one in the National Guard, spread across six states and capable of surging and augmenting an active-duty SFAB in any area of responsibility. Selected to serve as the first commanded of 1st Battalion, 5th SFAB at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Rowland begins the book by describing his ground-up, entrepreneurial approach to standing up an entirely new unit. His experience shows the importance of being highly innovative—and flexible—given military bureaucracy is not organized to support a new Army formation that was effectively a startup. He also illustrates the challenges of quickly building cohesion across the formation and making the unit well trained and capable for military exercises. The unit’s members had to meet their own readiness standards so they could expertly teach these skills to foreign forces—rapidly and starting from scratch.

Although Rowland does not discuss it extensively, there were added challenges surrounding the unit as it stood up and prepared to conduct its first missions. One of these was cultural. SFAB personnel wear a distinctive brown beret to distinguish them as professionally trained advisors—something that my research indicates is still viewed as controversial across the US Army. There is also a challenge of optimizing training for the realistic global operational environment. SFAB advisors attending the Combat Advisor Training Course earn an additional skill identifier after forty-one days of instruction for “assessing, liaising, supporting, and advising” a foreign security force. My research, however, suggests that this training program remains an aging legacy course because of its focus on teaching advisors to excel in environments like those of Afghanistan and Iraq. However, given growing emphasis on strategic competition with peer and near-peer states and helping allies and partners train for large-scale combat operations, SFAB deployments would involve a largely different set of challenges than advising efforts in the post-9/11 wars. That becomes apparent as Rowland describes the way his maneuver advisor teams worked with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region during their very first deployment. His unique perspective also offers insights into some of the less sexy aspects of advising—teaching allies and partners how to better plan, for example, and to develop the requisite support, logistical, medical, and training requirements to make their conventional militaries more effective and capable.

Rowland also describes SFAB organization and the way they are operationally used. A full SFAB is composed of two infantry battalions, a cavalry squadron, a fires battalion, an engineer battalion, and a support battalion. However, because SFABs were created only for the specific function of advising, they are not the normal size of brigade; their rank-heavy manning is set around eight hundred people. At the same time, due to selection and recruitment issues, my research has indicated that SFAB units are only 60–70 percent manned. When deploying, SFABs typically utilize a maneuver advisor team made up of twelve advisors that use their unique military background. By providing in-depth explanations of his unit’s deployments (under COVID-19 conditions and tight protocols) to Thailand, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, and other Asian countries and island nations, Rowland showed how his teams constantly had to adapt to different conditions and expectations, while also having to demonstrate the value of SFABs so that they could deploy more teams to other countries across the Indo-Pacific region. Interestingly, the biggest friction points Rowland’s teams encountered were with US embassy teams, which were typically risk-averse and at times resistant to the idea of having a small US Army team in country, working with host-nation forces.

Readers without an Army background and consequently lacking knowledge of the complicated set of jargon and acronyms used in the service will appreciate Rowland’s accessible language and simple explanations, including describing military life and Army bureaucracy in a way that is easy to understand and relate to. For instance, the US Army often uses a standard, eight-step training model: (1) plan the training event, (2) train and certify leaders, (3) reconnoiter the training site, (4) issue the event operations order, (5) rehearse, (6) execute the training, (7) conduct an after-action review, and (8) conduct retraining. Rowland describes the practical challenges his new advisor units faced in applying this model with host-nation forces with widely divergent capability levels—and how they overcame those challenges. In another example, Rowland demonstrated how his unit used the RSOI framework (reception, staging, onward movement, and integration) to facilitate a Royal Thai Army visit to their base for military exercises. Do these subjects—applying training models and facilitating foreign military visits—typically make for compelling reading? Probably not. But they are precisely the type of work SFABs are specifically designed for. Unlike conventional forces, SFABs’ top priority is working with foreign militaries, and Rowland’s accessible descriptions of this type of work adds important value to discussions about how much of a security force assistance capability the Army needs.

Ultimately, Green Light, Go! checks a lot of boxes. For military generalists, it is an easy-to-follow introductory read about the role and function of an SFAB in an era of strategic competition. It is also a useful resource for any leader that might be thrust into the position of having to innovatively create a new military unit or organization. The startup approach described by Rowland demonstrates leadership lessons that apply to any organization that must identify gaps and opportunities when working in a novel environment or with a new partner. Finally, the book provides a strong argument for SFABs to remain a permeant fixture of the US Army. Many SFAB advisors I have interviewed have emphasized the multiplicative effects that compound as they work with partners and enhance their interoperability with the US Army. Given the nature of the business that SFABs are in, readers will come away from Rowland’s book with an appreciation of SFABs as an important tool of American influence—one that is necessary for the future of US strategic competition around the globe.

Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, PhD, (@JaharaMatisek) is a military professor in the national security affairs department at the United States Naval War College, research fellow at the European Resilience Initiative Center, and Department of Defense Minerva co-principal investigator for improving US security assistance. Lt. Col. Matisek has published over one hundred articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals and policy-relevant outlets on strategy, warfare, and security assistance.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, Department of Defense, or US government. This article was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-20-1-0277.

Image credit: Spc. Jacob Núñez, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jahara Matisek · March 26, 2024

22. The biggest threat from China is right under our noses — and on our screens

The biggest threat from China is right under our noses — and on our screens

BY THOMAS P. VARTANIAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 03/25/24 9:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4552779-the-biggest-threat-from-china-is-right-under-our-noses-and-on-our-screens/?utm

Getty Images

Millions of people anticipated a glimpse of Taylor Swift at this year’s Super Bowl. That was likely millions more than noticed the stunning announcement by the government just four days earlier that Volt Typhoon — a conglomerate of cyber actors sponsored by the People’s Republic of China — had pre-positioned itself inside American critical infrastructures in preparation for cyberwar.

Intellectual theft, weather balloons, TikTok and now cyber war. What’s left for China to do before someone in charge takes action?

Like Taylor, technology tends to mesmerize and captivate us. Videos of gearheads unpackaging products and peeling plastic off screens in what resemble ritualistic ceremonies litter YouTube. Cryptocurrency computer codes invented by who-knows-who with no underlying value, backing or adult supervision intrigue us as they masquerade as the money of “the people.” Tech applications like TikTok have a pollyannish, feel-good, video game aura that lulls us into thinking bad stuff really won’t happen.

China knows how to take full advantage of it. If it had amassed its military offshore and focused every rocket in the direction of major U.S. cities, there would have been mass hysteria. But the insertion of digital explosives that can turn off our water, lights and ability to communicate seem to be too surreal to rate even a whimper.

Cyberspace has become the most dangerous and defenseless ecosystem on the planet. Instead of calling time out and rebuilding it to be more secure, we play the role of rats on spinning wheels foolishly thinking we can outrun the never-ending exploits of national adversaries, hackers, terrorist, traffickers and all-around creeps who are more than willing and capable of taking advantage of the internet’s porous qualities.

It makes no sense to share the same murky cyber waters with countries like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. We certainly would not share a military base with them. But as with the latest shot across the U.S. bow that Volt Typhoon represents, all the government can seem to muster is the admonition that businesses — which have less than any control of what bad guys do in cyberspace — be more vigilant and spend more money for cybersecurity. Cybersecurity consultants, a business that will approach $500 billion by 2030, love that.

The government should be announcing that a consortium of democratic nations is taking steps to implement fundamental solutions to cyber insecurity.

First, real authentication of humans rather than machines and IP addresses would add a new level of certainty. Multi-function processes help, but few incorporate all of the time-consuming and annoying elements that actually strengthen authentication: something the user knows, something the user has, something the user is, something the user does and somewhere the user is. Zero trust architecture must also be applied so that once authenticated into a domain, users don’t get free roam. Every inch of anonymity that is clawed back in cyberspace will result in a mile of greater security.

Second, internal and external governance standards that impose rules of conduct that resemble those we use to govern ourselves in the real world must be adopted. That necessarily includes the establishment of annoying global governing bodies and the enforcement of the rules by a readily identifiable and accessible cyber police force assisted by state-of-the art technologies. Violations of the rules must be punishable — perhaps by network expulsion or, in the most egregious cases, digital annihilation. Otherwise, much like paying a fare to ride the New York subway system, honesty and civility in cyberspace become optional.

Finally, we should return to the concept of secured private networks (SPNs) used by our legacy computer systems before there was an internet. Those new SPNs should require adherence to the most stringent security protocols before passports are issued to limited groups of users. Anyone who won’t accept those standards should be denied access, likely eliminating non-democratic nations and online creeps from cyber freeloading.

There is no magic to these solutions. They simply replicate what we do in the real world where fences, locks, borders and police have always existed. If we are willing to pay the small price to make these changes and create a more secure cyberspace, we won’t have to worry about waking up to warnings about China preparing to flip the switch on the United States.

It is time to shake off the hypnotic effect of digital technology and see it for the mixed bag of good and evil that it is. That must include an effort to evaluate the moral and ethical issues raised by the deployment of ever more powerful cyber weaponry, much as occurred with regard to the potential risks of nuclear proliferation after World War II. If we don’t act judiciously and merely plod along following the path carved out by tech entrepreneurs, our adversaries will slip into our lives as we’re distracted by the Taylor Swifts and TikToks on our screens, and we won’t realize it until it is too late.

Thomas P. Vartanian is executive director of the Financial Technology & Cybersecurity Center and the author of “The Unhackable Internet.”

23. How to keep China out of the Pentagon’s weapons

Excerpts:

Building upon lessons learned from the cyber security model, the Department of Defense could establish a secure, automated online platform to share supply-chain information among the Department and key defense contractors. A defense supplier could enroll in the program and report securely and privately about its subcontractors and their sources. Pentagon analysts, drawing on an integrated database of commercial and government classified and unclassified data, would use automation to uncover risks ranging from cyber connectivity with Chinese entities or other adversarial companies to foreign investment or control of subcontractors, vendor representatives sitting on foreign corporate boards and other signs of vulnerabilities. Officials could then quickly approve online sharing of the information at the appropriate level of detail with the relevant contractor so that it can make timely decisions about which subcontractor they are going to do business with.

As in the cybersecurity area, rapid and detailed information disclosure isn’t the full answer to supply chain risks but is an essential part. Our government must find a way—now, before the next conflict—to share supply chain vulnerabilities with the defense industry.

Otherwise, we run the risk that in that next conflict, another country will have compromised our critical supply chains, so our missiles will miss their targets, our bombs will fail to work, and our commanders won’t be able to communicate with their troops.

How to keep China out of the Pentagon’s weapons

The U.S. military should take a page from the cybersecurity playbook.

By GLENN S. GERSTELL and ANDREA MCFEELY

MARCH 25, 2024 08:00 AM ET

defenseone.com · by Glenn S. Gerstell

Two summers ago, when Honeywell told the Pentagon it feared that a subcontractor had improperly put Chinese metals in some F-35 jet engines, the reaction was swift. The Air Force halted acceptance of new aircraft containing the Chinese cobalt and samarium alloy. While the Defense Department and prime contractor Lockheed Martin raced to find out if the Chinese-sourced metals could be relied on, 18 badly needed fighter jets sat on a tarmac in Texas.

We were lucky that time. The Air Force resumed deliveries after determining that the potentially compromised parts wouldn’t affect airplane safety.

Next time, could sabotaged or defective Chinese parts, or secret surveillance devices, be slipped into weapons or communications systems by unwitting vendors further down the defense supply chain? In a conflict over, say, Taiwan, the United States can’t take the risk that an air-to-air missile will misfire due to China planting a defective chip in the guidance system or that secret software embedded in military communications system will siphon data back to Beijing.

Not only is the Defense Department aware of the risk in general, but the government or a major defense contractor often also knows the problematic source of a specific product—yet the information isn’t disseminated effectively down the chain of subcontractors. The result is we might discover the vulnerability after it’s already in the hands of the military—or worse, we sometimes never know for sure exactly what’s in our weapons or critical systems.

Many obstacles stand in the way of the government doing a better job of sharing supply chain vulnerabilities with the industry it relies on. The first is that simply tracking the origin of parts is difficult and costly. Given the complexities of today’s electronics and the nature of global supply chains, it’s often impossible for a contractor to know whether a component came from China. The problem is especially acute in the defense industry because of its far greater scope, involving the protection of the entire array of military systems, from nuclear missiles to aircraft carriers, from satellites to submarines. And it’s likely to get worse as our military increasingly relies on sophisticated future technologies.

In any case, sensitive ownership and sourcing information is rarely commercially available and even when it is, piecing it together in a coherent and accurate picture is beyond the resources of all but the federal government and the largest defense contractors—and the latter aren’t privy to classified insights.

Even when the Pentagon has details of potential compromises, whether through disclosures from contractors or from its own sources, officials are hesitant to fully share the information with industry. There’s no express statutory authorization for the Defense Department to divulge potentially derogatory information about whether a company is owned by a Chinese entity or whether a vendor is known to use Chinese-made products. Even if there were, fears of liability for cutting out a supplier due to erroneous information would make officials pause before disclosing something unless it was a certainty. Yet details about corporate ownership and parts provenance are often murky. Moreover, officials worry that sharing supply chain information with a contractor might divulge classified information or improperly advantage one supplier over another. Contractors themselves are reluctant to share information within the industry, both for competitive reasons and antitrust concerns; besides, there are few incentives to, and potentially even defamation liability for, revealing the information to the government.

The result: even where relevant information is known about supply chain vulnerabilities, it often doesn’t get into the hands of the contractors who need it the most.

But in many other spheres—from food and drug safety risks to terrorist threats against infrastructure—the private sector and the federal government share critical information. The Government-Industry Data Exchange Program run by the United States and Canada shares technical matters about defective parts and counterfeiting in government contracting generally, but it’s voluntary, isn’t focused on the defense industry and doesn’t deal with classified information.

There is, however, another sharing template relevant and adaptable to the defense supply chain problem: the well-known model for sharing cybersecurity risks. Protecting large institutional computer networks from cyberattacks and securing global supply chains have many common elements. Both networks and weapons are complex combinations of software and devices, with hidden electronic vulnerabilities that can be exploited by adversaries. Most of the technical knowledge about how those networks and platforms work, and their associated vulnerabilities, are in the hands of the private-sector manufacturers and operators; as a result, that sector is usually in the first and best position to detect malicious activity. But it’s the government that has classified and deep insights into adversary capabilities and behavior and is in the best position to communicate defensive information and take appropriate action against adversaries.

In the cybersecurity arena, these disparities are resolved by the government and the private sector sharing information about cyber threats, vulnerabilities, and remedies. And when they do, it makes a difference. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, often tipped off by a company that’s been the target of a cyber hack, routinely and quickly disseminate warnings and potential solutions to the private sector, enabling companies in many cases to thwart future similar attacks.

This cyber information-sharing model should be adapted to illuminate supply chain risks. Defense contractors and subcontractors could report problematic sourcing to the government, which could vet and enrich that information with classified data and details garnered from other vendors, and then disseminate the resulting analysis to the appropriate contractors. And just as cybersecurity vendors have great insight into their clients’ vulnerabilities and compromises suffered—and thus often are the first to inform the government of malicious cyber events—so too could defense industry supply chain risk management consultants alert the Department of Defense to questionable sourcing.

While the cybersecurity model shows the promise of public-private information sharing, it also reveals difficulties to be overcome, such as fears of legal liability. Reacting to the tepid response by industry under the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 due in part to such fears, Congress improved the law and initiated mandatory cyber reporting. These lessons should be applied to any new regime for supply chain reporting, perhaps including a legal “safe harbor” for entities that report supply chain information in good faith, even if subsequently determined to be erroneous. A safe harbor would encourage reporting by precluding claims for defamation or business torts such as interference with contract.

Legislation could equally embolden the federal government to disseminate information about problematic ownership or sourcing of products, without fear of contractor claims. The law is already clear that the Pentagon can make contractual decisions, in accordance with its regulations requiring contractors to meet “responsibility” standards, that have the effect of eliminating certain potential vendors. But those decisions are understandably fraught; Congress should remove any doubt by granting the Department of Defense express authority, within carefully crafted guidelines, to share negative information. Pushing the decision about the nature or severity of a supply-chain risk onto the government would make the contactors more willing to rely on that information. Perhaps aggrieved contactors, at least in some appropriate cases, could be afforded some notice to protest allegedly incorrect determinations.

Legislation could also assuage antitrust concerns with an exemption for reporting supply chain compromises—it’s normally illegal for companies in the same industry to share information in a way that might drive up prices or freeze out potential competitors who don’t have access to that information.

Building upon lessons learned from the cyber security model, the Department of Defense could establish a secure, automated online platform to share supply-chain information among the Department and key defense contractors. A defense supplier could enroll in the program and report securely and privately about its subcontractors and their sources. Pentagon analysts, drawing on an integrated database of commercial and government classified and unclassified data, would use automation to uncover risks ranging from cyber connectivity with Chinese entities or other adversarial companies to foreign investment or control of subcontractors, vendor representatives sitting on foreign corporate boards and other signs of vulnerabilities. Officials could then quickly approve online sharing of the information at the appropriate level of detail with the relevant contractor so that it can make timely decisions about which subcontractor they are going to do business with.

As in the cybersecurity area, rapid and detailed information disclosure isn’t the full answer to supply chain risks but is an essential part. Our government must find a way—now, before the next conflict—to share supply chain vulnerabilities with the defense industry.

Otherwise, we run the risk that in that next conflict, another country will have compromised our critical supply chains, so our missiles will miss their targets, our bombs will fail to work, and our commanders won’t be able to communicate with their troops.

Glenn S. Gerstell served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 and is a Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Andrea McFeely is a Senior Principal Initiative Lead at The MITRE Corporation and is a former U.S. government intelligence analyst and diplomat.

defenseone.com · by Glenn S. Gerstell

24. China’s Gray Zone Air Power

Gray zone here. Gray zone there. Gray zone everywhere.

Conclusion:

Gray zone activities do not involve the violence normally associated with offensive air power. Instead, China is seeking deference and submissiveness from others through implying the possibility of military escalation and bloodshed. The maintenance of the peace, not the winning of a skirmish, shapes gray zone actions. It is a use of air power fundamentally different to conventional thinking and that exploits both China’s advantages and a good understanding of others’ anxieties. It is a form of irregular air warfare but not as often imagined.

China’s Gray Zone Air Power - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Peter Layton · March 26, 2024

Editor’s note: This article is part of Project Air Power, which explores and advocates for the totality of air, aviation, and space power in the irregular, hybrid, and gray-zone environments. We invite you to contribute to the discussion, explore the difficult questions, and help influence the future of air and space power. Please contact us at https://irregularwarfare.org/tag/air-power/ if you would like to propose an article, podcast, or event.

The rapid expansion of China’s military forces has attracted considerable attention. The response has generally been symmetrical with others also embarking on acquiring high-end military equipment. US air power’s key operational imperatives are an example, featuring designing the next-generation air dominance fighter, fielding the B-21 next-generation bomber, and upgrading the F-35. Such responses have important deterrence value but can obscure other ways air power can be used.

In the last few years, China has turned to an irregular warfare approach with its increasing use of gray zone air power. Its largest application occurs daily within Japan’s and Taiwan’s air defense identification zones (ADIZ). This use of air power is not conventional but has certainly gained the close attention of Japan and Taiwan.

Worryingly, China is steadily intensifying its use of gray zone air power in terms of the means employed, frequency, and aggressiveness. Focusing on fielding high-end military equipment will not in itself solve this problem. Attention also needs to be given to China’s gray zone strategy with its strengths and weakness when considering possible gray zone counters.

Gray Zone Strategy

Gray zone activities aim to gain others’ deference through their concern over the consequences if the state taking such actions escalates to violence. It is not the actions themselves but the fear of what could happen that is influential. Gray zone actions involve a carefully measured movement toward political objectives while staying below key escalatory thresholds so as to avoid war.

In excluding war but also not being peace, several inferences can be drawn from experiences in employing military forces in both circumstances. Gray zone actions aim to gradually accumulate successes through a series of interdependent actions. This means implementation in a carefully designed campaign plan and control by strategic-level commanders able to allocate and apply significant resources. Moreover, tactical level operations in the gray zone must be tightly controlled to avoid any unintended escalation into war. It’s a form of carefully scripted brinkmanship.

Considering the resources required for such actions, China has an inherent strategic advantage in having vast scale. Chinese Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, once famously declared: “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.” Beijing exploits this advantage to gradually wear other nations down and into showing deference.

China’s gray zone activities are protracted by design and a seemingly forever drain on other, smaller nations’ resources. Inherent in this drawn-out approach is the need to keep continually ratcheting up the gray zone actions. The nations targeted will be less attentive and less fearful if China’s activities become seen as normal.

Such ratcheting requires some prudence as gray zone operations need to be calibrated to the resilience of the existing peace. Gray zone activities rely on the contemporary peace having sufficient resilience to able to absorb a gray zone shock and bounce back, not a fragile peace that can suddenly shatter and end up in a war.

Gray Zone Air Power

China’s gray zone strategy “way” is to use military and paramilitary means to incessantly intrude into geographic areas of concern to the countries affected, continuously reminding them of China’s presence and the threat it poses. Japan’s ADIZ surrounds the nation but the sensitive area where Chinese aircraft mainly intrude is in the East China Sea. For Taiwan, the pressure points are on the western side of the island’s ADIZ, particularly the median line halfway between Taiwan and mainland China.

In the case of Japan, there are about 600 Chinese military aircraft intrusions annually. Most are twin-engine fighters (such as J-16s and J-10s), often in multiple aircraft formations, with occasional long-range H-6 bombers, Y-8 electronic reconnaissance aircraft, and uncrewed air vehicles. The fighters are at times armed with air-to-air missiles.

In 2013, China created regional anxieties by declaring an ADIZ in international airspace that overlapped Japan’s. Against international law, China then began requiring all ADIZ transiting aircraft not landing in China to comply with certain procedures. In 2024, China further heightened tensions with the stationing of four Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Navy warships on its ADIZ boundaries. These ships now request all non-Chinese civilian aircraft in the ADIZ to immediately leave and sometimes threaten “defensive emergency measures” if an aircraft fails to comply. This appears another step towards trying to turn international airspace in the East China Sea into China’s territorial airspace with PLA fighter interceptions of transiting civil aircraft possible in the future.

Around Taiwan, China uses its air power in a similar manner although with greater scale and belligerence. After decades of generally avoiding Taiwan’s ADIZ, Chinese aircraft intrusions have recently dramatically increased. In the three years from mid-2020 to mid-2023, there were some 4000 intrusions involving approximately 20 different types of aircraft: fighters, bombers, early warning, and antisubmarine warfare aircraft, with about 10% uncrewed air vehicles. The largest single-day event involved 103 PLA aircraft, 40 of which crossed the median line.

Fighters make up the majority of aircraft crossing the median line with the most common being the J-16, an improved, Chinese-built development of Russia’s Su-27. Considering large aircraft, the Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft is the most prevalent.

PLA aircraft incursions mostly occur in the southwest sector of the ADIZ and often roughly midway, about 100 nautical miles, between Taiwan and the Taiwanese Pratras Islands. To some extent, many of these incursions could be excused as aircrew training as they do not fly toward Taiwan or the Islands but directly into the Pacific. This is not so of the incursions across the median line immediately adjacent to Taiwan. These are clearly designed to send a message, at times clearly spelled out in the media to avoid missing the intent.

Their rate has been rapidly increasing, from 22 in 2020 to 703 incursions in 2023. These incursions are usually shallow, 4-5 miles or so, and sometimes involve only a single aircraft. Nonetheless, their high-speed approach can lead to quick reaction alert aircraft scrambling from Taiwanese airbases.

China continues to ratchet up its actions. During the Fourth Taiwan Straits Crisis in August 2022, 11 ballistic missiles were fired into zones north, east, and south of Taiwan. Four missiles passed over Taiwan at more than 100 kilometers altitude, technically outside Taiwan’s airspace. Five impacted in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

In late 2023, China started sending balloons into Taiwan’s territorial air space. An estimated 26 had overflown the island at altitudes between 15,000 and 38,000 feet by mid-February 2024. In an instrumental use of law similar to the 2013 ADIZ declaration, in early 2024, China announced it would unilaterally move an earlier mutually agreed civil aircraft flight corridor eastward in the Taiwan Strait to within four nautical miles of the median line. Chinese civilian aircraft making even minor diversions for weather conditions now are likely to intrude across the median line.

Implications

Responding to China’s incursions is taxing for both Japan and Taiwan. Japanese fighters are frequently scrambling to try to intercept Chinese military aircraft penetrating their East China Sea ADIZ. However, Japan is finding it difficult to sustain this air policing posture and is being forced to cut back, creating a vacuum that China might fill and thereby incrementally gain de facto control of much of Japan’s East China Sea ADIZ airspace, particularly that over the Senkaku Islands. Despite the drain on resources, Japan believes it must continuously demonstrate strong determination to maintain its ADIZ and territorial sovereignty.

Taiwan is even more stretched given its limited air capabilities and China’s use of ballistic missiles and balloons. Initially, Taiwan scrambled fighters in response to China’s aircraft incursions but the dramatic increase in 2020 began imposing unsustainable costs. By the end of the year, some 8.7 percent of Taiwan’s defense budget was being spent on responding (this cost also included increased naval tasking). In early 2021, policy changed to emphasize surface-to-air missile system tracking of incoming PLA aircraft rather than fighter aircraft scrambles.

Both Japan and Taiwan are assiduous in publicizing China’s incursions, including by providing records accessible on the internet. This can help mobilize domestic public opinion to support pushback. More ambitiously, some consider that China could also be embarrassed by a more comprehensive global publicizing of its gray zone actions and thus be deterred from continuing them. There is no firm evidence to support this. To the contrary, it may be helpful to China by widely publicizing its power in a manner that helps win deference.

Counter-Gray Zone Guidelines

Countering China’s gray zone efforts is difficult as responding is in itself an outcome China pursues in its quest for others’ deference. Several high-level guidelines are offered.

First, a counter-gray zone campaign is likely to be a drawn-out operation requiring additional personnel, funds and equipment. The level of such support available will shape the counter-gray zone actions taken, their frequency and duration. Gaining and sustaining material support and societal backing will be fundamental to the campaign.

Second, focus on the decision-makers involved. Decision-makers at the various levels controlling a local gray-zone activity will have goals, motivations, and vulnerabilities that may be able to be discerned, understood, and exploited. Strategic level decision-makers in being remote and making long-term, set-and-forget plans, may be less aware of the local idiosyncrasies and dynamics. Operational commanders conscious of the need to avoid escalation may fret that events could spiral out of control. At the tactical level, confusion may be created by acting in unexpected or deceptive ways. Such confusion may reverberate upward, generating uncertainties, upending planning and misleading decision-making. The more the key actors are understood, the more tailored the countermeasures and the more effective they will be.

Third, China’s ADIZ incursions are inherently theatrical and consequently, responses might be designed to concern, confuse, or deceive China’s political and military leadership. An obvious example is to implement a tit-for-tat strategy, reciprocating China’s incursions with symmetry in time and space. Taiwanese aircraft might briefly penetrate the median line about 4-5 miles to the west before turning around. This may raise concerns over escalation but this is improbable as China’s gray zone activities rely on peace holding. Escalation would represent a significant Chinese failure. Nevertheless, any pushback carries risk and needs prudent management.

Fourth, attempt to establish a dedicated hotline between Japan and Taiwan with China to allow military-to-military communication if a gray zone event occurs that threatens escalation. Such efforts might be informed by the US-Russia and the Israel-Russia hotlines established in 2015 to manage risks arising from inflight incidents over Syria. The two hotlines have had mixed success but seem effective as a circuit breaker during crises. China and Japan already have a diplomatic hotline as a further possible model to build on.

Lastly, both Japan and Taiwan have similar problems with China’s gray zone actions. Consequently, they have developed closer linkages. Given China’s steady ratchetting up, conditions seem set for even greater cooperation including exchanging experiences, examining expected future developments, providing air tracking data and possibly coordinated air policing. Such cooperation would inevitably evoke noisy outbursts from China. However, perhaps simply discussing such cooperation would strike a pressure point and send a strong deterrence message to cease gray zone activities and escalation.

Gray zone activities do not involve the violence normally associated with offensive air power. Instead, China is seeking deference and submissiveness from others through implying the possibility of military escalation and bloodshed. The maintenance of the peace, not the winning of a skirmish, shapes gray zone actions. It is a use of air power fundamentally different to conventional thinking and that exploits both China’s advantages and a good understanding of others’ anxieties. It is a form of irregular air warfare but not as often imagined.

Dr Peter Layton is a Visiting Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, and a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Associate Fellow. He has extensive aviation and defence experience including flying fast jets and maritime patrol, force development, major equipment projects and as a defence attaché. Dr Layton has a doctorate from the University of New South Wales on grand strategy and has lectured on the topic at the Eisenhower School and numerous other institutions. He contributes regularly to the public policy debate on defence and foreign affairs issues and is the author of the book Grand Strategy and co-author of Warfare in the Robotic Age.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Main image: Images and video newly released by the Department capture a PLA fighter jet in the course of conducting a coercive and risky intercept against a lawfully operating U.S. asset in the East China Sea. Over the course of five hours, four PLA aircraft conducted this intercept, at one point reaching a distance of just 75 feet from the U.S plane. (Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs via DVIDS)

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25. When Understanding Goes M.I.A: Lost in Metaphors, Idioms, and Analogies

From the Army's Harding Project.

Lessons for us from a humble and self aware officer.

Excerpts:

My personal lesson on the dangers of idioms came seven years ago when I worked at U.S. Embassy Beirut, Lebanon. After a Country Team meeting, I briefed my commander on the outcomes and decisions. I remember the disdain on his face when I said the words “cleared hot.” With a raised eyebrow he interrupted me and said “Cleared hot? To do what?” As I stammered over my words he narrowed his gaze and said, “Did you mean to say that we were approved to continue a partnership with this particular unit?” “Yes Sir,” I responded. In an immediate verbal counseling, he reminded me that specificity mattered and that jargon had little value in professional conversation. He asked me what our State Department colleagues would think if I used the “cleared hot” idiom in a meeting. He emphatically stated the phrase “cleared hot” was anything but clear. It made me—and by association, him—seem ignorant to my colleagues.

Over the course of the year, the military and State Department staff mentored and taught me to speak in clear, direct, meaningful terms. Metaphors and analogies were to be used sparingly, idioms not at all, and acronyms were standardized around offices and directorates. The result was evident in the high level of trust placed in us by our theater special operations command headquarters and more importantly, the U.S. Ambassador.

Metaphors may provide visualization tools for your audience, but they can be dangerous for theorists, planners, and policymakers. War is not a football game and general officer staffs are not akin to football coaches, despite what Army Training Publications 5-0.2-1 Staff Reference Guide says. Nor is strategy synonymous with chess. Planners cannot create refined and detailed plans from describing an operational phase as a “knife fight.”

Conclusion

Shared understanding requires clear communication between senders and receivers, between units and commanders, and across units within a command. You may find it difficult to remove catchphrases and jargon from your lexicon; that is to be expected. Soldiers, especially Army officers, are socialized to speak in sayings, mantras, and soundbites. The goal is not perfect communication but more mature communication. This maturity comes through knowing your audience, choosing the right words to communicate your message, and most of all, practice and mentorship. Say what you mean and mean what you say. To harken back to 1937: “For upon the clarity of military language may depend the success of an army and the existence of a nation.”3

When Understanding Goes M.I.A: Lost in Metaphors, Idioms, and Analogies

Cleared hot? To do what?

https://www.hardingproject.com/p/when-understanding-goes-mia-lost?utm_=

MARSHALL MCGURK

MAR 26, 2024

On October 27, 2020, military theorist Olivia Garard published the poem “Every Brief Ever”, an ode to PowerPoint briefing styles ubiquitous in the military and Department of Defense. The poem is rife with cliches and catchphrases that speak to the devious deception of such briefings. Most of us can remember briefings that left us befuddled by overused jargon and mixed metaphors. Often by the end, the only clear thing is that the brief was a waste of time.

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Her poem resonated with me. Who among us has not rolled their eyes as a Colonel or Command Sergeant Major utters the phrase “Let me caveat that,” or “find the bellybutton for this” or when a junior leader speaks in terms of “getting the ball to the goal line”? I offer that as national security professionals, we should be gravely concerned about our abuse of language. Ultimately, lives and mission success are at stake.

When commanders, staffers, and instructors speak in shallow phrases without data, evidence, or thought, the audience gets lost in trying to understand the point. In front of senior leaders, you will not only lose understanding, you will lose their trust. Your attempt at shared understanding has gone M.I.A.: lost in metaphors, idioms, and analogies.

What are Metaphors, Idioms, and Analogies?

The overuse of literary devices is not new. Neither is military officers ranting about it. Argus J. Tressider wrote “On Goobledygook” for the April 1974 edition of Military Review, as well as a tirade against imprecise doctrinal terms for the December 1972 edition. An article in the 1937 edition of The Infantry Journal Reader asks officers to consider whether military jargon “isn’t in several ways a barrier to understanding and a hindrance to national defense.”1The authors certainly have a point. If we cannot understand one another in peacetime, lives will certainly be lost through delays in understanding during war.

Metaphors are “figures of speech in which a word or phrase denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.” Idioms are “expression[s] in the usage of a language that is peculiar to itself either in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements (such as “up in the air” for "undecided") or in its grammatically atypical use of words (such as give way).” Idioms vary by region and culture. “That dog don’t hunt” is a common idiom in the southern United States. Analogies denote inference, similarity, and likeness; “a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect.” Most readers would be familiar with the art of warfare being made analogous to chess.

The Hazards of Misunderstanding

My personal lesson on the dangers of idioms came seven years ago when I worked at U.S. Embassy Beirut, Lebanon. After a Country Team meeting, I briefed my commander on the outcomes and decisions. I remember the disdain on his face when I said the words “cleared hot.” With a raised eyebrow he interrupted me and said “Cleared hot? To do what?” As I stammered over my words he narrowed his gaze and said, “Did you mean to say that we were approved to continue a partnership with this particular unit?” “Yes Sir,” I responded. In an immediate verbal counseling, he reminded me that specificity mattered and that jargon had little value in professional conversation. He asked me what our State Department colleagues would think if I used the “cleared hot” idiom in a meeting. He emphatically stated the phrase “cleared hot” was anything but clear. It made me—and by association, him—seem ignorant to my colleagues.

Over the course of the year, the military and State Department staff mentored and taught me to speak in clear, direct, meaningful terms. Metaphors and analogies were to be used sparingly, idioms not at all, and acronyms were standardized around offices and directorates. The result was evident in the high level of trust placed in us by our theater special operations command headquarters and more importantly, the U.S. Ambassador.

Metaphors may provide visualization tools for your audience, but they can be dangerous for theorists, planners, and policymakers. War is not a football game and general officer staffs are not akin to football coaches, despite what Army Training Publications 5-0.2-1 Staff Reference Guide says. Nor is strategy synonymous with chess. Planners cannot create refined and detailed plans from describing an operational phase as a “knife fight.”

Idioms will derail presentations as the senior leaders in the room attempt to understand your point. Furthermore, senior leaders who use such jargon cause turmoil for their subordinates. When a Brigade Commander says “We are playing smash-mouth football and the ball is on the five-yard line,” the staff must now turn that expression into something tangible for the commanders. It is far better to say, “The enemy is near culmination, so we are going to reinforce the main effort to accomplish this critical mission task.” Your staff can turn the latter into a detailed plan.

Senior leaders must also exercise caution when in joint, interagency, or liaison environments. Overuse of idioms makes us look silly, foolish, or at worst incompetent. The soldiers and officers of today grew up hearing the idiom “turning the corner” during Congressional testimony on Iraq or Afghanistan. Our impressions of that idiom are not kind. During planning conferences, I’ve heard learned and senior people talk about “being out of Schlitz,” when they mean hitting their culmination point, or “going the distance” when they mean maximizing their operational reach.

Analogies can muddle communication between the speaker and the receiver. If you find yourself saying “in other words” or “what I mean to say” after using a supposedly clever analogy, you must acknowledge your words were befuddled and confused. Explaining analogies after long diatribes also breeds resentment. Clear communication protects your time and the time of your people. Unclear communication invites friction, and friction costs lives.

Change Your Approach

That’s not to say that literary devices are useless; they just need to have a specific purpose. We use figures of speech for a variety of reasons. One reason is that our brains get tired and thus crave simple, digestible information. Idioms can reinforce common bonds and strengthen team dynamics. Each profession has its own unique language whether it be sports teams, the military, or Hollywood. The key is to know when to use the language of your trade’s jargon, and when to speak plainly. In general, figures of speech should be used for three reasons: resonance, fostering relationships, and comprehension.

Metaphors should illustrate a salient point that you want your audience to remember long after you are done talking. Think of the common metaphor for the Army’s noncommissioned officer corps: the backbone of the Army. The phrase is compelling; our NCOs are not like the spine of a human, they are the spine, holding the Army upright and stalwart.

Your goal with metaphor is resonance. LTG Milford Beagle implores graduates of the Command and General Staff College and School of Advanced Military Studies to be planters. “Plant seeds and grow trees for which you won’t gain the benefit of the shade.” It is the metaphorical transference that resonates: the ownership and agency of being a planter in the military, empowered to continue stewardship of the profession through soldier and leader development. Furthermore, LTG Beagle knows his audience understands the metaphor and its message. It is often what he closes with, as his speech or presentation culminates with a final lesson: as field grade officers we are expected to mentor and cultivate those coming behind us.2

Use idioms sparingly, but strive to use them effectively. Expecting division staffers to turn your guidance of “take it to the hoop” or “put the ball in the end-zone” into detailed planning is foolish. Avoid idioms in planning documents and presentations, especially with our interagency partners. However, one area where idioms can be useful is in relationship building. When used for levity and rapport, sharing professional idioms is a form of trust, acceptance, and inclusion. Find where idioms intersect at cultural crossroads and commonalities.

As a method of clarifying complex concepts, analogies actually work quite well. Analogies denote similarity and likeness. Our brains often rely on comparison, especially when they are tired or trying to make sense of something. Retired Colonel John Antal provides an example of useful analogy when he makes human-machining with man-portable drones analogous to the archer and his arrows. Through his analogy, readers understand concepts of top-attack, range, the needs of the modern-day archer, or can think of creative ways to shield systems from the modern-day arrow. The caveat is not to take analogies too far.

Given there is one in the title, it is also appropriate to discuss acronyms. Acronyms are useful when they are understood by everyone within the organization. This matters even more in a joint, coalition, or interagency environment. For example, POL could mean petroleum, oil, and lubricants to mechanized units, but in other services POL means pattern-of-life, a component of intelligence surveillance. Needless friction can be avoided by publishing terms of reference prior to planning exercises or presentations. Pro-tip: if it doesn’t save time or space, don’t say the acronym.

Conclusion

Shared understanding requires clear communication between senders and receivers, between units and commanders, and across units within a command. You may find it difficult to remove catchphrases and jargon from your lexicon; that is to be expected. Soldiers, especially Army officers, are socialized to speak in sayings, mantras, and soundbites. The goal is not perfect communication but more mature communication. This maturity comes through knowing your audience, choosing the right words to communicate your message, and most of all, practice and mentorship. Say what you mean and mean what you say. To harken back to 1937: “For upon the clarity of military language may depend the success of an army and the existence of a nation.”3

Marshall McGurk is a Special Forces Officer assigned to United States Army Special Operations Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina. He is a graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

The title of the article is “War in Plain Language” by G.V. and is found on page 185 of the journal. The next article on page 197, “ANIMADVERSIONS ANENT ANFRACTUOSE AND OBFUSCATORY LOCUTIONS” is perhaps the most applicable to today.

Two presentations from LTG Beagle at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in October 2022 and May 2023 as heard by the author.

From “Military English” by Captain X, page 199 of The Infantry Journal Reader.

A guest post by

Marshall McGurk

Marshall McGurk is an Army Officer assigned to United States Army Special Operations Command, Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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___

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Conclusion

When Understanding Goes M.I.A: Lost in Metaphors, Idioms, and Analogies

Cleared hot? To do what?

What are Metaphors, Idioms, and Analogies?

The Hazards of Misunderstanding

Change Your Approach

Conclusion

Rebel groups kill officials recruiting for Myanmar’s junta